Vatican City

Rome, Italy - Day 3
Monday, June 23

The next day we went to the Vatican. We paid 40 Euros for a tour that bypassed the 4 hour line and that also covered all points of interest inside the sovereignty. Given that admission was 15 euros anyway, we thought the 25 euros to be well worth skipping the line and getting a guided tour. One of the first, and famous, carvings we saw was a reproduction of “La Pieta” (Italian for “pity) by Michelangelo.

It depicts Mary holding Jesus, and was made by Michelangelo at the age of 23. It is also the only piece to bear his signature, as a result of breaking into St. Peter’s Basilica (the main building in the Vatican) after hours. Since it was illegal for an artist to put his name on his art at the time (on the grounds that the art was meant to uplift the status of the patron, not the creator), it took a pardon from the pope at the time, to free Michelangelo from a death sentence. The pope pardoned him, because he wanted more work by him (a la Sistine Chapel). Our tour guide, an American girl who had been living in Italy for two years, was very knowledgeable about the stories behind the various artworks but also about the prevailing themes and movements of the time.

We walked through the catacombs in the basement, where lay all the past popes in coffins like this one. Some tourists shamelessly took pictures of Pope John Paul despite a sign, a security guard, what one would presume to be shared sense of respect forbidding it.

We then randomly saw our friends that we bumped into at Paris (and Keone at London too). Afterward, we did the infamous, 520 step climb up St. Peter’s Basilica, a climb which was well worth the visual treat that awaited us at the top. After walking down, we headed for the special points in the middle of Piazza di San Pietro (the circular area in the picture above), from which the 4 layer of columns, comprising the arcs on the border of the Piazza, all line up perfectly. We then went inside St. Peter’s Basilica to see the original “La Pieta,” which sat behind a few layers of bullet-proof glass.

This took us through the evening, after which we then went to Piazza Navona where a street artist sketched a caricature of me for 10 Euros. As we were about to leave the square, we were stopped by two men who proceeded to tie black, pink, and gold thread wristlets on us and demand 10 Euros. We then walked Fontana di Trevi, a famous fountain that has apparently made cameos in quite a few Hollywood movies.

So ended our sightseeing adventures around Rome.

Roman Forum, Palatine Hill, Colosseum

Rome, Italy - Day 2
Sunday, June 22

That morning (Monday) we went to see the Colosseum. On the way we stopped at quite a famous Gelato place whose name escapes me now. Given that there were 34 flavors, you can imagine our joy and drool.

We then developed an understanding for the toga’s use in Rome as we trudged through the excruciating 100 degree, incredibly humid heat at the Roman Forum, the center of Roman government and religious activity, Palatine Hill, the site at which the emperor’s palaces once stood, and the Colosseum, which needs no introduction. OCD fueled our desire to listen to every historic point at the Roman Forum and Palatine hill.

The Colosseum was the first historic site at which I chose not to get an available audio tour, and I still regret it since those are actually quite instructive. An exhibit of various adornments of the Colosseum covered the second floor. We walked around the periphery of the center field, a twenty feet deep stone labyrinth that, back in the day of the empire, was covered with a wooden floor dotted with trap doors through which lions, trees, and gladiators themselves could be added to an ensuing fight/execution.

My Garmin GPS, affectionately named “jeeps”, navigated us through small residential streets and alleyways, far out of the reaches of the peddlers hawking goods to tourists, allowing us to see Rome in a way we hadn’t been able to see Paris or Barcelona. Jeeps guided us to the Pantheon, a former major Pagan temple that was then converted into a Catholic church.

The Pantheon’s interior dome is an architectural wonder. It has an oculus, a hole in the center. You probably know that arches are deceptively hard to construct, because of the fact that the entire weight of the structure rests on a critical point of the top. A dome, which can be seen as a number of arches rotated around a central point, puts even more structural emphasis on this center point. This critical point is, however, exactly where there is an oculus in the Pantheon. The way the Romans accomplished this feat was by using concrete (they had that back then in a more rudimentary form) of varying densities. The structure gets less and less dense as you go from the outside of the circle to the inside, thereby eliminating the need for a solid central point on which to rest.

After the Pantheon, we walked over to the Piazza di Spagna, home to the famous Spanish steps on which young adults used to sit in the 18^th and 19^th century in the hopes of being picked by the passing by artists as models. At the top of the Piazza, we encountered a traffic jam, which we soon found out was caused by the filming of “Angels and Demons,” the prequel to “The Da Vinci Code.” I asked a portly man with a beard, two traits which I presumed to be indicative of power in the film industry, whether they needed extras, but he, misinterpreting what I said as a request to be cast in the movie, shot back, “You’re going to have to go through a talent agency for that.” They were filming a car chase scene, and given the narrow width of the road, we figured that the protective rock ledge at the side would be included in the shot. We went and sat on the shot through about 5 or 6 takes. We think we saw the actors who we think are Tom Hanks’ and Ayelet Zurers’ doubles.

