Hungary & Italy Part 2 of 2 (Italy)

 

Alright, now that we’re leaving Istanbul, I can finally start to write about Italy.  Technically, I’m still sort of on schedule. I’m still in the next country writing about the previous country.  Of course, none of that will be true in a few hours, but hey… at least I started on time!

So, I mentioned before, but Italy was a bit too rushed.  I think if we had to do it over again, maybe a minimum of 5 days in each city would have been enough.  Any less than that, and you feel like you can’t relax!   Also, in our first stop there, Padova, we didn’t have Wifi internet, so it was a bit more challenging to research and plan ahead.  Fortunately, our hosts were VERY lovely people, and they let us borrow their computer a few times so we could check email and buy train tickets (which they helped us figure out how to do).

But despite all that… we really did enjoy Italy!  I think our favorite spot was probably Venice.   Every city had things we enjoyed very much, of course, but there’s just something magical about Venice as a whole that really captured our hearts.  They place feels like a real-life Disneyland!

From Padova, you take a 1-hour train to Venice.  It costs 4 Euros each (about $5 or 2500 colones).  The train drops off right at the main canal, so when you get out of the train station… WHAM!  VENICE!  You are immediately surrounded by gorgeous buildings, beautiful bridges, and bright green waterways, full of all the various canal boats:  Gondolas, ferries, motor boats and water taxis.  And of course, you’re also surrounded by thousands of people.  Venice is a VERY popular tourist destination.  But you know what?  It’s totally worth it.

Following the suggestions of our hosts in Padova, Davide and Alessandra, we decided our first task was NOT to see any specific places, but just to get lost.  Getting lost in Venice is an official tourist experience.   To start with, there are signs EVERYWHERE that tell you which way to go to get to the most popular buildings and churches.  But even then, it is NOT possible to get directly or efficiently from Point A to Point B.  If you’re in a hurry, you’re screwed.  Either you’re going to be late, or you’re going to pay through the nose for a water taxi (as they say in Costa Rica, es una renta.  It’s a rent payment).  A “Vaporetto”, which is like a water… bus system… costs 7 Euros per person (almost $9 or 4500 colones), and they PACK people onto those things like sardines.  No fun at all!  So, if you’re doing it right, you skip the Vaporetto, and you get lost.  And you enjoy it.  And you get there eventually.  Or you get somewhere else, and you enjoy that instead, for the day.

So, on our first day, we followed instructions, and we just wandered, with no particular destination in mind.  We loved every minute of it! It was even sunny and beautiful all day for us.  We did see one famous sight, the Realto Bridge, which has lots of shops on it, but really was underwhelming, because they’ve done a really shitty job of taking care of it lately.  But in any case, we went into every little back alley we could find, and just enjoyed all the buildings, and all the lights and shadows and waterways and bridges, and smelled the flowers*, and just absorbed the sights and sounds of the place. 

*On occasion, you also can’t avoid smelling the water.  You’ll wish you hadn’t, though, since it’s full of untreated sewage.  But as long as the heat isn’t too bad, you’ll probably only experience the occasional whiff.  Oddly, drinking from the many water fountains is perfectly fine, and heavily inspected.  But do NOT fall in the canals.  It would be bad.   Moral of this story?  Don’t go to Venice when it’s hot.  Also don’t go on a heavy rain day, when the water is known to overflow and flood some areas.

Speaking of sounds of the place, within 5 minutes of walking away from the train station on our first day (a Sunday), we heard singing.  There was this random men’s chorus just singing in a corner.  There were about 20 guys in that group, and they were WONDERFUL!  And they weren’t even asking for donations!  We waited until the end of their set, and they never even passed a hat (for donations), they just moved on to another spot.  They were so good, we followed them.  And on the way, we saw ANOTHER chorus… and another and another.  They were all over the place!  Some all men, some all women, some mixed.  All were very good. 

Our hosts didn’t know about them, but between us all, we guessed that maybe the City of Venice just pays them to walk around and create magical little moments for people.  Whatever the case, it was certainly a magical experience for us.  That first chorus especially was so good, they made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.  I got a video or two of some of them.  Of course I couldn’t capture everything, but… I think you can at least get an idea (we’ll post that to youtube soon).

 

On our second day there, we decided that if we only had a couple days to spend in Venice, maybe we should at least TRY to see one of the most famous sights, San Marcos Square.  Remember when I said it was impossible to get anywhere easily?  San Marcos was our lesson for that.  We HAD a map, and we believe we took the most direct walking route POSSIBLE to get there, but it still took us TWO HOURS.  And those were not enjoyable hours.  Those hours were walking fast, through the crowded, busy tourist main streets, stopping to check the map over and over.   This meant we did NOT get to slow down and enjoy all the side alleys, or smell any flowers (we figured we could at least do that on our way back).   That day, we just wanted to see “the big thing”.  Well we got there eventually… and the big church that was there, that was free to see, had a big line, 3 days long.  So after all that, we couldn’t even go in.    Of course, by this point, we were tired, hot, hungry, annoyed from the un-ending crowds, and we had to pee terribly, because public bathrooms there are few, far-between, and cost money (the trick is to buy a coffee somewhere, but we didn’t have time for that).  And then, just as we were at least taking our consolation prize of snapping some photos from the outside of the church and the square, the sky opened up and we got a BIG aguacero (rainstorm from hell).  In Costa Rica, they’d call this “el colmo”… basically, the last straw.  The ONE thing you didn’t need to make your day truly perfect in how wrong it had gone.

