La messa è finita, andate in pace.

Spending ”a few hours” in a city can present the most cherished moments. Walking on Spaccanapoli, one of the oldest streets in Naples, on a sunny Sunday morning I would suppose is lovely during any season.

The masses were being finished when we entered Santa Chiara and Il Gesù Nuovo after climbing narrow alleys from around Corso Umberto. A group of priests hurried by in the New Jesus, one of them, the youngest, wearing jeans and sneakers under his robe.

Confessions were taking place left and right, the sinners sitting outside the booths, priest inside.

We bought wild strawberry eclairs at Scaturchio on Piazza San Domenico Maggiore before checking out from the hotel to finally take the boat to Capri.

Just reading those words makes my day: Piazza San Domenico Maggiore.

Hotel Nobody

Naples train station and the Piazza Garibaldi have bad reputations for ripping off and mugging tourists. I wouldn't recommend anyone inclined to listen to warnings about the dangers of this city to arrive by train on a Saturday night. It is a l i t t l e bit scary (I could hardly breathe), but we made it safely to the dark alley of Hotel Nessuno, sorry Nettuno.

Yes, we even tipped the cab driver in spite of his overcharging. ”Thank you so much for not stabbing us” I wanted so say in Italian, but I need to brush up the language better first.

Saturday October 10. Bologna - Naples: 4.25 pm – 8.46 pm

The track hosts, or should I say the train stewards, of the Eurostar Italia, were ridculously arrogant on our route, half sleepingly handing out half empty glasses of water.

Everything about this modern train, at first sight similar to the Shinkansen trains in Japan, is annoying, except maybe for the Space: 1999 inspired sliding doors. (The series was called Månbas Alpha in Swedish).

Holding your hands under the super modern faucets in the pee and poo area (that's bathroom for Americans) was a joke. When hands were put in place to get the water running, the water stopped; hands removed, the water began pouring again, ever so irritatingly.

Try that exercise ten times and you are about to use extra foul Italian language.

No paper towels, no hand dryer working. Toiletpaper (would that be bathroom paper in American English?) the impossibly thin kind (favoured by Americans and, I'm sure, many other nationalities) that tears to pieces of moist dust as soon as you touch them with wet hands.

More inspiring was looking out the window, spotting Guiseppe Tornatore children playing soccer in the continous flow of cities and towns so unlike the Swedish countryside.

Next to us a tourist family with the Top 10 Florence & Tuscany guide book. I have nothing against handy tourist guides per se, but the woman looks so miserable I fear that she is suffering from a facial paralysis if not a very severe case of cultural shock.

This train is frequented by heaps of tourists, primarily Western nationalitites. The restaurant has a full menu and we went for primi piatti (pasta etc), secondi piatti (vitello tonato), contorni (the tomatoes!) and dolci (torta di albicocca; apricots are in season). Too bad the Swedish krona is so weak: almost 11 to the Euro.

Saturday October 10. Munich - Bologna: 9.31 am – 4.11 pm

But then who needs fancy?

The six seat compartment taking us from Munich to Bologna brings back memories of the beauty of temporary and casual train acquaintances. How often do you lean over and strike up a conversation with your next seat passenger in a modern train?

We are instantly thrown into a six hour chat with a lovely and handsome couple: Frank and Marion Abbott from Cambridge in England, on their way to Bologna for a four day vacation.

We all appreciate the walls of mountains, the Alps on display through the train windows.

As always when I talk to British people I am self conscious because of my American accent which sometimes sounds banal and sloppy.

I mean, I love American English, I also love quite a few Americans!, it's just that the accent can be too much of everything every now and then, as I will show in a fresh exampel here soon.

Well, we made it in time to Munich without losing neither bags nor wits.

And this fancy Trenitalia train brought us from Germany to Italy. (The one to the right.)

Friday - Saturday October 9 – 10. Copenhagen - Munich: 6.53 pm – 8.57 am

How bizarr to ride the night train. You walk into a room on wheels, for instance in your home town, sleep one night and then wake up and walk out into another country.

At least that's how it should be.

Our sleeper from Copenhagen was delayed one hour because of two incidents. An accident on the tracks, supposedly involving a person, first stops it outside Odense. Then at 2.30 am everybody on the train is woken up by the conductor announcing in the loudspeakers, with the voice of an official who doesn't know what to do, that there is a passenger with an epileptic seizure on board and could somebody, preferably a physician please help?

As we won't make it in time to catch our connecting train from Munich we are woken up again, kindly this time, a few hours later and asked to get off the train in Nürnberg and catch a fast regional train from there.

Do you know the feeling of severe panic that strikes when you travel with too many pieces of luggage and you need to count them continously? I know that feeling, it often returns right when I have stepped off a train and the train sets off again.

Four bags is not to be recommended. If one is on your back, where are the other three? And is the one on your back really on your back?

The Glyptotek in Copenhagen

If you ever have three hours in Copenhagen (and you've seen Tivoli before) may I suggest you go to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and look at 2000 year old dudes and chicks?