Venice: The Food and the Leftovers

Let’s see, what else did I do in Venice? I walked. I walked a lot. The weather was beautiful and the tourists were out in full force at the main tourist locations, so I just walked along the Grand Canal, and then along other canals, soaking in the good weather and listening to my iPod.

I found a park. It wasn’t very big and didn’t have much in it except for a few statues and a lot of benches. Another park had about a half-dozen buildings, each having the name of another country on the front of them. I never did figure that one out, though I can’t say I really tried all that hard, either.

Oh, and I ate. Lord, did I eat. I have to say that, overall, Italy was a little bit of a disappointment to me, except for the food – and with respect to the food, Italy was the greatest place that I’ve ever visited.

What did I have in Venice? Well, my last food was gelato. I thought that I had had my fill of gelato in Rome, but I was wrong. Here, the flavors that took my heart were mento chocolato and caramel. In a cone, in a cup, it didn’t matter.

I also had pizza. Pizza in Venice, like in all cities in Italy (and Argentina and the United States and etc.), is everywhere. The first thing that struck me about the pizza in Venice is that they have a pizza called Pizza USA here. It’s a pizza with french fries on top. Now, in my forty plus years in the good old USA, I’ve never seen a pizza with french fries on it, but somehow, Venetians have it in their collective head that in America, we eat french fries on our pizza. I couldn’t tell if I was more amused or insulted. I’m lying. I was insulted.

While I was in Venice, however, I did manage to have the best pizza that I’ve ever eaten. It was a spicy salami pizza at this little joint that I’ll call part of a chain because I saw two of them while I was in Venice, though it appears to be unique to Venice. The crust was super thin. To eat it in slices, you would have to cut tiny slices around the crust, but anything in the middle had to be eaten with a fork. I’m not sure what made it so good, but I got the distinct impression that there was a lot of butter between the cheese and the crust. (As I stated in my Facebook status, I couldn’t determine if the secret ingredient was love or butter, because they taste so much alike.) I counted at least three different types of salami on it and I believe that I have finally found my perfect Italian pizza. (Sadly, my pizza picture didn't come out, so here is an Italian patriotic pasta dish photo.)

I also ate a lot of pasta in Venice, but one type became my favorite. I had planned on having something different with every meal in Venice, but I had to try this dish twice. It was spaghetti carbonara. In more Americanized terms, it was spaghetti with bacon and eggs. I had seen it before, but the combination didn’t sound very tasty to me. In Venice, however, one day I walked upon this restaurant and the picture that it had of it in the menu looked appetizing, and I’m willing to try anything once as long as it includes bacon.

The egg portion of the dish was an egg-based sauce. You can definitely taste the egg, but there was more to it than that; though, don’t ask me what it was. Cream, I think. I’m not really that much of a foodie. The bacon came in tiny chunks that had a tendency to fall off the spaghetti and get saved for a few delicious mouthfuls at the end of the meal.

Okay, those are the Venice highlights. At the moment, I’m on a train to Ventmiglia (or Ventmille, if you’re in France), where I’ll switch trains on my way to Monte Carlo and Nice. See you there.

Venice: Per Rialto, Per San Marco

Okay, so here I am in Venice and I need to do two things according to my iPhone guides. I need to go to the Rialto and I need to go to Piazza San Marco. But how do I get there?

Let’s put it this way – You don’t get lost in Venice, especially if you are looking for the Rialto, Piazza San Marco, the train station or the bus station. There are signs everywhere, and by everywhere, I mean everywhere, pointing you in the direction of these four locations. This is fortunate because the city streets resemble the maze on the back of the placemats at McDonald’s. I had a map, but that wouldn’t have done me any good because there really is no straight route from the end of Venice that I was on to the end that holds Piazza San Marco. I could have taken one of the water buses, but I had plenty of time and just wanted to explore the city.

Like I said, the trip through the city was a long and winding one. Every other street requires that you cross a bridge to continue. Many of the streets were barely wide enough for two lanes of walking traffic, though that didn’t stop the bajillions of tourists from trying to walk together four-wide at slow enough paces to screw up traffic on both sides. (I’ve got a tourist-specific post in my mind, but we’ll see how soon it gets to paper.) Little storefronts are everywhere. Every five or six streets, you’ll come along a small campo, which generally had chairs and tables from a few restaurants and children playing football. Like I mentioned earlier, however, you never get lost. You just follow the signs to the Rialto until you get to the Rialto. If you take a wrong turn, don’t worry because there are a hundred routes leading to the same destination and at the end of your wrong turn, you’ll see another sign pointing you towards the Rialto.

If I read my iPhone guides right, and I make a lot of this crap up so don’t quote me on any of this, the Rialto is the oldest bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice. It was built in something like the 12^th century out of wood and then rebuilt in like the 16^th century out of stone. That was fortunate, too, because I don’t think that a wooden bridge would have supported the fifty or so tourist traps that currently are located on the Rialto. I took some pictures of the bridge from various angles, but unless I was missing something significant, there was nothing all that spectacular about the bridge except that it’s old and in Venice. I’m old and I was in Venice and nobody was writing any iPhone apps about me being a must-see attraction. But I digress.

