Thank you for sharing the bus trip ... I am still ROFL!!! Having traveled extensively throughout Italy, I am more than familiar with those serpentine roads. So here's a story for you. Many years ago, one one of my trips to Italy, I decided to take the train between Rome and Campobasso (Molise Province). In looking over the options, I noticed one reasonably priced train was called the "accelerato". I boarded the train early in the morning and sat towards the front. Pulling out of the station, the aroma of 'moth balls' wafted up my nostrils. The train progressed slowly, winding around the hills and stopped at the next town. After 10 minutes or so, it pulled out of the station and again the choking odor of 'moth balls' hit me. Well, I soon discovered that the train ran on 'naptha' and was called 'accelerato' because it accelerated after every stop. This was the 'local' train. It took 4 1/2 hours to reach Rome!
That is too funny, too!
For any American who hasn't experienced the alternate universe of life beyond our borders, you really can't understand until you are face-to-face with the most eccentric ways that people in other countries sometimes deal with things.
Like you, I would also have guessed that "accelerato" would naturally have been Italy's version of the "bullet train". And what can I say about imagining naptha as "a fuel source" (that you are just lucky it wasn't methane)? What a rude break with reality for you-- but a great story once it was over!
Husband and I were in Italy exactly a year ago for a 17-day trip that turned out to be much too short. Like every other visiting American, I could imagine living there. I actually sat alone on our hotel balcony in Sorrento for a half hour at sunset staring at this ruined villa hanging on the cliff's edge over the bay, with my mouth agape and completely unable to look away. The villa looked like somewhere that had a Henry James character as its last invited guest, and my imagination ran wild until husband forcibly broke the spell by instisting on going to dinner. Ironically, all the Italians that we ran across who spoke English, seemed to take one look at me and launch into rapid-fire Italian as though I was "one of theirs", especially when we were in Milan. Funny, since I don't have a drop of Italian blood that I know of, nor do I speak any Italian I can't look up in a Rick Steves guidebook!
But the closest experience I had overseas to the Turkish adventure, was on a bus in the former Yugoslavia back in the late 1970's. The Yugo bus actually had shocks, but the roads on the way to this little village in southern Hercegovina were even more serpentine, unpaved, and hung precipitously over cliffs that edged bottomless pits of valleys. I was a spoiled LA babe back then who only visited Yugo because my parents insisted I see "the old country" as my first visit on what was supposed to be a Western European tour (the rest of which ultimately never happened). In any case, I can recall thinking to myself that I was going to wind up disappearing over a cliff on this ridiculous bus in a backward-ass, Balkan communist country with a bunch of unwashed gypsies and farm animals, and no one would find our bodies until we were accidentally included in a deathcount of the next Balkan war! And for what? So mommy & daddy could show me off to some God forsaken peasants with the same last name as mine, like I was some kind of prize pig!
This horrible bus trip really was hours long and ultimately culminating in arriving at a village whose only public place (other than a locked church) was a combo restaraunt/bar/grocery store/ post office/town hall/hardware store, all in a 15' by 20' room with a garage out back in case your car broke down (or your donkey threw a shoe). And to top it off, when we got to this all purpose rumpus room, it was empty and our relatives weren't even there yet. I was rumpled, dirty, exhausted, hungry and thirsty and in need of a restroom -- the one thing that this stupid place didn't have. And that's when mommy & daddy dropped the real bomb -- these distant cousins weren't peasants at all, they were brothers who were, respectively: the Yugoslav Minister of Culture, the Ambassador to Canada and the US, and the Ambassador to Portugal and Tito's top bodyguard -- this little village was just where they were born and where they still kept their summer houses. Great! Here I am this rumpled, dirty, grumpy, spoiled American girl from Los Angeles who now has to deal with a bunch of friggin' high-level commie diplomats and pretend that they are "family".
The whole meeting went as you might expect. The 21 year-old Minister of Culture's son (who wore a Rolex, drove his own Mercedes and had attended Swiss Boarding Schools before attending Oxford) invited me off to "talk on our own", where he decided to hit on me so hard that I had to punch him in the jaw to get him off of me. Later his father took us for a tour of the local church, where the father invited me to "see the artwork behind the altar". The father assumed that I was just a stupid American girl who wouldn't know that I would be desecrating the altar by venturing behind it -- until I declined and gave him an earful about the direspectful condition of the church in his care. Only after all of that, did I locate the nearest available restroom -- and it required me kicking the chickens off the path to use the first outhouse I had ever used in my life, at the Yugoslav Minister of Culture's summer house!
Finally, I had to endure about two more hours of hearing the Minister and Ambassador's wives brag about "all the celebrities they knew", and "the South of France" and every other pretentious and obnoxious "how much better our life is under communism" snippet they could manage (along with veiled insults that got past my parents, but not me) before we finally got the hell out of there. By the time we left, I was actually grateful to be on that bus again!
As a postscript, a few after that bus trip, photos of us taken at the airport when we first arrived appeared in the Yugoslav newspapers thereby turning us into three more phony celebrities that these horrible "diplomats" could brag about miserably having entertained!