The day my train was hijacked by the universe...

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I attempted to spend a few days in the Cinque Terre and on the beaches of the Italian Riviera. It would take a couple train changes to get there and I was careful about writing them down when I bought the tickets. The morning I left I checked the time table on the Italy's train website and wrote them down again, just in
case I lost one copy. So I boarded my train from Florence to Pisa no problem. In Pisa i was to switch to a train to Spezia. I am especially careful about boarding trains in Italy because it can be more confusing than other countries...often they don't tell you the ultimate destination of the train when you buy the ticket, but that is what is listed at the platform... usually they can't even be bothered to put the train number or train type on the platform sign either. the time is reliable in most cases. anyway, so i was frantically running around looking for a timetable, so i could find out what the destination of my train was, so i could find the stupid platform...as they also didn't have those helpful computerized TV screens in Pisa...

My train was supposed to be at 11:44, and it was the only one around that time leaving from that station. I found the paper time table and confirmed that the 11:44 train was indeed going to stop in Spezia and had a final destination that started with a 'z' and was like zugolia or something, I don't remember much besides the Z and always left from platform 7. The platform sign said zugolia and was the 11:44 train on platform 7, so i got on. when i looked back at the sign it had switched to some train that had left an hour before, and then it said nothing. as the train was getting ready to leave they made some usual departures announcemets in italian (blah, blah, blah, spezia, blah blah). Just to be super sure, I got up and found a conductor (they wear theses green jackets in Italy) and i asked him if this train would stop in Spezia. and he said "si,si si, this is the right train" and looked at my ticket. Okay, so I just settle in for the ride.

The train leaves late, which is typical Italy, and then makes some early stops at some small
stations and waits a hundred years at each one. Finally it starts moving with some speed. The
train ride was supposed to be less than two hours and we had bearly started out when already an
hour had passed. But I sat patiently. I kept looking for Spezia, but we really didn't make
many stops after the first few. It was now well after when i should have arrived. And we appear
to be in the mountains. Finally i asked this Italian woman, who didn't really speak english to show me on the map where we were. She pointed somewhere south of Bologna and WAY east of
Spezia. She said that we were not going to Spezia.

I was puzzled, but figured i would get off at Bologna and go back...unfortunately we whizzed
right past Bologna and then past the next major town Modena without stopping. At this point i am
freaking out a little bit because i was supposed to check in to the hotel by 5 and it is close to
4 now and I am way far away. The woman who was helping me, Margherita, went to find these other
women who spoke better English, Stefania and Ana. They were all school teachers, in a group of
five teachers and they had 30 italian kids with them returning from a field trip in Tuscany.
Anyway, I explained my situation and asked what the next stop would be... they thought it would be
Piacenza...which was close to an hour a way.

One of them went to find a conductor with the time tables to see if I would be able to make some sort of connection to Spezia. The conductor woman came and explained that indeed this train that I was on, that leaves from platform 7 usually goes through Spezia but there was a problem with the track, so it was rerouted. She said that there was one train from Piacenza, but I would have the same trouble with the track and
the train may or may not go there even though it is on the time table. So she is trying to make
cell phone calls to the train people. and ana is calling my hotel in cinque terre...It soon
becomes clear that i can't go to Spezia or the Cinque Terre. So next I try to get back to Pisa
or Florence where I have a flight back to London on Friday. The conductor lady said it would
be really late when i got back because all the trains from piacenza were slow and left after 6.
Ana was trying to help me call hostels in pisa and florence to see if there was anything
available. These towns are typically completely booked...and all we got from the phone calls were full hostels, busy signals, answering machines, the tourist office in pisa kept transferring us to hostel several hours away from pisa... At this point we are almost to Piacenza and the conductor lady was like..."It is
risky if you get off here... you might not have a place to stay, you might not get a train....you
really should just go to the end of the line where you can catch a fast train tomorrow back to
florence." And Ana agreed, "Yes, we are going to the end of the line and i know a place you can
stay." So where is the end of the line?? Turin. and it suddenly all kind of clicked...of course i am going to bloody Turin...

