Sunday heading back from Nice

This morning we got up early to watch the sun rise. It was pretty, and pretty warm. The sun rose over the cliff I described a few blogs ago. There were little one-man fishing operations in the water near the beach. Around 8, we went up the many flights of stairs hairpinning around the sides of the cliff to get to the top. There had been a Celtic fortress there at one time (cool ruins) and there were really neat mosaics in some stairs there. Also, there was a play area with a fantastic huge jungle gym made of coated cables. So you could climb up in it like a huge 3D spider web and bounce around. We had to hurry with all this, though, because while we watched the sun rise we decided to take the 10 am train back to Riva instead of the 2 pm, and we had to hustle back to the hostel to get packed up before eating breakfast. It worked out fine, though, and we got our meal in before heading to the train station. We spent most of the rest of the day on the train, and got in to Riva in the late afternoon.

Tonight's feature: Italian train mentality. The Swiss mentality and Italian mentality are directly opposite of each other, and you can see this in how they run their trains. In general, you can set your watch by a Swiss train. Ride them long enough and you'll encounter a problem now and then, but in general they're very timely. Italian trains, however, can be counted upon to be late. This matters when you have a connection to make. Today we sat at a stop for about 30 minutes, for no apparent reason. We did actually make up the time by the end of the trip, however, and had enough minutes to catch our connection, so it actually worked out fine. Today was particularly cultural, as we were sitting by three very chatty Italian ladies for almost the entire seven hours. They talked loudly and also slowly enough that I could catch some things now and then. Justin marveled at their ability to continue talking for such a long period.

posted by LizC @ 3/20/2005 05:31:00 AM