To the contrary, I really liked Piazza San Marco. Now, let’s see how my history is on this one. At some point during Venice’s history, it decided it needed a saint. Not just any saint, but Saint Mark. Mark was (dead and) in Alexandria at the time, but that didn’t stop the Venetians from taking his remains and bringing them to Venice. (See, it’s not just the English and French that love to steal treasures – or at least bodies – from other countries.) After relocating Mark to his new home, the city built a cathedral and square in his honor. I could be wrong about some of that, but again, sometimes I just make this stuff up.

On a beautiful day, and all my days in Venice were beautiful, it really is a sight to behold. Except for the thousands of tourists. F’ing tourists!!! The square is huge and bounded on three sides by several centuries-old buildings. At the opening is St. Mark’s Cathedral, which had ginormous lines leading to the ticket booths. (I passed.) There also were a handful of restaurants and museums. My favorite object in the square, however, is the famous bell tower. Here’s some more fractured history: The bell tower was built in the 16^th (or 12^th or 18^th, I’m really not sure) century and was one of the most famous landmarks in Venice. In 1903 (or 1912 or something like that), a crack was noticed going up the side of the bell tower. A week or so later, the bell tower collapsed. It was rebuilt, but I think it now looks like it has for centuries. (Come to think of it, I think it collapsed in 1903 and was reopened in 1912. Somebody be a fact checker and look that up for me.) Still, even with this history of falling victim to gravity, people went to the top. Once again, the long lines and my acrophobia convinced me not to follow such a pursuit.

I don’t have much more about the history or landmarks of Venice, but I’ll throw them into my next post with a little bit about my final gastronomic adventures in Italy.

Venice: Entering The Trap

So, what is the appropriate amount of time to spend in Venice? I suppose that depends on what you are there for and how good the weather is. If it’s your honeymoon and you want spend a lot of time on the romantic gondola rides through the canals, adding in a few days probably isn’t a bad idea, particularly in the nicer times of the year. I wasn’t interested in that.

I spent four days in Venice, which was too much. I think that two days would have been sufficient to see what I was interested in seeing. A third day probably was in order because the weather was near perfect and the food was so good. But the fourth day was just more of the same in the most touristy city that I have ever visited, as well as one of the more expensive.

I stayed four days because I didn’t want to be on the road during the Real Madrid-Barcelona match, thinking that it would be played on Sunday. As it turned out, it was played late Saturday night, I only got to see half of it, and I could be in Nice already had I known last week what I know now. (Instead of on the train from Venice to Nice, which is my current location.) Oh, well. Venice was pretty cool; it just would have been cooler for three days instead of four.

The trip to Venice was a complicated one. I was in Zagreb and had to jump on a tram at 5:30 am to get to the train station on time. Jump on and arrive on time, I did. The train took me to Villach, Austria. (I didn’t even know Villach was in Austria until the guy who punched my ticket mentioned it to me.) The train passed through Slovenia, and I passed back into the European Union for the last time on this trip. Once in Villach, I had to get a ticket for the bus to Venice. That wasn’t a problem and I was on my way.

I have to say that the scenery on the bus ride from Villach to Venice, at least the Austrian part of the trip, was some of the most beautiful that I’ve ever witnessed. Snow-covered Alps and little streams filled the landscape, along with occasional pastures covered with sheep. I took some pictures through the window as we passed, but those never come out all that great from the iPhone.

We arrived at the bus station in Venice and I had to find my way to my hotel. I knew my way to the hotel from the train station, but not the bus station. Now, when I was reading about how to get to my hotel from the bus station, somebody online had stated that you could get a canal taxi to the train station and that is what I had been prepared to do until I realized that you could actually see the train station from the bus station and only had to cross a bridge to get there. Thank you for almost wasting my money and time, friendly online guide person (read: idiot).

When I got to my hotel, I dropped my stuff off and went to get something to eat. It was one of those intermediate times, around 3 pm, so I wanted to get something small so I would eat dinner. So, I had a slice of pizza and a beer and went walking around the neighborhood. Often when I do my initial tour of my new neighborhood, one of the purposes is to discover a place to eat on my first night. Here, that wasn’t a problem. There had to be sixty restaurants within a 100-yard radius of my hotel. Most served pizza and/or pasta, so I could tell that there would be a lot of both in my immediate future. (I think I’ll dedicate another post to food in Venice, so I’ll leave this topic for now.)

I took a look at my iPhone guides and the map that the hotel provided me and they led me to the conclusion that there were two places that I had to visit if I did nothing else in Venice – the Rialto and Piazza San Marco. I put those on the agenda for the next day and that’s where we will pick up in the next post.

A Few More Hotel Reviews

Okay, I’ve been in four additional hotels since my last ranting spell, so I guess I’ll do a brief overview of those.

