Sliding Doors, Lesson in Italian Physics Continued

Returning now to the issues of trains, one can readily see that you cannot talk about Italy without talking about transportation. Italians and transportation are like Laurel and Hardy, who are surprisingly popular here. I will let you work out the details for yourself about that analogy.

The general law of antimatter, however, is something that amazes me each time. As I take the train to Forlì, which is fifty minutes from Bologna, I spend quite a bit of time at the train station. The train that I take to Forlì comes from Milano and the one I come back on is from Ancona. Both of these cities are major stops as is Bologna. So, while the smaller towns like Forlì and Faenza (I love that name, but finding a restaurant there is another story…) do not exhibit the full effect of this law as when then trains stop at Bologna. I usually take the Intercity or Interregional and they are more or less hourly.

But, it would be too easy to start with the train. First, you have to get to the train. Bologna has a dozen or so tracks in the main platform area. However, as a trivia question, there are two tracks that you will never have a train on. You will have to visit to know the answer. Anyways, on each of these tracks are trains coming from and going to major Italian cities as Bologna is at the center of the northern Italian train network. In fact, the train line that I ride is built along one of the oldest and straightest Roman roads in the world, the Via Romagna which bisects the Province of Emilia-Romagna. Bologna is in Emilia, Forlì in Romagna. Now you know.

So, in general, trains are supposed to run on the same track on a daily basis. That happens in fantasy lands like Switzerland, Germany, and Austria where you can set your watch by the train. As I never wear a watch and am often late (though those two are not connected in my case), I too can set my watch by the trains in Italy. Pretty much on a daily basis you can see a German, Austrian, or Swiss person being wheeled out on a stretcher from heart failure from the realization that he or she is going to be late for the first time in his or her fifty some-odd years on this planet.

The Italians, however, are different. It is okay to be fashionably late to the train station because the train won’t be there. For the first few weeks, I would be running to the station from the bus to get to the platform on time. Several times I got there when the train was supposed to leave, but I only found a guy sweeping the still-burning cigarettes off the binario onto the train tracks for the pigeons to smoke. Yes, even the pigeons smoke here. Damn, I had missed the train! This happened as I said a few times before I realized that the Italians had not even shown up for the train yet, much less the train. I had just missed the train from the previous hour, not this one. It is confusing if you start to think about the implications of that…

So, after ten minutes or so the Italians begin to arrive for this train. I have obviously learned better. If I want to take the 9:40 train, then I go at 10:20. However, if I want to leave when the 9:40 train would leave, I need to be there at 9:00 to catch the 8:40 train at 9:30 after a quick coffee. It’s kind of like a slide rule.

OK, so once you make adjustments for when you should be at the train station, the next step is finding the train. Sounds simple enough. They are large, make a lot of noise, usually pretty easy to spot in a crowd. However, remember that we are in Italy, and you can become invisible. So can the trains.

Normally if I take the 9:40, and I will let you do the math to figure out when I actually go to the station, that train is supposed to leave on Binario 4. So, you go to the main hall where there is the Arrivi and Partenze scrolling signs which indicate the trains and their binari. By the way, if there is one thing that I love about train stations, it is the scrolling signs. If you have never experienced one of these, then you are truly missing out. I have stood watching those for hours. Meanwhile I was pickpocketed and had my shoes stolen, but it is fascinating. You watch them spellbound and suddenly, rows and rows of numbers, letters, and symbols go racing by. It’s like Vegas, but you don’t have to pay. You stand there, everyone looking up as if Martians are landing (and meanwhile the pickpockets are have a field day) and everyone is waiting for their train to show up. The first time I was waiting for my train and it came up after lots of clicking and scrolling I yelled “Jackpot!!” and grabbed the guy next to me and hugged him. He was a pickpocket and took my train ticket.

The daily ritual then is for hundreds of people standing in the hall, looking up at the schedule and when the train and binario number comes up, it is chaos. Suddenly, the train that has been twenty minutes late rolls into existence on the board. However, it sometimes ends up be Ancoroma or Milanapoli so you’re not sure if it is Ancona, Roma, Milano, or Napoli. You roll the dice, it’s Ancona, binario 4. But when you get to binario 4, on the mini-scroll bar, it reads Venizia 8:56. But, it has not come, and you need the 9:40 train to Ancona. You go back to the main hall, and now, next to Romancona, the number for the binario is blank. All other trains have numbers, except yours. People are casually waltzing to respected binari, saying goodbye, talking on phones saying that they were about to leave, but not you. Standing there, after the train was supposed to leave, even on the calibrated analog system that you spent four sleepless nights perfecting, there is a blank.

Logically, a train that is coming from somewhere else must consequently arrive from that place, correct? So it seems. Looking at the Arrivi board, there is Milanoroma, binario 4. Looking back to Ancoromano, nothing. Binario 4, blank. Okay, you roll the dice again. You go to Binario 4 and you see, ES Monaco (which is very confusing because that is actually München, or Munich) 9:14. No Venezia train. No Romilancorona either. You decide to wait. There are a few coffee machines in the tunnels under the trains, so why not? Fifteen minutes later after having figured out how to actually get the coffee from seventy-two variations of sugar, coffee, water and milk with special names each, you go back to Binario 4. This time, it says Firenze 9:28. You go check the board. Arrival from Milano, binario 4. Some unintelligible gibberish that looks like there is an “a” and a “c” which you imagine could be Ancona, blank. As it is now well past noon, your hope of getting to work at all begins to dwindle. Back to the tunnel.

