November 5, 2022: What You See Is Not What You Get in Otranto
I meant to go to sleep. Really, I did. But you know how it goes, one thing leads to another and… "good mornin’, good morning’, it’s fun to stay up late, good mornin’, good mornin’, to you!”
Anyway, good evening (or morning) my pin pushers and port passers (because I call this blog pushpins and passports, and I’ve gone past tired and straight into slap-happy, so this is the kind of humor I currently find funny), and welcome to a new episode of “chaos in transition!” By which I mean we moved places again, and once again, it was chaotic. Buckle up.
Ok, so we planned ahead this time. We made sure we were prepared. We checked and rechecked. We called the taxi number the night before to make sure it worked and they would be able to do the pickup the next morning. We planned to catch the earlier train so if we missed it, we would still be able to get the later one and make our connection. We took screenshots of everything several times over, checked routes on multiple platforms.
We made the mistake of trusting Google.
That’s right, Google lies. Shocking, I know. But Google Maps has been so reliable since we got to Italy, we thought our navigation troubles were behind us. Big mistake.
It all went smoothly to start. We woke up at 3:30, triple checked everything was ready to go, and called the cab. We piled in and were dropped off at the train station with plenty of time to purchase our tickets and get to the platform at a leisurely pace. The train was punctual, and dropped us off at Venice Mestre with forty minutes to spare before our train to Lecce departed. After waking up with cappuccinos and pastries, we calmly proceeded to the platform, where we boarded the train in a timely manner and, having paid the extra ten euros for business class, settled into cushy, roomy seats with complimentary snacks and WiFi. I knocked out 3,000 words for NaNoWriMo (the goal is 50,000 words towards a new novel this month), walked around the train, did some reading, practiced Italian, looked out the window, completed a couple sudoku puzzles, and kicked back and relaxed with a video game. By the time we got to Lecce (three coffees later), Nicole and I were feeling pretty good.
“Look at us,” we said, “finally getting the hang of this.”
Which, naturally, is when things started to fall apart. Google Maps had informed us (and the internet had seemingly confirmed) that the best way to Otranto from Lecce was by bus. The 101 or the 106, both of which left from a bus stop a short walk from the train station. So we went there to wait for the next bus, which was supposed to come an hour and a half after we arrived in Lecce. We settled in to wait with a kebab for dinner, content to wait as long as we got that bus, though we were concerned. Not for any particular reason. We’d both looked it up, checked multiple sites, and walked up and down the street to make sure there wasn’t another stop nearby that we were mistaking it for.
But the bus didn’t come. 17:36 (5:36 pm for you westerners), came and went, and the only buses that came through were city buses. I started hunting down information, searching everything I could think of online, and finally said I thought we needed to go back to the train station. Even if the bus stop wasn’t there, someone there could probably give us directions, which we’d quickly discovered was extremely difficult. Far fewer people this far south seem to speak English. I tried asking one of the city bus drivers, but he only said, “No, no, no Otranto. Inner City.”
Now I’m thinking he meant that the buses only serve within the city, but at the time, I thought he meant that bus was a city bus, which I already knew.
We dragged all our stuff back to the train station. Asked the guy at the customer service desk, who also didn’t speak much english. I asked him about the bus, and he said, “No bus, train. At 6.” Again, I thought he was confused what I meant because we were in a train station, that he was saying this wasn’t where you could get a bus, but the train for Otranto left at 6. Of course, that’s when I checked the time. Six-oh-nine.
“It left,” the man said. “Ten minutes, it left.”
“And there’s nothing else?”
There was nothing else, he said.
We moved off to the side. There had to be something. If nothing else, there was a taxi, but a taxi from Lecce to Otranto would cost a hundred euro, and we were determined to figure this out. So we messed around with the ticket machines and found a train going to Maglie, which was at least a lot closer to Otranto, and the 106 bus was supposed to stop right in front of the station. Worst case scenario, we would call a taxi, which would supposedly cost between 35 and 45 euros. So we caught a train to Maglie.
This train was a single carriage, and it seemed to be about a century old. It seemed irritated to have been dragged out of bed, this train, but it got us to Maglie. We hauled ourselves out front and I looked up the route again to check the times.
