Venice, Italy

May 15th
Upon arriving in Venice, we discovered that the transportation strike we experienced in Bologna would affect us there too. The vaporetto boats (a.k.a. water buses) that usually transport folks from the train and bus stations to the middle of the island weren't running. And, it was raining. And, Venice is known for having the poorest street marking in the world. And, the directions to our hotel were literally this: take the vaporetto boat #1 or #2, get off at San Toma, when you'll get off walk first street left, then first street right and first street right again. Ummmm...

Rob totally kicks ass when it comes to directions. Seriously. The man can sort out just about anything. Tricky malls (like Valley Fair!)? Child's play. Vegas casinos? No sweat. He used the map we bought to maneuver the streets of Venice like a pro. It was cold, gloomy and slippery thanks to the rain, and I wasn't a happy camper. We got a smidge lost just once, at which point I decided to stop being pissed about the situation and that we needed to get some gelato. Really. How can anything go wrong when gelato is involved? After snagging our cones, we took two right turns, and I spotted our place. True story. Moral: gelato makes everything better.

After checking into the smallest room of all time, we ventured out to make the most of the little time we had in Venezia. Since we'd missed out on lots of luxurious gelato in Naples and Rome, we made a deal to stop at every single gelateria we passed on our journey. Rules: 1 - the place had to be a legit gelateria - not just a restaurant or mini-mart that happened to sell the stuff, 2 - we would only patronize establishments that were free of an obnoxious 'coaxer' employee hollering at customers to lure them in, and 3 - the price had to meet a precedent of one scoop for a Euro. That was it. We hit four places in an hour.
(My flavors: panacotta, caramello, pistachio, tiramisu...Rob's flavors: chocolate-vanilla swirl, peach, Nutella, marshmallow and chocolate cake)


We wandered to the famed Accademia Bridge, savoring our gelato all the way. The weather had cheered up a bit, so we continued on foot until we stumbled upon a traghetto. I knew how expensive rides in/on the gondolas are, and Rick Steves told me about a cheap and quick way to get a taste of the gondola without the pain in my pocket. The traghetto, rather than taking us down the Grand Canal, took us across it. Its a one minute trip...which was plennnnnnty of time for me. (sidenote: why do people not know how to board/sit on a boat? balance the weight, people!)



Next up, we hit Saint Marco Square, which houses an amazing (from the outside) basilica and a grand plaza. Where there is a square, there are gobs of people, and where there are hoards of people, there are pigeons. People, being the strange creatures that we are, feed pigeons. With their hands. Ick. Pigeons perched on people, everywhere. Rob decided to test the smarts of the pigeons to see if they'd approach him if he acted like he had food. Here are the results:

Rob LOVED this little hobo-ey kid, complete with a bird atop his pageboy cap
his big sister/aunt/mom had the same look going for her, accented with a spiderweb crack across one eye of her glasses. it was like a movie, I swear

and because Rob is a pusher, here's my lovely memory of the event
((yes, I am aware that I've made quite possibly the ugliest face a human can make. I was horrified then, and I am to this very moment. I can still feel the claws on my arm. sick.))

After dinner, we wandered to the Rialto bridge with more gelato in hand.


May 16th
Barcelona was on tap for Saturday, so another travel day was upon us...

Overall opinion: Venice is one of those places that's a pain in the ass to get to, but has a fantastic feel. The pace there felt slower to me, like things weren't such a big deal. For a place thats sinking, that's a foreign idea to me. Since its a tourism-based city, things are naturally more expensive there, but I feel like we got our money's worth. Do I need to summer there? Nah. Would I like to see it again someday? Sure.

you know you´re getting tired of traveling when...

• you decide that, rather than moving enough to share the sidewalk with the hoards of people constantly moving toward you, it might be a better idea to just check 'em instead
• you take 12 pictures during the entire 2 days you´re in a given city
• you eat at McDonald´s willingly, since you´re sick of trying to decipher menu items and their cost
• you consider, once again, throwing away all of your clothes, just so you won´t have to deal with packing them again
• you start to avoid mirrors/puddles/windows, since you may or may not have completely given up on trying to look decent
• you make written lists of the things you´re looking forward to eating/drinking when you get home
• you pine the days of not having to calculate what something costs in US Dollars...bring on sales tax...I can handle it
  

Bologna, Italy

May 13th
Leaving Rome with delightfully full tummies, we settled into our train ride to the land of O-S-C-A-R (sorry, I had to...). the train ride was gorgeous, snaking through the Italian countryside.

.:PIC COMING SOON:.

