Ciao from TrenItalia! I’m currently leaving the Rome Termini station en route to Florence after leaving Sorrento after an amazing three days, two and a half equally amazing days in Rome, and twenty hours in Qatar. And now to distract myself from the lipsmacking Asian man in front of me eating some mystery gelatinous food from a pouch (that is somehow a gel and crunchy?), I’ve decided to blog. Because hey, I have nearly two hours and don’t quite feel like finishing the second season of HIMYM quite yet.
Technically I should start with my final day in Melbourne, since I’m fairly certain that’s where we left off. Seized by my new compulsion to visit botanical gardens and monuments erected in honor of Queen Victoria, I decided to head down to two of Melbourne’s main gardens. First I actually made a brief detour to walk through Chinatown to mail a package back home and in a misguided quest for Vegemite in a local foodstore ended up with Koala Yummies and some of that soda with the marble in it, but not the Ramune brand. I then went to the gardens that are currently home to Captain Cook’s parents’ home (aka his birthplace) that was moved brick by brick from England and rebuilt in Melbourne in honor of Cook’s accomplishments in finding Australia and New Zealand, among other places. I won’t deny that it was a little strange to see a tiny English house rebuilt in the middle of a park in Australia. After wandering around there a little longer and taking in the fountains, I headed across the Yarra River to the actual botanical gardens and to the major war remembrance monument. While walking through the park a seemingly irrationally large amount of teenagers dressed in fashion reminiscent of both the 1980s and the current hipster scene (but mostly the ’80s) were starting to converge, and it turned out that there was an electronic musical festival that weekend. After seeing all of those same Melbourne teens in uniforms just the day before while walking around with Michael, it almost wasn’t surprising to see them dressed so differently, yet all still largely dressing the same still. After passing the aforementioned monument to Queen Vic and the war remembrance monument, I caught the tourist bus back up to Chinatown, from where I walked over to the QV shopping center (and I just now realized that QV most likely stands for Queen Victoria…) where I finally invested in a Woolsworth “cooly” shopping bag and Vegemite.
After shopping and wandering, I headed back to the hostel for a quick nap before making dinner and heading over to the train station to catch the bus to the airport (yeah, I said bus). My time in the airport was largely spent napping, attempting to nap, being addressed in a Middle Eastern language by a confused elderly woman who was on my flight, and fighting homesickness and a migraine. I don’t think I would have been too homesick upon leaving Australia had I not spent the day before with Michael talking about his return to Scotland after nearly four months, and I won’t deny now that I was a little envious, even if I was and still am excited about the European leg of my trip (and getting to see Michael for a third time before camp in Scotland and to see his parents’ puppy…oh, and to see everyone else I know between Florence and the UK as well!).
The flight to Qatar was relatively uneventful, with the exception of eating dinner at midnight and being woken up after a few hours of sleep for ice cream and other snacks. I sat next to a nice Danish couple who had gone to visit their son in Melbourne and who were flying out to Qatar to go to Pakistan for two weeks before returning to Qatar for a few days before heading back home. Qatar Airways has had the best in-flight entertainment of my trip so far; I watched Beauty and the Beast during dinner and finally got to see Secretariat between waking up and breakfast. Doha, Qatar was definitely an interesting place to spend twenty hours, and you could see (and hear) that they had already begun airport renovations in preparation for the upcoming World Cup. As such, the “Quiet Room” located next to the men-only mosque in the terminal wasn’t entirely quiet, but did serve nicely for an additional nap. Despite the “no sleeping” sign in the mosque, it was littered with sleeping men. (Ironically, iTunes is now playing “Arabian Nights” from Aladdin…sometimes Apple software is terrifyingly knowledgeable!) I proceeded to spend the remainder of the day waiting for the dusty haze to clear so I could take pictures of Doha (it never did), eating granola bars, watching Inception and HIMYM, and duty-free souvenir shopping (turns out the exchange rate is epic…not entirely sure what the currency was called, but one unit of it was equal to only $0.30). At about 1:30 AM I boarded a plane full mostly of western Asian men (who it turns out are the cheap souvenir vendors all over Rome) and a good number of European tourists and Italians. Despite knowing that I should be sleeping, this flight offered both HP7 and The King’s Speech, so I watched half of HP7 (and was spared from the awkward Harry-Hermione scene by the PA), slept, finished HP7, and ate breakfast and watched part of The King’s Speech (up until the older brother abdicates). While in the slowest customs line ever (thanks, street vendors), I realized I was the only non-Asian (western or eastern) but was graciously silently befriended by the man in front of me who saw that we were about to be cut off by a snobby couple, then made sure I had my passport out when we finally got to the front. So, to you random Asian man, I say thank you! (We got to witness three planeloads of EU citizens breeze through the line before we even got to the front…and all I did was get my passport stamped, no questions asked.)
