off again

trains, waterbuses, and subway cars

In a move of unprecedented brilliance, after schlepping my warm clothes all through Ireland and Italy, I then left them behind in Florence and am now for the first time in a place that is freezing, and I somehow have no socks or gloves. I think with this act of genius I have officially moved past "rocking it cool" into "rocking it ice cold" territory.

OK, so rewind to yesterday. The thing no one told me about Venice is that it is essentially a ginormous floating shopping mall.

 

It is also THE PLACE to buy all of your "Winnie the Pimp" merchandise

 

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And the site of this mysterious American flag Pieta, the explanation of which was long, in Italian, and therefore incomprehensible to me, but it did have something to do with Custer and Little Big Horn?

 

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Oh, there were some buildings and canals and stuff, too.

 

So now I'm in Budapest, but I don't really care, because I'm so fucking bummed about losing my stuff.

everyone loves a secret passage

I'm not sure what to say on my second-to-last day here in Duomoland, a.k.a. Italia.

Above are pictures of the main Duomo of Florence and the Baptistry next to it. I also visited Chiesa San Marco, where there used to be a monastery with frescoes by Fra Angelico in every cell. Super excellent; definitely the place to be a monk. I went inside the enormous Palazzo Vecchio and saw some secret staircases and the tresses holding up the ceiling, with original Vasari wood beams and 16th century olive pits etc.

I love Italy but all of this "go here, look at this" is starting to wear on me, I think. My eyes are starting to glaze over at the sight of a statue. I wish I could just sit around more and relax, but there's nowhere to do it here. It's weird that as small as Florence is compared to Rome, it feels so much more compact and hectic. Maybe that's just the tourist trail, but I have no idea how to escape it; any direction I wander in, there we all are. And it doesn't help that even if you find a quiet cafe they want to charge you $5 to sit down.

Well tomorrow will probably be the most hectic of all, getting on a train in the morning to Bologna, changing to another train to Venice, trying not to get lost in Venice in time to make our way back to the station and catch a night train to Budapest. But maybe then I can catch my breath.

church church piazza church

After a hot shower and a real nights sleep in a quiet dark room that doesn't smell, I feel like a whole new person. A cleaner person. Natan, when I asked him if he thought my blog was accurate, said it was except that I didn't complain about the last hostel enough. Well, for the record, the last hostel was such a pit that no amount of complaining would be enough, so I barely tried. But anyway that's all over now, and not a minute too soon.

Florence is full of tourists. Rome was too, but I think because Florence is so much smaller, you notice it that much more. Plenty of Americans, too. I'm tired of hearing my own accent.

The best most interesting museum I have seen so far is the one I went to this morning, with Galileo's instruments and all kinds of other old scientific and mathematical machinery that was once the height of technology and is now old and mysterious. All of these little pieces of equipment, half of them made out of gold and insanely complex and beautiful, for doing geometry, and little crazy bubbles of glass in interesting shapes for chemistry or alchemy or something. It was amazing. However they did not allow cameras (boooo) and were charging about $55 for a museum catalogue (hiss) so I sadly walked away emptyhanded picture-wise.

The famous synagogue here is ultra-weird. It's only about 150 years old and looks like a fucked-up cross between a mosque and a cathedral. Not Jewish-feeling at all. The wall and ceiling designs are pretty, but....weird. Again no cameras allowed so I only got a few crappy outside shots through the gate.

The church of San Miniato is way up the side of a hill, so there's all kinds of panoramic city views, but for me that wasn't as cool as the church itself, or the cemetary around it. There's all these stairs and walkways going around all sides of the basilica, and every nook and cranny or big empty space has graves and mausoleums. Tons of statues are in these little alcoves behind gates, which makes them look like cells, and then other alcoves just have random bits of building material or furniture. Sort of labyrinthish and creepy/cool.

The deceased have a good view

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I really loved the church itself, too. It was almost pitch black inside (in the middle of the afternoon) and cold. It felt like this enormous cavern underground, or carved out of rock. So simple compared to all these other cathedrals I've been seeing and to me, so much more effective in really giving that hair-raising "whoah" feeling.

Hard to get a snap of, though. Plus I felt weird trying.

fun with the funicular

Last night at the world's most disgusting, sketchy hostel, I was woken up...well not 'woken' exactly, that implies that I was sleeping before, let's say I was 'disturbed' by two guys screaming at the top of their lungs. This is what they were saying: "LET ME IN! LET ME IN! Kick down the door! Kick it down!" (kicking sound) "OWWWW. FUCK! Slip the key under the door! Put it on the mat! It worked in the movies!  I WILL KILL YOUR MOTHER! Let me IN!!!!"

I have no idea who was saying what, or what they were doing exactly, but this went on for about 45 minutes, during which I just lay there thinking, are they on drugs? Who can scream for that long?

Afterwards Natan and I decided that was the highlight of the hostel stay, because at least it was kind of funny in retrospect.

On the way to Firenze today, we spent the afternoon in Orvieto, a medievel hill town with one awesome stripey duomo.