Arriving in Bologna was no big deal, and we quickly sought out the bus that we were told would drop us right in front of our hotel on the outskirts of town in just 15 short minutes. Thirty-five minutes later, we discovered that we'd taken the damn thing in the wrong direction and had to go baaaaack to where we started to start again. Rad. A 15-minute trip took an hour and 20 minutes.

After finally settling into our (surprisingly nice) hotel, we hopped the bus back to the center of Bologna to forage for food. We found a cute, old school little place and ordered anything that had bolognese sauce (when in Rome...dammit, too late?). We had one mission in Bologna: eat. And that we did. I hate to say it, and perhaps its because we didn't have a local guide or anything, but since we didn't really know what we were doing, I wasn't terribly impressed by the bolognese. Mine own's pretty good, if I'm to toot my own horn, and I could compete with the stuff we had...

May 14th
Okay, so I lied. We had two missions: eat and relax. After 16 straight days of hardcore tourist-ing, we were whooped, and looked forward to laying around and not going out to see anything. That's right. We hoofed it to Bologna to lay around in the hotel (which we did, until 3pm) and eat. No lines, no crowds, no history. Hell, no pics. Now that's vacation.

We slept late, slinked into the hotel's breakfast, and headed back for the pillows. We watched TV (someone was smiling down on me: an old episode of Project Runway was on. The season with Christian....so happy.). I took a nap and a whirlpool bath. When we finally emerged, we ate gelato, did some shopping (I heart H&M), and had pizza for dinner. A much-needed nice, easy day...

.:PIC COMING SOON:.

May 15th
Venice-bound...buuuuuut, thanks to a nationwide strike of some public transportation services, we weren't able to take the bus back to the bus station to make our train. Awesome. The folks at the front desk of our hotel suggested calling a taxi. Um, no. If I've learned one thing on this trip (albeit a negative outlook), its that everyone is trying to get ahead, and many times, that equates to screwing someone else out of their money. I'm not a natural fan of cabs. I'm just not. Between base fares and per-kilometer fares and tips and meters, I just don't enjoy the experience. So, we pushed back a little bit and took the hotel's shuttle (for which we paid 10Euro, rather than '15 or 20Euro' for a cab, thankyouverymuch).

Overall opinion: I'm extremely glad that we took a few days to mellow out in Bologna. It definitely refreshed us for the last long leg of our journey, and may have even slowed the pace on our upcoming cities. The food wasn't the most fantastic thing I've ever experienced, but we may not be at the place in our lives to be spending the money necessary to enjoy such delecacies...

Rome, Italy

May 11th
After leaving Naples, I didn't feel so hot. We figured it was due to the general stuffiness of the train, but I didn't feel much better when we checked into our hotel.

My sweet boyfriend had emailed the hotel a few days before our arrival, telling them that it would be my birthday, and asking if they'd help arrange a nice surprise for me. After woozily checking in, I was supposed to open the door to notice the lovely vase of flowers and a bottle of champagne. I was so ill by this point that I barely saw the stuff (Rob had to point it out...). I hardly thanked him and our host before disappearing into the bathroom...

An hour later, we were both in trouble. It wasn't exactly as we'd intended to spend my birthday, so we decided to postpone it and celebrate on Tuesday.

May 12th
Still fighting with our touchy tummies, we were Vatican City bound by 9:30am. Saint Peter's Basilica was glorious...really. Its gigantic and manages to exude a grandness even when swarming with thousands of people.


I'd been in Italy for like five days and still hadn't had gelato. A crime against humanity, I know. Even though my guts were nervous, the raspberry goodness made things much better:


The Pantheon was up next. Its the oldest un-retrofitted building in Rome, and was pretty spectacular.

the look of general disgust on Rob's face is thanks to the street-vendor in the green shirt, who was offering (and offering, and offering) Rob some stupid little trinket. it got really old, really fast to be harrassed to buy something all the time...

After a nap, we headed to the Colosseum. It was closed when we arrived, but relatively uncrowded. We eavesdropped on an Aussie tourguide's brief history of the giant, and then headed out for some dinner before a nighttime visit to the Trevi Fountain.





May 13th

an awesome mobile knife-sharpener who was hard at work right outside our hotel...

Since much of our time was encroached upon by being sick, we hadn't climbed Michaelangelo's dome (cupola) at Saint Peter's Basilica. Our train was set to depart at 2:44pm, so we hustled back to Vatican City in the morning to climb the 437 steps to the top.

I was shocked by the things that people wear. I try (not hard enough) to be non-judgemental, but when going to what is called the Holy City, must you dress like you work in a brothel? Really? Appalling. Rob's favorite moments of Holy City irony were when people would cut in line to get into the Basilica. Are you serious? Are you really that important that you can't be an honest world citizen when at the Pope's house?!??!! Ugh.