I arrived in Rome on my mom’s birthday, which was beyond emotionally difficult, as I was overjoyed to be back in Italy after twelve years, yet I was there without her (despite offers to fly her out). Thankfully, the hostel offered an hour of free wifi, and between that and the awesomeness that is Jacquie Mateja and Skype, I got to talk to my mom after a day full of visiting the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, finally getting to go in the Coliseum after a twelve year wait, eating large amounts of gelato for only 2 Euro, and everything in between. The HI hostel Alessandro Downtown was fantastic: free left-luggage service, the customary European free breakfast (here, cereal and slices of Italian bread), an amazing building (I think it was once an apartment building, complete with tiny elevator), and a little old Italian woman who comes every night to cook free pasta. And by little I mean older than me, and completely adorable and amazing. After attempting to watch a single episode of HIMYM around 8:30, I went to bed.
The next day I stopped by the Pantheon, where my inner art history minor kicked in way worse than I did when I went to the Trevi Fountain (which was supposedly built so as to block the shop of a certain annoying barber…never annoy artists) and the Coliseum (which has Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns in chronological order from bottom to top). I also got excited knowing that not all that long ago my old roommate Lauren accidentally stumbled upon the Pantheon one afternoon while studying in Rome over the summer of 2008. After the Pantheon I made a brief stop at Piazza Narova before crossing the Tiber River to visit the Vatican for the first time since we celebrated Bridget Kennedy’s eleventh birthday there twelve years ago on our last night in Italy. Despite a new pope and some scaffolding and construction work in preparation of the beatification of Pope John Paul II on May 1, St. Peter’s seemed not to have changed at all from my last time there.
. . .
(continued from the train from Florence to Venice)
It was great to be able to wander around the Vatican knowing that the “arms” outside framing the square of St. Peter’s were Rococo and by Bernini, as is the area around St. Peter’s remains, and that Michelangelo’s Pieta to the right of the entrance was once damaged when my old art history professor worked for the Vatican and had since been perfectly restored. Seeing all of it together almost made me wish I was Catholic, but instead I settled for being a content little tourist with a partial background in art history. After St. Peter’s I got some lunch (ravioli and Fanta, because deep inside I’m still 11) then went to the Vatican Museum. It was here that I was most thankful of having taken art history classes, as the museum was packed full of guided tour groups (mostly Asian and Italian) who packed around posters of the Sistine Chapel that were outside in the courtyard, while I could skip around them safe in the knowledge that the Last Judgment is on the wall and the Old Testament kings and prophets were just below the ceiling, while the first several stories of the Old Testament, from Creation to beyond the story of Noah, were depicted on the ceiling. But that comes later; as I had gotten there about two hours before closing, I may have rushed a bit through the museum to ensure that I got to see and fully appreciate the Laocoon and Raphael’s School of Athens (both of which were great to see again in person, even if the Laocoon is still damaged). It may have been that this time I went to the Sistine Chapel in the afternoon and not the morning, but the room seemed brighter than I had remembered (and I may have snuck some photos…which is much easier with a small camera than a giant Canon or Nikon thankfully). On the way back to the hostel from the museum I stopped at the Lonely Planet recommended Old Bridge gelateria, which serves massive helpings of amazing gelato for rather low prices (2 Euro got me a serving about the size of two fists, and that was only the second smallest size). I also managed to get a little turned around walking back and ended up back at the Coliseum, mostly because I missed a turn then was drawn to the Coliseum like a moth to a flame.