“The bus should come in 12 minutes.”
“If it comes,” Nicole pointed out.
“Right. But hopefully, it will. In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can fill up my—oh.”
“What?”
We looked together at the front door of the train station, which in the thirty seconds we’d been standing outside had been shut, barred, and the lights inside had all been turned off. If there were any doubt, there was certainly no going back now. No help to be found inside, either.
So we waited for the bus. The bus which never came. Still, we shrugged it off and called a taxi, which is difficult when you don’t speak Italian and they don’t speak English. The dispatcher was very helpful, and ended up messaging me on Whatsapp so we could both use Google translate (yeah, Google is still good for something in Italy, apparently). With some relief, we waited for the taxi, eyeing every car that passed hopefully. After our 3:30 am wakeup call, 9:30 felt like nearly two in the morning.
Our driver, Gabriele, loaded us into the car and set off.
“Bassano was so long ago,” Nicole said. She laughed. “Lecce was so long ago. That was five hours ago.”
I realized she was right, which seemed insane, that after traveling the entire length of the county… it was the last thirty-five kilometers that we couldn’t get across.
After a few minutes I pulled Google translate back up and typed in, “Do you know the 106 bus?”
“No!” the driver said, so emphatically that I was certain he wasn’t just telling me he hadn’t heard of it. Between that, the man at the train station, and the inner city bus driver…
I turned to Nicole, “Yeah, I don’t think that bus is a thing that exists. At all.”
“It’s a ghost bus,” she joked, “driven by Davy Jones.”
I don’t know what the deal with this is, dear readers. There are a lot of these bus lines that seem to fall under this grouping that doesn’t seem to exist. 106, 101, 104… I don’t know if they used to exist and don’t anymore, or if you have to call ahead of time to say you’re going to need it, because there are so few people in this region, or what. At least we know there is a train we can take.
The taxi dropped us off at Piazzetta de Ferraris, which is about as close as cars can get. We unloaded and set off (downhill, thankfully) on the five-minute walk to our AirBnB. Enclosed by castle walls, alone in narrow cobblestone walkways and open piazzas filled with cafe tables and chairs, we both forgot about the long take and the heavy suitcases. We walked along the sea, the crashing waves, ancient castle turrets and walls bracketing us into the old town, as we neared our apartment.
Nobody pinch me, I thought, please, please, nobody pinch me.
So, naturally, what followed was a big, fat, pinch. Or a jab at my funny bone, perhaps.
We reached the AirBnb, which has a padlock on the outside (weird, as in theory anyone could come along and lock us in, or out, with a padlock of their own). We unlock that and open it to see a glass front door (making the padlocked wooden front doors even more disconcerting, as there was no way to properly lock them from the inside, so anyone could come along and just look in through the front door). Once we got everything in I stood there fiddling with it, trying to figure out if there was a way to keep them shut (there seemed to be on one side, but not the other, very strange), and Nicole went around to look at the place.
“I think we’re in the wrong place,” she said as she came back down the stairs, “There’s only two bedrooms, and neither of them are made up.”
I pointed out another door, and she opened it to find the third bedroom, which also wasn’t made up, but at least this one looked like the pictures on AirBnB, because nothing else did. In the photos there was a big beautiful blue couch facing a tv, in reality there was a tiny, bedsheet-covered red couch that looked like it had been pulled out of the dump wedged in across from the door. In the photos there were countertops all the way around the kitchen, or at least tables, covered in pretty tablecloths, and the appliances gleamed. There was a huge fridge, a good-sized stove, a big sink. Well, the big sink was still there, on four rickety legs that looked ready to collapse, but there was no counters or tables around the small, dirty stove, just an exposed gas tank and stained walls, and the fridge was half the size of the one in the photos. There was trash in the corners, and some weird little alcove that was covered in burn marks and soot for no apparent reason. There was trash on the tiny, ugly sofa, too, and trash on the tables. One of the few bright lights flickered obnoxiously, casting the already dim, eerie surroundings in an even more forbidding light. Then we discovered a strange back room that hadn’t been in the listing at all, empty except for the washing machine and ironing board, despite being a huge room, with a walk-in freezer that didn’t work and was creepy as hell. A lot of the tiles in there were damaged, and it felt stark and unclean.
