Better Late than Never

So I know it's two weeks after the fact, but here is the recap of my half-term trip to Italy.

Mike, Omar, Andrew and I had the distinct pleasure of catching a 3:10 am bus to the airport for our 6 am flight to Palermo, Sicily. Despite the hellishly little amount of sleep we were all running on, by 10 am we were in gorgeous Sicily where it was sunny and around 70 degrees. Using our extremely limited Italian skills we managed to get a bus from the airport (the driver of which I spoke to in French... I had a hard time transitioning from the French roommates mindset to Italian) to the main train station and from there to our hostel. Our hostel was really nice and down this cute little side alley. We dropped off our bags and set off to explore the city.

Palermo is not really a touristy town, but there was plenty to keep us occupied. We went in search of food and found this great little pizza place that was probably a fast food joint, but the food was amazing and lunch was under 2 euro. Next, we wandered down to the water and hung out on the Mediterranean coast. We scrambled over some cement blocks to the waters edge and took some pictures. We met who may have been the only other tourist in Palermo besides us at the botanical gardens. She was a very nice woman from Iowa who took our picture. The gardens were absolutely beautiful- tons of flowers and tropical trees with busts and fountains interspersed. Naptime at the hotel was refreshing and much needed. We got a recommendation from the receptionist at the hostel for dinner. The restaurant was down this little alley and the food was absolutely the best we had in all of Italy. I had a traditional antipasta (salami and cheese) appetizer, followed by a pasta second course, and grilled swordfish with a raisin and pine nut stuffing for my last course, plus wine for under 20 euro. The atmosphere (flower sellers aside) was wonderful. An accordian player came in and we gave him a tip and he played our table a little serenade. Feeling pleased with ourselves, the boys got another bottle of wine on the way home and we hung out on the balcony before passing out for the night.

The next day we checked out of the hostel and stopped by the train station to get our tickets to Naples. We wandered around Palermo some more, including some side markets that had pretty much every animal you can imagine skinned and hanging at butcher's stalls and what had to be half of a swordfish posed on ice at the fish stall. Wandering the crowded markets was made more difficult by all of the people trying to ride their Vespas through the whole thing. We also hit up the local archeological museum, which was really neat. There was all kinds of ancient pottery and cave drawings from nearby caves. After another trip to the shore (and more views of insane amounts of PDA) we grabbed a quick bite for dinner and headed to the train station.

Our train journey to Naples consisted of two trains. Our first train was from Palermo to Messina, which is the eastern most city on Sicily. To get to the mainland, we transferred trains at Messina, and they loaded our train onto a ferry to get across the water. The train was split into three sections and loaded on the boat- so surreal. The train was a sleeper train, so I got a few hours of sleep and the distinct feeling of taking the train to Hogwarts.

Morning in Naples was not a good one. The city is so disgustingly dirty. Every step was spent avoiding stepping in excrement or on a homeless man. Even the beautiful sunrise couldn't take away from the post-apocolyptic/Mad Max feel of the place. We dropped our bags at our hostel and made for the ferry station to get our tickets to Capri. Unfortunately, the earliest ferry to Capri wasn't until 1 pm, so we had to try and amuse ourselves in the city until then. The side streets of Naples were almost as quaint and charming as those in Sicily, but the main roads really took away from any charm the city has. Luckily, we spent the better part of the day at Capri. It was really nice to return there 6 years after my first trip. It is such a beautiful place, even though it is full of tourists. It was nice to recognize the rocky cliffs and the blueness of the water. We got tickets for the last trip to the Blue Grotto for the day. It's so hard to describe how beautiful it is in there- the pictures really can't do it justice. We took a speedboat halfway around the island and then loaded into smaller row boats to be taken in the grotto. Our guide and all of the others were trying to have an Italian tenor singing contest while guiding us through. The boys all went swimming in the Mediterranean, which was Andrew's big goal for the day, while I waded in the water. We ate some dinner, which was overprices (naturally) and only alright, before taking a bus to Anacapri. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the chairlift, but we did get a nice view for sunset, and wandered around the little shops up at the top of the island. We caught the last ferry of the night home and crashed at our hostel in Naples.