My last day in Rome was Ash Wednesday, which was surprisingly underwhelming, as the Pope had his audience inside that day, and nobody had ashes on their foreheads, not even the nuns or priests or non-religious staff at the Vatican (I’ve since asked my friend Cullen about this, and she said that most Catholics would likely go to the six PM Mass and that even then the ashes in Italy are much lighter than they are in the US). Thus failing to happen upon an outdoor papal audience, I settled instead for paying 5 Euro to walk up the 551 stairs to the top of St. Peter’s dome, which was equally amazing (the view) and terrifying (the stairs about halfway up continue to go straight, but the walls are slanted, then everything varies between being big and open and being steep and narrow).
After the climb I went back to Piazza Narova for lunch (spaghetti with a buttery sauce, pepper, and Pecorino Romano cheese, a Roman specialty and very similar to what I would make at home when in need of comfort food), then boarded the train to Naples to go to Sorrento/San Agnello where my hostel was. I arrived well after dark in a strange town, wandered around for five minutes before being able to understand the hostel’s vague directions, and finally ended up at the relatively empty Seven Hostel. I ended up in a nice room with Carly and Kirsten, two girls from along the Great Ocean Road in Australia who had been teaching in London, and Emory, a girl from California who came to Sorrento to work in a gelateria so she can go home and open her own gelateria when she’s older. For much of the stay there we only ever encountered four or five other people, making the club-like hostel feel a bit like a ghost town (until people began arriving on Friday to stay for the weekend). You could easily tell that the place would be packed all summer and very vibrant, but it seemed a little sad in the cold of early spring.
My first day in the Almafi area I went to Pompeii, which is decided much better when not jetlagged and being chastised for not knowing the difference between Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian columns (and being able to largely skip over the plaster casts of the dead). It felt almost surreal to be able to walk around the houses again, this time being able to note the frescoes and if they were first style, third style, or fourth style and if I had once memorized it for art history or not. I was even able to go into one of the closed houses as one of the security guards let in a German couple as I was walking by, and I was even told by the guard to hop a gate to have a closer look at the villa’s bathroom. In a weird bit of irony, my favorite part of Pompeii may have actually been all of the stray dogs. While there is a sign at the entrance warning you about them, once you enter there are large posters about the adoption program to take them out of Pompeii and put them in warm and loving homes. Most of them had been given collars with tags, and for much of the time my heart belonged to a German shepherd mix with a black tail; however, after deciding to make the trek out to the Villa of Mysteries due to the frescoes we learned about in art history, I met the dog I want to move to Italy for to adopt. She was in the foyer of the restrooms lying down waiting for someone to pet her, and after watching an Asian tourist approach her and back away repeated, I went up and let her sniff me, at which point she rolled over onto her back. I tried to stand back up as the line began to move, at which point she put her paw over my hand and licked my face. While I wasn’t sad to leave Pompeii (there turned out to be plaster casts of the family in the rooms where they slept and died in the Villa of Mysteries), it was difficult to leave behind the affectionate stray.
After Pompeii I finally returned to Sorrento (which, for those of you who don’t know, “Return to Sorrento” is a song, and my mom has a music box from there that plays it), and it was the first time since Auckland that someplace felt a lot like home. There was a faint hint of salt water in the air, and all of the trees were full of oranges, lemons, and flowers.
