When I was a kid, my grandmother lived in the small Northern Ohio farming and gypsum town of Genoa, Ohio. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I heard of Genoa, Italy.
I once walked along Genoa Street in San Francisco’s North Beach, but this year is finally my opportunity to visit the real place.
Alas...
We spent most of Thursday on the train speeding across the coast of France.
We had lunch with a view: good sandwiches from our favorite café in Séte, apricots from the guesthouse, chocolate, and red Bordeaux wine.
This turned out to be the highlight of the day.
That, and we made friends with the people sitting across from us, an interesting couple who were heading to Nice and offered to show us around. It turns out that we ended up helping each other through the long afternoon.
We shared some water and chocolate, and helped each other figure out the train problems and new connections.
There was a big delay in Marseilles which caused us to miss connections onwards, causing us to spend more time waiting and reading between trains. The domino effect was disastrous and wasted the entire day.
This caused our guesthouse for the evening to tell me we would arrive too late and find another place to stay GOODBYE! (La Piazzetta. Don’t bother booking there.)
Thus we barely caught the last train out to Genoa (I literally ran into the station to grab the first sandwich I saw, and a bottle of water. The “sandwich” was one slice of ham on a huge bun.) and we arrived past 23:00.
And that is how we spent our day of walking in Genoa sitting in train stations instead.
We stopped at the ticket machine and purchased our biglietti onwards to Varenna the next morning.
Fortunately for us there are a lot of hotels right at the train station, and the first one we tried, literally just across the street, had "una Camera doppia per due" available.
The desk clerk looked at the clock, “It is normally €79 but I can give it to you... for sixty.”
OK then.
It was a nice room. Not cute or fancy and we didn’t even bother to open the window. It was simple clean and spacious and we slept well.
And, bonus! In the morning they made real coffee, real espressos not drip.
Hotel Galata. If you ever need it.
And so I saw three things in Genoa after all:
The statue of Cristoforo Colombo, second the Genova Piazza Principe Train Station (Which makes the White House in Washington DC look like a dump. A train station for gods sake. This may be the only issue I agree on with Trump. The White House is a dump. In comparison. And these are his words; nothing “fake” about that. I am happy to find common ground with my fellow patriot, Donald.).
The third thing I saw was the little bar and the bottom of my coffee cup.
*Side note*
On the train I read an article in The Atlantic about health, and it stated that one good measure is if you walk 0.8 meters a second you should live out your full life expectancy.
OK then.
I googled it and that is merely 1.79 miles in an hour.
Hell, I’ll live to 175 at that measure!
But I may not live long enough to return to Genoa.