Rome
Our three-week trek is ending tomorrow, but at least we managed to finish on a high-note. Rome was just as enjoyable this time around as it was three years ago, and what's more, I got to check out some sights I had not gotten to last time around (San Giovanni Laterano, Domus Aurea) as well as revisit some of my faves, this time with Nesrine (the Forum and the Palatine, and the Vatican and Saint Pete's, naturally!). Nesrine is currently finishing her last minute shopping-spree, then it's off to see La Traviatta, and early to bed. We have to catch two flights tomorrow, but with any luck we should back to the old grind by tomorrow, Tuesday latest, sob. It seems that the more travelling I do, the more I want to do in the future. I guess the many fantastic memories I have of this three-week adventure will just have to tie me over until the next trip!
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Florence
What does one say about Florence? Well, for starters, it is as amazing as I remember it being the first time I was here. I bet Nesrine that she would like it even more than Venice, and I was right. Venice was great, don't get me wrong... but you can only take so many vaporetto rides before the novelty starts to wear off. I did get to see the palazzo, which I had also missed the first time around --what the hell did I actually do the first time I was in Venice, come to think of it? I was impressed by the Doge's appartments and the state offices, which was kind of the idea behind their whole design, I guess: to overawe any visitor with the military and economic power of the Venetian republic. I actually got a bit creeped out going over the "bridge of sighs", imagining how many poor bastards got a last look out towards the lagoon before they were locked up in those horrible dungeons!
We arrived in Florence last night by train, and had to do a bit of running around to secure lodgings. I had the absurd idea of staying in the same place I had rented last time I was in this city, but of course, the Bellavista was all booked up. Nesrine, who did not appreciate the stench of urine in the vestibule did not mind that the hotel turned out to be unavailable. Nevertheless, we did manage to find a place to stay just a stone's throw from the Palazzo Vecchio.
Our first evening in Florence turned out to be quite an exciting one: Nesrine was in the middle of a heated bargaining session with one of the many African street vendors who sell knock-off purses around this city when suddenly, a half-dozen cops appeared out of nowhere. We slithered away as they took the hapless entrepreneur into custody. Nesrine felt sick about the whole thing, since she blamed herself for distracting the fellow and thereby preventing his escape. I felt less sympathy. Getting pinched by the carabinieri is just one of the risks inherent in his chosen line of work. It comes with the territory.
This morning, after securing tickets to the Uffizi for tomorrow, we wandered across the Ponte Vecchio and did a bit of shopping. I also paid a return visit to the Brancacci chapel to see the Massacio frescoes depicting the life of Saint Peter. That was also worth a return visit, since I had had a chance to read more about the importance of these works (studied by renaissance masters for decades after they were done in the early 15th century) and they were every bit as impressive as the first time I had seen them.
Tomorrow, we hit the Uffizi, and then, on to Rome, for the big finish!
What does one say about Florence? Well, for starters, it is as amazing as I remember it being the first time I was here. I bet Nesrine that she would like it even more than Venice, and I was right. Venice was great, don't get me wrong... but you can only take so many vaporetto rides before the novelty starts to wear off. I did get to see the palazzo, which I had also missed the first time around --what the hell did I actually do the first time I was in Venice, come to think of it? I was impressed by the Doge's appartments and the state offices, which was kind of the idea behind their whole design, I guess: to overawe any visitor with the military and economic power of the Venetian republic. I actually got a bit creeped out going over the "bridge of sighs", imagining how many poor bastards got a last look out towards the lagoon before they were locked up in those horrible dungeons!
We arrived in Florence last night by train, and had to do a bit of running around to secure lodgings. I had the absurd idea of staying in the same place I had rented last time I was in this city, but of course, the Bellavista was all booked up. Nesrine, who did not appreciate the stench of urine in the vestibule did not mind that the hotel turned out to be unavailable. Nevertheless, we did manage to find a place to stay just a stone's throw from the Palazzo Vecchio.
Our first evening in Florence turned out to be quite an exciting one: Nesrine was in the middle of a heated bargaining session with one of the many African street vendors who sell knock-off purses around this city when suddenly, a half-dozen cops appeared out of nowhere. We slithered away as they took the hapless entrepreneur into custody. Nesrine felt sick about the whole thing, since she blamed herself for distracting the fellow and thereby preventing his escape. I felt less sympathy. Getting pinched by the carabinieri is just one of the risks inherent in his chosen line of work. It comes with the territory.
This morning, after securing tickets to the Uffizi for tomorrow, we wandered across the Ponte Vecchio and did a bit of shopping. I also paid a return visit to the Brancacci chapel to see the Massacio frescoes depicting the life of Saint Peter. That was also worth a return visit, since I had had a chance to read more about the importance of these works (studied by renaissance masters for decades after they were done in the early 15th century) and they were every bit as impressive as the first time I had seen them.
Tomorrow, we hit the Uffizi, and then, on to Rome, for the big finish!
Monday, September 10, 2007
A Fleeting Glimpse of Athens and on to Venice
That's about all we got... but it was enough. We left Santorini on a high-speed ship bound for Pireaus after 9 PM, knowing that we would not be getting to Athens until very late, but we were not 100% ready for the ordeal that followed.
