I asked the conductor about the night train and he said that no reservation was neccesary, so that naturally made me think that I was getting a free sleeper bed. How wrong I was. When I arrived at the terminal and showed the conductor my Eurail pass, he made a waving motion with his hand and muttered "last car". The last car of a train never holds anything promising, so my heart sank slightly in fear. As I walked down the platform I gazed longingly at the sleeper cars thinking about the nice sleep I was going to have until all of a sudden the sleeper cars stopped and (shudder) the compartmentalized cars started. No, no, no. I can't do this. Not two nights in a row. No, no no. So I walk in the last car and it's stifling hot. Come on, these train have AC...Why do they wait so long to turn it on? (Just so you know, in compartmentalized trains, you cannot recline the seat without moving directly into the seat across from you. If you're lucky and no one is seated across from you, you can slide both the chairs down to make on long bed.) That was my prayer. I start walking down the train car and every single one is full. Full of sweaty, bothered people looking unhappy. I finally end up gettting in a car with a family that has one seat left and I sit down and stare out the window, already sweating profusely.
The conductor walks by and all of a sudden everyone on the train starts yelling in Italian. I don't know Italian, but I understood enough to know that there was a serious problem. I determined after a few minutes that the AC was broken in the car. Therefore, anyone who knew Italian complained until the conductor moved them. I was not one of those people. I was left in the car with a guy from Romania. The good news was that we were the only two people in the compartment...A semi bed!
So we both extend all six of the chairs and lay down and turn the light off. Once we were trying to go to sleep, we had a conversion that followed thus:
Me: Inglese?
Him: No.
Me: Espanol?
Him: No. Francese?
Me: No.
We both laughed at the hopelessness of the situation and laid down to try to sleep. Now the problem with sleeper cars is that they make a stop about every twenty minutes to pick up more passengers, so it makes sleeping just about impossible. The worst that could happen was that someone could board the train and get in your cabin, sit across from you and make sleep impossible. Apparently the Romanian knew one Enlglish word (shit) and we would both repeat it as people walked by our compartment looking for a seat. Neither of us could communicate to eachother in one language, but we both knew that we didn't want any more people in our compartment. So everytime the train stopped, we would both sit out and I would look out the window to the platform and he would look out the compartment window and we would both sit there and mutter the only English word he knew until we were sure no one was going into our compartment. This went on for about 5 more stops until we realized that we needed sleep.
So we both settle down for good and I look out the compartment window and see two young boys (Zack and Blake's age) sitting outside their compartment because there is apparently no room left. They were sitting there looking into our compartment like they would give anything to be where we are. I look at them for a few moments and started wishing that I had a curtain to draw so I didn't have to look at them anymore. The coldness of that thought struck me as absolutely hilarious, and I just started laughing at how absolutely evil I was being by wishing that I didn't have to see their faces, which were obviously upsetting me. The Romanian wakes up and looks at me like I'm crazy, and I just point to the boys amidst my laughter and he realizes the comedy of it and starts laughing too. So we both are in the compartment laughing hyserically for about ten minutes until we finally settle down. Just as we settle down though, the snack man comes wheeling down the aisle and makes the two boys get up from their seats so he can push the cart through. This brings on another fit of hyseria. So after we die down again, we both remembered that we needed to drift off to sleep and promptly went to bed.
Finally, eleven hours later, the train arrives in Napoli and I don't feel quite right...
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