Day 9
Note: gentle readers, be impressed. I paid €3 for the privilege of posting Day 8.
Quick easter egg from yesterday:
Look through the pictures taken from the bus. In one of them, you will see a woman in the passenger seat of a car holding her hands over her eyes as they pass the bus.
Notably, yesterday we also discovered that in Roma Termini you have to pay €0.80 for the privilege of using their toilets. I'd rather hold it.
We wrecked shop on Holiday inn Express's breakfast buffet this morning. They even had a magical yogurt shooter. You put your bowl under it, push a button and it starts slinging yogurt forcefully into your bowl. The tough part then is figuring out how to make the thing stop. I added some granola and honey because the yogurt is unsweetened and unflavored. I also had a croissant, piece of pineapple upside-down cake, chocolate cake, and some orange juice. Unusually, they also had cold cuts of some types of meat and a pizza-ish substance. Ugh.
We stopped by another ATM which also dispensed me cash with no complaints.
We got on the train, and sit down in a car with nobody in it. A Caucasian male and Asian female sit down next to us. He is toting the biggest bottle of Coke I have seen outside of the U.S. They both sit down DIRECTLY across the aisle from us.
Four minutes before the train leaves an Asian couple runs in, and the girl is out of breath. Unfortunately, however, this doesn't keep her from talking quickly and loudly in between each breath she takes. They sit down with the other couple and comprise the foursome from hell. I'm not even going to try to explain the extent of what they discussed. I don't have enough time. Card games, music. Stupid DATs. Obviously. Now they are trying to sleep on each other while sharing MP3 players. How sickeningly "cute."
We are on the non-express train to Florence, which will take 4 hours to travel 230km. The express, which takes 1 hour, cost an extra €10 in addition to a day on our Eurail pass.
I don't like paying more, but economically, it doesn't make sense to take the slow train. Here's why: a round-trip plane ticket for 23 days to Italy is $1104.39. 1104.39/23 is $48.02 per day. Each day, let's allocate a conservative €40 for lodging and meals (per person) which using an exchange rate of 1.4 $/€ (I don't know what it is now; it is depressing to watch) comes out to $56 per day. Add that to the daily plane ticket cost, and you have 56+48.02 or $104.02. Now, since you can't do anything at night, assume a (liberal) 12-hour day and divide 104.02/12. Roughly $8.67 an hour. So, by sitting on a train for an extra 3 hours, that 3x$8.67 hours or $26.01 is wasted. I didn't count the original hour in this little marginal analysis for the same reason I didn't count the cost of the Eurail pass for the day: because they are both sunk costs--that hour is going to be travel no matter what, and the pass is paid already. We are JUST examining the cost or benefit of paying an EXTRA €10 for a faster train. Comparing €10x1.4=$14 to a forfeiture of $26.01 in lost time, you come out $12.01 ahead by paying €10 and taking the faster train.
Sure, you get to see the countryside and the guy hanging out of his car relieving himself as the train passes, but I'd rather be walking or doing something rather than sitting in this chair that was ergonomically designed by the same people that did the Guantanamo Bay detainee interrogation chairs.
One thing I have discovered is that I can hop on the cell data network here to send a quick email with my global SIM card... but it is very, very expensive. It would cost $14.40 to send one floppy disk worth of data and a whopping $7000 to send an entire CD. So, each picture that I would upload over the cell network would cost me about $2. Ridiculous, huh? $10 per each megabyte of data transferred.
Behind me on the train, a girl tweezes her eyebrows.
We transferred at Florence after getting off at the wrong stop and hopping back on the train before it left. We are now on the train to Siena. Our stop is Poggibonsi. From there, we take the bus to San Gimignano.
We met the lady who took us to our bed-and-no-breakfast at the bus stop. She drove up in an old blue standard Renault.
Our room is large, but simple. And, it's in the middle of an active vineyard! Walking amongst the grapevines is a relaxing experience in this gorgeous weather. The mother of the lady that picked us up apparently had a moral objection to the three of us in a single room, but it's okay, because now we are all siblings.
We have access to a kitchen, so we are walking into town to buy some groceries... and for me to send this in.
I found a FON spot! FON is a network of people who host an wireless access point for others in exchange for free use of other FON access points. Free legit wireless!
Life Lessons:
1) Breakfast: the most important and consistently good meal of the day.
2) If you can't read it, it probably doesn't say what you think it says.
3) Just because it has grapes on it doesn't mean that it's grape juice.
4) Just because you THINK you want to understand someone doesn't mean you actually want to know what they are saying.
5) Sometime it's easier to claim family ties than explain a situation across a language barrier.