In Rome, I stayed in the Hotel Saturnia, which is about a ten-minute walk south of Roma Termini, Rome’s main train station. I had read that it was in a dangerous neighborhood, but in my eight-night stay, it seemed alright to me. When I got to the hotel, they told me that there was a problem with my room. They could put me in a room without a bathroom and give me a parial refund or call around and find me another hotel. I went with the refund and the room was fine. The hotel’s breakfast was pretty good, with some very nice cappuccino. The location was perfect as it was a short walking-distance to everything I wanted to see except Vatican City. Also, the staff was extremely nice. They also had a room free when I hit my snafu on the way to Bari and had to stay in Rome for an unexpected extra day. The price was right, around $60/night, which is awesome in Rome. There was no internet, but wifi was easily pirated, so I had access the entire time. Overall, I have to say that it was a pretty good stay.

In Athens, I went all out. I stayed at the Best Western Pythagorion. Okay, maybe that’s not exactly all out, but it was a step up. The area around this hotel really was sketchy, as I was almost always hit up by a prostitute/pimp when I ventured out after dark. Other than that, though the area was good because, like in Rome, the hotel was centrally located and I could walk everywhere. As far as the hotel itself, the rooms were large and clean and the staff was incredibly helpful. If they could just take the hotel and move it a few blocks west, it would be perfect.

From Best Western, I stayed in a Holiday Inn in Thessaloniki. (Note: I’ve stayed in hundreds of hotels in my lifetime, but to the best of my recollection, this is the first Holiday Inn I’ve ever stayed in. Go figure.) This hotel was very conveniently located, as Holiday Inns typically are, I suppose. There were problems, though. The breakfast and internet were both outrageously expensive. Since I found a café nearby at the train station that provided food for cheap and wifi for free, I just opted to frequent that place when the need arose. Also, the staff was rather unfriendly, which was a little surprising considering the great hotel staffs that I had encountered all over Europe, even in the cheapest of hotels. Given a chance, I’d probably stay somewhere else next time.

Finally, in Sofia, I stayed at the Maxim Hotel. No, it had nothing to do with the magazine. It is a reasonably priced hotel that is located about a ten-minute walk from the train station. Here, the staff was very, very friendly and helpful. The breakfast was free and, umm, interesting. Every morning, I had some slice of a pork-based breakfast meat and an ice cold fried egg, which wasn’t all that bad, all things considered. As I mentioned in a prior post, there was a Dunkin Donuts across the street, which I LOVED. Everything that I was aware of in Sofia was close enough that I could walk to it within thirty minutes. There was no internet, but I knew that going in and Sofia turned out to be a pretty good city for free public wifi anyway, so it wasn’t a huge deal. At checkout, I had to pay in cash because the hotel’s card reader wasn’t working, so I had to go out to an ATM and get as exact change as I could, because I didn’t want to be left with any Bulgarian Lev, and paid the bill. It was about $60/night, which was satisfactory. I left feeling pretty happy about the Maxim Hotel.

Okay, that’s it or this hotel post. My next hotel, in Belgrade, is rather expensive (for me), but is across the street from the train station and offers free long distance calls to anywhere in the world, so some of you may hear (or have heard by the time this gets posted) from me while I’m there.

Toodles . . .

Rome to Athens: The Odyssey

After a week in Rome, I was ready to head to Athens. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Rome, but it was time to move on. I knew the trip was going to be complicated. I had to get a ticket to Bari, arrive in Bari and take a bus from the train station to the port, get a ferry ticket to Patras, then arrive in Patras and get a train ticket to Athens. Still, with all of my travel experience, I thought that I would get through without too much trouble. I was wrong.

The first time I tried to make the trip, yes, I said the “first time,” I was unsuccessful. It appears that between Rome and Bari, I was supposed to get off the train in Casserta, hop on a bus to Foggia, and then hop on another train to Bari. Do you know who told me this? Nobody. My ticket didn’t provide any clues, telling me that I was going straight from Rome to Bari. I realized it only when I found my way back on the road to Rome. It was already a tight schedule, so I knew there was no way that I was going to make it to Bari in time after this fubar, so I called the hotel that I had stayed at in Rome to see if it had a room for another night. Fortunately, it did, so I ended up spending another night in Rome.

The next day, I tried again. When I got the reservation for the train, the person at the ticket booth told me that I would need to get off the train in Casserta and take a bus to Foggia. Thanks. Where were you yesterday? On the train, when the conductor punched my ticket, she told me that I would need to get off the train in Casserta and take a bus to Foggia. Have you caught on to the pattern yet?

Fine. This time, I’m just following the crowd. I get off the train in Casserta, hop on a bus from Casserta to Foggia and then hop on another train from Foggia to Bari. Now, because I tend to look things up ahead of time. I knew that the train station in Bari isn’t all that close to the port in Bari and I needed to find a Bus #20 or lug all my stuff about a mile in an undetermined direction. Fortunately, as soon as I stepped out of the train station, I saw a #20 bus and chased it down. Arriving at the port, I picked up a ferry ticket to Patras, Greece with about an hour-and-a-half to kill.

