As Seen in Tacitus

Location: Trieste, Italy
Local Motorists: Bat-shit Loco

November 8

Getting out of town is a simple affair, and I arrive at the train station well in time to grab my scheduled transport. However, I am pleasantly surprised to find that I can get a seat on a train that I had no realized existed, mainly because the internet denied all knowledge of this heavenly coach. This new train is simple, requiring me to change trains only once and with plenty of time to spare, whereas the train advertised online that I was going to take required two train changes, taking a taxi across the Slovenia-Italy border, fighting the vicious hydra, and answering three surprisingly difficult questions before crossing the Bridge of Death. The fact that this new train leaves two hours later than I had planned for means relatively little, especially since my actual travel time is cut by an hour. I attempt to use the time on the internet blogging and cruising for, I don't know, Slovenian slave-brides, but of course the local internet cafe was inexplicably closed. Oh, well... Sherlock Holmes entertains me, and I'm soon on my way.

I sadly have no company for this leg of the journey, but I do manage to catnap and watch the blackened scenery go by.

Upon arriving in Trieste, I have no problem locating my destination despite the lack of maps in the train station, mainly due to two things. First, the tiny distance away that I am going. Two, my halting command of Italian.

See, over the past weeks, I have uttered the phrase, "I'm sorry, I don't speak [French/Swedish/Finnish/Polish/German/Czech/Slovak/Magyar/Slovenian]," so much that it has almost become my default answer to any question, even if uttered in English or telepathically queried straight into my monolingual cerebral cortex. Even as necessary and sensible a thing as it is to say, it gets quite embarrassing when one is surrounded by so many people who speak three or four languages, and up to this point I had begun to feel a bit like a Down's Syndrome sufferer strung out on retard-laced heroin. However, now that I am in Italy, the three semesters of Italian instruction I received from our much-vaunted American university system are struggling to the forefront, eking out inch-by-blood-soaked-inch a position in my frontal lobe aside boobs and fine hops. As such, I took great pleasure in being able to ask for and receive directions for a clerk in the station using only the local tongue. Head merrily full of verb conjugations, I head out.

Last week a girl in my hostel in Bratislava introduced me to the finest invention since fire, or perhaps the iron maiden: Couchsurfing. Based via a website of the same name, couchsurfing is the operation of a network of people all dedicated to the sharing of cultures and all that jazz, who have opened their homes for world travelers to crash on their couches. Finding a place to stay anywhere in the world is simply a matter of running a search on the myspace-like website and emailing people who have signed up where you want to go. It is with two of these people - a married couple, in fact - whom I am to stay with tonight.

I arrive at their appartment just in time for dinner. Having never met Orsola and Paolo (as the mortals call them) before, I am surprised and delighted at the open arms and warm smiles with which they welcome me. They are just finishing dinner, so they encourage me to shower off the train funk, which I do with great relish, and I emerge to discover a scrumptious 4-course Italian dinner in the kitchen. We sit down and dig into breads and cheeses and roast pork and essence of puppy dog tails while talking and laughing for the better part of two hours. Their command of English is impeccable, and I do what I can to pry some greater knowledge of Italian out of the situation without seeming like a dumbass, which suprising success. All in all, it's a brilliant time. Now this is what international traveling is all about. After dinner Paolo and I take a walk to see the town at night, which is quite beautiful. Both being writers (Paolo is an associate professor at the local university by day, but also has a published novel to his credit), we have lots to talk about, and by the time we get back and I settle onto the couch for sleepy time, I'm sad to see the day end.

November 9

When I wake up this morning Orsola and Paolo have gone off to work, but I help myself to some breakfast as they commanded the night before and set off into the city.

Trieste is really quite small (small enough that my handy-dandy Lonely Planet guide doesn't even offer it a footnote), located on the Adriatic Sea a stone's throw from the Slovenian border. My day is spent wandering around with no real aim except to see stuff, as I often do. I head via the main piazza up a very large hill to the castle (by this time I have realized that all towns in Europe have a castle; it's like a law). The castle itself is closed for restoration - of course - but from the outside it's very pretty and is even bordered with some Roman ruins. Hooray!

One notable feature of the town is the cats. There are feral cats everywhere. You can spot them all the time if you just look around, doing everything from prowling to sleeping to snuggling together in little kitty swingers' clubs. I though cats were solitary... apparently I thought wrong. I later find that they live primarily on the castoffs of the numerous local fishermen, which explains their numbers, extraordinary good health (although I did see more than one with one milky-white blind eye; friggin' creepy), and relative lack of fear around humans. I am even able to sit down and pet one or two of them.

A couple hours more wandering around and soaking up the town, then I take a seat on a bench by the harbor to lunch on apples, bananas, and a jar of peanut butter I ganked from the hostel kitchen in Ljubljana.

I believe that Italy represents in part the darkest vision of Earth's future, in which humans are kept as mere slaves and the planet is ruled by damn, dirty mopeds.

I manage, after some difficulty, to local the ruins of an old Roman theatre, smack-dab in the middle of the city. For preservation reasons, the ruins are off-limits, but they're quite pretty from outside the barred area, and I admire them for quite some time.

Always on the lookout for new ways in which to explore cities, I come upon the idea of hunting cats. One of the enormous colony residing in the theatre slithers out under the fence, and I busy myself in stalking it. Have you ever tried to catch a cat with nothing but your wits and bare hands? Like catching greased lightning. During the process of my gentle, patient stalking, my black quarry leads me around alleys and plazas and stairways that I would never otherwise have gone. After about half an hour he realizes that I am about to pounce on him and disappears into a small fenced glade where I cannot follow. Crafty bugger. Ah, well... he served his purpose.

It's getting late now, so I pop on down to the only international call center in the entire freakin' city (oh, and by the way, there are no internet cafes... WTF?) to call Jenny and wish her a happy 13 months, then make my way back to the apartment for dinner. Tonight it's spaghetti, but the irrepressibly happy mood is the same as the night before, and I end the meal a very happy man. After dinner we head to Paolo's office for internet time (since it's the closest place where access can actually be achieved), where I email people and book hostels for a few minutes. Then it's bedtime for bonzos, although I manage to crank out a two and half mile run before I hit the sack.

Tomorrow: To Venice!

Progress Thus Far:
Countries Visited: 9
Stupid Tourist Moments: 47
Monuments Flipped Off: 38
Free Booze Ganked: 10
Free Food Ganked: 27

people, living just to find emotion.
-Journey