We tried to go into a museum and see if they had a bathroom, but no… not without paid admission.  We surrendered and decided to call it quits for the day.  Also, there was no affordable food near-by; only expensive restaurants, because this was of course the tourist center of the city. We were getting miserably soaked. We had seen signs for a Chinese restaurant on the way, so we hunted that down.  They were also expensive, but at least cheap enough that we could afford to share a single plate, so we could use their bathroom, and get out of the rain for a few minutes. 

Well, we made it there, and even they were pretty expensive.  So we ordered a plate to share, so we could at least use the restroom and not be starving.  And you know what?  They actually bitched at us for only getting one plate!  Screw YOU, people!  It’s not like you were stuffed with customers when we came!  At least we’re buying SOMETHING!  So, we “enjoyed” our Shitty Fried Rice (like Chicken Fried Rice, but with no flavor), and got the hell out.

We went back the next day, and went back to the original idea of not having a real plan.  We wandered, we saw some of the more out of the way places, and we saw the edges of the city and a big port where some of the bigger boats could dock.  We even saw an old sailing ship that the Italian navy still apparently uses for training.

We even found ourselves a really cool exhibit about Da Vinci’s inventions. Basically, whoever made this exhibit had taken a lot of his drawings, and built them up! They were not all life-size, but they were all pretty darned cool. Some were models of basic principles, like a fly-wheel (a machine that stores spinning energy), a water screw (a device that you turn to easily lift water), or demos of various pulley systems. Some others were miniatures of some pretty vicious military weapons he made, like a sort of tank with 20 spinning cannons on top, or a device to knock ladders off of castle walls. They also had a REALLY cool design for an instrument he made, which was a sort of mini guitar on one side, and the head of a dragon on the other (see the dragon’s face in the mirror).   All in all, a very cool museum.

A bit about Padova, now.  Padova is a fairly small, mostly residential town (as far as we could tell), but one that’s well-connected by train.  It’s also completely OVERFLOWING with Jasmine!  So much so, that very often, that wonderful fragrance just smacks you right in the face as you’re walking down the street.  Of course, it helped that we had the wonderful fortune of arriving there right at the peak of the bloom, which apparently lasts less than a month.  Yay us!

So, in between our Venice visits, we spent our evenings with our hosts Davide and Alessandra, eating some of the best gelato of our lives, learning how to cook a really yummy risotto, and even making it to a neat local festival they  found for us in their neighborhood.  Also, while walking through their neighborhood, they showed us a really cool thing they have there, which they (our hosts), call a “robot cow”.  Basically, it’s a vending machine that sells fresh, whole milk (unpasteurized, even)!  You can buy a bottle there, or bring your own.  The milk is pretty cheap, and it’s supplied by local farmers every day (in fact, a few times a day).   The milk is also DELICIOUS!  I bought a couple liters. 

So, that’s enough about Venice, I guess.  Let’s move on to Florence, Pisa and Rome.   First of all, though, the trip TO Florence was pretty sweet!  We finally got to ride in one of the SUPER fancy high speed trains!  I never felt like we were going super fast, but perhaps that’s because they’re just so damned smooth.  They’re designed so the whole train leans into the turns, to make the ride more comfortable.  Still, the trip was plenty gorgeous besides. 

At any rate, Florence was cool, and certainly very pretty, but it wasn’t our favorite place.  Partly, this was because here we finally broke our perfect couch-surfing streak, and had to spring for a hostel.  Well, even taking a couple beds in a 12-person mixed dorm, still cost us just under $50/night for the two of us.  For reference, our planned budget for each day on this trip is $50/day to cover EVERYTHING, including food, local busses, entertainment, etc.  So, blowing that all on a hostel really sucked. But, that’s life. 

The result of all that, though, was that we didn’t feel like we could actually afford to eat anywhere fancy. On top of that, te museums were INCREDIBLY expensive, so we tried to keep our touristing to stuff we could see for free.   Jime and I can appreciate beautiful art, but we are not exactly huge art fans, so this was not a life-long dream for us to see.  Plus, we knew we were going to go to the Vatican museum.  Oh, and to top it all off, I had my head-lamp stolen from the hostel.  Bastards.

Meanwhile, we also got to spend a lot of time with an old friend of Jimena’s from grade school, Vanessa, which was super cool.  She took us on a few walks through the city, and up to a park on top of a hill with a great view of the city below.  We even got to spend time with her family, just hanging out in a little piazza near our hostel.  Especially since we didn’t have a couchsurfing arrangement for this city, it was really nice having that personal contact to make us feel a bit more connected.