Now, you get to binario 4 and the mini-scroll bar is blank, except for two numbers a 9 and a 4. Suddenly, these scrolling signs aren’t so endearing. However, there is now a crowd forming and you hear whispers of faraway places like “Ancona” and “Forlì” and you figure out that you are not alone. So, then the crowd grows. Obviously you still have to work out some kinks on your analog system because magically every Italian has figured out that the 9:40 train is about to depart. It is 1:35. The mind literally boggles.

The crowd is now so large, that nobody from binari 6 and up (if you are paying attention, you know one of the trivia answers) can get by. There is a Doctor Suess story about two critters, a northbound one and a southbound one that refuse to move until an entire city and highway system is built around them. Something similar happens at this point, but eventually a little lady with more determination than most climbers of Everest have, breaks the dike and passengers from Balzonoroma come bursting through. When the confusion has hit its zenith, there is an indecipherable screaming over the intercom in a language that could very well have been spoken by the Italic tribes thousands of years ago, but you don’t understand a word of it. But somewhere in there, the Italians have managed to decipher, or at least you think they have, that among that cacophony of barking, static, and what may or may not have been singing, was the information that the train to Ancona would in fact be leaving from binario 4 as the train from Milano was in arrival. You dash to the main hallway to try and verify this, but just then, the scrolling bar has just finished spinning, and there is no train to Ancona. You sprint back to the binario to see that the train has in fact arrived.

And now, we get to the concept of antimatter, almost. The train glides towards a stop as there is another round of crackling howling and screaming over the intercom and everyone on the platform begins asking each other if this is the right train. Lots of lifted shoulders with hands out at the sides, which means in Italian, “don’t ask me, I’m invisible.”

The train stops. The air is thick with anticipation. No, that is smoke. Every single Italian has just lit up a cigarette and is frantically smoking it, knowing that they are about to board the evil “non-smoking” train. The pigeons begin to descend, shaking from nicotine withdrawal. Now, how the concept of non-smoking trains got passed in Italian is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that it is more or less obeyed, is nothing short of witnessing the birth of the universe. Smoking in a crowded auditorium after an Umberto Eco lecture is another story, again. Especially when it was Eco. But, that will have to wait.

The doors begin to creak open. The pigeons are going nuts, waiting for the Italians to toss their cigarette butts to the platform. As I said, this train is coming from one major place and going to another, stopping in a middle major place. This equals lots of people. Lots of people with mass. Let us restate our law: Two or more objects containing significant mass are required to fill the same place at the same time. And so it begins.

Unlike the buses which have an ingress and an egress, the trains have one, two-foot wide door for each end of the car. On the inside of the train, there are thousands of Milanese people who were last sighted in the Bermuda triangle when the train left the station 12 hours ago and on the platform, there are thousands of Bolognese who are now a week and a half late to work. And there is one, two-foot wide door standing between them. Instead of standing aside and letting the Milanese descend and then have the Bolognese board, it happens simultaneously. I don’t mean, about the same time. I mean sim-ul-tan-e-ous-ly. The Milanese would never yield to a Bolognese and vice versa, so what happens is antimatter. As a Milanese descends, a Bolognese boards and presto! Two bodies occupy the same space. The mutated result is a part fusion, part fission. At the beginning of the process, the Milanese and Bolognese masses merge to form one larger massive body of four arms and legs, two heads and several brands of designer clothing including at least six pairs of sunglasses. And then, the fission begins and the boarding Bolognese and the descending Milanese seem to appear more or less intact, though not necessarily with the same three pairs of sunglasses.

After this defiance of natural process occurs, you start to fight for the seats. But that, like the flight is another lesson in Italian Physics.

For now, the train begins to pull out of the station. The pigeons swarm the tracks, and an American comes running up the stairs onto the platform believing that he has just missed the 16:45 train to Rome and realizing that the “long lost friend” who hugged him in the station just lifted his wallet. In the distance, the ambulance can be heard responding to a call about a German tourist at the train station.

Flying Lessons, Italian Style

Having just flown from Brussels to  Amarillo, via my favorite transitional airport, for now at least, Newark Liberty, I remembered a piece I wrote a few years ago about my least favorite airport experiences traveling back to Italy from the UK.

Hope you enjoy. (Remember, it only hurts when you laugh):

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And so we come to a very brief lesson in Italian physics. This law is best defined by the experience of riding Italian trains. The law that we will discuss today in Italian Dynamics (ID) is that of the anti-matter law. In normal three dimensional space, it is impossible to have two bodies which contain mass occupying the same space at the same time. In ID, this law does not exist. Whereas normal physical phenomenon resist being turned into anti-matter, ID requires it. In other words, as a law: Two or more objects containing significant mass are required to fill the same place at the same time.