The next day I went to the island of Capri, which was decidedly less fun alone than it was with thirty other people from school. As the ferry was approaching the island, the first thing I noticed was the color of the water. For those of you who have never seen my car or know its history, I almost ended up with a white car until the car salesman pointed to a car that was “Capri Sea Green” in color. While I wanted the car because only two in the lot were that color (I’ve since only seen one white Corolla and at least thirty between Florida and North Carolina that are the same color as mine), I somehow always doubted that the color was actually the same as the color of the water around Capri. It turns out I was horribly, horribly wrong, as the water is the exact same color as my car (and led to an entire day of missing driving in my car). I ended up on a boat to the Blue Grotto within my first few minutes off the ferry, and despite the overcast sky was lucky enough for the sun to come out by the time our boat reached the grotto. As I switched from the small boat to the tiny boat, I couldn’t help missing seeing Mrs. Moore (the head of Berkeley Prep’s Lower Division) and her elderly mother transfer between the larger ferry to the small boat to the tiny boat. However, I was soon happily distracted by the lacy flowers decorating my boatman’s jeans and his singing, and before I knew it we were in the grotto. It was even better than I had remembered, and I was happy this time to have a digital camera to document it rather than having to rely on memory again. (By the way, it’s great with a waterproof camera, even if the water is really cold.) Other than that, Capri was almost underwhelming, perhaps due to having to picnic on rolls and Nutella rather than buying a real lunch and staying only in the town of Capri due to not wanting to spend extra money to take the bus to Anacapri and back to spend more money going up the chairlift for the views. Granted, the island was stunning. I caught the fast ferry back to Sorrento, where I ended up buying more souvenirs and groceries for dinner.
My last morning in the area I had breakfast with Carly and Kirsten (Emory had already gone off for more work orientation), and then the three of us took the bus to Positano and Almafi together (I got at Positano, but they continued on as they had gone there the day before and were headed to Salerno). Despite being unable to find the hotel I once stayed at in Positano, the town seemed completely the same, from the massive amount of stairs to the beautiful little church at the bottom that the Berkeley choir once sang in and the Chez Black restaurant just off the beach where we celebrated Sarah Wells’ birthday almost exactly twelve years ago. I ended up eating at Chez Black thanks in part to memory and also at the insistence of my mom and Mrs. Shivers, which very nearly almost left me stuck in Positano for two extra hours before I went to Florence. While I know it’s normal to linger over a meal and enjoy the restaurant after you eat, I had twenty five minutes between the end of my meal (after begging for the check) and when the bus would arrive at the top of the town to go back to Sorrento. I had timed the walk down the stairs at being close to twenty minutes, and running back up them on a full stomach and getting minorly turned around was agony as the minutes ticked away. Two minutes before the bus was due to arrive I began to give up about two thirds of the way up, as I figured it was due to leave before I had gotten there, when I heard the bus honking as it rounded the corner into Positano across town from where I was. At this point I resumed sprinting up the hill, alternately cursing my full stomach, the folly of spending money on lunch, and eating at the bottom of the hill, and managed to reach the bus stop less than a minute before the bus arrived. As I collapsed into my seat, I noticed that the man behind me was wearing a UF sweatshirt, and that I had seen him the day before in the Sorrento train station. It turned out that his name was Tim and he was from New Mexico travelling with his older sister Glenda. We spent much of the ride back to Sorrento discussing Gator football and Italy, and how we were both headed back to Naples to catch other trains later that day. When we arrived back in Sorrento, we parted ways (they went to lunch, I went to get my pack), and I ended up on the same train to Naples that they were on (along with the Sorrento men’s soccer team…all of the cute ones were married sadly.) Both Tim and Glenda saw me to my train to Florence (they were continuing on to Rome before going back home), which now gets this blog back to where I began it.
