wait- you're fining us for what?

The train system in Italy can be an interesting experience. I feel as though I need to document our experience we had last week on our excursion from Siena to Lucca. The morning started out quite early for me as I walked briskly up to Piazza Gramschi. The streets were filled with delicious scents of freshly baked pastries and bread, the early morning air not yet polluted by smoke and garbage. I arrived to meet the other girls at 7:30 am and we purchased our bus tickets to get to the train station. We got nervous we were going to get on the wrong bus seeing as how we were instructed we could take the 3 or the 10 bus to the station…whichever came first. We saw a 10 come but on the other side of the street…so us, being the smart girls we are, ran across the street and a little bit down to the 10 and were told that we had, in fact, been standing on the right corner if we were wanting to get to the train station and to go back and wait for the next bus to come. Laughing we sauntered back to the corner and waited. The bus came and we piled on, all validating our tickets, and made it unremarkably to the train station. We all purchased our €8.20 ticket to Lucca and went out to the platforms to await our train that was to be there in about 20 minutes. After a somewhat embarrassing moment of having to be told that you have to go underground to get to the far platforms instead of walking across the tracks we made it to the correct waiting place. The train came a little early and we found our seats in the boxcar. A little while later a man in a green suit coat came to check our tickets. We all pulled them out and politely handed them over to him as proof that we did purchase seats on the train. He examined them for a minute then looked up and started speaking in english but with a heavy accent and I was only able to catch a few words. Something about validation, fine, and €40 stood out from all the other words he said. I speant the next couple minutes discussing with this man about what validating your ticket even meant, where you were supposed to do it, and why we were getting fined. He agreed to only charge us €5 a piece instead and wrote us up each a nice yellow ticket and made us fork over the cash. Lame. Who knew that the tiny yellow boxes on the platforms that aren't even marked are actually of vital importance? To me it seems like some sort of conspiracy they have going here that gives them a great opportunity to impose fines on innocent travelers. Well anyway- after we got over our fine we arrived at the station in Empoli to transfer trains to get to the Pisa station. We awaited the trains arrival and decided to run to the end of it to try and get seats together. Ha- bright idea. There were no seats anywhere on the train that a group of 8 could sit remotely close to each other, seeing as how Pisa is a major train hub, and so we were forced to stand. However, luckily for us we noticed an empty car to our right (probably meant for cargo of some sort…) so we took advantage of the situation and took a seat on the floor of the train. It was quite and enjoyable ride with Lynzie and Alyssa playing speed and the rest of us enjoying the scenery. Well anyway--we made it safely after that to Lucca and absolutely loved it. On the way home we ran into some more exciting train adventures. It seemed that every time we arrived on a platform the train we were meant to be on was already pulling away! The first one we missed by mere seconds because who knew that the platform #1 would be behind the building going the opposite numerical order? Hmm. Then because we missed the first one we were all of track for our connections…so each consecutive transfer we had no idea what to train to get on next. Hence the confusion of platforms and missing of trains by seconds even more times! By the time we got home to Siena it had been three hours of train travel and we were all so exhausted and just wanted to get on the bus to get back within walking distance to our houses. Oh but wait--the buses were done running for the day cause it was Saturday! Thanks to the unscheduled smoke break by the driver of our last train we got to walk back to the city! I thought we might die. Nevertheless, obviously we made it and our day filled with wonderful train experiences was finally over. Tomorrow will bring a group travel day to Florence so we can all learn how to use the train system--however I think our group of 8 is pretty set!