The best traveling requires a lot of sound planning and a lot of sound improvisation. As I've explored more of the world, I've explored the balance between these forces and consistently pushed towards the development of improvisational skills. This means quickly recognizing signs, figuring out how airports and train stations and urban transportation systems are laid out and generally not freaking out when arriving in an unfamiliar situation. Planning before a trip is required to understand a sense of what worthwhile activities are available in a new setting, but active observation once on the ground is crucial for discovering new enjoyable gems.
For 17 days in late July - early August, I was off on a special well-planned trip. The 2014 World Ultimate Club Championships were being held in Lecco, Italy and my Hong Kong club team had received a bid. Though this was my second World's after the WUGC 2012 in Sakai, Japan, I don't take these experiences for granted. I am not nearly a good enough player to make a World's level club team in the USA, so my pure luck in being in Hong Kong allows me entry into this tournament over numerous more accomplished players. The location in Italy was an additional stroke of luck, as our team had two core members of Italian extraction: Giovanni Lion and Luisa Zhou. They were a couple who had moved to Hong Kong several years ago to bring a family business into a new market and had discovered ultimate there. They both dove headfirst into the sport and after a proposal on the sands of Boracay during Asia's largest beach tournament, they were also engaged. The WUCC in Italy gave them the best opportunity to combine their loves of ultimate and each other, and bring their Hong Kong community to their home. And so they planned their wedding in Padua a week before the tournament, and about half the team took an extended vacation and joined them. I was part of that crew and let me just say, if you have a chance to attend an Italian wedding in Italy, do it.
More planning had me breaking off from the wedding crew the following day and taking the 30 minute train ride into Venice, where my parents were waiting for me. Venice was part of my parent's honeymoon and my mom's favorite city in the world. She was so happy to be back among those delicate canals after a decade and a half of absence. With a US return trip looking unlikely for me this year, family reunions are very hard to come by, and so we decided to tour Venice and Austria the week between the wedding and the tournament.
My preparation for the trip had actually begun in January, when I decided to learn Italian. With a flimsy foundation in French and Latin (and a failed year of Spanish) under me, I figured I'd annoy my three Hong Kong-based Italian friends (hi Michele!) and learn some Italian for this trip. With the help of the app DuoLingo (highly recommend) and lots of GoogleTranslate, I had some conversational ability after seven months. As a linguistic nerd, it was very fascinating to discover how the language spun off from Latin and differed from the other Romance languages. As a traveler, just knowing a few key phrases (posso avere, vorrei, dove, bano, acqua, birra, grazie mille, prego, perche) went a long way. A lot of Italians not in service jobs didn't speak English very well, and most were always very happy to see some foreigner bizarrely wanting to learn their language.
I won't recount the Innsbruck to Salzburg to Vienna trip with my parents in this post. Nor will I go over the week of World's ultimate and the gelato-filled walks along Lake Como in the evenings. But I do want to get into how I got from the former to the latter.
I didn't have any plans to get from Vienna to Lecco (outside Milan) until just two weeks before the trip. Flights from Vienna to Milan were insanely expensive, north of $600 USD for an hour and a half flight. Knowing how useful Europe's rail network is, I looked for flights from Vienna to other Italian cities such as Genoa, Torin and Rome. I still couldn't find anything reasonable. A direct train ride would take 14 hours overnight, but was starting to look like the best option. Bordering desperation, I suddenly remembered a bit of trivia. Vienna and Bratislava, Slovakia were two of the closest national capitals on the planet - perhaps I could fly out of the Eastern bloc? Boom, Ryanair operates heavily out of Bratislava, and there was a direct flight at the perfect afternoon hour from Bratislava to Bergamo, the closest of Milan's 3 airports to Lecco. Could this plan be any more perfect? I was going to get to Lecco by the power of trivia and Irish thriftiness.
And so I departed from parents in Vienna (they headed their way to Budapest), boarded the hour long train to Bratislava, saw the center of the town formerly known as Pressburg, boarded a bus to my Ryanair flight, landed in Bergamo and caught another bus to that town's train station. Along the way I had hawkishly searched for outlets and kept my phone at a healthy charge. Everything was going according to plan.
