#11: playing tiny UNO on a train across italy

Happy Friday! Hope y’all have a lovely start to your weekend :)

#11: playing tiny UNO on a train across italy

Our destination was the magical Cinque Terre, a cluster of colorful villages set up on cliffs in the Italian Riviera. First, though, we had to get there. 

It’s both easily said and easily done–get a train from Milan to Monterosso, then a train from Monterosso to Cinque Terre. My traveling companion and I had flown into Milan. We’d gotten a shuttle from the airport into the city. We’d walked around for, well, about ten minutes (lugging luggage around the city is no fun) then sat outside the train station for a little while. Now, at last, we were on the train! 

Even still: hours separated us from our destination.

There is absolutely something to be said along the lines of if you’re going to while away the hours anywhere, it might as well be on an Italian train. To which I’d say, sure. Fair point. But sometimes, entertainment is necessary. Even on Italian trains.

So, what else was there to do? 

“Want to play tiny UNO?” I asked my friend.

“Um, absolutely,” she responded.

That was all I needed to hear. I whipped out my tiny UNO deck.

Please understand: I am a light packer. On this week-long jaunt through Italy, I had a backpack instead of a roller suitcase. Each item that I brought was weighed and thought through and chosen with precision. Including tiny UNO. I just knew it would be needed. One day. The day had come.

These cards were barely an inch long, less than an inch wide. They looked so funny when held, the hand-to-card proportions all out of whack. UNO (tiny and regular sized and giant) is one of my favorite games. You have to match either the color or the number of the card facing up. There are also cards in the deck that cause chaos: making the person next in line draw 4 more cards, for example, when the goal of the game is to run out of cards first. It’s quick, and easy, and provides many, many opportunities for talking smack–but in a friendly way.

I dealt the cards for my friend and me. We played a round. Much smack-talking and +4s and “ha!”s ensued. Then we noticed something.

Our seats on the train were facing two others. In the one directly across from me sat a little old Italian man, looking out the window. In the one directly across from my friend sat a twentysomething Italian woman, who was talking on the phone and watching us play with great interest.

So, as I was dealing the next round, I made eye contact with our across-the-seat neighbor. In that way of communicating without assuming a shared language, I raised my eyebrows and held out a card, asking without so many words whether she wanted to be dealt in, whether she wanted to play.

Our neighbor nodded, vehemently. Of course, we dealt her in.

She joined in on the +4s and “hahah!”s with great glee. Once she got off the phone, we started talking, the three of us. Her English was very good. We told her about how we’d literally just gotten to Italy, a few hours before. We told her about the plan for our trip. In response, she taught us a few Italian phrases. I don’t remember most of them, but thanks to her, we learned how to say “grazie” (thank you) somewhat properly.

The conversation turned. She had never been to America before, but luckily–so luckily!–we’d brought bits of America to her. My friend had loaded up on snacks at the airport in New York City the day before. Our card-playing companion got her first taste of Cheez-Its and chocolate covered pretzels, straight from a snack shelf in the USA. 

Her eyes widened. “Those are good,” she said, and reached for some more. We had plenty.

At one point, my attention turned from my traveling companion and our newfound friend to the little old man sitting across from me. Later, my friend told me she’d noticed me eyeballing the man, wondering if I should ask him to play. In her narration, she’d been thinking, “Megan, don’t you do it!” I didn’t, unfortunately. I wish I had. That would have been a funny story.

But–like all UNO games and train rides–there was, eventually, an ending. Our Italian friend had to leave; she was doing postgrad work at university, and needed to catch another train or maybe just spend time in Genoa. I packed up the slippery, teeny-tiny UNO deck and put it safely back in a side pouch of my backpack. Before long, we were disembarking at Corniglia, in Cinque Terre. That, though, is a story for another day.

For now, I’ll leave with this: the destination was magical, just like we’d hoped. But–and we couldn’t possibly have bought this alongside our tickets, or shoved it onto an itinerary–so was the train ride to get there. The journey had its own particular form of magic, as–oftentimes–they do.

Share meander with megan