This has taken forever to write up and post, and it's not even done yet. As you'll gather from the title of this blog, I had a weekend (and a following Monday) straight out of the Twilight Zone, to it's taken some time to get up on the internetz.
When we got back from Venice, we came home to a freezing apartment. What must've happened was the pipes froze, because about five minutes after we turned on the heat that had been shut off for the weekend, the water heater started pouring water out of it. And I'm not talking a few drips–I'm saying it might as well have been the faucet in our kitchen sink, because it was giving our closet and kitchen a pretty epic one-inch flood.
So we went the next days without heat. I slept the first night wishing for one of those mummy sleeping bags while trying my darndest to huddle under the thin blankets on my bed. I slept the next night on the couch upstairs from the hospitality of the girls and guys living in that haunted apartment. But that ghost is another story.
So anyway, it's not nearly finished yet and it's long and crazy as anything, but here's part I of my Twilight Zone weekend:
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Sun 15 Feb 2009
This weekend of my study abroad experience I spent in the Twilight Zone. You might've heard to it referred to as Venezia, Venice and/or Carnivale.
It only just dawned on me now that perhaps Friday was so freaky because it was Friday the 13th. That's not supposed to be s superstitiously dangerous day here in Italy, but my weekend begs to differ.
*********Thursday/Friday*********
Piu o meno, I can't tell you where these days started and ended. They're basically moshed together because of the chronology and Twilight Zoneyness.
We left on the first train around 19:00. Simple enough. What was supposed to be an hour and a half layover at the first stop became a five minute one that resulted in me downing my chioccolato caldo and burned tastebuds that still remain in my mouth.
Since layover no. 1 was so short, layover no. 2 lasted a little over three hours before we could catch the sleeper train that would bring us to Venezia. This time was spent finding a bathroom, buying a slice of pizza because we felt bad for using the pizzeria's bagno, at least two hours of card games at the train station, and an unnecessarily long amount of waiting outside in bitter cold for the train. Sounds normal enough. But then, that's how all episodes of the Twilight Zone start, no?
We were split up on the third and last train in sleeper cabins that were nearly entirely too dark to see and filled with people already sleeping. We rushed onto the train car nearest to where we waited, impatient to get out of the cold. The first cabin I see has seat number 121, the number listed on my ticket. That was lucky, I thought, to end up right in front of my seat. I opened the cabin door. Inside were six seats, three filled with three heads of sleeping people and the other three filled with six feet of said sleeping people. Great, I now thought, my cabin is completely full. All the other ones in the car were in the same state. I later discovered that the seat numbers are the same in all the cars and that I was in the wrong car. In fact, my seat was a few cars down in a cabin with Kayla, Karrie and an empty seat where my butt should've been.
Luckily, an older italiano with graying hair and a baseball cap noticed I was standing in between cars looking for a place to sit and I conveyed to him in fractured Italian that my seat had a tush in it. He told me to come with him and found us both seats in a mostly empty car. He also put my giant travel backpack above on the luggage rack for me. I probably said grazie about a thousand times, but I doubt he knew how thankful I really was to him for helping me so I wasn't standing in the aisle of a train car all night.
The cabin we entered had two people in it. It was dark, but I looked over at the one two seats to my right. I had to do a double-take–I thought the kid, who looked about college-age and had very short, very dark hair, was the Alex that lives above me in San Faustino. I was about to say hi and I realized it couldn't be him because I had seen him in a full cabin in the last car I'd been in. I didn't say two words to the kid, but I couldn't believe I was sitting almost next to his Italian evil twin.
The other uomo in the train car, another middle-aged man with dark hair and the beginnings of a potbelly, I assumed was Twilight Zone Alex's dad and they were traveling together. That idea went out the window when Twilight Zone Alex left the train around 04:30, a few stops after the man who had helped me find the seat. I started talking to this last man, who I had assumed was Italian. It was dark, so I had no way to know until he told me that he was from Bangladesh and working in Italy sending money back to his family. We had a small conversation in Italian/English where I was just grateful to practice some foreign language conversational skills. Then Twilight Zone Bangladesh man asked if he could take a photo with me when I told him I was from New York. I was glad my stop was a few after that so I could get out of Twilight Zone Train.
I figured my Twilight Zone night would end right there, at 05:26 in cold, dark train station of Venezia. A whole horde of USAC kids had taken the same trains this night and we probably looked like a tour group as we walked through the streets of Venezia that night to the few people awake and around to see us in one huge group. But as we sluggishly got off the train after three hours or less of broken sleep, I noticed Amy, Chris, Nicole and Kelly hadn't gotten off the train. It seemed to be sitting in the station for a few minutes, but Kayla told us the train didn't end in Venezia but went to a bunch more stops that I think ended out of the country. So I grabbed my phone out of my bag to call her and tell her to get off the train. The next 10 minutes or so went something like this:
I call Amy.
AG (me): Hey, this is our stop! You guys have to get off the train because after this the train goes on to a bunch of other places NOT in Venice.
AA (Amy): Are you sure? The guy here said there's one more stop in Venice before we have to get off.
AG (to Kayla): Are you sure this is the last stop in Venice?
Kayla: Yes.
AG (to AA): Yeah, this is our stop.
AA: Okay, if you're sure we'll get off the train.
AG: Sounds good, see you guys in a minute.
*A couple minutes later my phone rings*
AG: Hey, where are you guys? I don't see you on the platform.
AA: Yeah I don't see you either. Do you see the McDonald's?
AG: Noo... maybe you're on the other side of the platform?
Kayla: You can't get off the train on the other side of the platform.
AA: Yeah, that's probably it. We'll meet you at the McDonald's.
I hang up the phone, enter the station, and come out on the other side of the train. I see no McDonald's. A few minutes later my phone rings again:
AA: Hey, We're at the McDonald's. Where are you guys?
AG: I don't see any McDonald's. I don't think there's one at this station...
AA: We're in it right now though...
This goes on for a while. The kids at the McDonald's had climbed onto the same train as us; I had seen it happen and searched for seats in the same cars as them. Yet somehow, we figured out. The train car they were on was stopped at the Venezia Mestre station at the same time that the train the rest of us were on was stopped at the Venezia Santa Lucia station. Meaning either the train somehow split into two separate trains with such little noise or movement that no one had heard or felt it happen–or it had somehow entered another dimension. Considering the likeliness of the physical possibility of the former, I'm more inclined to believe the latter. I spent much of the rest of this weekend pretty wigged out by this idea.
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