Bergamo train station gave me my first hiccup. It was 8:04pm, and as I navigated the ticket vending machines in the twilight glow, I realized the Lecco train would leave at 8:08pm. I quickly inserted my credit card, but the machine baffled me by asking for a PIN. My credit card doesn't have a PIN, and when I used my debit card's PIN, it rejected me. I tried my debit card, but that didn't work either. Flustered, I ran to a machine that accepted cash and threw in all the change I had in my pocket. The ride to Lecco was only 4 euro, but it was too late, I had already missed it. No worries, there would be another one at 9:08. After a McDonald's break across the street, I was back at the station prompt and early waiting for the Lecco arrival on Platform 1. At 9:00pm a train arrives at Platform 1 and I lug my bigass suitcase up onto the empty train and take over 2 seats. Soon my cabin becomes partially occupied by what seems like high school kids with too much time on their hands, jumping around and fooling around. The train gets going at approximately 9:08 and I text my friends in Lecco that I'm on the way and will be at the station at approximately 9:40.
As the train rolls through the night and into dark, empty suburban station, I realize I have no ability to tell when I would arrive in Lecco. It was difficult to read the station signs in the dark. So I asked a nearby passenger if he knew where Lecco was and he was completely confused. I pulled out my ticket and showed him Lecco. "Ohh LEHHH-COO," he replied in what I thought was an exaggeratedly Italian pronunciation of the city name (complete with hand gestures). "No, this way, no Lecco." Merda. The train stopped at that moment, and in sheer panic, I got off of it. Fortunately, an African woman got off at the same time and she could clearly see my disorientation. "Where are you trying to go?" she asked me in English. "Lecco!" She paused and thought, and then told me, "Ok, you can't get there directly from here. You need to wait and in 20 minutes a train will come back on this platform going the opposite direction and take you back to Bergamo. From there you can catch a train to Lecco." Her English was excellent and her directions very reassuring. I thanked her over and over again and watched as she walked out of the station to the dark featureless town behind it. Til now, I'm not sure how I caught the wrong train. I think I'll chalk it up to the stereotype that Italian trains are never on time. Likely, I was on an earlier train that had been late and left platform 1 at the time the Lecco train was supposed to leave. The Lecco train probably then left later.
This station was really lonely at 9:30pm. There were no high rises in the horizon, and the sound of cars was eerily replaced by that of crickets chirping. I was really alone in a completely random isolated train station somewhere in Northern Italy. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I am from a suburb and that this is no different from what Newton Centre station would look like at night. At least the weather was nice and cool. A flash came across the sky, followed by a cackling roar a dozen or so seconds later. A storm was brewing elsewhere in Lombardy. I looked around the station and noticed just one covered bench. A man was stretched out, possibly asleep, on said bench. A brief wave of speculative panic swept over me. I hoped that the kind woman's directions were correct, otherwise I might have to spend the night sleeping at the station in a rainstorm sharing a covered bench with an Italian hobo. That was the first time I thought about the practicalities of spending a night in an Italian train station.
The train did come and I relaxed as I made my way back to Bergamo. As the train pulls into Bergamo and I rushed off, I suspected that the train to Lecco was leaving soon or had just left. My suspicion wasn't far off - there were no more trains to Lecco. There were no buses nor taxis. It was 10:15pm and I had failed the Italian train system. And outside, the storm I had seen in the distance had arrived. I called my driving teammates and told them of my stranded situation. I was only an hour away from Lecco, surely one of them could come and pick me up? But everyone had arrived that day, some driving from as far away as Rome, and were too weary to make the 2 hour round trip. Plus, ultimate games had actually already been cancelled for the following day and I suspected that heavy drinking had commenced upon the reception of this news. My teammates told me to bunker down in Bergamo for the night and come to Lecco in the morning. Looking out of the station into the pouring rain and seeing no hotels or inns, only the McDonald's, I told them that I'd figure something out.
I was a little surprised that there no taxis at the station. Even Newton Centre will have the occasional yellow cab, and Bergamo is a city of 120,000 with actual tourist attractions. The train station was in a miserable state too, with over 2/3 of the building under repair and covered by white cloth specked by construction dust. There was no where to sit that wasn't a public circulation area, and after a quick contemplation, I ruled out sleeping at the station. I couldn't find an outlet either, so I would have less than 40% charge to get me home. At this, I went back into the station ticket counter area, and approached two men in suits. "Excuse me, could you help me call a taxi?" The men immediately reacted with awkward taken-abackedness, and it was clear that English was their medium of choice. I stuttered out, "uh...telefono...taxi? Per favore?" The guy gives a nod of understanding and gets on the phone, asking me "where? uh, where Lecco? Lecco central?" I told them I had the address, figuring that with GPS there'd be no trouble finding our hotel.
