Far From Florida

         Yesterday we returned from an excellent 2 day jaunt in Milan, which was exceptionally fun and tourist-y, and deserves its own post which we will provide at a later date. Today, however, I will be recounting the tale of our voyage from Italy to Lyon.

        We purchased our tickets to and from Milan in two legs, with a connecting train from Geneva. By “we” I mean “Teal purchased while I stood next to her for the sake of solidarity.”

        Our total travel time was to be 7 hours there, and 9 hours in return, thanks to a mathematical error in calculation by Teal. According to our tickets, our return journey should have only been 7 hours, but Teal’s miscalculations proved to be prophetic.

        We left Milan at around 12:30 on Thursday on our first leg to Geneva, confident that we had all of the necessary documents and information to successfully make that trip. It turns out, however, that Switzerland is not in fact a part of France or Italy (I know, right?) and that leg of our journey wasn’t covered by our France/Italy Eurail passes. We learned this when the ticket collector on the train told us that that leg of our journey wasn’t covered by our France/Italy Eurail passes.

        Much confusion and stammering took place, and we were forced to buy a ticket for that part of the trip. The ticket guy turned out to be a cool dude and only made us buy one ticket instead of two, but we still were not sure if he was nice or just trying to rip us off. After looking at our Eurail documentation, it turns out he was being nice and that the woman at the Lyon train station was incompetent in booking our seats. Crisis, while not averted, was dealt with.

        I hadn’t planned on spending much (any) time in Switzerland before our departure from the United States, and therefore hadn’t told my bank that I would want to use my card there. No problem, though, we had plenty of cash. Oh wait, the Swiss are economically neutral. They don’t take Euros. We are hungry. We only have an hour. We want ze FOODS. HOW DO?! L

        We figured out a way to convert our currency and got lunch and some beers (we had to spend the Francs! They wouldn’t be worth anything to us after we left!) Turns out we had time because our train was a part of the national train strike, causing a 20 minute delay*. We thought nothing of it.

        *To clarify: the trains themselves were on strike, not the people running the trains.

        Our 2 hour train ride to Lyon would be extended by an attempted train suicide about halfway through the trip.

        While it was stopped at one of the stations along our journey, the train apparently tried to kill itself by lighting the engine room on fire. It just couldn’t take it anymore, I guess. Teal and I first noticed the strangely long delay after watching an entire episode of Mad Men then looking out the window and seeing the same thing.

        Now, after spending 2 days in Italy (a language we spoke not at all), being back in French-speaking territory made us feel like native speakers. Communication was much improved. However: when the French make important announcements over crackly train intercoms, they talk fast. They sound like they’re practicing for the speed talking Olympics, except all the time. We were concerned that something important had been said and that we were just completely in the dark.

        The train eventually got running again, and we eventually made it back to Lyon, where the train strike had reached into the metro stations. We were exhausted, hungry, and had to go to the bathroom. We were not in the mood to wait on the Metro. The trains were running intermittently, and a trip that would normally take us 15 minutes ended up taking 50.

        As we prepared to get on our final train to Croix Pacquet, our outdoor stop, we noticed that a train across from our stop had just given up and was sitting solemnly on the tracks. When our train arrived it was so upset with the strike that it was crying. Either that or it was pouring rain outside.**

        **It was pouring rain outside

        We sprinted through a torrential downpour to a store to buy frozen pizza and ice cream before more running to our apartment. It took us longer to get from Milan to Lyon than it took us to get from Miami to Paris by about 2 hours. Traveling is hard.

-Alex