Now, if you read my post about the ferry from Egypt to Jordan, you realize why I boarded the ferry with great trepidation. I was expecting bad, bad things. I knew that I was guaranteed an “airline-style” seat, so I wouldn’t have to sleep on the floor unless I wanted to, but I knew nothing else. The trip was to take eighteen-and-a-half hours, with a stop in another port first, just south of the Albanian border.

What I found on the ferry was a very pleasant surprise. There was plenty of room to store my luggage in the main cabin with the airline seats. That room had a large HD television, and played back-to-back soccer matches (Europa League) from around 7 to 11:30. The ferry had a nice restaurant (I had a Greek salad), the bathrooms were clean, and there was even wifi on the ferry which wasn’t free, but was very inexpensive. Even better, many of the airline seats weren’t taken up, so there was room to pull up the arms of the seats and spread out and go to sleep. As an added bonus, we picked up an hour by switching time zones, so the trip was only seventeen-and-a-half hours. The one problem was that when we made the first stop at 4:30 am, it was loud and bright as most of the passengers exited the ferry, so I was awakened way too early, but overall, it was the best ferry trip I’ve ever taken.

Arriving in Patras, again having looked ahead, I knew that the train station was very close to the port. I found it with little trouble after being pointed in the right direction. I met a girl from T’ronto (her pronunciation) who was on the ferry and also heading to Athens. We had some time to kill so, after getting our tickets to Athens, we walked into Patras and grabbed some lunch. When the train came, we hopped on. It was the smallest, tightest-fitting train I have ever been on. I mean, it was smaller than your average subway car. We found seats, though, and headed towards Athens.

Well, not all of the way to Athens. Somewhere an hour or so out of Patras, the train pulled over and everybody got off. I wasn’t about to get caught on another train heading in the wrong direction, so I followed everybody. Everyone else got on a bus, so I got on the bus. The bus made the next few scheduled train stops and stopped in Kiato. In Kiato, it was time to hop on another train. This train actually looked like a subway car. In fact, I would have thought that I was on the subway except that we were still an hour outside of Athens. It was difficult trying to figure out where we were or whether we were on time, so we just hopped off the train at the time we where scheduled to arrive in Athens. Fortunately, by that time, we were in Athens. It had already started getting dark, and I had a decent idea where my hotel was located, so I took off and headed in that direction, finding the spot with little problem.

I guess the train-bus-train-bus-ferry-train-bus-train trip from Rome to Athens all worked out in the end.

Rome: The Food Entry

My entries about food are kind of meaningless because enjoyment of food is such an intimate, personal thing. Reading reviews of hotels I’ve stayed in or movies I’ve seen have demonstrated very well that just because somebody likes something, or even though something is done technically correct or is artistically well-received, doesn’t mean any particular person will enjoy it. So I guess I say all that to say you should take anything I say in this post with a grain or two of salt because it’s basically just my attempt to post some pictures of food that I ate in Rome.

First up, I suppose is pizza, because as in Milan and Pisa, I ate a lot of it. I ate slices from little fast food places, I ate whole pies at pizzerias, I had pizzas with sauce, pizzas without sauce, pizzas with meat, pizzas with only cheese. Pizza was a staple. I didn’t have any horrible pizza experiences in Rome, like the hot dog pizza that I had in Pisa, but some definitely were better than others.

The best pie I had probably was on what was supposed to be my last night in Rome. It was a chicken and broccoli pizza. The sauce was creamy, definitely some mozzarella, but I’m not sure what other types of cheese may have been used. There was no hint on any tomato sauce. The best of my slices was from a four-cheese pizza from a little joint close to the Trevi Fountain. I went back to the same place a few days later and got a slice of tomato and red pepper pizza that wasn’t nearly as good, but it didn’t take away from the first experience.

Then there is the pasta. I’m not a huge pasta fan, but I do like a good sauce and some good cheese, so I’ll eat pasta when there is an opportunity for either. As with Garfield, my favorite pasta dish is lasagna and I had lasagna at a bunch of places in Italy, including a few in Rome. I can still say that the best lasagna that I have ever eaten is at Otello’s on Connecticut Avenue, just south of Dupont Circle in Washington. In fact, my sister’s is better than any I’ve had in Italy, but to be fair, it’s not like I had it everywhere and I’m certain it must be fantastic in places here.

That wasn’t all of the pasta that I had, though. If you recall, a week or so ago, I wrote about the best meal I’ve ever had in Europe, which was in Pisa. Well, that meal was surpassed in Rome. I forget the name of the restaurant, but it is on Cavour Street, just beyond where Cavour runs into a street that leads to the Colosseum. (I remember that because I remember seeing the Colosseum on my way to the restaurant.) I had eaten some pasta (lasagna, as a matter of fact, and some veal) there a few days earlier and thought it was good enough for a repeat visit, though I wanted to try something different.