Afterward we walked through a giant park that sat the north of the city, a park which also housed a villa, now museum, of an old cardinal. After coming back, we were moved into a different room, one not inhabited/haunted by Ostello.

First night in Rome

Rome, Italy
Saturday, June 21

Having arrived at Rome a day earlier than anticipated, we immediately called our hostel, Hotel Acropoli, to make a reservation for that night. The number listed on the Hostelworld.com reservation, however, belonged to a hotel booking agent who instructed us to meet him at a particular Piazza, whose name remains unknown to this day. We did not immediately realize, however, that this man was not a member of our hotel staff, but two big clues led us to an Encyclopedia-Brown-like resolution of the mystery – the man’s screams at when we told him it would be easier if we just met him at the Hotel and the fact that the Hotel receptionist told us that we had probably spoken to a “conductor.”

For dinner we went to a pizzeria with a menu identical to that of the first two restaurants from where we’d been booted for being late, and for only ordering one pizza, respectively. We watched Italy lose to Spain. A chocolate cake bought from a baker across the street turned out to be a rum cake, each bite of which tasted like a shot, making me then wish I had chaser.

Shortly after we got back to the hotel, we were greeted by who I am sure will be one of the most memorable characters’ we’ll have come across this entire trip – Ostello the 80 (+/- 5) year old man who, upon dropping his bags onto the floor after entering our 6 bed room, greeted us with a hearty “Buono Serra.” It’s important that you understand how the room is laid out, if you’re to fully appreciate the horror and hilarity of that night. There were 6 twin beds lined up next to each other, with a half-wall partition the length of the beds, in between the first four and the last two. Keone and I took the farthest two, in the set of four, by the window as the room was unbearably hot. Ostello, took the bed that was farthest from us on the opposite side, a bed we couldn’t see because of that wall partition.

We heard strange croaks and gurgles coming for the first hour or so, and Keone admonished me for suggesting that we might wake up next morning with a dead man in the room. About two hours into the night, at around 1:00am, we were jolted awake by a blood-curdling scream, dripping with anger and pleading – “Bella! Bella!” – that was coming from the other side of the wall partition. These screams/cries/sound emissions were then quickly followed by thumping/slapping. We had absolutely no idea why he was screaming the Italian word for beautiful, and we had even less idea as to how he was making the slapping sound. This continued throughout the night. In the morning, Keone couldn’t take it anymore, and went to see what was going on. He was apparently, in his sleep, crying out “Bella!” and slapping his black leather shoe against the wall over and over. I kid you not, it was terrifying at the time.

Cruise from Barcelona to Rome

Cruise from Barcelona, Spain to Rome, Italy
Friday, June 20 - Saturday, June 21

Our cruise from Barcelona to Rome turned out to be an experience whose price rapidly escalated from the initial 40 Euros per person. It also served as a good lens, and an opportunity to brace ourselves for unstable, ready to explode concoction that is the post-menopausal Italian woman. On the shuttle ride over, Alicia and Nikki, our two new friends from Chicago and Scotland, respectively, along with the two of us were loudly and forcefully herded to the back so as to preserve four Italian middle aged women’ incredibly inefficient arrangement of luggage. I had never seen anyone so concerned with, yet at the same so inept at managing their bags.

The pleasant surprise that was the relatively low cost of our tickets for an 18 hour cruise faded as we saw that we had seats on the ship. Imagine a partial cross section of a Boeing 747, and you’ll have the room in which we were assigned seats that were not next to each other. We gladly upgraded to a cabin with beds, air conditioning, and a private bathroom for 15 Euros. The ship was decently large with a number of cafes, bars, restaurants, a casino, an arcade, a club, and a computer lab. The pool which got us excited at the time of booking, however, turned out to be a square with each side measuring about 5 meters long.

After dinner in the overpriced, on-board restaurant, we watched the end of the football match, and then went to the club. The awkwardness of seeing a swarm of 13 year olds dancing in a sea of sexual frustration/ignorance was heightened by their fathers drinking at the bar. With our books in hand we quickly marched out, and proceeded to walk on the deck for about an hour before calling it a day.

Greeted by an industrial landscape of cranes, barges, and scaffolding instead of grand, old Roman ruins, we soon found out that our destination port, Civitavecchia, was a city located few hours from Rome, not a Roman port (these turned out to be a figment of our geographically handicapped imagination).

