I am so tired that I feel like I walked the full length of the Chinese Wall today. I left my hotel at 9am. I am still on the train at 9pm. Italian trains, don’t you just love them? So why should I be spending more than 12 hours on public transport, when in reality the distance is no more than 250 miles?

Well the Alps have a lot to do with it - you see having 3.5km high mountains between where I am and where I want to be is somewhat of an obstacle. The rest seems to be the fact that the Italians have a train system similar to the UK’s.

Let’s start the story in Bologna. For a large city, with a large station, one would expect there to be at least some sort of information available to the traveling public. Well there was - the information displays told me that my train left from platform 3. Apart from the fact that there are three - yes THREE - platform 3’s.

After some confusion on my part, I found the correct platform 3 (apparently, you need to know the direction in which you travel: North/South, East or West), only to discover that the train on platform three was not the train I was looking for. Good job I asked the station guard - the platform had changed to platform 1, without anything changing on the information boards. So I wait at platform 1, hoping to find my train to Milan. And I wait some more, and some more after that. Eventually, a train roles up to the platform, stops and without opening the doors, departs again. At this point, I was getting worried - was it platform 3 after all? The train was already 10 minutes late, and the boards still hadn’t changed. After another 10 minutes, my train arrived, with no visible clue as to where it was headed. There was no sign on the train, no information on the information screens (in fact they were completely blank by now) and no one around to help. So I just got on and hoped for the best.

Luckily, 2 hours later, I arrived in Milan. I arrived 5 minutes after my connection was supposed to have left. But not to worry - the train was still there. Or so I thought - the information board said Geneva and it even had the correct departure time on it. The train also said Geneve, via Brig. But it went to Genova - and there is no town that is called anything like Brig on the way to Genova. I am not blind and I can read. The Italians once again swapped trains/platforms.

The train to Genova stank of piss and had no way of getting food or drink - let’s just say it is worse than any UK train I have been on, Arrived in Genova around 3pm and unfortunately, I had no lunch and there was no time to get any at Genova - time to join the queue of 100 or so people to get my ticket back to Milan. I decided to go first class - at least I stood a chance of having a carriage that doesn’t smell of piss. Oh, and once again I found myself on the wrong platform - change of platform , no announcement. If I hadn’t bothered to ask someone, then I would have found myself in Napoli (yes - around 150km south of Rome).

I finally found myself in Milan again. And I found myself on a train that had nothing on it (or the platform) to tell me where it went. It was an “Alpina” branded train, so I guessed it would cross the Alps. It was the only train to leave at the correct time. I got on it, ceased to care where it took me, and I ate my lunch (at 6pm).

After leaving Bologna at 9am, I arrived home at 1am the next day. But at least the tickets were cheap

I am off to a conference in Bologna tomorrow. I am going to present my work on organic spin valves, and hopefully set up a collaboration or two. It means any updates to the website won’t happen for a few days. I’ll post about my antics when I get back….

Well this is the first entry on my new look blog… just to test if it works. No comments yet, but I am working on it!