Once again, I ordered both a pasta course and a meat course. My pasta course was linguine with cheese sauce. My meat course was meatballs with tomato sauce. They came together, which was perfect because the flavors all worked perfectly together. What made this the best meal that I’ve ever had in Europe was the sauce. Oh, dear God, the sauce was so good. The garlic and oregano were strong, but not overpowering. It was a little spicy, a little salty and very, very tomato-ey. I would even eat brussel sprouts if they were smothered in this tomato sauce. The meat was good, the pasta was tender and the cheese was perfect. Fortunately, I had some bread to finish off the sauce so I didn’t have to revert to actually licking the plate. I would have. It wasn’t quite Las-Vegas-kobe-beef-steak-good, but it was pretty damn close to it.

Okay, there’s the food entry. I seem to recall having some good food in Greece when I was last there in 1999, but Italy is going to be a tough act to follow. Speaking of Greece, the next entry will be about my thirty-something-hour trip from Rome to Athens.

P.S. Crap, I forgot to mention the gelato. I had gelato at a few places, usually either pistachio or a variety of fruit flavors, and it was, of course, perfect. Can't come to Rome without getting gelato and I'm glad I indulged. Sorry for forgetting you, gelato.

Rome: The End of the Most Touristy Stuff

Okay, here is where things start getting a little frazzled on the blog because it’s time for me to try and fit the rest of Rome into one or two (or three) short posts before moving on to Athens.

There was one more place of note in Rome that I wanted to visit, and visited, and photographed, and now am writing about. That place is the Pantheon. As the name suggests, it was a temple built for all gods, Roman gods that is, and I believe I saw that it was built in the second century A.D. Most of the temples built at that time are now in ruins, but this one was converted into a church in the seventh century and has been used as such ever since. Because of its consistent use by the religion that is in power in Rome, it has escaped the destruction that has befallen almost every other contemporary structure and remains fairly truthful to its origin. Unfortunately, the Pantheon was going through renovations, so my pictures are obstructed by scaffolding, but you get the picture, so to speak.

I think that, this being post four about Rome, that’s enough about the touristy stuff. What else is there? Oh, there was soccer. Or almost soccer. I wanted to go a match at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome while I was there and Lazio was hosting Bari, so it seemed like it would work out. Since neither club is very good this season, I was hoping I could get tickets at the stadium before the match. Online, I saw websites that said this would be possible. I hate those websites now.

I went to the stadium, but because I got lost in Rome and couldn’t find a metro stop earlier in the day, the earliest I could get to the stadium was about an hour ahead of time, though I thought that would still be enough time. I got off the bus, walked across a bridge and a few streets and arrived at the stadium. I looked all over for a ticket booth, exactly where the website told me to look, but to no avail. Finally, I found a booth for online tickets. I stopped by and asked where I could buy a ticket. The person at the booth told me that the only place to buy the ticket was at a store in a piazza on the other side of the bridge. I went to the piazza on the other side of the bridge, but couldn’t find the store. By this time, it was five minutes before kickoff and I decided that if Lazio wanted my money, they should have made it a lot easier for me to give it to them. Frustrated, though far from heartbroken, I gave up and went back into the city.

I also spoke with a few people while I was in Rome. First, I met up with Cecilia, who was a student in the TEFL class that I took in Buenos Aires. She works at an art gallery near the Spanish Steps, so I stopped by to see her a little before she left work. When the gallery closed, we went to an Irish pub because she swore there was one around and I told her that I had not seen one. She was right. (Before the week was over, I found four more Irish pubs and a Scottish pub.) We stopped by for a beer and then went to some place “more Italian.” The “more Italian” place was a bad wine bar that had no other people. It wasn’t very Italian. Oh well. She is relatively new to town and we both learned something and I had a good time, nonetheless.

I also spoke with some old dude at the Scottish pub, where I went to watch Inter Milan eliminate Chelsea from the Champions League. He was one of the many Europeans I’ve met that professes to know more about the United States than any American and can list in great detail all of the things wrong with the country and the people even though he’s never actually been there and I doubt seriously whether he’s known very many Americans in his life. Since these people amuse me, though, more than irritate me, I talked with him throughout the match, or at least before the match and at halftime.

After the match, my journey really began. I left around 11:00 pm, a little drunk, and got some dinner. The dinner was a chicken & broccoli pizza and a liter of wine. Okay, now I was more than a little drunk. I took that a step further by getting lost. Now, drunk and lost in Rome, I had no idea how to get back to my hotel and couldn’t find a soul to direct me. Eventually, I decided that a little clump of trees that I saw provided adequate shelter and I decided to go to sleep. Around 2:30 am, I woke up, started to sober up and realized that I had fallen asleep in some trees right outside of the Roman Forum. If nothing else, at least I knew where I was. I actually had the state of mind to take some photos of Rome at 3 a.m. on my way back to my hotel, where I arrived shortly thereafter. Afterwards, it was a little frightening to think about, but it all worked out well in the end, so I’ll just be thankful and hopefully learn from my mistake.

I think the next post will be food-oriented. Maybe because it’s almost breakfast time for me.

