Napoli! 2023 The Next Chapter

 Let Go and Let God Bus Driver 

    Riding the bus in Naples is an everyday occurrence for many Neapolitans.

    It certainly became one for us.

       Scott sussed out how to download the public transportation app where we could purchase a week-long ticket and activate it (which we had to do every day we took the bus.)

    We soon learned to let go and let god the bus driver. (apologies to AA).  The road down to town is part cobblestone, part tarmac, all with many holes and tight turns. Along steep cliff-sides and too-narrow passages.

    Riding the bus in and around Naples conjured up so many past traumas for me: vertiginous ascents and descents. Overtaking on a curve/hill. The terror invoked by the thought of plummeting to a rocky and/or water death.  No guard rails. Blowing a tire on a too-tight turn.
    All the above have happened to me.  The Beartooth Highway in Wyoming was one long vertiginous, switch-back ascent with steep cliffs on one side and only air on the other.  Thank god there were guardrails.  There weren’t any on the 4k road down to a small seaside village where we spent several days in Croatia. Add to that a one-way-only stretch where the ascender had to back up to let the descender pass. One wrong move and off the cliff you go.
    Overtaking on curves was a frequent occurrence in Slovakia.  Those incidents where death occurred were routinely covered in the national newspapers. While not ever seeing a mortal accident, we did see too many drivers passing on curves and hills.
    I actually did blow a tire on a mountain pass ascent in Slovakia because I took the switch-back curve too tightly (the tire survived until we got to our driveway 20 minute later).
    This is all to say that I again became a fatalist bus rider: those Neapolitan bus drivers (many of them very good-looking, both men and women) know what they are doing. No careening off cliffs or smashing into oncoming traffic.

Bus inspectors. For perhaps the first week of our daily ride into town, we saw no bus ticket inspectors.

    But for the next three weeks, an inspector would frequently step onto the bus and randomly check for validated tickets.

    We were always compliant.
    Not everyone was.  There was a smartly dressed young scofflaw* who not only did not have a validated ticket.  He had no ticket at all.  The inspector stopped the bus and proceeded to write up a long citation during which he cited which violations the guy had broken.  The busload of us people sat there for at least 20 minutes while the inspector made his point in front of us all.
    Finally, he escorted the perp off the bus and we continued on our journey down the hill.

    We saw that same perp once more on our daily bus ride.  We noticed he validated his ticket upon boarding the bus. 

    There was only one other time when an inspector called out a woman who didn’t have a ticket.  He just showed her off the bus.
    We were just a little smug about knowing to keep our tickets valid every time.

* Scott made me use that word