9. Urban Hymns

We’re going undercover today, meaning that today’s featured sunglasses are designed to make you blend into a typical Italian suburban crowd while picking up all that goes on around you. That’s why I’ve gone for the sunglasses with secret bilateral cameras brought to us by chinavasion.com. Guaranteed to make you look as Italian as the next man (as long as they’re wearing the same sunglasses) and a snip at €255.22.

But onto business. A rather industrial blog today. After failing 70% of my elementary candidates today (a rather higher percentage than normal, which I in no way put down to a bad night’s sleep) I thought I could do with a bit of a pick me up and so reached for a beer from the mini-bar. Lovely. As I was opening it, I cast an eye out of my hotel window and glanced over to a secluded spot behind the railway shed that my window happens to overlook. To my surprise, there were two youngsters indulging in more of a pick me up than a beer from the mini-bar, as you can see. The zoom was on max and my window was a little dirty, but you can certainly make out which punter has just been shooting up (his arm is extended). The other one looked rather anxious and was searching the ground for some time, seeming to have lost something valuable. After a while, his friend helped him out with something and they wandered off.

While ‘people of the street’ often get a bad rap for being degenerate, uneducated and generally unpleasant, there are brighter sides to the story. While passing some time reading in a sun-lit piazza recently, I noticed this gentleman [pictured] sitting opposite me. He had a huge bag of collected newspapers (surely the only person collecting any rubbish in Naples at the moment) and was taking his time going through them all, carefully folding up and keeping the interesting articles and discarding the ones he didn’t like into a third bag, presumably to be thrown away. All this while listening to an old transistor radio set playing classical opera. The batteries were almost out and the reception was a touch on the dodgy side, but this was advantageous as it meant that out of a radius of 2 metres, you could barely hear a thing. Melvin Bragg would be proud.

And onto trains, or at least the underground. As you will know, the underground in London has some strict protocol: stand on the right, let others off the train before you board, move down between the seats, etc. Having started to use the Neapolitan underground again, I’m reminded of the protocol here: shoulder barge people out the way in order to get onto the train first. This experience, while at first appearing quite aggressive, has the bonus of being quite liberating. You don’t have to apologise, as no one else will, and you don’t have to wait. If you like, it’s a kind of survival of the fittest. The downside is that it does take longer to board a train as the people trying to get off don’t have a clear lane and the people trying to get on just get jammed while crowding on. A blurred, action picture of one such underground train, looking to all intense purposes like a normal train, can be seen here.

And then there are other forms of transport in the city. I won’t bother you with buses but will jump straight to the funicolare. What might that be? Well, according to the directions to get to one school, it said I had to get one and being unsure I checked in my Italian/English dictionary. The translation: funicular railway. This didn’t help much. I don’t know, maybe I was just being dense, but as it turned out, it was a kind of train on a big escalator. See the picture. Quite convenient when you don’t want to walk up a hill. Anyway, this and other forms of transport can all be had for the sum of €1.10 for 90 minutes on any combination of local public transport. What London Underground’s excuse is for £3 for a single, I can’t fathom.

Anyway, time draws on and it’s time to celebrate it being Friday. Many of the local examiners are off tomorrow morning so we’re off for a tasty bite to eat and plenty of delightful red wine. I’m sure that’ll be a fine way to relax, but if not, at least I know there’s the railway shed across the way for extra resources should they be needed...

As for tomorrow, weather and inclination permitting, it'll be a trip to the island of Capri, where I hope to visit the world famous car factory.