Barcelona

Barcelona, Spain
Wednesday, June 19 - Saturday, June 21

I arrived in Barcelona on Thursday, June 19, and, I eventually managed to exit from the main train station, with the assistance of an incredibly friendly old lady. The people of France and England had not been this warm, and, further fueled by stories I’d heard from fellow travelers, I couldn’t help but think that kindness must be a zero-sum game – if there’s people here quite eager to help me out, there must also be people quite eager to, put it crudely, screw me over.

The hostel sat on top of a long, steep hill whose climb was not pleasant. I found out that I had achieved a considerably level of notoriety around the hostel owing to the spread of my passport story. Our roommates, two Spanish girls, did not speak a word of English, but, oddly enough, the mutually acknowledged language barrier made for a comfortable détente.

Keone, having arrived a day earlier, made friends with a Spanish couple, Alvaro and Lorea, who just saved him from being fleeced for 50 Euros for a ten minute taxi ride. We met up with those two, along with their two Scottish friends, Bobby and Andy. Cynthia, our Californian waitress of Argentinian descent, added to what would be one of few nights of merriment with the pleasure of conversation in English. Toward the end of the night, the owner of the bar, a 45 year old play-boy from Venezeula, stopped by to help clean up. A former architect, he designed the bar himself, particularly proud of the gold and black design of the bathroom – a Dolce and Gabbana accent, he claimed. His appreciation for such fineries was lost on us

Barcelona is probably the second most widespread city we’d been to at that point, after London, and the stupidity of our ambitious plan to walk back home quickly came to light. No longer under our two Spanish friends’ protective gaze, we were ripped off by a taxi – 15 Euros for a four block ride.

We had to switch to a six-bed the next morning, Friday, June 20, where we met Ryan, a junior at Carnegie Mellon that was studying art, with whom we discussed what were most definitely not mutual fortes - Barcelona and art.

I should note that the “siesta” culture which middle-school and high-school Spanish culture repeatedly mention to spice up the normally bland, conjugation ridden classes, is quite absent in the larger cities in Spain, and, from what we gathered from speaking with locals, is becoming a relic in the smaller towns as well.

That day we walked down Las Ramblas, the most popular pedestrian boulevard in the city, which dotted with souvenir shops, restaurants selling paella and other Spanish delicacies, and what is possibly the most creative street performers I shall see. Las Ramblas street performers don incredibly intricate costumes, ranging from GI Joe to Satyr to Anger, and perform a small act for and take a picture with those who pay them.

Halfway through the street, stretching to the right side, was El Mercat Boqueria, the famous Barcelonan marketplace with vendors showcasing any and all type of fruit you imagine, vegetables, sausage, goat legs, and what seemed to be an endless variety of fish. In effort to find reasonably priced Paella, we began walking on the side streets of Las Ramblas, only to find ourselves lost in a three block long alley lined with no less than 20 hookers. Spreading around to stand in the middle of all possible exits from the alley, thereby forcing us to pass them on our way out, we made a mad dash for the last open street. We had lunch at the noodle restaurant “Wok to Walk,” that was half a block away.

We then made our way to the harbor to check out the beaches, piers, as well as to book our cruise to Rome. In our three hour wait until the booking office opened, we sat on the pier, throwing almonds, that proved to be not only inedible, but incredibly foul tasting for our new Spanish fish friends.

That night we went to the beach, walked through the garden in the middle of the city, and saw the Arc de Triomf, which was considerably smaller than its Parisian cousin. We had dinner at a small eatery – pork sandwiches, a young, fruity Spanish red wine, and Estella, the national beer. Although we were somewhat drunk by the time we got back to the hotel, we decided to take showers being dirty form walking around all day. We took two of the three communal showers, which were arranged one next to another in a line, and the antics that followed – squirting each other over the wall with cold water – was frowned upon by the occupant of the third shower – an Asian guy across from whom I stood in the mirror for a good 5 seconds before I realized that I was wearing nothing but crocs on my feet.Keone’s adopted an extreme version of the Barcelonan “lisp” pronunciation, which normally makes “c”’s with an “s” sound into a “th.” Keone, however, has taken to pronouncing all “s” sounds with a lisp

Tours

Tours, France - Monday, June 16 - Tuesday, June 17

I’m sitting here quite concerned about what only appears to be a thin, plastic sliding partition, one that doesn’t close all the way, as the door to the bathroom. The reason for my concern is that Keone just walked in proclaiming that he was “about to drop bombs like nobody’s business.” In fact, because the toilet is tucked into a corner of the bathroom, he just slid open the partition now, revealing only his knees and face, to show me how to operate the shower – a knob that switches water flow, controlled by our sink’s faucets, between our tap and shower head.

