Well, the day began badly. We woke up at 6:15am in order to be ready to make our hour long trek to school and catch the bus by 8:15am. However, the program directors tell everyone to be there super early because they are Italian and expect everyone to be late. So, the bus didn’t end up leaving til 9:15am, an additional hour of sleep could definitely have been had.
The weather was not optimal for our sight seeing. It was unusually cold and very foggy. The Rivoli castle that we first went to housed a contemporary art museum that was inside. But the directors thought for some reason that this visit would take us 5 hours. Maybe if we had stood in front of each piece and searched our souls for meaning, then it might have taken 3 hours. So we ran around, ate a long lunch, spent a good hour in the gift shop and finally boarded the bus around 2:30pm.
yup, that's contemporary if i've ever seen it...
The temperature continued to drop as we made the half hour jaunt to the abbey of San Michele. The abbey was on top of a very high hill and on smogless and fogless days you can see the other side of Torino. Today was not one of those days. Again we had two hours for this journey and needed only one hour, and that included a trip to the café. If I had planned the trip it could have been a half way jaunt instead of an entirely too long one.
Luckily we talked the bus drivers into taking a large group of students, who lived closer to downtown than school, to drop us off significantly closer to our homes. This would save us an hour bus ride and brighten our moods. We weren’t 10 minutes into our 45-minute drive when our bus driver decided to go under a bridge that our bus was too tall for. Yup, that’s right, we got stuck. I’m pretty sure this didn’t have to do with our change of destination; I think it was just not a well-calculated move. Thankfully no one was hurt, but it did cause quite a big disturbance. The bridge we were going under was an underpass and since it was rush hour, the cars were honking and everyone was trying to get around. Eventually the police got there and got traffic figured out so we could slam on the gas and back up to a place where we could turn around. We know the whole top of the bus didn’t hit, only the part in the back where the air conditioner lived. This led us to consider the fact that we were breathing in toxic air conditioner fumes. Delightful. That predicament definitely took awhile. Then we moved towards another direction and the train bridge was down. A train came to a stop over the tracks and stayed there for half an hour. We were undeniably crabby from the trip before this whole ordeal and now inhaling carbon monoxide; it was a happy trip home.
The drama finally ended and we were dropped off closer to our apartments. Hopefully the bus driver didn’t get into too much trouble, but I don’t know what kinds of reprimands are common in Italy… poor guy. I’m never going on another field trip again.
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