No smoking on the train

Traveling is not always as easy as getting from point A to point B. Sometimes you get on a train and everything seems normal until suddenly there’s smoke pouring in the windows and you wonder if a local house is on fire. Then you realize that it’s actually your train that’s on fire and the thick, black smoke filling the air is coming from somewhere underneath your car. You sit calmly listening to Sun Kil Moon on your iPod as the train comes to an abrupt halt and engineers pile outside and stare at something very important near the tracks below your car. A pair of aged, wrinkled ladies, one sporting a tiny lapdog in her purse, peer out the window and speak in hushed Italian mumbles, glancing at you occasionally to see if you understand.

Finally the train starts again, but it’s running late so it skips your stop and drops you off in a town called Solerno. This is not where you want to go and you say to the conductor, “What about Naples,” but he is busy and doesn’t care and tells you to take bus number four to Pompeii and figure it out from there.

So you stand outside the train station in Solerno and wonder where in the hell you are and how one goes about getting to Naples.

At the bus station there are seven men in blue uniforms standing outside a small, dingy storefront eating ice cream cones, making loud, crowd-pleasing jokes in Italian. You ask one of them for help and he tells you to take the number fifty bus to Pompeii. “It’s a blue bus and it comes at 4:00,” he says. You look at your cell phone and the clock says 3:35. You were supposed to be in Naples at 1:45 to take the train to Sorrento. Instead you’re in Salerno and you haven’t eaten anything since 10:30 and your water is running low.

“Where does the bus stop?” you ask the man with the ice cream cone.

He points. “Sometimes over there and sometimes over there. I don’t know.”

There are buses everywhere: orange, blue, short, long, parked, moving. They layer each other, stacked side-by-side, making it impossible to read their crucial little numbers. You sit on the ground next to the station and eat a piece of bread from a stash in your purse. How am I in this place? you wonder. Just fourteen hours earlier you were on the roof of a fourteen-story apartment building in Rome watching from a candlelit corner as drunk, Italian Buddhists danced to salsa music and ate pasta from paper plates. Is this really my life?

Eventually bus number fifty pulls up and you ride it for an hour until arriving at the train station in Pompeii. You get on the train, pray that it doesn’t start smoking, and wind up fifty minutes later in Sorrento. Four hours late and much patience lost, you locate your hostel and collapse on the bed, ready to sightsee in a brand new city. Though it requires little more than sitting and staring out a window, traveling is exhausting and often eats up the entire day. But you really can’t complain because in the end of the day it’s fiery trains and meandering buses that will always get you where you need to go.