On Our Way to Paradise

Thursday, October 15th

On Thursday we left for Nice early in the morning, coincidentally running into the Spain Term students who were leaving on our same train. We almost all missed the train too because the boards weren’t updated correctly, so we stood waiting for nothing until we asked a second time and found out the train that had been sitting in the platform all the while was indeed our train. And that’s just one example of why travel days were by far the most stressful days we had on free travel, or in our whole term. Emily, Nelly, and I hadn’t known each other before the trip, so free travel turned out to be a crash course on getting to know each other via highly stressful moments that can bring out the worst in you. Thankfully, I think we did well in giving each other a lot of grace too.

The first leg of our trip was to Genoa, where we took a lunch break and waited for our connecting train to Nice, France. One of the priceless moments of this afternoon was when Nelly and I were sitting outside a café in the train station and happened to eye this poor old woman who appeared to be severely struggling to a) figure out where she was, and b) figure out where she was going. She looked a little haggard, had white-grey frizzy hair, was wearing an oversized, men’s checkered sports jacket, and pulled a small wheeled cart as her luggage. We watched as she shuffled over to one of those scary yellow boxes that look like they are going to suck up your ticket, but instead they actually validate them; it seemed as though her ticket wasn’t getting stamped. She put it in; she pulled it out; she looked at it closely, and tried again. Suddenly, the ticket blew out of her hand, and she froze. Abandoning her cart, she shuffled over to the right to pick up her ticket while another traveler budged in front of her to stamp his own. Even though she looked helpless, this guy was not very interested in helping her. Making her way over several feet, she repeated this cycle again at another yellow box, but this time seemed to attract more friendly fellow travelers. I was most satisfied to see her struggle end happily as she began to walk down the stairs to her platform, accompanied by a young man who voluntarily took her cart down the stairs with him. I have no idea how she would have done that herself.

Boarding our train to Nice might have been the most stressful moment of free travel in my opinion because 1) the train looked different from all of our other trains so we weren’t sure it was the right one, and 2) someone was sitting in one of our seats and of course insisted she was right (even though she wasn’t; she was in the wrong car number), yet Europeans don’t care about seats apparently. Amidst our struggle of trying to figure out if we were in the right place, we turned around to find the same haggard woman we had been eyeing up earlier. The sight of her right next to us gave us a bit of comic relief, especially because she was still moving particularly slow, bending down into her cart, and clogging up the corridor. We decided she was our second train angel because even though she didn’t particularly help us out, she seemed to be a sign that we were in the right place. For all we know she was probably making sure we were on the right train, and not the other way around.

Anyway, it didn’t help our stress levels to be carrying around what felt like a ton of luggage that ended up having to sit outside of our train car compartment in the hallway for everyone to step over. Haha. Thankfully we did figure out that we were on the right train, though we had to share 2 seats between the 3 of us for while. Quite snug and all in a row, we each had out our “White Teeth” book (the assigned reading over free travel from Mark Bruce), which we thought looked really funny – all of us squished together with our noses in the same book. Once we were sitting down reading, I remember a point when we randomly started giggling because the situation was just so awkward and funny. At least we were able to laugh about it.

This train ride was another absolutely gorgeous experience because we were riding right along the Mediterranean coast, so just about any view of the ocean had our jaws dropping. Arriving in Nice we trekked about 15 minutes through town and up three flights of stairs (typical) to our hotel. We were tired, but didn’t let ourselves crash for too long because we were so excited to see the beach. We wandered out of our hotel, found a panini for dinner, and then began to wander along the “promenade”, as the map titled the street along the beach. Even though it was slowly getting cooler as it got later, it was heavenly to walk along the water and watch the sunset behind the Nice landscape of orange architecture and grand palm trees – a true paradise.