15 minutes later I was walking with two strangers into a third stranger's sedan. They explained to me that they were all Moroccan-born and had been living in Italy for many years. The driver was actually a professional, and he would drop me off for 40 euros "dopo" dropping those two off. The two guys at the station spoke some broken English, and surprisingly poor French. One of the guys kept trying to throw Spanish words at me like "vamos", figuring that "sono Americano" could mean that I was from anywhere in the Americas. The driver however, spoke about as much English as I speak Swedish. Furthermore, he had no GPS, and was unsettlingly giddy about the opportunity to take me for a ride. I called my teammate, telling him that I was hitchhiking a ride, and to call the police that if he didn't hear from me by 2am. I texted him the license plate number, and then got into the car with three Moroccan-born strangers who seemed friendly. At this point, I was aware that what I was doing was crazy, but all my planning had gone to shit and I figured it was time to use any and all of my spontaneous charm to get me 50km to Lecco. I ascertained that the two men in the train station were young, younger than me, working class immigrants who had come from a long shift in Milan at some service job where they were required to wear suits. The driver was their friend who drove for a living. All were in the course of their honest business when I approached them in desperation, and 40 euros and the chance to do a good deed seemed like reasonable motivation for letting a polite Asian stranger speaking broken Italian into their car.
The driver successfully dropped off his two friends, then invited me to the shotgun seat and tried to figure out where to go. He made me call a friend who spoke Italian, so I dialed up Gio and handed the phone over as Gio explained our address in Civate, a town next to Lecco. I hadn't realized we weren't actually staying in Lecco. We then embarked on a lengthy journey on back country roads and little town rotaries, rarely exceeding 50 kmh. I think my driver was named Omar, and I used every single Italian word I had ever learned in trying to buddy up to him. "Quanti anni vivi in Italia? Di dove sei in Morocco?" "Quanti sorelli o fratelli hai?" I learned that he had lived in Italy for 7 years, was originally from Casablanca and had 4 sisters, all still living there. Casablanca!? Really the one Moroccan place I have any familiarity with. "Casablanca! La filme! Molto famosa!!" He laughed and said si si si. I tried to use some of the quotes from Casablanca on him, "Play it again Omar!" but it didn't appear as if he had ever seen the movie in English. Omar then asked an elaborate question, pointing at my seat then his wheel then the road? "Something something posto something something guidare something something in America?" I searched through my Italian app looking for words relating to driving, before suddenly realizing he was asking me what side of the road people drive on in America. "La misma! I mean uh...stesso. La dextra...noi guidamo a la dextra...si....the same..." He laughed and nodded then said "Fast and Furious. Me piace." Ah that was his favorite film! I chuckled and went along with this new bit of conversational material, before retreating into terror at the thought that he might emulate any of the stunts from his favorite movie.
Omar really didn't know the way. We'd get to a rotary and he'd drive around slowly looking at the signs, inevitably missing the exit and doing another round or two around the rotary. I did keep seeing signs for Lecco, so my fears that I would be kidnapped to an undisclosed location were slowly being assuaged. Suddenly my phone rang and I remembered that I had promised my mom that I'd whatsapp her when I successfully reached our hotel. It was 11:45pm and I figured that if I had told my mom I was riding next to a strange Moroccan man in a black cab on some random Italian country road without a clear idea of when I'd arrive, she'd probably freak out and try to get Navy Seal Team 4 to extract me. "Hi Mom. How's Hungary? I'm fine."
"Are you with your team?"
"Uh, no. No, but I'm on the way. Don't worry about me mom."
"Ok."