In Florence we mostly walked around, saw all sorts of stuff from the outside, saw a really cool bridge, and went into one really gigantic church. We did enjoy some very fine picnicking, though, after Vanessa told us about the Central Market, which had all sorts of really great meats and cheeses and breads. When you’re only buying enough for a sandwich, even we could afford a bit of the fancy stuff. :)

(pretty train)

(pretty fountain)

(a pretty mannequin museum, apparently featuring mannequin Cylons)

(Cheeeese!!)

While we were in Florence, we of course took a half-day trip out to Pisa, to see the Leaning Tower.   We had been warned by many folks that there was really nothing else in Pisa worth seeing for a tourist (Pisa disagrees, of course, as they have maps and signs for several different things that we didn’t care about).  So, a half day was perfect.  Well, we can now confirm for you that yep… the tower is indeed leaning.  It’s weird!  It’s also very cool.  And, we were apparently very lucky in our timing, because up until very recently, we learned, the tower has been under continuous re-construction for about the last 10 years.  During that time, it was covered with scaffolding, so you couldn’t see the whole thing.  Well, for us, it was perfect!  You can even climb to the top now, if you want to pay $20 and wait for 6 hours.  We just decided to watch from below.  We also chose to do all of the obligatory “hold up/knock down the tower” type poses that, honestly, are required of any tourist with even the SLIGHTEST sense of humor.  Yes, everybody does it.  Yes, you have to do it too when you go there, or you fail at life.

After Florence, it was off to Rome.  One more excuse to ride a bullet train.  :)  They don’t get old for me.  Rome was also a non-couchsurfing city for us, but we did try something a bit more interesting than a hostel.  Jimena remembered about this thing called AirBnB.  Basically, it’s just like couchsurfing, but it’s paid.  You pay to stay in a room in somebody’s house.  And, as it happens, in Rome, the costs for a hostel were the same as for the room we found with AirBnB, so AirBnB it was.

It was nice, actually.  Our host, Susanna, was super friendly, sweet, knew the city well, and welcomed us on arrival with a map, and pointed out several locations close by for food and groceries and even primary bus routes.  Plus, while we were there, she very kindly bought us breakfast a couple times, and even let us join in on a dinner party she had, which was sort of a lesson on how to make a proper Carbonara sauce (hint:  there is no cream in it, but there is LOTS of bacon!  Well, they use a special cured kind of meat that’s fancier than bacon, but bacon will do).  A very delicious lesson indeed!

(I don’t care what you call it.  It’s… BAACOOOON!!)

As for the city of Rome, I’d say we enjoyed that more than Florence.  Despite serious atheist concerns from Jimena, we saw the Vatican Museum, and no, the church did not get struck by lightning. The Vatican museum had one cool room, which was the ancient Egypt exhibit, featuring artifacts dating as far back as 2400 BC.  But the rest of the museum was less interesting to us.  A lot of statues by people nobody knows about, with no explanations.  Yeah, yeah, they’re pretty.  Whatever.  Honestly, other than the Egypt rooms, this is one of the worst curated museums we’ve ever seen.  And, you have to go through ALLLL of it before you can get to the Sistine Chapel, which is at the end.

(Mmmmm  mummies!)

(This statue had no name.  I name him Leatherus Facecus, III)

The Sistine Chapel is pretty incredible.  Again, we had good timing here, but they just recently finished restoring all the paintings!  So, whereas over the past decades, the colors have been faded, dark, and covered in soot and dirt, they were now vibrant, colorful, and spectacular!  This apparently came with a catch though.  The catch is that they no longer allow photography.  Apparently the restoration was financed by a Japanese company, and as payment, that company now owns the rights to all photographs of the place!  This was a FANTASTICALLY stupid deal for them to make.  Jimena looked it up, and it seems the restoration was only around $3 million!  There’s no way either Italy, the Vatican, or even Rome couldn’t have paid for that, and reaped a profit in short order.  But nevermind all that.  They can yell “No photos!” all they want.  Nobody listens.

(Let’s see how long it takes them to “Cease and Desist” me.)

Oh, and interestingly, we learned that if you take the “right door” (which is supposed to only be for guided tours), instead of the “left door”, when you leave the Sistine Chapel, you exit right next to St Peter’s Basilica, one of the biggest and grandest cathedrals in the world, where the Pope gives occasional sermons, and where they apparently crowned Charlemagne as the first Emperor of Rome.  Neat church!  There are many other interesting and bizarre facts about this church, but I won’t go into them here.  It is mighty pretty, though!

(I swear the streaming sunbursts were there when we arrived)

We also saw the Colosseum, and even took a special tour that let us go underground as well as up to the higher floors. The tour guide sucked balls, and was too fast and boring as hell. But at least he gave us access to the cool places. Eventually we just started ignoring him entirely and just took the time to take cool pictures (which he would have left no time for, because he sucked).

We spent our last day in Rome wandering through the ruins of the Roman Forum, and of “Palatine Hill”.  Palatine hill was much prettier.  It’s a beautiful landscape of ancient buildings covered with growth of new wild flowers and some planned gardens.   It also has some pretty great views of the Colosseum next door. In the end, it was just a lovely quiet day, and was a great way to spend our last day in Italy.