Ooh Toussaint... This was our Halloween break meaning “all saints”. Since we are transferring schools, we had a few extra days off. So I skipped school on Wednesday and took the train from Aix to Nice (40 mins delayed) then from Nice to Vintemille.
This trip was absolutely gorgeous and the train went down the coast the entire time.
When I arrived in Vintemille, I was caught completely off guard because I totally forgot I was in Italy and I dont speak a word of Italian! Anja had texted me saying that she couldnt get her train from Pisa to Sestri because there was apparently flooding. I was out of phone credit and confused because the weather was beautiful but I figured when I got to Sestri I would find internet and figure it out.
In the Vintemille station however, I saw a girl who looked just as lost and confused as I was. I walked up to her and asked if she was Emilee and thankfully she said yes. Emilee is one of Anja’s friends from school in Lyon who was going to meet us in Sestri. Thankfully the only text I received from Anja told me that we might be on the same train and to keep an eye out. Thank God we found each other. We got on the train and rode it all the way to Sestri where on arrival we had to call the maid of the house we were staying at who only spoke Italian.
Anja had called her and said that it would just be us and thankfully Emilee had credit on her phone. We found a taxi driver who spoke french who took us to the cross streets of the house and then Tina, the maid, met us outside with the keys. Through a combination of Spanish, English, very few Italian words, and hand gestures, we figured everything out. So there we were, two strangers staying in a house in Italy who we dont even know the owners of, who speak no Italian, ready to begin our adventure...
As it turns out, Emilee is great. She is 21 from Grass Valley who goes to UCSC and we know tons of the same people. The house we stayed in was very cute, but about a 20 minute walk out of town. Tina had stocked the kitchen for us with milk, bread, cake, meat, cheese, juice, beer, everything we needed, it was sooo nice. So we were set for breakfast in the morning where we made ourselves lattes, toast, and cereal.
Unfortunately for Anja, the train coming from the south was cancelled because of the flooding in Cirque Terre and she was stuck in Pisa. She decided to take a train from Pisa to Florence to Milan then down to Sestri instead of being stuck in Pisa alone. Very very frustrating especially since they wouldn’t refund her money for the ticket and she had to go 8 hours out of her way. The train system in Italy is not even comparable to France and it made us very thankful to call France home.
So Emilee and I spent the day exploring Sestri. It is a very small town with not much to do in the slow season. There are two bays, the Bay of Silence and the Bay of Fables. These bays were named by Hans Christian Anderson who wrote the Little Mermaid which is said to be based off the town of Sestri Levante.
We walked around the town around 2:30 when most things in France open back up after their 2 hour siesta at lunch time. In Italy, it is different, they take 4 hour siestas and things dont open up until 4. We were very confused because it was as if we were walking around a ghost town on a thursday afternoon.
We walked and saw the few tourist sites that are in Sestri, an old ruin of a church, an older actual church, pretty views, but there really isn't that much to do there. We had lunch, then finally the stores opened and we looked around those, ate gelato, and walked some more.
We were basically killing time until Anja’s train arrived. Finally it did and we took another taxi home and called it a night.
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