Back to the strangely enjoyable awkward chitchat with Omar. I realized as it was happening that this experience was nuts, and it dawned on me that I had been in a not too dissimilar situation before. In fact, the last time I had gone to World's in Japan, I had been given a late night ride by a stranger who only spoke Mandarin (read about it here http://cal337.blogspot.hk/2012/10/worlds-ultimate-and-guts-championships.html). That story hadn't ended with getting out of the stranger's car, and neither would this one. We kept driving agonizingly slow in unclear directions and my phone battery dipped below 25%. Omar explained that he normally did drive "stranieri," foreigners. "Sono strainiero anche!" I exclaimed, figuring that I was exactly his clientele. He gave a polite chuckle, non-verbally indicating that no, he actually didn't typically pickup unannounced travellers who were coming from Hong Kong but were really from the US and were here for a wedding in Italy but had flown in from Slovakia. I had difficulty expressing my full story to him in Italian. Finally, after navigating several road closures and asking for directions, I saw Lecco Stazione, empty and staid, before me. We exchanged 40 euros, bid each other ciao, and I waited patiently at the empty steps for my teammate Will to pick me up.
I had been informed that the drive to the station was about 15 minutes. 20 minutes after I called Will, he texted me that he was on his way. Again it was dry, but I saw lighting bolts at the distance. 10 minutes of silence went by and the lightning came closer. For the third time that eventful evening, I wondered if I would have to sleep at the train station. It was hard to believe that I had had breakfast in Vienna and lunch in Bratislava, dinner at a McDonald's in Bergamo, and here I was now in an empty train station in Lecco. I walked out of the station, and saw one car parked right outside the driveway with one dude sitting with a cigarette, staring towards the train station. What the hell was he doing? There was no way he was up to any good. I edged back up towards the station and prayed that Will would quickly find me.
Will called again, saying he'd reached the station but he thought it was the back of the station. Since I didn't see any sign of him, I quickly ascertained that I was at the front of the station. "Can you just drive around?" "Not sure, the GPS is telling us to go down this road that is closed." "Fuck.." "Well keep looking around, hang in there."
Another 15 minutes go by. It's now 1am and I'm strolling around with my luggage, keeping a wary eye on sketchy Italian dude sitting in his car. Suddenly I see a tall white man walking towards me! "WILL!" No response. I forget that I'm in Italy and not Asia, and that the local inhabitants can also be tall white men. I sheepishly keep ambling about with my luggage, and don't raise my hand at all when I see a second tall white man approach. This one was actually Will though and he led me to the parked car that his wife was driving. Within 90 seconds of entering the car, the storm reaches us and it starts absolutely pouring. Somehow I reached our hotel safe and dry and slept on a bed and not a train station. Basically according to plan.
For 17 days in late July - early August, I was off on a special well-planned trip. The 2014 World Ultimate Club Championships were being held in Lecco, Italy and my Hong Kong club team had received a bid. Though this was my second World's after the WUGC 2012 in Sakai, Japan, I don't take these experiences for granted. I am not nearly a good enough player to make a World's level club team in the USA, so my pure luck in being in Hong Kong allows me entry into this tournament over numerous more accomplished players. The location in Italy was an additional stroke of luck, as our team had two core members of Italian extraction: Giovanni Lion and Luisa Zhou. They were a couple who had moved to Hong Kong several years ago to bring a family business into a new market and had discovered ultimate there. They both dove headfirst into the sport and after a proposal on the sands of Boracay during Asia's largest beach tournament, they were also engaged. The WUCC in Italy gave them the best opportunity to combine their loves of ultimate and each other, and bring their Hong Kong community to their home. And so they planned their wedding in Padua a week before the tournament, and about half the team took an extended vacation and joined them. I was part of that crew and let me just say, if you have a chance to attend an Italian wedding in Italy, do it.More planning had me breaking off from the wedding crew the following day and taking the 30 minute train ride into Venice, where my parents were waiting for me. Venice was part of my parent's honeymoon and my mom's favorite city in the world. She was so happy to be back among those delicate canals after a decade and a half of absence. With a US return trip looking unlikely for me this year, family reunions are very hard to come by, and so we decided to tour Venice and Austria the week between the wedding and the tournament.
My preparation for the trip had actually begun in January, when I decided to learn Italian. With a flimsy foundation in French and Latin (and a failed year of Spanish) under me, I figured I'd annoy my three Hong Kong-based Italian friends (hi Michele!) and learn some Italian for this trip. With the help of the app DuoLingo (highly recommend) and lots of GoogleTranslate, I had some conversational ability after seven months. As a linguistic nerd, it was very fascinating to discover how the language spun off from Latin and differed from the other Romance languages. As a traveler, just knowing a few key phrases (posso avere, vorrei, dove, bano, acqua, birra, grazie mille, prego, perche) went a long way. A lot of Italians not in service jobs didn't speak English very well, and most were always very happy to see some foreigner bizarrely wanting to learn their language.