The next day, Monday, we caught a train into Rome. From the train station we learned that public transport is "free" in Rome. We didn't know that you had to buy tickets for the tram before you got on, but when we offered the driver money, he waved us off. So we took a tram to our hostel before dropping our bags and meeting up with Eric, the boys' roommate, and Ilyse, his girlfriend. They were on their way to the airport, but stopped to give us some tips. We met them outside Vatican City and then headed into St. Mark's square. After more photo-ops, we headed out to get some dinner. We walked to a lot of the touristy sites by night including the Spanish Steps, Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, and Piazza Navona. We caught another tram back to the hostel and got some much needed rest.

Our second day in Italy was taken up by the Vatican and the Colosseum. The Vatican is another place I'm glad I went back to with some perspective. We went through a lot of the museum on our way to the Sistine Chapel. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of wealth the Catholic Church has and just how many priceless items from antiquity they have in their collection. The highlight of the museum for me was a statue of the River Nile reclining with 13 babies and various animals that live in the river. It was stunning, and apparently restored by a company from good old Pennsylvania!

The Sistine Chapel is so breathtaking. The scale is unimaginable, even when you're standing in the center. I can't imagine how taxing physically and mentally it must have been to paint that. Every figure is portrayed with such lifelike detail and the stories depicted are so dramatic. My favorite part is not the famous scene that everyone knows, but rather the depiction starting at the ceiling and curling down onto the far wall of heaven and hell. The depiction of hell is gruesome, but the contrast with heaven is startling and beautiful.

After the Sistine Chapel, we headed into St. Peter's Basilica. I love La Pieta, and I got significantly closer to the sculpture than I did last time. St. Peter's will always be beautiful and grand and a testament to the power of religion and the wealth of the Vatican, but I have some sentimental attachment to it after singing (albeit not with any kind of finess or talent) there. I found the little side chapel where we sang and got to point it out to the others.

Next up was the Colosseum. We paid for a guided tour, and it was entirely worth the money. Sometimes it's just nicer to have the information spoken to you instead of having to read it or research it yourself. The kind of technology that the Romans were capable of is amazing. The Colosseum had a retractable ceiling to shade the audience from the harsh sun and the building could be filled with water for mock sea battles. The life of a Gladiator was certainly a hard one with very little reward for most other than staying alive for the next fight. Over 700,000 people were killed there in the first year of the public games.

We had a bit of an adventure to our second hostel in Rome. We booked a hostel closer to the Ciampino airport because our flight to Venice was early in the morning and we thought we would save ourselves some trouble. Well, we got to the train station, bought our tickets, and carefully checked the time table and the platform information. Ciampino was supposed to be the first stop. Unfortunately, we somehow missed that the train we had gotten on was an express train, so it didn't stop at Ciampino. Three stops after our target, the train stopped and we got off along with some girls from Amsterdam who had the same problem as us. While we watched Italian commuters walk unconcernedly across the train tracks to get to the other platforms, the girls from Amsterdam told us how they were on a 2 week school trip to Rome, Florence, Lyon, France, and Paris for an art history class. A train back to Rome came, and we were able to get off at the right stop.

We felt relief at knowing we were only a bus ride away from our hostel. Our relief was short lived. At first nothing seemed amiss. We were safely loaded on the bus with our bags and were waiting for the trip to start. The driver was going a little fast, but nothing more outrageous than we had seen from other drivers on our trip. I started to feel uneasy when a local man got on the bus, sat down, and started crossing himself. All of a sudden the bus drive is going at least 60 mph down crowded city streets. We were the last stop on the bus route and we were all super relieved to have survived to the end. Our hostel was literally in the middle of nowhere- there was a small airplane in the parking lot! After checking in, we asked the man at the front desk about dinner since it was now 9 pm and we hadn't eaten. He said there was a restaurant about 300 m. down the road. We set off on the poorly lit street and while walking by the nunnery/airline hangar our sense of unease began to grow. We finally got to the main road, and the steakhouse, about 1 mile later. The food was superb and our waiter was lovely. He didn't speak too much English, but it was more than all of the other waiters. He found out we were musicians and promptly told us that his favorite musicians were Cream, Led Zepplin, and Jimi Hendrix; such a nice man.