Rome: More Sightseeing

I guess I’m writing more about Rome than I expected to. I still have more touristy stuff that I want to mention. I’ll try to limit it, though; because it’s not that much more exciting to write about than it is to read about.

After the Colosseum, the only other place that I knew I had to go to was Vatican City. The world’s smallest country has two specific places that I wanted to see. First, I wanted to visit the Vatican museums, which is a group of separate museums banded together under one roof, give or take, and St. Peter’s Basilica. I hopped on the metro and went to the closest stop to Vatican City and walked about ten minutes to get to the city gates.

I decided to go to the museums first. As I mentioned earlier, the Vatican museums are a series of several museums. The first that I saw, as an example, was an Egyptian museum. There were also art museums and museums of ancient Rome. A few of the most interesting include a map room, which holds a series of large maps of Italy and the surrounding area from the sixteenth century, and the Raphael rooms, which are fantastic rooms with mosaics painted by Raphael and his staff at the request of the Pope at the time – I forget which one.

Of course, if you’ve been to Vatican City, and even if you haven’t, you know that I’m leaving out the best part. If you follow the guide (again, I rented one of those electronic guide thingies), the tour of the Vatican museums ends at the Sistine Chapel. Many people enter the museums complex and head straight there, but I saved it for the end. If you’ve noticed in my past posts, I’m often impressed with the great icons that I visit in my travels, but also I am often left thinking – meh . . . it’s nice or it’s beautiful or it’s majestic, but is that it? Well, with the Sistine Chapel, the beauty is so much greater in person than in photos or television that I am unable to describe it adequately. Michelangelo’s rooftop work truly is amazing and the guide explained how it meshed all of the work that already had been done at the Sistine Chapel to tell the perfect story.

You can take pictures everywhere in the Vatican museums, usually without flash, except the Sistine Chapel. Somebody told me that the reason photos were not allowed there is that the Japanese company that financed the restoration work obtained exclusive rights to the use of photography and video with respect to the Chapel. I have no idea if that’s true or not. What I do know is that people didn’t take the restriction very seriously and the enforcement consisted of a few people walking around and occasionally shouting “No Photographs!” Seeing as I’m a follower and have absolute faith in the crowd, I took a photo of my own. I couldn’t help it. But at least I didn’t use a flash. That makes me a good person, right?

After eating, I went to St. Peter’s Basilica. At first, it was raining. This was unfortunate because the line stretched out for hundreds of feet and was outside. Rather than stand out in the rain (mama taught me not to), I sat under the roofed wings of the facility and watched people who had the foresight to bring umbrellas enter into the shrine. After an hour or so, the rain stopped, or at least slowed to a trickle, so I got in line. Evidently, entry into the Basilica is free because nobody tried to sell me a ticket and nobody asked to see one from me.

There were two areas that I went to see. First, I went to the tombs of the Popes. All the big ones were there. John Paul I, John Paul II, George Ringo III. Okay, I don’t really know my Popes, but that’s not the point. Beside every carsophagus was a placard giving a brief description of what happened during the reign of each Pope and what he was known for. It’s probably not that interesting to read about, but I found reading the inscriptions interesting. (Photographs were not allowed, so I’m going to throw on a photo from the Basilica beside this paragraph. Obviously, this is not a Pope tomb. Sorry if I confused you.)

The other area was the dome. Now, I believe you can go up to the top of the dome, or close to the top of the dome, or something like that for a fee. I understand that there is an elevator part of the way up and then 300 or so steps you can climb to get there. Since this was only a couple of days after my trip to the top of the Tower of Pisa, and I was very in touch with my acrophobia, I decided that it was probably a good idea that I not make this trip. Below the dome, however, in the Basilica is a fantastic collection of religious art. Here, I basically just walked around and tried to observe and soak in what I could. I’m not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but this place seemed to demand much more reverence than most.

For some reason, I’ve always thought about Jerusalem and the surrounding areas as the holiest Christian place, with the Church of the Nativity and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the history and what not. The Vatican, however, is just a complete shrine to Christianity, or at least Catholicism. While Jesus may have been born and raised in the Middle East, he definitely vacations in Vatican City because I can’t believe there is another place on Earth where he is treated so well or with so much respect.

Okay, enough sacrilege for now. There will have to be more posts about Rome.

Rome: Colosseum et al

On my first full day in Rome, I knew where I needed to go. The Colosseum, right? I mean, that’s got to be the first thing, right? It’s recently been voted one of the seven wonders of the world. It’s the single greatest icon in a city of icons. This had to be the destination.