I arrived in Florence knowing that Cullen (GV staff ’10, GV camper most of the years I was there) would be out of town for the weekend and that I would be staying with her friend Bred, whom I had messaged on Facebook earlier and glanced briefly at his picture. After the minor adventure of getting from the train station to San Lorenzo (I was given instructions in Italian at the station and knew I had to take the first left and turn right at some point), I met up with Bred and one of his friends, who had decided for fun to switch names. Figuring something was a little up (Bred didn’t seem quite so tall in his Facebook picture) and having spent many a class with Senora Gallager swapping names whenever she substituted classes over a six year period (how she never realized blonde haired Jessica Rainey wasn’t an “Ah Young Jung” I’ll never figure out), I decided to play along. We went back to Bred’s apartment directly across from San Lorenzo, where his friend had trouble with the keys and the door (which nearly destroyed their ruse), and I was quickly ushered inside to a whole group of their international friends who had come over for dinner. At this point their game began to really fall apart, as half of the group couldn’t remember the switched names, but as everybody was still largely talking in Italian I didn’t let on that I had figured them out. After dinner we ended up going to a party of another of their friends, and it was during this walk that the story of the name switching was revealed, along with the fact that apparently only Bred knew Cullen and most kept asking me if she was his dreadlocked friend from Canada (which she is not, but rather an awesome almost ex-pat from Atlanta). While I thought Bred’s apartment was amazing (seconds away from San Lorenzo and the Duomo, with fading frescoes on the ceiling of the main room), the friend’s apartment had a rooftop balcony that you could see the Duomo from.
I woke up the next morning first to church bells early in the morning then again later on to the sound of rain. Despite the cold and the wet I set out for the Ufizzi, purchased a reserve ticket, and spent an hour walking around the outside of the Duomo and the Baptistery and walking around the sculptures across the way from the museum (which included ones I had studied of Perseus beheading Medusa and the Rape of the Sabine Women. Going inside the Ufizzi was even more exciting than going into St. Peter’s, because the museum houses works that I was too young to know about or appreciate at the time, especially Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Boticelli’s Primavera and Birth of Venus (which I did enjoy as a child, but even more now that I’ve studied them), and Artemesia Gentileschi’s Judith and Holofernes. The Ufizzi also houses a replica of the Laocoon made before the father’s arm was damaged, so it was nice to see it in full. After the Ufizzi I returned to Bred’s and watched the last half of Juno with his girlfriend Nadia, who’s German, before curling up on my bed with HIMYM and a small cold.
As the next day was Monday, and in Europe the standard day for museums to be closed, I didn’t have much planned, other than knowing that at some point that day Cullen would return to Florence and we would finally get to meet up. She ended up getting back to Florence earlier than I had expected, and we went out to breakfast together with Bred and Nadia. Afterwards the four of us walked up to the top of a hill overlooking Florence, where we split ways so I could spend time with Cullen before returning to pack up my bags to stay with her for the night. After dropping my stuff in her room in the NYU study abroad dorm, we went grocery shopping, and I was introduced to new foods that I sincerely hope I can find at the Italian food store back home. We made lunch, and I finally got to have pesto in Italy, as well as spinach for the first time since I was in Christchurch. She then set me up with the Internet in her room while she went out to a meeting, then returned and we went out for the best gelato I’ve possibly ever had. At this point it began pouring down rain again, so we went back and spent much of the rest of the night snacking, playing chess, and I uploaded photos onto Facebook while she watched Glee (thanks again to Lauren Siemer for telling me about Project Free TV, as I was able to pass that along to Cullen).
This morning I woke up early to go to the Academia to see Michelangelo’s David while Cullen had a job interview for a possible job this summer supervising teenagers in some summer program (I’ll miss her at camp quite a bit, especially whenever Mountainside comes to help out at the farm). Afterwards we took a Just One photo and grabbed breakfast before she walked me to the train station and I promised to return after grad school and stay with her again in Florence before I got on the train, which got me to where I am now, sitting here and typing away as the train pulls into Venice.
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