I won't recount the Innsbruck to Salzburg to Vienna trip with my parents in this post. Nor will I go over the week of World's ultimate and the gelato-filled walks along Lake Como in the evenings. But I do want to get into how I got from the former to the latter.
I didn't have any plans to get from Vienna to Lecco (outside Milan) until just two weeks before the trip. Flights from Vienna to Milan were insanely expensive, north of $600 USD for an hour and a half flight. Knowing how useful Europe's rail network is, I looked for flights from Vienna to other Italian cities such as Genoa, Torin and Rome. I still couldn't find anything reasonable. A direct train ride would take 14 hours overnight, but was starting to look like the best option. Bordering desperation, I suddenly remembered a bit of trivia. Vienna and Bratislava, Slovakia were two of the closest national capitals on the planet - perhaps I could fly out of the Eastern bloc? Boom, Ryanair operates heavily out of Bratislava, and there was a direct flight at the perfect afternoon hour from Bratislava to Bergamo, the closest of Milan's 3 airports to Lecco. Could this plan be any more perfect? I was going to get to Lecco by the power of trivia and Irish thriftiness.
And so I departed from parents in Vienna (they headed their way to Budapest), boarded the hour long train to Bratislava, saw the center of the town formerly known as Pressburg, boarded a bus to my Ryanair flight, landed in Bergamo and caught another bus to that town's train station. Along the way I had hawkishly searched for outlets and kept my phone at a healthy charge. Everything was going according to plan.
Bergamo train station gave me my first hiccup. It was 8:04pm, and as I navigated the ticket vending machines in the twilight glow, I realized the Lecco train would leave at 8:08pm. I quickly inserted my credit card, but the machine baffled me by asking for a PIN. My credit card doesn't have a PIN, and when I used my debit card's PIN, it rejected me. I tried my debit card, but that didn't work either. Flustered, I ran to a machine that accepted cash and threw in all the change I had in my pocket. The ride to Lecco was only 4 euro, but it was too late, I had already missed it. No worries, there would be another one at 9:08. After a McDonald's break across the street, I was back at the station prompt and early waiting for the Lecco arrival on Platform 1. At 9:00pm a train arrives at Platform 1 and I lug my bigass suitcase up onto the empty train and take over 2 seats. Soon my cabin becomes partially occupied by what seems like high school kids with too much time on their hands, jumping around and fooling around. The train gets going at approximately 9:08 and I text my friends in Lecco that I'm on the way and will be at the station at approximately 9:40.
As the train rolls through the night and into dark, empty suburban station, I realize I have no ability to tell when I would arrive in Lecco. It was difficult to read the station signs in the dark. So I asked a nearby passenger if he knew where Lecco was and he was completely confused. I pulled out my ticket and showed him Lecco. "Ohh LEHHH-COO," he replied in what I thought was an exaggeratedly Italian pronunciation of the city name (complete with hand gestures). "No, this way, no Lecco." Merda. The train stopped at that moment, and in sheer panic, I got off of it. Fortunately, an African woman got off at the same time and she could clearly see my disorientation. "Where are you trying to go?" she asked me in English. "Lecco!" She paused and thought, and then told me, "Ok, you can't get there directly from here. You need to wait and in 20 minutes a train will come back on this platform going the opposite direction and take you back to Bergamo. From there you can catch a train to Lecco." Her English was excellent and her directions very reassuring. I thanked her over and over again and watched as she walked out of the station to the dark featureless town behind it. Til now, I'm not sure how I caught the wrong train. I think I'll chalk it up to the stereotype that Italian trains are never on time. Likely, I was on an earlier train that had been late and left platform 1 at the time the Lecco train was supposed to leave. The Lecco train probably then left later.
