Wanderings

I sat on a stone wall under the cliffs of Sorrento looking up at the moon and sky and sighing about life. I had to wait for the "C" bus to take me to my hostel. I watched the "B" bus pull away filled with my fellow ferry passengers, followed by the regional bus for the countryside, and I watched them wind up, up the cliffside and disappear. 

I was content to write in my journal and eat a pink lady apple or two, and take pauses to look up at the stars and sigh some more about life and watch the people go by when the occasional ferries disembarked. Everyone knew each other, it seemed; one man who was lucky enough to have a car ended up with half the boat's passengers in his back seat. They all crammed merrily together and went away up the hill, and I was left alone with my pink ladies again. By and by I saw some lights and the gentle roar of a bus coming down and around the bend, and I started gathering up my pens and journal eagerly. I trotted across the parking lot with old Bertha behind me, only to stop in dismay when I saw the letter “B” again as the bus rounded the final corner.

“It CAN’T be,” I muttered. “Where was the C?!” When it came to a full stop, I hopped aboard.

“C?” I said. “Cuando? Do’ve?”

The bus driver was accompanied by an older woman who seemed to be just riding around with him, hanging out. Between the two of them, they eventually understood me, consulted a bus schedule, and told me that there wouldn’t be a C for another half an hour.

“Aarrgh,” I said.

And so I spent what was probably my third full hour of the day waiting for the bus, and fourth or fifth waiting for transport in general. I watched the regional and B buses roll around the corner and up the hill. I watched the ferry passengers disembark and greet their families and drive merrily away up the hill. I looked at the stars. I wrote in my journal. I ate my last pink lady. And finally, finally, when the B bus had come around for the fifth or so time and I was narrowing my eyes at it and growling, I saw what I at first thought must be a cruel hallucination; the letter changing from B to C. I opened my eyes wider but it was still C, and now the driver and his lady friend were at the doorway, grinning wide, beckoning me to come aboard.

I was excited to actually pay for a bus ride for once, since they had been so nice to me, but it turned out I was supposed to have bought the ticket in a nearby market which was now closed. So, I got my third free bus ride of the day, and a private one at that, since now it was getting late and no other ferry passengers had come down the port for quite a while. It was finally my turn to trundle up, up the winding hill, and at one point there was a car blocking the narrow road and the driver beeped and tossed his hands up and said a lot of things that I’m pretty sure I got the gist of in Italian, and finally the car moved and the woman said something wry and they both cackled and we drove on.

As we began to enter the town, I got the sense that the two of them basically bombed around Sorrento all night, waving to their friends out the windows, gossiping, and making fun of random pedestrians or people they didn’t like. I was glad I had managed to stay at least somewhat on their good side; they delivered me almost to my hostel doorway, gesturing emphatically out the bus windows when I almost headed in the wrong direction, and then chugged off again with a farewell beep. 

And then, it was time for my latest hostel experience: the swanky Seven lodgings, which basically consisted of a huge bar and a couple rooms thrown in for good measure overhead. I’m not sure if the 18 Euro a night price tag made up for the all night bass thumping and heavily accented wailing of obscure American rock songs, but oh well… I am (I keep telling myself) learning to be flexible.