All Aboard...Literally!

So often in movies we hear the train conductor yell, “all aboard” before the train leaves the station.  Often there are people, those who don’t have tickets for the train, left standing on the platform…not in Italy.  When they say all aboard, by golly they mean let’s shove AS MANY people onto this train as humanly possible. 

Sunday we went to Sperlunga, a beach on the Mediterranean for the day.  This is one of the day trips the school set up, and it’s the beach so naturally almost every person in our 67 student group wanted to go check out the Italian beach.  We arrived at the train station with plenty of time.  All of us students had just been on the train the days before for the ride to and from Florence, so we’re thinking we’ve got this down, we know what we’re doing, short train ride and we’ll be at the beach, right? WRONG!

When the lady from the school met us at the station, she told us what platform to wait on and said something along the lines of, when the train arrives, hurry to get on a find a seat.  Poor unexperienced Americans had no idea of what was about to happen.  The train pulled up and before it had screeched to a halt Italians were running to follow the doors.  Once they opened it was like cattle being herded into the barn.  People were pushing, shoving, running from door to door wiggling their way to the open doors.  We thankfully got on and seated rather quickly, so we had seats.  Once our coach had filled up I figured that was it, no one else would be able to ride in our car.  Wrong again.  Apparently for these trains not everyone gets a seat.  Once the seats were full people were standing in the aisles, in the breeze way between coaches, basically anywhere they could find.  It was INSANITY. Thankfully the windows opened so there was a nice breeze flowing throughout the coach, however, I did get repeatedly elbowed in the head by the lady that was standing over me dozing off as she rode. It was an interesting ride, but don’t fret, it just gets better from here.

Train Station

Our train was 39 minutes late arriving to the Fondi station where we were detraining.  When we finally arrived, we stepped off, in the middle of po-dunk Italy, not joking. 

We then had to board a bus for a 15 minute ride to the beach.  Seems like no big deal again, right? No, wrong! The first bus to be filled was the size of a touring bus, you know, like a greyhound bus.  That bus was filled with people, not just in all of the seats but in every square inch of the isle, the doorway, the windows, everywhere, there was a person standing, sitting and holding on for dear life.  Not all of our group was able to fit onto this bus because there were many others heading for the beach as well. So about ten of us waited for the next bus.  This bus was instead a city, smaller, and already packed with people.  I think by now you get the picture, they filed us in shut the door and there we were, sardines in a bus on the way to the water. 

Beach

Waterfront Housing

Alas, we had arrived and the beach was breathtaking!  There are a few photos (I didn’t want to risk damage to Ash’s camera so I just took my little one for this day, but I still got some nice photos to see!) This beach was beautiful, even though there were way too many speedos on way too many men, other than those sites, the rest of it was amazing. 

 

We laid in the sand, floated in the sea and enjoyed a relaxing afternoon.  I was so pumped to get to see and go into a body of salt water other than the Pacific.  This water was much warmer than the Oregon Coast and so much fun to splash around and cool down after a hot week in Rome. 

Showing Mom I actually wore my dress : )