This station was really lonely at 9:30pm. There were no high rises in the horizon, and the sound of cars was eerily replaced by that of crickets chirping. I was really alone in a completely random isolated train station somewhere in Northern Italy. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I am from a suburb and that this is no different from what Newton Centre station would look like at night. At least the weather was nice and cool. A flash came across the sky, followed by a cackling roar a dozen or so seconds later. A storm was brewing elsewhere in Lombardy. I looked around the station and noticed just one covered bench. A man was stretched out, possibly asleep, on said bench. A brief wave of speculative panic swept over me. I hoped that the kind woman's directions were correct, otherwise I might have to spend the night sleeping at the station in a rainstorm sharing a covered bench with an Italian hobo. That was the first time I thought about the practicalities of spending a night in an Italian train station.
The train did come and I relaxed as I made my way back to Bergamo. As the train pulls into Bergamo and I rushed off, I suspected that the train to Lecco was leaving soon or had just left. My suspicion wasn't far off - there were no more trains to Lecco. There were no buses nor taxis. It was 10:15pm and I had failed the Italian train system. And outside, the storm I had seen in the distance had arrived. I called my driving teammates and told them of my stranded situation. I was only an hour away from Lecco, surely one of them could come and pick me up? But everyone had arrived that day, some driving from as far away as Rome, and were too weary to make the 2 hour round trip. Plus, ultimate games had actually already been cancelled for the following day and I suspected that heavy drinking had commenced upon the reception of this news. My teammates told me to bunker down in Bergamo for the night and come to Lecco in the morning. Looking out of the station into the pouring rain and seeing no hotels or inns, only the McDonald's, I told them that I'd figure something out.
I was a little surprised that there no taxis at the station. Even Newton Centre will have the occasional yellow cab, and Bergamo is a city of 120,000 with actual tourist attractions. The train station was in a miserable state too, with over 2/3 of the building under repair and covered by white cloth specked by construction dust. There was no where to sit that wasn't a public circulation area, and after a quick contemplation, I ruled out sleeping at the station. I couldn't find an outlet either, so I would have less than 40% charge to get me home. At this, I went back into the station ticket counter area, and approached two men in suits. "Excuse me, could you help me call a taxi?" The men immediately reacted with awkward taken-abackedness, and it was clear that English was their medium of choice. I stuttered out, "uh...telefono...taxi? Per favore?" The guy gives a nod of understanding and gets on the phone, asking me "where? uh, where Lecco? Lecco central?" I told them I had the address, figuring that with GPS there'd be no trouble finding our hotel.
15 minutes later I was walking with two strangers into a third stranger's sedan. They explained to me that they were all Moroccan-born and had been living in Italy for many years. The driver was actually a professional, and he would drop me off for 40 euros "dopo" dropping those two off. The two guys at the station spoke some broken English, and surprisingly poor French. One of the guys kept trying to throw Spanish words at me like "vamos", figuring that "sono Americano" could mean that I was from anywhere in the Americas. The driver however, spoke about as much English as I speak Swedish. Furthermore, he had no GPS, and was unsettlingly giddy about the opportunity to take me for a ride. I called my teammate, telling him that I was hitchhiking a ride, and to call the police that if he didn't hear from me by 2am. I texted him the license plate number, and then got into the car with three Moroccan-born strangers who seemed friendly. At this point, I was aware that what I was doing was crazy, but all my planning had gone to shit and I figured it was time to use any and all of my spontaneous charm to get me 50km to Lecco. I ascertained that the two men in the train station were young, younger than me, working class immigrants who had come from a long shift in Milan at some service job where they were required to wear suits. The driver was their friend who drove for a living. All were in the course of their honest business when I approached them in desperation, and 40 euros and the chance to do a good deed seemed like reasonable motivation for letting a polite Asian stranger speaking broken Italian into their car.
