Day two in Italy
Wednesday, June 6, 2007 12:24
The intercity train to La Spezia

This morning, my brother and I went with dad to cash the traveler's cheques that NOBODY USES ANYMORE.
The metro we took was noisy and crowded, and when we finally got to Piazza Missuri it took us 12 blocks of of eternity to find an American Express on via Lago, because the streets change names at every driveway, the map was wrong, and the policemen didn't speak English.
Yeah, I can be an ugly American tourist. So what?

Later on Wednesday
La Spezia, Italy
MY Hotels La Spetzia

16 minutes before we were due to arrive in La Spezia, the train was forced to stop, due to a rather large rock slide. We (and our luggage) were shepherded (with a trainful of other passengers) to a bus, then to an OTHER train on the OTHER side of the rock slide.
When we finally get to La Spezia, my brothers and I (having not eaten all day) are famished (understandably), so we raid the mini-bar (it was free in the last hotel!), and consequently find that this is about twice the street price.
Hmm.

We head over to a restaurant that the concierge recommends, the Trattoria La Nuova Spezia, and upon arriving, are treated to jokes in Italian, swordfish steaks, nyoki with pesto, pasta with cheese sauce and bacon, the house wine, a tray of desserts, a cognac, a cafe corretto, and some very delicious sea-something, which turned out not to be so delicious when we learned it was Squid.
After four hours of this, we had to pay up and go to our pseudo-home, or else risk exhaustion's wrath. It was rather dark, and after about ten minutes of walking this way, we realized we had no idea of where we were.

And that was when it started to rain.

We traipsed over deserted piazzas to deserted streets for another fifteen minutes, finally bumping in to a group of streetlamp-lit teenagers who had a very bad case of the giggles, but did show us to our hotel.

We fell into bed with nary a care.
Only as I was falling asleep did I remember that we needed to get up the next morning...