I headed upstairs, hoping that somehow, what I would see would not be what Nicole had said. But indeed, one bed was unmade (and there was a pile of hair or fur or something on the floor), and the other was evidently slept in, with wine glasses on the bedside table and on top of the cabinet, and trash on the floor. Weirder, still, were the bathrooms, which certainly hadn’t been photographed well for the listing. One bathroom had two toilets in it, the other had two showers, though one of them was wedged in the corner and looked like a hazmat shower torn out of a disreputable lab, while the other had its only little room, and there was another toilet in that room as well. There were used towels all over the place.
It certainly wasn’t what we thought we’d booked. It wasn’t the big, cozy, kitchen that I’d dreamed of making thanksgiving dinner in. It wasn’t the homey bedrooms that made us imagine we were in a movie. It wasn’t the comfortable living room we thought we would settle down at in the evenings, where I pictured myself hammering out a blog post. And, if nothing else, it wasn’t clean.
So we called the number on the listing, and spoke to a very confused woman who seemed to not believe us, and wanted to give us the agreement she had with the cleaner. We called her using my phone, because I’d gotten an Italian SIM card, and she said she would message me on WhatsApp and then hung up. Of course, I don’t use Whatsapp with my foreign phone numbers, because it’s easier to keep my American one there to stay in touch with everyone consistently. But Nicole had been messaging her on WhatsApp for days, preparing for our arrival, so she just messaged her again, hoping she would communicate that way. Instead, I got a call back from the same woman, who was irritated that I didn’t have WhatsApp and demanded I give her my number, and we told her Nicole had just texted her, on WhatApp but she kept insisting I give her my number. Then texts started popping up on Nicole’s phone:
“What? No! Send me photos, please.”
We were very confused. “Are you texting with someone right now?”
The woman on the phone was growing more agitated, but now I was nervous. We really had no idea who she was, or who the person Nicole had been texting was, and it became increasingly apparent that they were not the same person. And then the woman on the phone apparently got fed up and hung up on us again, while the woman texting Nicole kept asking for pictures, which we were trying to send but weren’t going through.
“I was waiting for you at 4,” she told us. I don’t really know what that was supposed to mean, except if she’d been to the place, why didn’t she look inside to make sure it was ready?
Eventually the photos went through and she called Nicole through WhatsApp. “The madam didn’t understand, she gets confused sometimes, she thought you were coming on the 9th,” she told us. “I have another apartment that is ready, you can go there. I will send you the address.”
So we gathered up all our stuff (because no way we were leaving things there when who-knew-who would be coming through the place), and dragged it all half a mile across town, uphill, upstairs, to another apartment. Which is clean. Technically. I mean the ceiling fans have rust and dust half an inch thick clinging to them and the tub has rust all along the bottom, and the linens all smell like Motel 6 laundry detergent that gives me a headache, and when I went to get water glasses they were sticky on the outside so I decided to wash them, and when I did, one of them broke in my hands, and there doesn’t seem to be any trash anywhere and there’s no soap in the bathrooms.
But yeah, it’s technically clean.
But if this is her—Marcella or Frederica or whoever’s—idea of clean and well-equipped, I’m not sure I want to stay in any of her places. No matter how amazing the view is. I’d rather walk two blocks to the sea but feel comfortable in my home for the next six weeks. Have a kitchen that’s actually useful. A shower I can relax in. You know. The basics.
So that’s how I ended up sitting up in bed nearly 24 hours after I woke up, writing a blog post. Because it turns out “too good to be true” really is too good to be true, I don’t actually trust these sheets to be clean, and just sitting on them makes my head pound because the scent is so strong.
But hey, word is it will all look better in the morning.
Edit: It’s morning. It all looks more or less the same.
To be fair to Otranto, though, this city really is gorgeous. The sea, the castle, it looks like a fairytale. Hopefully once we figure all of this out, it will feel like one, too.