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7月18日 Firenze e RomaAfter the Cinque Terra, things got hot. Unpleasantly so. Florence and Rome are both fascinating cities, with amazing things to see, but my impressions are tempered by an overall sweaty feeling.
We did all the big sights. Medici business and the Duomo in Florence; Pantheon, Vatican, Forum in Rome. Through both luck and good management we waltzed past the lines for the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and the Colliseum in Rome, and resisted Yammy’s suggestion that we go back to point and laugh at the other poor suckers.
Some highlights included the couple of great little restaurants we found near our B&B in Rome (including one that seemed to be a locals' only place and our ordering needed to be single words and big gestures).
It turns out the discovery that your country’s Vatican embassy is the closest one to St Peter’s comes with a rather dashing song and dance number entitled “Who Does the Pope Love?”. I have burst video. I’d post it, but that would recklessly squander the blackmail opportunity. Tam FTW!
My sister is better than your sister. 7月13日 Five LandsFrom Pisa, we jumped a train to the Cinque Terra, five towns perched rather precariously on the Ligurian coast. We stayed in Riomaggiore, inconveniently close to its station and the wonderfully regular and loud trains.
The towns are linked by the aforementioned train and a coastal walking track, so the towns were filled with very vital and energetic looking visitors. In the on-going ‘represent’ competition, Cin would have beaten me, but I thumped Yammy. In fact, through all of Italy, I thumped Yammy – he only came close in the Vatican City. Very Catholic, those Croatinians.
On our second day, Yammy and I set off to try the track. We did the really easy bit between Riomaggiore and Manorola, and the moderately easy bit between Manorola and the Corniglia train station. At the station, we looked up at the 400-odd steps to the town, and elected to take the train all the way to Monterosso for lunch.
The Cinque Terra area is the home of pesto, and also makes some rather pleasant wines, so we indulged in both. We never did get to see the fourth town Vernazza, despite a number of attempts to reach it, one of which ended up with us stranded in La Spezia for an hour around midnight, hanging out at a bar with about 10 other people who also weren’t very good with a train timetable. It's All About PerspectiveI was playing around with Live Earth and Google Maps (mostly to figure out just how far Yammy and I walked in Pisa - see previous post). I found my current house, my sister's house, my first primary school, my boarding school, my last house in Brisbane and my new love, Dubrovnik. (Both Mum's place and the family farm in Yanco didn't have the resolution.) All nice places that look a bit ordinary in satellite pics.
Obversely, my childhood town of Karumba actually looks pretty lovely, as long as you stay far enough away. Somewhat apt, actually. 7月11日 Yammy Broke the Tower!From Dubrovnik, Yammy and I flew to Pisa. Our stopover in Rome ended up being rather longer than anticipated, and we arrived in Pisa fairly late on a Saturday night. We’d intended to catch the train into the city, but we arrived after it stopped running, and joined the end of a rather long cab line.
Thirty minutes later, line haven’t not budged an inch, Yammy squirreled off to inflict his high school Italian (very convenient that. Came in quite useful.) on the general populace. He arrived back at the line with the story that there was a festival on, and that the cabs couldn’t get over the bridge…but that we could walk.
This seemed a little far-fetched, but we were game, so off we set on what we were sure was going to be a bit of a walk. We reasoned that maybe we’d find a cab somewhere else.
It turns out that Pisa airport to Pisa central is entirely walkable. Pisa downtown pretty much starts at the airport fence. Our hotel was only a couple of hundred meters from a certain notable tower and yet our walk was an easy 3km or so. Or it would have been, if it hadn’t been for the thousands of people on the street in our way. We’d arrived on the night of Luminara, Pisa’s biggest party.
The next morning we got to gawk at a tower and a cathedral and a baptistery, but it could hardly compare. 7月10日 From the Queen of the Adriatic to the Pearl of the AdriaticThe day we traveled to Venice, Cin and I calculated that we caught 7 different instances of public transport, covering 5 different types. Strangely, it didn’t seem like that big a day.
Yammy had been at home in Croatlandia, so he drove on over and met us at the airport and we bused and vaporetto’d our way to our hotel near the Rialto. My train and metro commute home from the Copenhagen airport may have impressed Mark but it doesn’t really compare with one that involves boating down the Grand Canal.
I didn’t really expect to like Venice – an old description of “smelly and overpriced” had stuck with me, but I found it rather charming. We wandered and boated our way around, and only once accidentally ended up on a three-hour tour that took us nowhere.
The next evening, we picked up Mrs Yammy’s car from the airport, and via Slo-V, ended up in the heart of Yammy-town in Rijeka, Croatvillonia. We camped out at YammySis Nats’ place in Opatija for a couple of days while being giving the Yammy Tour of the area. From there, Dr Yammy was kind enough to give us a lift to Zagreb, where all three of us caught a plane down to Dubrovnik.
