Oh man. There is no better place for anxiety-eating than qui in Italia – I managed to consume 4 separate gelato flavors today (a cone with menta and fiordilatte at lunch, and a nocciola and cioccolato on my way home from school) on account of being semi-stressed by the excessive amount of stumbling around aimlessly on Italian transportation websites to try to figure out how the hell to make this proposed Capri trip work.
So: I’m here in Italy, I have no plans for the next two weekends, and I want to travel. The weather is beautiful and perfect for beach-going, but it's so stressful trying to coordinate with people to get anywhere. Today was the first time I really missed having well-established friendships and people who I know share the same interests, etc etc, because then we could just agree on where we want to go, plan our trips, and be done with it. However, since that is NOT the case, and since I’m always the one planning shit back in real-life-America, I’ve just totally taken a back-seat here, figuring that everyone is traveling and there is always room for one more, so I might as well let everyone else do the planning and just hop onto whichever trip that works.
This weekend, Capri sounded pretty awesome, and Mel, Marinna, and a few of their friends were planning some elaborate trip that they invited me to join them on so I figured I’d just do that and boom, there would be a freaking amazing weekend right there. However, they all embarked on their journey this afternoon, and I am still signed up for a class trip to Assisi for tomorrow, so I just assumed that I’d leave from Assisi tomorrow afternoon to go meet up with them in Capri. Unfortunately, that is way more of a hassle than I originally assumed…
So here’s my problem. Thus far, I have kind of just been blindly assuming that everywhere in Italy is about a 3-hour, €10, non-stop, direct train ride away, which with today’s reality check, I realized is so obviously not the case. Capri is, in fact, a 5-hour, €40 train ride away, with a layover in Rome, and then requires an hour-and-a-half ferry ride from Naples to the actual island of Capri. Which would be a totally fun and exciting adventure with friends, but unfortunately, I would have to do the whole trip alone, since I would be MEETING people there, not going WITH them. Also, I’d be leaving later in the afternoon from Assisi, so there’s a chance that by the time I arrive in Naples, there will be no more ferries to Capri for the night and I will have to spend the night in Naples... by myself... eek.
But then again, since I did have a group of friends beating out the path for me (they are already there by now- they made the whole train/ferry trip earlier today, and have already set up an apartment rental right on the island for all three nights), I figured I’d just relax for now since everything is kind of out of my control at this point, and just wait to hear from them when they get there, so they can tell me how the train ride was, what the ferry schedule is for tomorrow, how the apartment is, what the weather is like, etc, so I can make a more informed decision on whether or not it's worth going through the semi-gruelling travel, or if I’d rather just come back to Florence with the group from Assisi and take some more manageable day trips, like checking out Fiesole or hitting up the Miu Miu/Prada/other Italian whatnot outlets a couple of minutes outside of the city. However, I’ve been calling them all evening and have not heard back from them since they first got on the train. I have a bad feeling that cell reception is very shotty down there and therefore I am kind of fucked on the whole words-from-the-wise plan. Bleh.
But I made it my motto for my time here in Italy that I will never pass up a cool opportunity on the basis of a) money, b) homework or c) convenience, so therefore, I’m just gonna pack shit for Capri and bring it with me to Assisi, and if I haven’t heard from them by the time we get off the bus in Assisi then I’ll just leave my shit on the bus and come back to Florence with everyone else. In the meantime I’m just gonna check the train schedule and try to track down an updated ferry schedule, and hope for the best. Ohhh man. Let the adventures begin…
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