Let me break this down for you, dear readers. I went to Basel (Bah-zle), Switzerland this weekend to visit a friend in what I thought would be a nice and easy 3 day trip, considering the fact that Switzerland is so close to Italy. Train there, fly back. Easy, right?
Wrong. I spent a total of about 17.5 hours getting to and from Basel, and only 10.5 of those hours involved actual travel.
Lets do the math: 17.5-10.5 = 7 hours of waiting for various modes of transportation to get me back to Bologna.
SEVEN.
That's a lot of hours. Let me tell you, I have never played more games of Snake in my life-- thank God for crappy Italian cell phone games. I must have played too much for my little phone to handle, though, since the battery died shortly before boarding my plane. Also, for some reason my iPod decided to freeze and was stuck on shuffle. News flash: I have almost 6,000 songs on my iPod, and not-so-luckily for me it decided to randomly select the most terrible songs that I didn't even know I had on there. I sense an iTunes purge in my near future.
Let me now take you through a much less painful version of my voyage to and from Basel, the tiny Swiss town a bus ride away from the borders of France and Germany:
Outbound:
2 hour train to Milan
30 minute layover
4 hour train to Basel
Pretty straight forward. Despite the fact that I had not been sleeping well for the previous week and was consequently very tired from multiple nights of little to no shut-eye, and despite the fact that I had to catch a 4am train from Bologna to Milan, the train ride through the Alps was worth it. I hadn't realized how much I miss the Rockies until I was surrounded again by absolutely gorgeous snow covered peaks. Note: the Alps are much pointier than the Rockies.
Now, I had thought that this albeit long but easy outbound train adventure would be the longest end of my trip, but I was absolutely wrong. So, so wrong.
Observe the following time table for my return journey:
30 minutes to the airport
2 hour flight delay ( plus the fact that I was there about an hour early anyway)
1 hour flight to Venice
20 minutes sitting on the tarmac because of a ground crew strike.
30 minute wait for the bus to the train station (I missed the previous bus by 5 minutes)
30 minute bus ride to the train station
2.5 hour wait at the train station (from about 10pm-12:30am) for the next train to Bologna, since I missed the previous train by again, 5 minutes.
2 hour and 15 minute train ride in which I had to sit/stand in the corridor since there were not enough seats
25 minute walk back to my apartment at around 3am
I'm not sure what was my favorite part: the 2 hour flight delay in a terribly barren airport, the strike which caused me to miss every other connection I needed to get back to Bologna in a timely fashion, the freezing 2.5 hour wait at the station, the 2 hour train ride which I spent standing in the corridor because my seat got jacked, or consequently unwillingly making conversation on the aforementioned train ride with a Romanian who didn't respect personal space.
Never again, I tell you.
I mean, Switzerland is cool and everything, but what I thought would be an easy trip definitely turned out to be one of the most ridiculous waiting games ever, and I'm not entirely sure it was worth it. The good news is that I am now back in Bologna safe and sound, and I am heading out to London in 2 days. I'm telling you right now, if getting to and from London is as difficult as it was traveling to Basel, then....I quit.
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