The ship was great--unlike the last high-speed jet boat we had taken from Mykonos to Paros-- those Greeks know how to sail in style. The only downside was the heavy cloud of cigarette smoke wafting throughout the cabin and choking the young'uns. Smoking and non-smoking sections aboard these vessels are adjacent to the point of being almost interchangeable. Anyway, our trip and arrival at the port of Piaraeus was without incident. I wish I could say the same about the next couple of hours.
I have read that in the fourth century BC, the Athenians built walls around the road betweeen their city and its port of Piraeus during the Peloponesian war to keep marauding Spartans out and allow the passage of goods up to the city. If only they were still intact! Piraeus is the kind of ugly you see in post-apocalyptic movies starring Kurt Russell or Mel Gibson. Worse yet, the taxi drivers are relentless in their efforts to lure unsuspecting tourists into their cabs as they come off the vessels in the port, unaware that they will likely get fleeced. Nesrine and I ran the gauntlet for about 500 M, fending off the unwelcome attention of these shady characters, until we arrived at the bus stop. After a quick confab with some French Backpackers --I don't speak the Breton version of French, but I could almost understand 50% of what they were saying-- we hopped aboard a bus bound for central Athens.
The driver waved us away dismissively when we told him we didn't have tickets and offered to pay cash-money. Free trip downtown! Nice. Even though it was 1:30 in the a.m. by now, I could still see clearly enough outside the bus to be dismayed by what I saw. Whither the polis of Pericles? This place was a dump. After about 30 morose minutes trundling through a nightmare of urban decay, with the French girls, an assortment of weirdoes, trannies and hookers as our travelling companions, we jumped of as near to our hotel as we could, and headed out on foot after bidding the Bretonnes bonne chance. Downtown Athens at night is not for the faint-of-heart, and after several accidental detours into dark alleys among the labyrinthine streets, we soon lost our nerve. A cab was hailed, and we piled in, agreeing on the reasonable-sounding price of 5 Euros... mostly because I could not see a meter, and the cabbie looked reasonably unfriendly --but not outwardly hostile.
Ha. Barely 5 minutes later, we were in front of the King Jason hotel. What I had thought was the car radio turned out to be the meter. It read 2.60. Somewhat disgusted with myself, I handed the surly cabbie his fare, which included a 100% mark-up thanks to our earlier agreement, and we staggered into the hotel. It was 2:30. We had not been in our clean-but-unremarkable room more than 5 minutes before the wailing started from next door. There is a corner in hell where the tormented damned make such sounds, I'm quite certain, but these noises were coming from right next door. Evidently, some fellow was having a very bad night. I guessed it was a bad-breakup and a late-night drunk-dial gone wrong. Nesrine, the kinder soul, thought that the fellow was sick. We were starting to get a bit alarmed by the cries of anguish coming from the next room, when they suddenly stopped. This was our window of opportunity to get some shut-eye. It was 3 am, and we were getting up at 8 am to see the Acropolis. We took it. I resorted to ear-plugs.
The next morning, we were relieved to hear our neighbour was alive and well... no one could still be wailing so vigourously and have anything physically wrong with them. Mentally? Maybe... At any rate, we did not stick around to find out. We had just a couple of hours to see the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the Erectheion... all the old stuff that people go to Athens to see. The ruins of the Acropolis are spectacular, but everthing around it in a 10 km radius... I compared it to a pearl in the middle of a pile of manure. A crude analogy, but waddaya gonna do? I was on 4 hours sleep.
The trip to the airport that afternoon confirmed the prejudices I had developed the night before: Athens is huge. It is dirty. And it is afflicted with urban blight. I'll entertain contrary opinions when people show me any holiday snaps that do not feature the Parthenon or anything within a 1000-meter radius of it. Any takers?
After a bit of a white-knuckler on a flight with Alpi-Air --which I suspect is recycling the 19780s-era fleets of former soviet republics ( I swear I saw bulgarian instruction stickers in some areas of the plane) --we arrived in Venice. We took a vaporetto down the Grand Canal to our hotel, the Campiollo, which just a hop, skip and a jump away from the Piazza San Marco. We were promptly upgraded to a ridiculously fantastic apartment and spent a wonderful evening enjoying it -- it was closing on 8 pm by now and we were too exhausted to do any sight-seeing that evening.
Due to some poor planning, I never got a chance to visit Sain Mark's church last time I was here (ridiculous, I know), but I took care of that omission this morning, and it was worth a three-year wait. We saw amazing mosaics and those 4 big horses, cast 1800 years ago, that the crusaders stole from the hippodrome in Constantinople in the 1200s. I think San Marco is everything the Hagia Sofia was and might have been to this day, if history had played out a bit differently before the walls of Constantinople back in the 15th century. The rest of the time, we just kinda wandered around, gaping at everything. Venice kinda has that effect on people.
Some say that La Serenisima ain't the lady she used to be, but after Athens, she was looking pretty spectacular, let me tell ya!