Okay, on to the climb:

as we got closer to the top, the walls started to curve inward

our view from the top

Next on our schedule was the highlight of my time in Rome: learning how to make homemade pasta. Our amazing, fantastic, terrific hotel hosts, Arianna and Ivan, caught wind (from Rob) that I was dying to see pasta be made (and then eat it...of course), so they arranged for us to learn how to make fresh, homemade pasta. I took three pages of notes. I cannot WAIT to make/eat this again:

pasta pasta pasta

a PERFECT lunch (Rob called it my 72-hours belated birthday lunch)

I was truly sad to leave Rome, especially as our time there wrapped up with an awesome experience with fabulous people.

Overall opinion: Dear Rome, I'll be back. And this time, I plan to eat waaaaaaaay more than before. I heart Rome, even if it is crowded and hot and loud. I want a moped, I want a pasta machine, and I want to speak Italian. For the most part, Rome was amazing and I'll definitely return.

Naples, Italy

its a piazza that loves me...thanks Italy!

May 8th
After spending more quality time with Athens International Airport (and yet another delayed flight...thank God we have no more connections booked for the remainder of our trip...!), we arrived in Naples, where we were greeted with another interesting bit of public transportation and shaky hostel directions. We made it...that's all that matters. Well, pizza also matters. That's why we visited Naples. So we ate some almost immediately:


Although it was different from the thick-crusted, buttery delights that I adore back home, the thin crust pizza of Naples, with a fork-and-knife requirement, was fabulous. Chewy, doughy, cheesy goodness.

one of the various alleys we wandered through. EVERYONE hangs their laundry outside. EVERYONE. its like the place is constantly waving flags, celebrating something...

May 9th
6:15am comes really early when you've been on vacation for 3 1/2 months. We needed to catch a 7:35am ferry to Capri (pronounced cap-ree, just so you know), so I groggily made my way out of bed.

Capri was beautiful...absolutely beautiful, even if it was overrun with tourists. After our hour-and-a-half ferry trip, we stuck to land for an hour before jumping on a smaller boat to tour the island.



Capri is home to the Blue Grotto and the Green Grotto, and the famous Faraglioni rock point, and a 14Euro boat ride was the best way to see it all. However, Rob and I chose to opt out of the 11Euro 'visit' to the Blue Grotto. That's right, they put you on a boat for 14Euro before gouging you once again by charging admission to a natural wonder. To get into the Blue Grotto, passengers needed to take a teeny tiny canoe (steered by a tip-grubbing skipper) into the cave. This meant that passengers needed to step off of our boat and into said canoe. Fortunately/Unfortunately, no one ended up in the drink. We did time the length of the visit for those who ponied up the dough, which clocked in at a whopping four minutes.

swarming like bees to honey

exchanging tips from previous customers, in front of current customers...classy.

the opening to the grotto is really tiny, and the skippers pull the boats through via a chain

After hanging around outside the Blue Grotto for about half an hour (long enough for the 6 canoes to shuttle in the folks on our boat), we continued on to the Green Grotto and the Faraglioni before heading back to the port a few hours later:

the water color here is totally legit...not PhotoShopped at all, I swear.

LOVED these jellies, but they didn't love having their pics taken, and were dodging me bigtime.

Back on land, we headed up to the center of Capri...which we mistakenly thought would be a 20 minute walk. Wrong. A walk doesn't cover it. A haul straight up a hill covers it. We were winded and melting by the time we reached the summit, which did boast an amazing view. Since we're smart travelers, we'd gone to the local market and picked up some pruscuitto, salami, cheese and bread and had a little picnic.



May 10th
Rob and I were dying to climb Mount Vesuvius and check out Pompeii, which ended up being one of the main reason for visiting Naples. Food was the other, naturally. We took a super-shaky old train out to Pompeii and hopped on a bus to take us part way up the volcano. We'd heard that the climb took about 30 minutes, but based on our previous experiences with climb times, we figured we'd be up there most of the damn day. The bus wound up the mountain, and we arrived at the 'entrance' to the path up the volcano. It was different than we'd expected, and packed with other people.

a lava floe from the most recent eruption in 1944

It was already pretty hot by the time we got up to the entrance, and there isn't exactly shade on a volcano, so we planned to hoof it quickly and get back down to enjoy some more pruscuitto in the shade. I clocked our time, and we were halfway back DOWN after 18 minutes. This was mainly due to the swarms of sun-loving bugs that came out whenever the sun emerged from behind a cloud. They didn't sting or bite, but they were super annoying...ick.

that's a big hole! (where's the liquid hot magma?!)

