The Schoemaker's

One would think that traveling on the train though Europe would be exciting and quite pleasant since we Americans always hear about how easy it is.  We have survived to tell you, “Never go to the Rome terminal”.

We were very excited to take a train and see the countryside.  What we didn’t know was that our travel agent booked us in First class… yeah… but on the economy train line.  How lovely it was to walk into the terminal and immediately hold tight to all of our belongings.  It was like we had walked into the worst part of Baltimore in the middle of the night or for the Philly locals, it makes the R5 train look like the Ritz of trains.  We couldn’t understand any of the signs and were getting hungry so Matt thought it would be wise to feed Jeni… She’s much happier with a full belly…. So Matt had Jeni stand outside of McDonalds with ALL of the bags while he waited in line to buy food. During this time, Jeni panicked and guarded everything. Once Matt arrived, Jeni relaxed and they both started to eat.  Within 3 minutes, a man tried to pick pocket Matt (he didn’t even noticed until Jeni said something) and then we had a Gypsy beg for food, flash her bra, and hand me her baby…. I guess she wanted to swap her baby for my nine-piece nugget… Then after saying no repeatedly she thought she would try to grab our bag.

Finally it was time to get on the train.  We knew that we were sitting in first class, so we “thought” that it would be similar to a plane.  How wrong we were.  First a man tried to take Matt’s ticket out of his hand but Jeni got mouthy and he left.  When trying to get onto the train, random men tried to “help” you with the bags and again Jeni had to get mouthy to make them go away.

Ahhhh… we were finally resting in our seats with our bags stowed away.  Many strange gypsies started getting on the train and begging to Jeni. If it weren’t for the nice Italian lady yelling at them, all of our money would have been gone to socks and Saint cards.  When we were both relaxed and the gypsies were gone.  An Italian man started yelling “attention” to us and was pointing at our luggage.  Well… someone was trying to steal our luggage. Great, how lovely.  We ended up having to take turns sitting in the back of the train so one of us could guard our stuff (With all of the other Americans, of course) and the other one clutched to the laptop bag sitting in our seat.

As for the lovely countryside view…. We really got to know how the insides of mountains and hills look like. Let me describe it to you… It’s Dark… That’s it… Just Dark! However in one particular break in the darkness we did see some pretty sunflowers! Amazing. The darkness has fully broken and we are now in Venice, home of the Gondola and the 10-minute 70-euro water taxi ride.

Tags: honeymoon, Rome, Train

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 4:58 pm and is filed under honeymoon, Rome, Train. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.