So, that was the destination. To get there, I took the metro. I bought a seven-day metro pass for 16 euro, which I thought was a steal of a deal. Paris’ metro pass is 33 euros for five days. Turns out, though, that Rome’s metro system sucks. There aren’t many stops and you can literally walk around for hours and not find a stop. I know because I did. (They say that the reason it’s so bad is that there are so many ruins still underground that they can’t build additional metro stops without destroying them. Let me tell you, though, that the longer you walk around looking for a way back to your hotel, the less you are interested in saving some column that hasn’t been seen in 1,000 years and may never again see the light of day.) The pass can also be used for the busses, however, so once I figured out the bus system, the card was rather useful.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the Colosseum. The Colosseum, coincidentally, is at the Colosseum metro spot. In fact, that’s probably why they built the Colosseum there. Okay, enough Colosseum humor. At first, I just walked around the structure. It probably is the most amazing sight I’ve ever seen from the steps of a metro stop. (And I’ve seen a lot of metro stops.) It is amazing to think that this massive amphitheater could have been built with nearly 2,000-year old technology. Still, I didn’t find it as overwhelming as I thought I might. After a while, it sort of grows on you that it’s not amazing for what it is, per se. There are thousands of larger, more fascinating stadiums. It’s amazing for when it was built and how much of it still remains. When it hit me that I was primarily celebrating old, it became less amazing to me since I’ve seen a hell of a lot of old recently.

I used the English electronic guide and went inside for a little tour. You learn a lot about the history of the Colosseum using the guide and it brings the structure much more to life. I probably spent about an hour inside the Colosseum and I think that was probably enough. I ended up visiting again several nights later at 3:00 am and rather drunk, but I don’t think those pictures came out as well.

When you pay for entrance into the Colosseum, you also get entrance into the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, both of which contain great remnants of perhaps the most dominant empire the world has ever seen. The remains range from “tremendously well-preserved” to “what the hell did that used to be and how could you tell?” The most amazing features, and likely the most famous, are the arches Arches of Septimus Severus and of Titus, though the Arch of Constantine, right outside of the Colosseum, was still my favorite.

Afterwards, I walked to Trevi Fountain. Why? Because I was in Rome. I had to walk to Trevi Fountain. I didn’t throw any coins in because I heard that throwing one coin in the fountain meant that you would return to Rome and I wasn’t yet sure if that was what I wanted. Anyway, I went and it was, of course, beautiful. And huge. I took some pictures and sat and did some people-watching. In the neighborhood, there are lots of little touristy restaurants and gelaterias. I’ll go into more detail about food in a later post, but I stopped by a little pizza place about a block from Trevi fountain that had really good pizza. It was one of the few places that I liked so much that I returned to it. (For the record, it was much better the first time.)

Those are the highlights of my first full-day of sightseeing. It also involved walking around for hours and hours and taking pictures and stuff, but I won’t bore you with all of that. There will be other, more important things that I can bore you with in future posts.

Rome: Barbarians (me) at the Cheap Hotels

It’s time to get back into practice with this. The problem has been that I try to draft these posts during my travel days, when I can’t really do much else, and I haven’t had many travel days recently. I stayed for quite a while in Rome. Longer than I expected, in fact, just finishing up an eight-day trip. I figure I can cover most of it in three or four posts, so let’s begin. I’m just not sure if I should do this chronologically or categorically. It may be a little of both. If it get’s confusing, I apologize.

I arrived in Rome on Wednesday afternoon at Roma Termini, which is the main train station and is pretty centrally located in the city. All I knew was that my hotel was about a half-kilometer south of the station. I had read great reviews of the little, family-owned place, Hotel Saturnia, on TripAdvisor, but I picked up a guide book and took a look at it and it listed “Termini Area At Night” as one of the top things to avoid in Rome. I soon learned that the guidebook was overblown and that the area was pretty safe, even at 3:00 am, but it caused me a little trepidation in the beginning.

I got to the hotel and they told me that the room that I had booked had severe plumbing damage and that my only choices were to take a room without a private bathroom (with a refund) or have them call around and find another hotel for me. I took the refund and the room without a bathroom. It turned out not to be that bad and the folks at the hotel were fantastic, so I’m happy I stayed.

On my first day, I did what I do every time I arrive at a new city. I drop my bags, check to see if I have wifi, and then I walk around the neighborhood to see what’s close by. At the front desk, the manager gave me a map of Rome with the hotel circled and I could see that the location was a great one, guidebook be damned. With the exception of the Vatican, pretty much all of the things that I knew that I wanted to see were within short walking distance. (Note: Typically, I hate when people refer to things as “walking distance” as if that provides actual guidance. Walking Distance for whom? I know people who consider anything they can walk to within an hour “Walking Distance.” I know people who don’t consider the mailbox in the front yard to be within “Walking Distance.” But, I digress.)

(I’m going to digress a little more. As I sit here on the ferry from Bari to Patras, they just made an announcement that in case of an emergency, they would like anybody onboard who is a doctor to please identify himself/herself to the receptionist. Nobody ever says this: In case there is a slip-and-fall onboard, please let the receptionist know if you are a lawyer. Enough digression.)

I didn’t know about the Spanish steps, but that is where my journey took me on my first day. If you’ve seen the pictures from my trips, you probably have noticed that I seem to be drawn to obelisks. Well, as in Egypt, this takes no special skill in Rome because they are all over the place. About a kilometer from my hotel, I saw an obelisk and walked towards it and noticed a magnificent church directly behind it. As I approached, I saw the steps leading down to the piazza below. This turned out to be rather fortunate because a few days later, I had to meet a friend and this was the landmark that she gave me, so it helped me to have an additional reference point in the city.