So let me back up one week when i am reading my guidebook about the Cinque Terre. I have
sections of the guidebook that i ripped out and on the back of the Cinque Terre page I have one
page for Turin. it is the town know for '06 winter olympics, fiat, and shroud of turin. But
there is this paragraph on page 744 of Lonely Planet Europe on a Shoestring that I would like
to quote:

"Turin is a magin city. Situated on the 45 th
parallel, it is, according to occult lore, one
of the tree apexes of the white magic triangle,
with Lyon and Prague and of its black magic
counterpart with London and San Francisco.
Mysterious and ancient lines of energy ares said
to converge on Turin, as do two rivers, the Po
and the Dora. The Po represents the sun and the
masculine, while the Dora symbolises the moon and
the feminine; together they form a protective
ring of water around the city." It goes on to
say that the "black heart" of the city is Piazza
Statuto and the "white heart" is Piazza Castello,
the centre of the city's white magic map.
Bisecting the piazza castello a line divides the
black and white halves of the city which passes
between statues of Castor and Pollux outside
Palazzo Reale.

I read that last week and thought, interesting, I
should go there, but then looked on the map and
immediately dismissed it because it is almost to
France and a long train ride away.

So we are pulling in to Piacenza and they are all saying "Are going to get off or stay? We think you
should stay."

The teachers were actually from a town called Susa just outside of Turin, directly west of the
city along the Dora River in the mountains. We had to switch trains in Turin, which did indeed
have some crazy vibes. Ana said she had an extra train ticket to Susa because one of the students had been
absent from the trip. So I went with them. We got there around 8 pm and she took me to her
'friends place' which was actually a super nice bed and breakfast... which she insisted was free
because they were friends. I had been staying for the past six weeks in bunk beds in rooms of 4
to 14 people with lights on and off and people in and out at all hours, people that smelled bad,
people that snored loudly and made strange noises. Bathroom facilities were of varied quality, often smelling like piss, unidentified hairs here and there and always always soaking wet floors from the ten people
that showered before you. So this place was completely amazing. It was floral and pink and
cream. It had pictures of pink flowers on the wall and a pristine bathroom with fluffy towels.
i was really excited. the guy that ran the B&B was super nice, and though he didn't really speak
english, we got by. I could hear the Dora River from my bathroom, but couldn't see it, and couldn't see the mountains because it was dark. I had seen the foot hills coming in and they
looked like the cloud forests in central america. Really beautiful and green and misty.

I wasn't actually sure where we were at that point, or where susa was in relation to turin
because it wasn't on my map and i hadn't seen another one yet. Anyway, Ana and Stefania dropped me off
there and said they would send a friend to pick me up in the morning to take me to the station.
They said Margherita would be by with her husband (both teachers about 50 plus years old) to pick
me up to take me to have dinner in about a half hour. Unbelievable generosity and hospitality.

Margherita and her husband came and picked me up, walking me to the car holding an
umbrella over my head and telling me to watch my step here and there. They were really cute.
They also didn't speak much english, but we got by with a little english, spanish, french,
italian... They take me to this place which they say has the best pizza in susa. it did
indeed have great pizza, but the funny thing about it was that they were blaring egyptian
bellydance music. margherita was dancing around a little bit at the table and i showed her
another bellydance CD i had in my purse and we talked a little bit about 'danza de vientre'.

They told me Susa was a site of both first the celts and then the romans.
After dinner they said, "okay now we go on tour of susa..." So
around eleven at night we are going around to these ruins and churches and the medieval part of
the city. They showed me the Arch of Augustus, and one of the springs of water that is always
flowing out a brass spicket (it doesn't turn off, like in rome) and the aquaduct. When we were at
the aquaduct they stopped and pointed the lights over at some rocks and in broken english
explained that they were sacred druidic stones used by the celts/druids for cermonies and
sacrifices to the divine. And they told me that six km away was a sacred site for 'madelena.' We
went to another site that was a roman temple that was currently being excavated. So I am
there in some crazy mountain town in the middle of night in a misty rain looking at sacred celtic
ruins. And I thought I was just going to the beach.