We bussed back down the mountain on our way to Pompei's ruins. Again, not much shade in a town that was decimated by a volcanic eruption. Entrance alone was 11Euro per person, and an audio guide would have cost 6Euro more. In order to get a map of the place, you had to rent the audio guide. One thing I'm getting tired of in Europe is being nickled and dimed for everything: toilets, bread, water, sitting 'fees' in restaurants. If the original amount you charge me is a bit higher, but includes everything, fine. Just don't continue charging 'little' bits at a time. Anywaaaaays....

our rendition of Pompeians (yeah, I'm going to hell.)

since we flat-out refused to rent an audio guide/map, we were a bit aimless...until Rob found this little beauty (in Italian, of course)

in the Pompei Colosseum

We thought that the ruins would showcase a bit more of a museum and we were really interested in seeing the (albeit morbid) last 'poses' of volcano victims. It turns out that there's not much museum after all (we weren't all that surprised), but we did find some of what we were looking for in the Garden of the Souls:

May 11th
Using our Eurail passes, we were bound for Rome by noon-thirty...

Overall opinion: Naples was pretty cool. It's got a bit of a bad rap as a bad city, with lots of pickpocketing and rascals, but we steered clear of these things. I grew tired of constantly dodging people, but loved the food and the weather. It was a great base for our day trips, and our hostel was pretty amazing. I'm not sure that Naples would be high on my list of places to visit again, but I think I'd go back someday...

Question: you know what's the opposite of fun on your birthday?!

Answer: suspected food poisoning.

Wait, that sounds like someone dropped cyanide in my drink or something. Not the case. However, something that has been tossed down my throat in the last 12 hours has severely disagreed with me. And Rob's in the same boat. This boat sucks. I want to eat pasta and gelato and drink wine, but my tummy's saying nuh-uh. Dammit.

I must say, though, that my birthday was lovely until this crap kicked in. We've arrived by train in Rome, and from our room, I got to hear an accordion (?) play the typical Italian music, which was awesome. Upon checking into our hotel room, I opened the door to a beautiful room outfitted with a vase of flowers and a bottle of champagne...Rob is such a wonderful guy. (Okay, mushy stuff over). We'll be saving that bottle until tomorrow, methinks.

Oh yeah, and I didn't write this post for sympathy, really. I'm on a world tour and loving it. I'm a VERY lucky girl. Hell, I could even explain that this is the best possible time on this trip for us to be feeling like this. Really. I wrote this post so that next year, when I go, "What did I do on my 27th birthday?," I can remember it.

Athens, Greece

May 7th
Arriving in Athens was an adventure of its own, as we descended into Athens International Airport via a nosedive. No joke...the plane hit a 50degree angle as it slammed on the brakes to make its landing. The experience was made better by landing on one side's wheels before the other side touched down. I prayed. I'm not at all religious, and I was praying like a nun.

The fun continued after we got our bags. The hostel's directions included using the Metro system, which we discovered was undergoing a huge retrofit and will be closed for the next three months. Awesome. Using the advice of the surprisingly friendly folks at the Information kiosk, we determined that we'd get to join approximately 39,057 other people attempting to make their way to the center of the city by bus. After literally smashing ourselves and our stuff onto an overcrowded bus, we went twelve feet and picked up more people, including a gruff man that pushed and shoved before demanding I tell him why I was 'pushing' him...to which I replied something like, "Um, I'm just trying to keep my feet on the ground, bud." We continued our shoving match for the next hour before he finally got off the damn bus. I won.

We'd planned a very short trip to Athens, since Rob mentioned that there wasn't a whole lot to see/do, and I had one thing on my agenda: see the Acropolis, specifically the Parthenon. Ever since middle school, I've wanted to see this thing in person. I have no clue why...I'm not particularly good with history, so I can't even remember what the building was used for, but come Hell or high water, I was going to see it in my lifetime. So I did.


We spent about an hour walking from our centrally-located hostel to the entrance, and about an hour up on top of the Acropolis (I relearned that it houses the Parthenon and a few other buildings...).

in the bottom right quarter of this view from the Acropolis is the Temple of Zeus, and just to the left over the bank of trees is the 1920-something Olympic Stadium (I think)

I'd been in Greece for like four days and still hadn't tried ouzo, Greece's national liqueur, so we celebrated our travels with a bit o' the hard stuff at dinner before heading back to the hostel to prep for our departure for Italy. It tastes the way anise smells. Rob likened it to those Good N' Plenty candies. I'm not sure I'll crave it in the future...


May 8th
We were ready to rock our way to Naples, so we departed quite early and took a less disruptive bus ride to the airport, where we had a totally easy flight...sigh.

I'm on a boat...
(hehe...not really)