Nightmare.

Don't get me wrong, I love Italy, I love the gorgeous food, the climate, the architecture, the traditions and culture and myriad other things. However, I don't think you can ever appreciate how lucky we are in the UK until you live in somewhere like Italy. When you are on holiday you don't mind so much that nothing is open on a sunday, that everything closes in the middle of the day and that banks are open less hours than the average person works.

When you come here on holiday, you don't mind that everything is unorganised, that people don't queue, that there is no rule for which side of the escalator to stand on, that the automatic ticket machines at the station are slow and likely to crash which is why there is always a huge queue for the manned ticket booths.

When you come here on holiday it doesn't matter that the buses and trams in the cities are unreliable and that intercity trains can be delayed for up to 4 hours because of heavy rain. It doesn't worry you that buses to smaller towns stop running at 8:30 in the evening or that a taxi for an 8km journey costs 20Euro.

I think you can see where this is going.

In the UK we are spoiled with a wealth of information intended to aid the average person as well as tourists i.e. it's easy to follow. People queue on the right of the escalator, so you can walk down the left side, people form an orderly queue when a bus or train pulls up instead of pushing their way to the front (Ok, not in central London), there are buses that run 24 hours a day and trains that run until at least 3 in the morning.

We had a lot of difficulty in getting home from the airport. The bus to our town stopped running at 9pm and the tickets we were sold for the train were useless because they used a route that (you guessed it) stopped running earlier in the day and used a rail replacement bus service that ran every TWO HOURS!? Thankfully we encountered the nicest strangers I've ever met in my entire life. People volunteered information without asking, they walked us to platforms and pointed out timetables and platforms and escalators to us, a random guy at one of the many train stations we ended up at, actually drove us to another train station and told us how to get home. Maybe he should be working for Tren Italia? Why the actual employees of the rail company couldn't have informed us of the a) correct and b) easiest way to get home at that hour is beyond me, but at least we met such kind people on our journey.

I don't know if you can tell, but the shine is starting to wear off. I need to get a scooter, then everything will start to look brighter again.