We made it back to our hostel unscathed and crashed for a few hours until our 5 am taxi road 10 minutes down the road to the airport. After an uneventful flight, we were in Venice! Venice was by far my favorite city. There are no cars, for one thing. We stayed at this little bed and breakfast behind what was the Jewish Ghetto during WWII. We had to walk right through where the ghetto used to be to get to our hostel. You pass under a little wooden archway where there were these square shaped holes cut in the brick work. We found out that those holes were for the bars that they used to lock the Jews in at night with. It was a sobering thought every time we passed by.

Venice is full of brightly colored buildings, bridges, and a nice mixture of tourists and locals. We went to San Marco square on our first day in town. It's a beautiful church but the piazza is so filled with tourists and pigeons that you can barely move. The Rialto Bridge is grande, but there are other more scenic bridges in less touristy areas. Our first night in Venice, we decided to take advantage of the kitchen factilities in our hostel and cook dinner. Italian grocery stores are much like the rest of the country- strangely crowded and insanely busy. We ended up making homemade Al Fredo with Italian sausage, peppers, and squash. That night we went to the Venice Jazz Club to see a Brazilian bossa nova trio. 20 euro reserved us a table and bought us our first drink. The music was fantastic and we ended up getting a bottle of house wine after our first drinks were finished. It was a nice relaxing night towards the end of our trip.

We didn't want to shell out the money for the ridiculously overpriced gondola rides or the water taxis, so we walked all of Venice. There are water taxis for a good reason: Venice is quite large and the roads are quite confusing and your calves quickly tire of going over bridge after bridge, but if we had stuck to the grand canal we would have never stumbled upon what we dubbed the leaning tower of Venice or this great exhibit of historical instruments in a church. We also hit up the Peggy Guggenheim museum. They converted her house on the Grand Canal into a museum by basically taking the furniture out. She was a huge patron of modern art. I have a new favorite Picasso thanks to the visit. We ate at a little restaurant close to our hostel (aka, out of the tourist area) for dinner.

Milan was not what I was expecting. As the fashion capital of the world, it was definitely cosmopolitan, but I wasn't expecting to like the city as much as I did. We stayed at this great hostel called Bed&Bed Milan. It was fantastic, despite the misgivings we had because of the name. We headed straight for the Duomo which will probably remain the definition of gothic architecture in my mind. It is all peaks and sculpture and butresses and is absolutely beautiful. We decided to come back the next day for an audio tour. We were looking for some cheap dinner, so we were wandering around looking for menus with no English translations. The more authentic, the cheaper the meals tend to be in Italy. We found this great little place a few blocks down the road from our hostel. It had the red checked table cloth and everything. My first course was home made pesto which was absolutely delicious. I decided to be adventerous for my second course and order the carne cruddo. I knew that carne meant meat and decided that even though I had no idea what Cruddo was to go for it. Well, out come the second courses and in front of me, the waiter puts down a plate of at least a pound of raw hamburger meat with lemon juice and some parsley. I immediately start giggling and the waiter comes back and of course, he speaks no english and we don't speak enough Italian to tell him that I can't eat raw beef. Omar tries to help by saying "caliente" and eventually the waiter understands that I want it cooked. It ended up being pretty good and I left the waiter a nice tip for not making me eat raw hamburger. We got gelato as a dessert from the gelateria down the road from our hostel.

We went back to the Duomo on our last day in Milan for the audio tour. The church is so beautiful on the inside: 52 columns, 1 for each week, and the most beautiful stained glass windows I have every seen. The organ has 120 stops and 1500 pipes. Andrew went to a service that evening and said that the organ had a full 10 second reverb. Insane! After the Duomo we went in search of La Scala. It is one of the most famous opera houses in the world. Mike spotted the poster for a concert that night that was selling 5 euro tickets. We went to the ticket office and were told to show up 2 hours before the concert to get the tickets. While killing time, we went to this park that has a castle in it and ate lunch. It was at this park that I had the most amazing hot chocolate of my life. The drink was so thick that my spoon stood straight up until I was almost done! It was basically a melted hershey bar. Amazing. We got the tickets to the concert without any problems. The Theatro La Scala Orchestra was playing Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 and Also Sprach Zarathustra (better known as the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey). The concert was so amazing good. The clarinet section on the Strauss was absolutely spot on. It was a great end to our trip to Italy.