The driver successfully dropped off his two friends, then invited me to the shotgun seat and tried to figure out where to go. He made me call a friend who spoke Italian, so I dialed up Gio and handed the phone over as Gio explained our address in Civate, a town next to Lecco. I hadn't realized we weren't actually staying in Lecco. We then embarked on a lengthy journey on back country roads and little town rotaries, rarely exceeding 50 kmh. I think my driver was named Omar, and I used every single Italian word I had ever learned in trying to buddy up to him. "Quanti anni vivi in Italia? Di dove sei in Morocco?" "Quanti sorelli o fratelli hai?" I learned that he had lived in Italy for 7 years, was originally from Casablanca and had 4 sisters, all still living there. Casablanca!? Really the one Moroccan place I have any familiarity with. "Casablanca! La filme! Molto famosa!!" He laughed and said si si si. I tried to use some of the quotes from Casablanca on him, "Play it again Omar!" but it didn't appear as if he had ever seen the movie in English. Omar then asked an elaborate question, pointing at my seat then his wheel then the road? "Something something posto something something guidare something something in America?" I searched through my Italian app looking for words relating to driving, before suddenly realizing he was asking me what side of the road people drive on in America. "La misma! I mean uh...stesso. La dextra...noi guidamo a la dextra...si....the same..." He laughed and nodded then said "Fast and Furious. Me piace." Ah that was his favorite film! I chuckled and went along with this new bit of conversational material, before retreating into terror at the thought that he might emulate any of the stunts from his favorite movie.
Omar really didn't know the way. We'd get to a rotary and he'd drive around slowly looking at the signs, inevitably missing the exit and doing another round or two around the rotary. I did keep seeing signs for Lecco, so my fears that I would be kidnapped to an undisclosed location were slowly being assuaged. Suddenly my phone rang and I remembered that I had promised my mom that I'd whatsapp her when I successfully reached our hotel. It was 11:45pm and I figured that if I had told my mom I was riding next to a strange Moroccan man in a black cab on some random Italian country road without a clear idea of when I'd arrive, she'd probably freak out and try to get Navy Seal Team 4 to extract me. "Hi Mom. How's Hungary? I'm fine."
"Are you with your team?"
"Uh, no. No, but I'm on the way. Don't worry about me mom."
"Ok."
Back to the strangely enjoyable awkward chitchat with Omar. I realized as it was happening that this experience was nuts, and it dawned on me that I had been in a not too dissimilar situation before. In fact, the last time I had gone to World's in Japan, I had been given a late night ride by a stranger who only spoke Mandarin (read about it here http://cal337.blogspot.hk/2012/10/worlds-ultimate-and-guts-championships.html). That story hadn't ended with getting out of the stranger's car, and neither would this one. We kept driving agonizingly slow in unclear directions and my phone battery dipped below 25%. Omar explained that he normally did drive "stranieri," foreigners. "Sono strainiero anche!" I exclaimed, figuring that I was exactly his clientele. He gave a polite chuckle, non-verbally indicating that no, he actually didn't typically pickup unannounced travellers who were coming from Hong Kong but were really from the US and were here for a wedding in Italy but had flown in from Slovakia. I had difficulty expressing my full story to him in Italian. Finally, after navigating several road closures and asking for directions, I saw Lecco Stazione, empty and staid, before me. We exchanged 40 euros, bid each other ciao, and I waited patiently at the empty steps for my teammate Will to pick me up.
I had been informed that the drive to the station was about 15 minutes. 20 minutes after I called Will, he texted me that he was on his way. Again it was dry, but I saw lighting bolts at the distance. 10 minutes of silence went by and the lightning came closer. For the third time that eventful evening, I wondered if I would have to sleep at the train station. It was hard to believe that I had had breakfast in Vienna and lunch in Bratislava, dinner at a McDonald's in Bergamo, and here I was now in an empty train station in Lecco. I walked out of the station, and saw one car parked right outside the driveway with one dude sitting with a cigarette, staring towards the train station. What the hell was he doing? There was no way he was up to any good. I edged back up towards the station and prayed that Will would quickly find me.Will called again, saying he'd reached the station but he thought it was the back of the station. Since I didn't see any sign of him, I quickly ascertained that I was at the front of the station. "Can you just drive around?" "Not sure, the GPS is telling us to go down this road that is closed." "Fuck.." "Well keep looking around, hang in there."
Another 15 minutes go by. It's now 1am and I'm strolling around with my luggage, keeping a wary eye on sketchy Italian dude sitting in his car. Suddenly I see a tall white man walking towards me! "WILL!" No response. I forget that I'm in Italy and not Asia, and that the local inhabitants can also be tall white men. I sheepishly keep ambling about with my luggage, and don't raise my hand at all when I see a second tall white man approach. This one was actually Will though and he led me to the parked car that his wife was driving. Within 90 seconds of entering the car, the storm reaches us and it starts absolutely pouring. Somehow I reached our hotel safe and dry and slept on a bed and not a train station. Basically according to plan.
