Rome: July 5

Sunday July 5, 2009

Today is our free day and I spend the majority of it waiting. Our plan is to take the train out to Nettuno, to spend the day at the beach and relax. Josie, Becky and I are late meeting up with the other girls at the Colosseum. We rush through the Metro stations and as I am getting on the metro, my water bottle slips through my hands and lands in between the doors. Almost as if in slow motion, the bottle rolls off and into the black abyss of the train tracks. It was the water bottle that Bracken had given me my last day in LA. My only California souvenir. And it was gone forever.
We finally arrive at the station and buy our tickets. We look on the departures list and head to the platform to wait a half hour for our train to arrive. We start realizing that the train in front of us is not working and that no one else around us is waiting. We ask a nice lady if she could help us and she explains that on Sundays the platform number changes and that it is at 16 not 11. We start running to 16 and watch as our train slowly starts moving away. Full of unbelief at seeing this sad but humorous “movie moment,” we decide to wait for the next train that comes in an hour. This time we decide to go to the information desk to find the right platform. There, it is told that our train, due to it being Sunday, only runs every 2 hours, not every hour. It would be another hour and half of waiting on platform 12. So we sit and wait and wait. Five minutes before our train departure time, we finally start looking around and questioning if we are on the right platform. We find a sweet adorable train conductor just exiting a train and ask if he could help us. He kindly walks us over to the board and explains that they sometimes change the platform numbers at the last minute and that we needed to continually watch the electronic board that is constantly changing, in order to find the correct platform. By now, we had missed our second train. So after about 3 hours of waiting for phantom trains, we give up and go to sketch the Colosseum.