Big Pizza Pie

Day 78

I had wanted to be up stupid early to get the 5:30 am train to Naples, only the guy at the hostel told me that there was no way of getting to the train station at that time. I was forced to sleep in and take the 10 am train instead. It was a four hour long train and I had a middle seat. This made it hard to write and uncomfortable to read. It was irritating that the people who had tables were not using them but watched me try to balance everything.

The hostel that I was at in Naples was called Giovanni's Home. It was truly more like a homestay than a hostel. Giovanni gave me a map and about an hour long rundown about traveling in Naples. This included from what to see, what to not see, to what areas not to go in.

As my train had once again been late it was too late to do anything. Instead I treated myself to a pasta with seafood dish at a nearby restaurant. Either the dinner didn't agree with me or I had picked up some sort of bug because I couldn't keep anything down that night. I went to sleep early hoping that I would feel better the next day. Two days with little activity made me a bit upset.

Slow Train Movement

Day 77
I was up at 4:45 am for my flight back to Catania. At the airport the immigration guy asked if I had had a good time. I love Malta.

I had some time to kill and spent it reading my newest book, Eat, Pray, Love. I fell asleep before the plane took off, but some nasty turbulence about 10 minutes in woke me up. Still, it's not a long flight and soon I had grabbed my stuff and was on a bus to the train station. There, the guy gave me wrong change, but when I called him on it he apologized and gave me what I was meant to have.

The train ride was quite uneventful except that to get the train from Sicily to the mainland they break it up and put the whole thing on a boat. I was able to get off and walk around on the boat for a bit.

The train was a bit late and then my connecting train was also late. This meant that I didn't get into Cosenza until about 2 hours after I had meant to be there. The directions to my hostel were awful and I kept having to ask people every few meters if I was headed in the right direction. Eventually I made it there though.

The hostel was odd. It was decorated very oddly, like you might imagine you great aunt's house to look, with everything covered in doilies and having a particular smell. I was also the only person there. At one point when I was taking a shower it seems like someone was really pissed off, because I could hear yelling from downstairs very very loudly.

As I had gotten there so late I didn't really have time to see much of anything. Cosenza used to be a major capital in Italy, seeing now though was sad. It was dirty, far dirtier than Sicily had been. A lot of it seemed shut down. The large train station was half boarded up. There was also a significant amount of homeless dogs running around.

I spent the evening getting my pictures from Malta organized and working on the blog. There wasn't anyone to talk to anyway and I wasn't about to wander the streets after dark.