Milan Central Station is a madhouse. If you have been to a train station in an Italian city, you know this is redundant. The status quo of a train station in Italy is madhouse. We get on the train, miraculously find a couple of seats. We sit. In 1 hour and fifty-three minutes, we’ll be in Genoa. We sit. A Polish family sits across from us – man, woman, child curl up on two seats. We all do the obligatory nod. We sit.
Since I was a kid, I have loved trains. Not in a Sheldon Cooper way – I don’t know train numbers or which train rode the Chicago–New York line in 1976. But I have always loved being on a train. I took a train downtown for high school. It’s the chugging forward, the quiet persistence of a train. It moves quickly at times, other times it just ekes around a corner towards its destination. Nevertheless, it moves, it gets you there. It’s mostly quiet and mostly boring. Perfect.
As much as there’s a distinctly pleasant feeling when a train is moving, there’s a distinctly unsettling feeling when a train isn’t moving. Trains are large pieces of metal. And when one is sitting still when it should (according to the schedule) be moving, you feel that it will never move again.
Such is the situation in Milan (where we still sit). 2:23 becomes 2:33 and then 2:43 and I would have made more progress towards Genoa if I had gotten out and walked to the end of the platform. People mosey on and off the train. This tells me (an avidly obsessive time and schedule keeper, a bad thing to be when it comes to Italian transportation) that we are not moving anytime soon.
At 3:02 our train lurches a little to the right and makes a slow crawl out of the station. I heave out a sigh of relief. This relief lasted until we arrived at the next town, where we sat for another thirty or so minutes. Again, people mosey in and out of the train as if it’s the middle room of a pub. A pub I would make wealthy beyond their wildest dreams at this moment.
“Ah,” Burke says in a mysterious, yet terrifyingly concrete manner. I know that ‘Ah’; I hate that ‘Ah’. She rounds it out with, “here it is.”
“Here what is?” I ask. My toe begins tapping the floor of the train. The Polish man uses a knuckle to windshield wipe a thread of sweat from his forehead.
“There’s a transportation strike today.”
Objectively I know that a strike means there are fewer workers and so a train can’t stick to a schedule for safety reasons. I suppose running headlong into another 500-ton train would most likely put a damper on my holiday.
Subjectively I have come to the realization that Italy hates me and got together as a country to figure out the best way to ruin my holiday. They landed on mucking up the transport because they know I’m obsessive about schedules and times and getting places. It is this outlook that governs the next 2.5 hours to Genoa. We sit a lot. A lot. Children in the car begin to notice. From behind us a child moans.
“We’re just sitting here! Again! We’re not moving at all!”
Not since I heard a kid wax amazed on the virtues of chocolate (which they had tasted apparently for the first time) have I agreed with a child so much.
When we eventually arrive in Genoa, the sun is beating down on us. The woman from the booking company is at our apartment.
We find the metro. Perfect. I breathe a sigh of relief. It’ll two stops, a four-minute walk, and we’re there. Holiday may commence! We can’t find the entrance to the metro. Then we find the entrance, but there’s a gate pulled down in front of it. I look at Burke.
“Ah,” she goes.
My toe taps the ground as Burke figures out how long the walk is. I measure a gin and tonic in my head and pick up the bags.
