I remember when I was a lot younger, probably in high school, and I wanted to go to Europe so bad. I wanted to see how they did public transportation, because I thought that the United States did a really poor job of getting everyone everywhere. This was coming from a girl living in Phoenix, which has horrible long distance travel, although the buses aren't that bad. But I heard that not many people in Europe even have their drivers licenses because they don't need them, and I wondered what we did wrong in the States so that everyone had to have their own car. I wanted to find alternate ways of traveling so we wouldn't waste so many resources in transportation, and also so we wouldn't pollute the world as much as we are. I have since changed my mind, to a certain degree. This weekend going down to the Amalfi Coast though showed me what I wanted to see all those years ago. There are definitely differences between Italy and the United States that will always be different. For one thing, the distances between places in the countries will always be different. There will never be a time when you want to go somewhere awesome in the United States that you only need travel about 8 hours to get to almost the other side of the country completely. That's not going to change, so we can't really use the same system of transportation as Italy uses (and I imagine other European countries use as well). I think it's a good idea to look at how they do things though, so we can think about transportation in a whole new way.
I took buses, trains, and who knows what else to call the transportation I took this weekend to get everywhere we wanted to go. It was interesting to take all the different buses that I took, since they were usually charter-esque buses, but they were considered public transportation. The bus from Siena to Florence was one that picked us up form the bus station where all the buses go and it had a ticket validation place on it. but it was nice, comfy chairs and it was a rather big bus. I would never have thought to ride it standing up, but there were definitely people who were just standing in the aisle as though there were nothing more common in the world to do. They really pack those buses a lot fuller than any bus I traveled on in the United States. We just walked around Florence, so we didn't have to worry about any buses within the city. But we saw them, and they were almost always full, and people were standing in the aisles and they came pretty regularly. Then we finally got on our bus that would take us towards Amalfi over night. That was more like a greyhound bus, except there were definitely assigned seats. They only took as many people as there were seats available, but I was surprised some of the places they stopped to let people off and pick people up. granted, I was asleep for most of it, so I may just have a bad perception of where we were stopping, but it seemed weird to blind (I took out my contacts), foggy me.
When we got to Salerno, we tried to figure out how to get to: Paestum, Amalfi, and eventually to the town our hostel was in. There was a train to Paestum, which when i got there I was surprised that there was a train that stopped at Paestum at all. I guess it could be considered a tourist attraction, but it didn't even have an open ticket office at the train station, and we had to buy our tickets (which looked just like bus tickets) at a tabaccarea or bar. pretty easy to get a ticket, even when the ticket office is closed. that's something I liked a lot! The fact that you can get tickets from many different places, and not have to travel to a specific area to get tickets to ride just one type of bus or train.
The buses we used after getting back to Salerno onwards were like the one from Siena to Florence: more well used greyhound charter buses. Some of them had graffiti on them (so a lot of them did, especially the farther back you sat) and there was one that felt really dirty no matter where you touched, but it was fine. and it was crazy how those buses could make it around the turns on the road and past other buses of the same size on roads that I would never have thought could have both of them on the road at once. There was more than one occasion when I wanted a camera to take a picture of how close the buses got to each other: it was definitely just a few centimeters apart for a while. at least it wasn't ever like in Rome when we saw a bus turn onto a street and after trying for 5 minutes to not hit any cars (including the one that was parked where it shouldn't have been) it finally just scrapped against the illegally parked car and kept driving. no scrapping this time, thank goodness. I would have thought it was simultaneously hilarious and terrifying that we scrapped.
Finally on our way home, we were to take trains from Salerno to Siena. it was the greatest ever! I've been on a few different types of trains now, but the best train I've gone on was the one from Salerno to Chuisi. it was, to explain it the best I can, a Harry Potter train. There were cars and there were rooms in the cars that had doors you could shut. There was a hallway outside and definitely there was a man who kept walking up and down the halls trying to sell food to whoever wanted it. We were so thrilled to ride that train, we took a bunch of pictures of us in the compartment and hoped that the 6th spot on the train wouldn't be filled up, so we could have it to ourselves. That was not the case because when we got Naples we got a 6th person in the compartment, but it turned out ok. Rosaline was super friendly and knew a tiny bit of english. we didn't talk to her very much, but when we were watching a movie on my laptop, she told us she had seen it before in Italian, and watched it along with us for a while, even though it was completely in English. Later (we were on the train for quite some time!) we were practicing our Italian, and asking Deidra and Natalia how to say things, since we (Rachel, Brittany, and I) don't know anything and she pipped in to help us understand how to pronounce things and how to use the grammar correctly. it was awesome, and she was super nice about it all. The train was probably one of the best parts. if I can even say there was one best part. there were so many parts that were awesome, that I can't say only one part was the best.
I think that's what I want in the States the most though: trains that go a lot of different places and are easy to use. Trains generally go faster than buses, and probably than cars. and even if they don't go faster than cars, they are more fun to ride, they take more people at once, and they are just more awesome. Natalia agrees with me: trains are the best way to travel. That's the one thing I want to try an incorporate in the transportation systems of the States more: trains that go places and are used more often.
those are my thoughts on the weekend. obviously I had more fun and did other things besides ride on buses, but we seemed to do a lot of that, so I got to think about it a lot (when I was awake on those coastel winding roads)