That's about all we got... but it was enough. We left Santorini on a high-speed ship bound for Pireaus after 9 PM, knowing that we would not be getting to Athens until very late, but we were not 100% ready for the ordeal that followed.
The ship was great--unlike the last high-speed jet boat we had taken from Mykonos to Paros-- those Greeks know how to sail in style. The only downside was the heavy cloud of cigarette smoke wafting throughout the cabin and choking the young'uns. Smoking and non-smoking sections aboard these vessels are adjacent to the point of being almost interchangeable. Anyway, our trip and arrival at the port of Piaraeus was without incident. I wish I could say the same about the next couple of hours.
I have read that in the fourth century BC, the Athenians built walls around the road betweeen their city and its port of Piraeus during the Peloponesian war to keep marauding Spartans out and allow the passage of goods up to the city. If only they were still intact! Piraeus is the kind of ugly you see in post-apocalyptic movies starring Kurt Russell or Mel Gibson. Worse yet, the taxi drivers are relentless in their efforts to lure unsuspecting tourists into their cabs as they come off the vessels in the port, unaware that they will likely get fleeced. Nesrine and I ran the gauntlet for about 500 M, fending off the unwelcome attention of these shady characters, until we arrived at the bus stop. After a quick confab with some French Backpackers --I don't speak the Breton version of French, but I could almost understand 50% of what they were saying-- we hopped aboard a bus bound for central Athens.
The driver waved us away dismissively when we told him we didn't have tickets and offered to pay cash-money. Free trip downtown! Nice. Even though it was 1:30 in the a.m. by now, I could still see clearly enough outside the bus to be dismayed by what I saw. Whither the polis of Pericles? This place was a dump. After about 30 morose minutes trundling through a nightmare of urban decay, with the French girls, an assortment of weirdoes, trannies and hookers as our travelling companions, we jumped of as near to our hotel as we could, and headed out on foot after bidding the Bretonnes bonne chance. Downtown Athens at night is not for the faint-of-heart, and after several accidental detours into dark alleys among the labyrinthine streets, we soon lost our nerve. A cab was hailed, and we piled in, agreeing on the reasonable-sounding price of 5 Euros... mostly because I could not see a meter, and the cabbie looked reasonably unfriendly --but not outwardly hostile.
Ha. Barely 5 minutes later, we were in front of the King Jason hotel. What I had thought was the car radio turned out to be the meter. It read 2.60. Somewhat disgusted with myself, I handed the surly cabbie his fare, which included a 100% mark-up thanks to our earlier agreement, and we staggered into the hotel. It was 2:30. We had not been in our clean-but-unremarkable room more than 5 minutes before the wailing started from next door. There is a corner in hell where the tormented damned make such sounds, I'm quite certain, but these noises were coming from right next door. Evidently, some fellow was having a very bad night. I guessed it was a bad-breakup and a late-night drunk-dial gone wrong. Nesrine, the kinder soul, thought that the fellow was sick. We were starting to get a bit alarmed by the cries of anguish coming from the next room, when they suddenly stopped. This was our window of opportunity to get some shut-eye. It was 3 am, and we were getting up at 8 am to see the Acropolis. We took it. I resorted to ear-plugs.
The next morning, we were relieved to hear our neighbour was alive and well... no one could still be wailing so vigourously and have anything physically wrong with them. Mentally? Maybe... At any rate, we did not stick around to find out. We had just a couple of hours to see the Acropolis, the Parthenon, and the Erectheion... all the old stuff that people go to Athens to see. The ruins of the Acropolis are spectacular, but everthing around it in a 10 km radius... I compared it to a pearl in the middle of a pile of manure. A crude analogy, but waddaya gonna do? I was on 4 hours sleep.
The trip to the airport that afternoon confirmed the prejudices I had developed the night before: Athens is huge. It is dirty. And it is afflicted with urban blight. I'll entertain contrary opinions when people show me any holiday snaps that do not feature the Parthenon or anything within a 1000-meter radius of it. Any takers?
After a bit of a white-knuckler on a flight with Alpi-Air --which I suspect is recycling the 19780s-era fleets of former soviet republics ( I swear I saw bulgarian instruction stickers in some areas of the plane) --we arrived in Venice. We took a vaporetto down the Grand Canal to our hotel, the Campiollo, which just a hop, skip and a jump away from the Piazza San Marco. We were promptly upgraded to a ridiculously fantastic apartment and spent a wonderful evening enjoying it -- it was closing on 8 pm by now and we were too exhausted to do any sight-seeing that evening.
Due to some poor planning, I never got a chance to visit Sain Mark's church last time I was here (ridiculous, I know), but I took care of that omission this morning, and it was worth a three-year wait. We saw amazing mosaics and those 4 big horses, cast 1800 years ago, that the crusaders stole from the hippodrome in Constantinople in the 1200s. I think San Marco is everything the Hagia Sofia was and might have been to this day, if history had played out a bit differently before the walls of Constantinople back in the 15th century. The rest of the time, we just kinda wandered around, gaping at everything. Venice kinda has that effect on people.
Some say that La Serenisima ain't the lady she used to be, but after Athens, she was looking pretty spectacular, let me tell ya!
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