Unlike St. Peter's, this one actually felt like a church to me, not just a museum with some nuns in it. I think the plain stone walls make the art that's in it feel more meaningful to me - more religious somehow. When everything is covered in gold no one thing seems particularly noticeable...not even the Pieta.

Its main economy now seems to be running adorable shops to sell stuff to tourists - which there were a fair amount of, though everyone besides us seemed to be Italians on their long weekend.

It was really nice -  a very cute town with tiny winding old streets, down which came barrelling through lots of cars practically as wide as the street and going way too fast (trying to squish pedestrians is obviously a popular sport!) Also, the train station does announcements in English, which makes things considerably easier.

We didn't have that easy of a time of it in Florence - why oh why does the stupid guidebook never mention there are TWO train stations - but everything is cool now. All right, dinnertime - as usual there are more photos on my flickr! http://www.flickr.com/photos/23698397@N00/

sardines

Natan says I can't call the Vatican a hellhole, so to make myself clear, let me say it is only the Vatican MUSEUM that I consider a hellhole. Oh man. I can hardly think of a more miserable time I've ever had.

First, there was the waiting in line for over 2 hours in the pouring rain, surrounded by people all pushing and shoving the whole damn time, and a girl behind us whining incessantly to her boyfriend: "Why can't I ride on your back...my feet hurt more than yours...you're supposed to love me!"

When we finally made it to the museum entrance I thought we were finally in the clear, but what a fool I was. Inside is just the same but 1000x worse. Everyone pretty much ignores the entire museum and just shoves their way singlemindedly to the Sistine Chapel. What this means is that for another maybe hour and a half, you are pushed forward and forward in this inescapable crowd of people crushing you, through a million billion halls all covered ceiling, walls, and floor in mosaics and art and gold and bright decoration, not that you can see the decoration, because pretty much all I could see was the backs of the heads of all the Japanese tourists in front of me as I was herded on and on and on and on and on until finally we were in la Sistina.

Look, I'm not saying it's not cool, or talking shit about a great masterpiece blah blah blah, but I COULDN'T BREATHE. It's really hard to appreciate art when you can't breathe.

On the plus side...uh, we finally escaped.

St. Peter's Basilica was very cool and gave the same feeling without the entry fee or the mosh pit, by the way.

Here's some pictures from before I completely lost my will to live.

 

basta walking

I am so tired. And there is more walking to come tomorrow! And probably every other day. Shit.

Today basically all I did was walk around the city with Natan. We saw a bunch of stuff, such as...

Roman Abraham Lincoln:

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the Jewish Ghetto:

A market/fair/carnival thing at Piazza Navona:

Lots of animal statues:

Then we tromped around from place to place and up about a million flights of stairs to one skanky hostel after another, trying to find where our stupid reservation was. At one point we were told to wait outside in the hall for like 10 minutes with our heavy-ass backpacks on waiting for the floor to dry. Then once it was dry, the woman just told us to go somewhere else. That was the hostel right near the most sewage-smelling nasty piazza ever, now officially renamed Piazza Stinky.

Note to self: reservations IN ADVANCE next time.

The day was beautiful though, I enjoyed all except the hostel parts, especially just sitting outside eating pizza or drinking espresso and looking at the buildings & the people. I feel like I'm learning so much, for example: Italian women wear really tight pants. OK, maybe that's all I've learned...

taxi attack

Dude. Italy is awesome. Even first getting here last night, riding through the city I had this ridiculously positive feeling about being here (not that you could tell from my morose blog post later) and now after a much better day I can confirm, I love Rome.

I swear everything here is gorgeous - even the ugly things - perhaps I am just blinded by actually seeing the sun at such long last. It's not that the ancient ruins aren't cool, because they are, but everything around them is cool too. I love that it seems like the new buildings are made to fit right in with the BC ones, so that you're looking at a street and it almost makes sense that this ancient temple is sitting next to a 200-year old bank and a current shoe store, or whatever.

I spent most of the daylight hours wandering around the Coliseum and Roman Forum, and getting freaking lost on the way both there and back, and then going on an epic quest for a tourism office which supposedly existed, and which eventually turned out to be located...next door to the hostel.

The city runs an open-top bus for tourists which goes around to all the main sites, which I rode tonight with Natan and a Canadian girl we met, to see everything lit up at night. It was pretty awesome but very hard to get good pictures. Mostly the bus moved and they came out all psychedelic.

Tomorrow is a holiday here, I believe it has to do with an immaculate conception of some kind. Because of that things are a little jam-packed accomodation wise so we're moving to another hostel tomorrow, and then a different dorm the night after that.

Other people are waiting for the computer now so more updates tomorrow!

boringness

Sorry to report that I have no pictures or fun stories today, it was pretty much just bus-airport-travel hassle nonstop. We got to the Rome hostel after dark and then I sat on my bunk in a funk. I didn't mean that sentence to rhyme, but oh well. Now I need to find something better to eat than airport trailmix, "Product of Japan, Thailand, Taiwan or Malaysia," so far my only meal of the day, and figure out what to do with tomorrow. God, traveling is so tiring sometimes.

I have a feeling I will like Italy though.