When we got off of the train to Tours, we were a bit lost as to how to get to our hotel. Thirty minutes and a 5 Euro map later, we realized that we would be staying a little ways out of the city centre. We boarded a bus headed in that direction, but, out of our increasing worry that we would pass our stop and then be whisked away into bumblefuck France, we exited a few stops too early. I now realize that our map only contains large streets. We maneuvered our way to the main highway by a one mile U-shaped path, a path which we then found out was entirely unnecessary owing to the existence of intermediate streets. As the intermediate street path involved a few turns, it wasn’t immediately apparent to us just by looking at them, that it would lead to the main highway.

Regardless, we walked on an unevenly poured tar path on the side of a freeway, passing a car full of French guys, about our age, who yelled “Bienvenue a Tours,” in the direction of our hotel. We must have walked nearly three miles with packs on our back and front (we started wearing our smaller day bags on our stomachs – in essence we looked like pregnant people) along with that cardboard box, mentioned earlier, whose contents had now dwindled to grapes, carrots, half of a bottle of water, and three bananas.

The hotel wasn't even in the proper town, so we ended up staying at a different hostel, Hotel Terminus, that was right next to the station.

We then did our laundry, which was a fiasco. Because of some poor laundry machine design, if the knob used to set type of wash – whites/colors/permanent press/woolens – is turned 360 degrees, the machine locks and doesn’t run. Being industrial washers, we couldn’t pry them open. Essentially, my nice hoodie, polo, towel, and all of my underwear would have to be abandoned if nothing could be done last night, since this morning at 8:00am, the store’s opening time, would be well past our train’s departure. This happened at 5:30pm after the manager had left for the day, trusting an automatically locking door to shut at 8:30pm, closing his store. We called him at the emergency number posted in the store, but he spoke fast French which Keone couldn’t understand. We asked some random person walking by on the street to speak with him and translate to us, but we couldn’t figure out the machine, still. In a one mile run back to the hotel to use a bathroom, I decided on a whim to ask our concierge to speak with him again, and this time, the manager agreed to come in (at 8:15pm) and fix it. For nearly 3 hours, I thought I would have to abandon my underwear and towel in a rogue washing machine in Tours, France. We spent the better, and what would have been an enjoyable part of the day, 5 hours to be precise, in a Laundromat.

Saumur

Saumur, France

Sunday, 15 - Monday, 16 June 2008

Saumur quickly led us to realize that the smaller regions of France essentially shut down on Sundays. The station was on the northern side of the Loire, which also happened to be the more desolate side of the town (see Southern side of the Madeleine in the blog entry about Nantes). There was not a soul to be seen on the streets, and the taxi cab stand, which looked like it could easily accommodate up to 15 taxis, was completely empty. We walked across to the city centre to find what was a more packed part of the city store-wise, but equally devoid of people. It was almost like walking into a ghost town.

Walking along the main road, Rue de Franklin Roosevelt (“rue” is French for road), we looked down an alley to find a sign for a “Rouge e Noir”, “black and red.” Wanting to take a sign of what seemed to be either a strip-club or whore-house, I whipped out my trusty Canon. Seconds later, we were approached by a French woman, reeking of alcohol, who happened to be dressed in black and red. I immediately put my camera away, and just as I was about to raise my right arm to defend myself from what I thought was going to be a beating from a prostitute, she asked, in broken English, for two Euro so she could call her mother. We gladly gave her the two Euro, and she left.

We kept walking down the main street. We went inside what seemed to be an upscale restaurant, only to be told by the hostess, who also happened to have a look of shock at homeless people walking into her trendy eatery, that they weren’t open for another few hours. We settled on the only place that was going to opening soon enough, “Boite a la Pizza.” After grabbing our food and deciding to eat it at our hostel, we called a cab – we’d been told at the local tourism office that our Hostel was quite a ways away. The cab-ride to our Euro 40 room turned out to be Euro 50 one way. Equipped with our Harvard skills of critical thinking, we quickly deduced that 50 + 50 is more than what we’d pay for a hostel in the city (the Euro 40 was going to be charged regardless of whether or not we stayed at the far away hostel, since the cancellation was not 24 hours in advance).

We got a room, with one queen bed, at Hotel de Londres. Afterward, we went to a Café des Cloud to watch the Switzerland vs. Portugal soccer match, accompanied by a Saumur Rouge – a red wine from the region.

The next morning we woke up at around 10:00am and left the hotel by 11. We found a Supermarche (even if you don’t speak French, I assume you can figure that one out) and bought a big meal consisting of tomatoes, carrots, pears, grapes, bananas, milk, bottles of water, and a bottle of wine, all for about $12 a person. We then ate half of this in parking lot of the grocery store. While washing our pears by pouring water bottles onto our hands and chugging milk, it hit us with the force of the odor of a sharp French cheese that we were homeless. We got to the station at 1:05pm, just missing the train to Tours which left at 1:03pm. We’re sitting at the train station right now, on a bench on platform C, finishing off our box of groceries. Eating a box of cherry tomatoes proves to be quite acidic in the mouth.