I put Kim and my ticket into the on board validation machine, and it whirred and clicked and spit them back out, like it always does. A few minutes later, a man came by checking tickets – and it turned out ours hadn't been validated – either because we inserted them wrong, or the machine hiccuped, or something. Luckily, some random Italian women on the bus vouched for us, and insisted that they'd seen us insert them into the machine! Thank goodness, because I did NOT want to pay that fine. The bus employee lectured us for a while in Italian, then we mentioned we were going to Vietri. He said we'd passed Vietri already! He got off the bus with us at the next stop, and walked us to our connecting bus to Amalfi. He even stood in the road so cars would stop so we could dash across the street because our bus was already coming. It was all very silly, but we felt so bad that we couldn't understand what he was saying to us, and everyone on the bus kept talking about us in Italian!
The bus to Amalfi was a terrifying experience. The road was a tiny, winding cliff edge full of sharp turns and blind turns and SHARP, BLIND TURNS. In CA it would have been a one lane road, or maybe just a shoulder. But here it had traffic in both directions, AND people passing. I was very surprised we didn't seen an accident.
In Amalfi it was cold and drizzly, so we never did get to go in the water, but we enjoyed walking around and looking in the shops. The Amalfi Coast is known for their ceramics and giant lemons, so naturally there were plenty of ceramics with giant lemons painted on them. I was tempted to buy all of everything, but I'm backpacking so I had to use discretion!
Since Kim and I were feeling particularly poor and reasonably hungry, we bought some bread, some cheese, and 2 bottles of wine (what? It's a fruit.) to have at the hostel. When we got there, the atrium of the hostel building was filled with camera equiptment, amps, spotlights.....including a giant spotlight at the top of the stairs leading to our room, so we couldn't close the doors to our wing. Kim and I opened up our bread and cheese, pried into the wine bottles using knives, and while we were enjoying our meal we were interrupted by someone down stairs using a microphone. We peeked down and saw that the downstairs was full of people milling about being loud and important. Since it was 9:30pm, and we wanted to catch an 8am train, we had planned to go to bed soon and went to the front desk to ask what was going on. The desk closed at 10pm, so we wanted to make sure we knew what was happening before then. We were told that they were filming a movie, and they would be filming all night (later conversations revealed they would actually be filming until only 3am). We told the receptionist that we weren't okay with that, and that we couldn't sleep because of the noise. She said it wasn't her fault, that the city had required her to allow the camera crews to film there. We told her that it also wasn't OUR fault, but that we'd paid 35 euro to sleep here, and if we couldn't sleep we wanted our money back. She talked to the film crew, and the agreed upon solution was to....send us to a different hotel!
So, Kim and I packed up ASAP and one of the film company's minions drove us over to a 4 star hotel just feet away from the train station, complete with a mini-fridge to chill our moscato, a private bathroom, air conditioning and free internet! And people wonder why Americans continue to complain loudly.
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