I’m in love with Dubrovnik. The town is amazing (though all that marble is a bit slippy), the Adriatic is gorgeous, the day trips are fun, the food is wonderfully Italian, the booze is wonderfully Croatian. In fact, the only disappointing thing is that for a town in Dalmatia, there was a distinct lack of spotty dogs.
We walked the walls, we splashed in the sea, we drank the grappa. We made our resident Croatoan speak Croatish to all the other Croatvillians. I nominated a least-favourite saint. (Saint Blaise, the patron saint of Dubrovnik. Patron saint of a town that got destroyed by an earthquake in the 1600s and had the shit bombed out of it for no good military reason during the Balkan War. Slack-arse motherfucker.) We were haunted by church bells.
On our last evening, Cin had to leave us to go back to the US and work, so Yammy and I consoled ourselves by brownbagging to an outdoor cinema to see “Ocean’s 13”. The fact that we brownbagged prosecco only makes this slightly less ghetto. 7月6日 I Look Like a Monkey and I Smell Like One TooI don’t really drink wine. If it ends up in a glass in front of me, then I drink it and usually enjoy it, but like how music is just pretty sounds in my ears, I can’t really appreciate it. Charles shared a bottle of ’89 Grange Hermitage with me last year and I enjoyed it immensely, but it was probably wasted on me.
I’m similarly ambivalent about food. My blood-sugar roller-coaster means I have to think about it far more than I care to, which, really, is at all. Bring on the food-cube. I’d find it very convenient for Vegemite on toast to fill all my dietary requirements. Vegemite is tasty.
I suppose this means that my recent birthday present to myself was a strange choice then. Cin and Nick came to visit and we did all sorts of fun things on the big day. Perhaps not enough to top Kb’s big weekend, but we had great coffee, great baked goods, great fun staring at the hippies, a great visit to the Museum of Erotica (which did, as expected, run the gamut from slightly seedy to incredibly gross. Also, the Paris Hilton video? Snore.), gigantic great glasses of beer in a sunny square watching a very pretty passing parade. And then we went to dinner.
Copenhagen has a restaurant. It’s called Noma. It does ‘Nordic cuisine’. It’s the only Danish restaurant with two Michelin stars. It was recently named the 15th best restaurant in the world. So that’s where we went. After all, I only plan to turn 31 four or five more times in my life.
We had the seven course meal with accompanying wine, though it really ended up being about 8 or 9 of each. And it was fucking incredible.
Weird ingredients, bizarre combinations of flavours, strange textures. And it worked. It’s like every other meal I’d eaten was a tiny static-y black and white TV and suddenly I was watching high-def plasma. It was almost religious.
And the next day, I flew off to Venice. So my birthday didn’t suck. 7月5日 En ProvenceI’m not a big fan of crowds. So little seems worth hundreds or thousands of people consuming availability, driving up prices, impeding passage. You’ll never see me in Munich in October or in white in Pamplona.
In May and June, Denmark has a series of holidays which, if interpreted liberally, result in a bunch of long weekends more or less in a row. I tee’d up all-sorts of fun stuff to do. Sheer embarrassment prevents me from dislosing why I didn’t end up in Barcelona in May as planned, and stupid TechEd in stupid Florida in why I didn’t end up spending a June weekend in Prague, but I did manage to make it to the south of France for a lovely couple of days. Unbeknownst to me, however, I managed to pick the one weekend where the Cannes Film Festival overlapped with the Monaco Grand Prix, and brought a Nimes feria and some sort of art thing in Aix along for the ride.
Needless to say, when I hit the Marseilles airport, and they’d lost my car reservation and had nothing available for days, things did not look good. The problem did get fixed though (let’s say “through force of personality”) and I proceeded to belt about Provence and the like.
Beth's characterization of Marseilles as a ‘terrible crumbling place' meant I didn’t tarry long in that town. I shot off to Carcassone to peer at medieval turrets for awhile (has Europe spoiled me that I feel cheated by 150 year old reproductions?), before toddling on back to Arles for the night. Arles is a great city to wander around. Some artist once lived there and painted the stuff when he wasn’t chopping off key parts of his own body – it can be fun wandering into a famous painting.
From Arles to Nimes to dodge a feria and peer at a Roman arena, to Pont du Gard to look at other old Roman business, to Avignon to stare at a pope’s palace, and a bridge and curse a catchy tune, through St Tropez and Cannes all along the Cote d’Azur to a night in Nice. Which is nice enough, and the Salad Nicoise definitely worth it.
From Nice, I ventured into Monaco, missing the race by a day so I got to drive the course in my sporty Kia roller-skate as they packed it up around me. At that point, my itinerary mostly ran dry, so I spent the day ambling back through Provencal countryside, admiring the grapevines and murderous sky. My last night I spent in Aix-en-Provence, which seems to be a lovely city with gorgeous tree-lined streets that on a stormy day are a bit gloomy and ominous. The weird confrontational dude in the street who almost pushed me down didn’t help my impression, though I did buy a great hat. |
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