The next morning I come into the dining area for breakfast and can see that the river is actually
directly out from the balcony there. It was funny because he had put this table cloth on the
table that is the same one we use at christmas. And there was this song playing by Akon 'shake
your body like a bellydancer' from a CD which i heard nonstop in this one gare in africa when waiting
for van for six hours played on this solar powered radio that would go on and off with the
weather. Anyway the bed and breakfast guy, Sergio, made me a nice breakfast and then started showing
me all these books about the area. First I looked at a map to see where we were. I realized
that we were just west of Turin close to the French border and in line with this town called
Briancon in France. One of two other times I have ever had problems with trains in my life I
ended up in Briancon probably two hours from Susa. Alex and I had accidently boarded some train going to the mechanics area with a half dozen other people. We all had to walk 2km back to the station, where our real train had already left. We got on some random train in the general direction that we wanted to go...it took forever..and as night was falling I was insisting we get off and find somewhere to stay. We got off in some random town, and I'm don't remember exactly why, maybe Alex looked it up in the guidebook, but we got onto this bus whose engine was running and waiting when we got off the train. It took us to Briancon around midnight and we spent the night in some field. Looking at the map I realized that we actually took the bus across the french-italian alps to the Susa valley four years ago and then got on the train at Oulx that went through Susa and Turin on the way to Milan. I just hadn't realized it.

Sergio showed me pictures of all the mountains in the area that were at the moment covered in
clouds and of this Mont St. Michel place that he said was three kilometers away. He explained that there
are three Mont St. Michel/St. Michele/St. Micheal monuments in the world...the one I just saw in
France, the one near Susa (closed until July) and then one in south Italy in the Puglia area. If
you look at a map they kind of are in a diagonal line from France through Italy.

I was flipping through the books and suddenly noticed this carving of a bull and something
about Cesar Augustus Tauranius. I suddenly made the connection that the Italian name for turin is
torino (little bull). When I got back to Florence later I checked on wikipedia and indeed
the area was founded by these celtic-ligurian people know as the taurini (tau meant mountain to
them). The whole area was known as Taurasia. It was then renamed around 28 BC as Augustus
Tauranius for Augustus, and then the name changed to Torino in italian and Turin in English. And if you haven't gathered I'm a Taurus.

Also interesting side note also from wikipedia, the name susa is Persian, an ancient town in persia, one
of the first documented towns from something like 7000 BC, and pronouced 'shusha' in persian. So I was in Shusha with Margherita and Ana. This only caught my attention because 1) I'm obsessed with Persia and Iran 2) My three best friends growing up were Margaret (nickname Rita), Anna, and Susha (kind of a unique name)

So at ten in the morning Ana and Stefania (both working) send their friend to pick me up, and not
only have they given her train tickets with reserved seats all the way back to Florence for
me (insistently free again), Ana has also managed to book me a hostel in Florence for the night and
printed out information for me. Again, it was just such incredible hospitality. And they wouldn't take
anything for it.

I got to Torino with an hour before my next train and went out to see the city, which is
really spiffed up since the olympics last year. I ended up in Piazza Castello (white heart) and
was actually running because of this pouring rain and suddenly all the town bells started striking
twelve o clock and i looked up to see that i was in the direct center of the plaza, on the dividing line, and the statues of Castor and Pollux were in front of me. I took a few pictures of Torino and then ran back to the
train station to change my clothes and board the train.

The rest of the trip back was smooth and uneventful...although on the three consecutive
trains the passenger sitting across from me (men, women, all ages) pulled out this white graph
paper and started doing complex calculations that looked like physics based calculus. the first
time i was like oh, interesting....but my the third train and the third person... wow Italians really like their physics based calculus...

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