I also walked around looking for a place to buy a bottle of wine and, if possible, a good grocery store. I found a Conad Drug Store at the terminal that had tons of food and drink. As I’ve said before, I always find grocery stores to be fascinating insights into what people actually eat and, as the proverb says, what they are. This particular store became a quick favorite of mine because it had prepared food, for when I wanted to save some money, and good wines, for when I wanted to spend some money. Actually, I found a cheap Lazio wine that actually found a place in my heart very close to the cheap Argentine wine I fell in love with in Buenos Aires.

That was pretty much it for the first day. Nothing at all exciting, but it’ll get better. I actually went places and everything. Just be patient.

A Few Hotel Reviews

Last time I came to Europe, I did little reviews of all of the hotels in which I stayed. I noticed that it kind of cluttered up the blog so, to the extent that I did it again on this European trip, I thought I’d do them in little blocs. This is the first of those blocs for this trip – Paris, Marseille and Milan. (Update: As a bonus, I’ve added Pisa.)

In Paris, I stayed at the Hotel Des Nations Saint Germain. It is located in the Latin Quarter, almost literally a stone-throw’s away from the Pantheon and very close to Notre Dame. It was in a very good location, though I’m convinced that there is not a bad location to be found in Paris. The closest familiar chain that I saw was a Starbucks that was located about a kilometer away. There also was a Carrefour grocery very close, which is a grocery chain that I fell in love with in Buenos Aires. The room was about average size for a European budget hotel room. Just a little bit larger than the full-size bed in the room, but large enough. There was a small television with CNN International and BBC and the bathroom was roomy enough. Nothing spectacular, but it was under $100/night, so I will take it. Oh, and internet. It was available, but you had to pay for it. Not too pricey, though, as I spent about $5/day.

In Marseille, I stayed in the New Hotel Select. It is located about four blocks south of the main train station. As I’ve written about before, the neighborhood is a little sketchy between the train station and the hotel, but wonderful in the other direction. When I arrived, I was given a rather large room with a huge bathroom. I was ecstatic for the price – around $80/night. On the second of three nights, though, the toilet stopped working. I was a little less ecstatic. I was moved to the room next door, which was much smaller than my previous room. My ecstasy had pretty much ended by this point. The hotel had free wifi, but only in the lobby, which sent me down to the lobby on a few occasions to play with the beautiful internet. The staff was friendly, but one thing that was really curious was that when I checked out, at 5:00 in the morning, I had to wake the night person up as he was sleeping on the floor behind the desk. I still got out on time, though, so whatever.

In Milan, I stayed at the Hotel Aladin. I’m not sure what to say about this place. It was cheap. So it’s got that going for it. Location-wise, it wasn’t ideal. It was a 25-minute walk to the nearest metro stop, so that was a pain. It was clean enough, I guess. The proprietors were an Asian couple that spoke a little English and were very friendly. That’s about where the good things ended, though. The shower stall was entirely too small for me, and I’m not a huge guy. Somehow, Expedia believes that the fact that there is a computer downstairs for public use during the five minutes a day the owner or his family wasn’t using it constitutes “high-speed internet service.” It didn’t help me none. The television had only local stations, nothing in any language other than Italian. The walls were thin, the room occasionally loud, and there was no breakfast. And when I say it was cheap, I mean only in terms of Milan. Thus far, it’s still the most expensive hotel I’ve stayed in on this leg of the road trip. Had I known, I probably would’ve stayed somewhere else, but I just wanted some place cheap that would allow me to see a match at the San Siro, so I guess the place wasn’t bad enough to ruin my trip, but I don’t think I could recommend it.

As a bonus for you, my special friend, here’s a fourth hotel review in this entry. Since I’m currently on a train from Pisa to Rome, I can comment on the Alessandro Della Spina Hotel, in which I stayed in Pisa. Again, I went cheap, but this was at least listed as a 3-star hotel (which aren’t as nice as 3-star hotels in the U.S., but aren’t bad). Here, my experience was much better than in Milan. Even though I didn’t have an address for the hotel, just a general idea that it was to the southeast of the train station, I found it easy enough and it was only about a 10-minute walk away. The staff was extremely friendly. Although the room was small, typical for European hotel rooms, it was very nicely decorated and very clean. Internet service wasn’t free, but it was there and after Milan, I was extremely thankful for that. It was about a 20-25 minute walk to the main tourist areas in Pisa, so the location was adequate for that as well. The hotel also served free breakfast. There was nothing hot, but they had two of my favorite luncheon meats – mortadella and salami, so there is no way I can complain. All-in-all, I have to say that I was rather pleased with my experience at this hotel.

There you go – the first of a series of hotel reviews for this trip. Tune in next time for Rome, Athens, Thessaloniki . . .