This law can be seen on a daily basis at the train station, or any other place that requires a line in Italy. Requires is a big word. However, we must first digress on the concept, or rather the lack of the concept of a line before we return to the issue of trains. A well-known textbook axiom taught in school in geometry is that in Euclidean space, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. Italians were absent on that day.

I was in Dublin recently and saw a very curious thing. There was a bus stop and the bus had not yet arrived, but there was this odd event. People were standing in single file. The bus came, they stayed in line. They boarded the bus, the bus left, and a new line eventually formed. I was in shock. I cursed myself for not having my camera with me. People back in Bologna would never believe this. I tried to remember if I had ever seen anything like it. Misty images of standing in line at movie theaters in America drifted by, but it seemed like a dream. Did people really stand in lines?

Wondering if the world was coming to an end, I was relieved to be back at the airport a few days later for my flight to Forlì with Ryanair. Ryanair is the Irish answer to Southwest Airlines. You can buy very cheap tickets and change them (with a rather large fee) and go to exciting airports like Forlì, or Stansted and spend another hour actually getting to the city you want to go by bus or train, in these cases Bologna and London. However, the main thing that Ryanair learned from Southwest Airlines is what is affectionately called “the cattle call” by those who have experienced it. As you know, that means no assigned seats and general admission. Obviously these people have not been to a Who concert or lived in Italy.

So, Ryanair adopted this same procedure. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Italians do general admission on any airline, regardless of the boarding procedure. Now, they are encouraged to do this. At Stansted, they have a horribly underexplained system of queuing that the Brits seem to figure out in their typical Brit-logic, the Americans just wonder aloud until an annoyed Brit clues them in on what is going on just to shut them up, and then there are the Italians.

The queuing is like this. Numbers 1-64 on the inside of a cordoned passage, 65 and above on the outside which wraps around so that the two lines begin at the same place. When 1-64 are in, they readjust the cordon, and voila, the second line goes in. Simple enough, right? I arrived from Dublin and got to the Forli gate in Stansted. There were more or less 50 or so people. I was number 118 on the card, so I had to go on the outside. People continued to file behind the first line. Much more than 64. Finally, a Ryanair person announces, only in English, the queue system and that people with 65 and above need to move. No one moves. Then, the employee announced how to look at the card to find your number. No one looks. Meanwhile, there is an Italian-speaking employee looking around bored. Now, since the flight was ninety percent Italian, you would think that the Italian employee could help clear things up, but instead, there is a sudden angst among the big line. “Are they letting us through?” As such, there began a condensation of matter. Now, everyone wanted to be at the front of the line.

While I was still standing alone on the outside, beginning to feel quite lonely, the Ryanair British employee who had made the announcements assured me that I would be first in the second group. I smiled politely. As the push from behind increased, an Italian-speaking Brit began to try to explain to the crowd the system. He pointed to where their number was and explained that most of them needed to move. Now, they got angry. Now they had no excuse. Several of them obviously understood the English, but in a way that only Italians can do, completely ignored it. They had become invisible. Nobody could see that they were number 130 and in the front of the line. Telling a couple of ladies six or seven times that they needed to move, the Brit finally began to give up. They ladies looked at him wondering, “Whom are you talking to? We are invisible.”

Finally, some started to give a hint that maybe they would act like they happened to hear this Brit. And then, the Ryanair employee started saying several times in English that those with 65 and above needed to move to the other line. This only caused everyone with 65 and above to start pointing their fingers at me and laughing. I smiled politely.

And then, showtime. There were two Ryanair employees who were going to start taking tickets, one of them was the Italian. The exasperated third employee who had tried to assure me that she would be able to control this began to mentally think about career changes to an alligator wrestle in Louisiana as she announced that we would begin boarding only those numbers 1-64. All others would have to move. She removed the cordon and the madness began. The other Brit who was one of the ones taking tickets was desperately searching for the number, handing her the boarding cards as she checked off the numbers 1-64 while Francesco was letting anyone go by with a cheerful “Buona Sera.” The cordon was placed back. Francesco was told again what he was supposed to be doing and the announcement was made again that only 1-64 could board. The Italians looked at her in amazement, “Whom is that strange British woman talking to? We are invisible.”

The cordon was removed. Repeat. Cordon replaced. Now, instead of having Francesco explain this in Italian over the intercom, he was given the task of checking off the numbers and two Brits would take the boarding cards. So, then, those with 65 and above didn’t move to the other line, they just stood there, making it nearly impossible for people with 64 and below to get by. Meanwhile, I had become quite a sideshow attraction standing there by myself on the other side of the rope. I smiled politely as my lower lip quivered.

After fifteen minutes of this, the now frazzled woman employee turned and asked Francesco if 1-64 had passed, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then, she found him singing with a group of Neopolitans at the next gate and so bringing him back, they counted the cards and yes, 1-64 and 25 others had boarded. So, in a defiant act, she removed the cordon on my row, and I mean my row as it was just me and two Japanese tourists who had gotten lost, and I was able to board. I thanked her. She smiled politely as a tear squeezed from her eye and she was wondering if her psychiatrist would still be up at this hour.

The plane ride is another story.