Still alive, a couple of close calls, though

I am glad that the Piacenza’s finest orchestra was informed of our arrival — a very nice gesture to greet two simple travellers with such hospitality!

It has been a week now in Italy and the places we visited are starting to blur and mix up a little bit. I remember vaguely being in Bergamo for two nights and getting up early on our third day in order to power through a couple of smaller towns and arrive to Modena or Bologna asap.

Getting there had to start with a hitchhike trajectory Bergamo-Crema-Piacenza. Turns out it’s not that easy. By the end of our first hour of waving, smiling and being quite optimistic about our intentions a guy stopped and said it will be impossible to find a ride to Crema. Luckily he was kind enough to take us to a bus stop close by.

This is me on the right, refusing to let our excellent hitchhiking plan go to waste. By then we already realized it was too late to catch a bus..

After a while we started questioning everything, mostly because people in the cars passing seemed to be very amused by us. Is it because they never saw a hitchhiker before? This theory seemed exceptionally realistic when a car stopped and showed us which is the way to Crema (it wasn’t the biggest a-haa moment since we had our thumbs showing that direction). Another theory was, that Crema did not exist and it was a slang word for something naughty. This would start puzzling me stronger and stronger by the minute.

Make sure you call this number if you want to reach five strangers at once!

So we obviously gave up at some point and took a bus back to Bergamo.

We found a hostel in the centre that had the coolest advertisement on the front door — a sticky note! There was 3 different B&B options in this house and we obviously picked the brilliant sticky note guy. Called him and after talking to most of his relatives, friends and lawyers on the phone probably, got intstructions to an apartment which turned out to be quite nice.

A new pact was made — tomorrow we will not return to Bergamo no matter what happens! No alarm clock, though. Too risky, might not get enough sleep.

So in the morning we decided to take the bus to Crema and try out couchsurfing in Piacenza. I have to be honest with you guys, Crema was not as wonderful as we had hoped for. It’s probably not even good enough to describe this dirty word you are all now thinking of! We bought a bus ticket from a cafe that, I assume, make up stories about buses going to places.

We don’t always reach Crema but when we do, we take panorama photos so everyone could enjoy the view!

I mean, if two foreigners ask if you can sell them a couple of tickets to Piacenza, you have to help them, right? So you just give them random sheets of paper and show them directions to the hypothetical bus stop. And if they come back worried in two hours you just tell them to relax and explain that this is the Italian way of public transport.. they just have to wait a little bit more. Soon you’ll be on your way home and they will never see you again. Then a random guy will direct them to another town called Lodi, ‘cause this is where they should have bought tickets to if they wanted to reach Piacenza.

Some food photos now:

We had some food during this, though. Everything on the photos is excellent in it’s own way and probably is what saved us from going crazy berzerk on the Italians.
One more notable fact: so far we have tried several kinds of Lambrusco with prices from 1,5€-19€ a bottle. Turns out they all taste like Lambrusco.

And I’m hungry again. But yeah, we got on a bus eventually and headed towards Lodi in order to catch a train to Piacenza, finally. And as you could see on the first picture, we made it!

We figured the fake tickets can become handy on the next bus if we can maintain our composure as the girl from the cafe did. If you strongly believe these are tickets to Lodi now, this might work!
We kindly thanked the people of Piacenza for a gathering in honor of our arrival. See that guy at the first table, letting others know we are here? Grazie mille!

There’s not much to say about Piacenza. We met a street merchant who was kind enough to offer us accommodation but we turned him down politely for safety reasons. After an hour of walk we met an old couple, Carlo and Carla, who took us under their wing for a moment and drove us to a hotel nearby. The hotel name is easy to remember — it was “Hotel”. Apparently a gathering place for Nazies, too: in the front desk a skinhead was minding his own business, watching an old Mussolini movie from his smartphone and explaining his dog in Russian that we are not the enemy. Still good enough for a place to sleep and keep on moving towards the next longer stop we have had on mind since the beginning of our trip.

In order to get on the train from Piacenza I had to enter the Matrix and destroy all evil. Piacenza is at peace once again!

Since we haven’t seen any officers on the public transport we figured the tickets are optional and decided to go for the option of not buying them this time. Our train ride was about two hours long and obviously one hour and 50 minutes in the ticket officer arrived. So we got kicked out.

I recommend Samoggia for it’s lack of civilization.

And this is where we leave you, for now. Guess what town we were heading in the comment section!

Talk to you soon,
Mark and Kadi