i see danger

In addition to all my Italian language learning, I have also picked up a few handy signs and gestures for getting by in the world. For example, and I have demonstrated for your education as well, the army sign for "I see" is fingers pointing to one's eyes, and the sign for "danger" a downward slashing motion. This comes in handy when you are leading infantry over a hill and you see the enemy approaching, or you are about to pass men who think it's fine to clap at you or suck their teeth at you, or if you see a really good gelato place. Or if you plan to sleep on the ground outside of Rome's central train station.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Heidi's original schedule called for her to get into Rome early in the morning and then catch a train to meet us in Florence. But stupid American Airlines canceled her flight and put her on a much later one that would get her into Rome fairly late the next night. So, since we had received an invitation from th ex-spies to come down to Rome, Brie and I decided to go down there, hang out with them in Rome, and ride a late night train back to Florence with Heidi, so she wouldn't be dealing with that stuff alone late at night. Yvette stayed in Florence since she was kind of tired of us anyway.

The time in Rome was fun. I finally made it to the Colosseum (photo courtesy of Coma's camera with a polarizing filter), after three trips with Yvette where I only looked at the outside, as well as Palatine Hill and the Roman Forum. But I didn't have the good book with me, and basically my sightseeing is useless without the good book. It was interesting to look at cool ruins but we didn't really know what we were looking at. After that we did a lot of walking around. Brie and I took them for lunch at our favorite place, which we call Santa Monica Pier, but which is really called Cafe Strega, or Witch Cafe, don't ask me why. I only know this because of reading Harry Potter.

When it was close to time for Heidi's train, we went to a gelato place near the Termini Station. Places near Termini station are not really the nicest places to eat. This one was interesting because we were drinking rancid wine (Brie and I were not drinking it, they were drinking it, maybe the Army makes you immune to it) and then an African man came up to us to sell belts, and Coma offered him some of the wine, which upset the gelateria owner, who started yelling at him, and then he started screaming back that we had given him the wine, and then everybody was yelling at everybody. So basically we started a riot.

Then we moved inside the Station to wait for a while, and finally I got a call from Heidi, and I checked the times to make sure we were still with the trains, and it seemed that we were. So then she got there, all safe and blonde, and we bought our tickets to Florence. And then as I was looking for the train number on the track schedule, I realized that I had somehow managed to buy tickets from a different Rome station to Florence, and that there was no way that we had enough time to get to Rome Tiburtina in time to catch the train.

But we looked on the schedule and there was a midnight train to Florence, so we decided to just take that and plead ignorance if the conductor checked. So we got on that train, said good-bye to the ex-spies again, and waited to leave. One of the ex-spies gestured through the window, very animatedly and specifically, that they were going to wait for the train to leave, but they didn't. And I know they didn't because we just sat there. For about twenty minutes, with nothing happening. And then I got off the train to check the track number and they turned off the lights inside the train. Because that train wasn't leaving for Florence, it was arriving from Florence. But I would like to point out that everyone looked at the board and we all thought it was leaving for Florence.

So then we got off the train. (In retrospect, maybe we should have just hid on it and waited until morning.) No ex-spies, no trains to Florence, nowhere to stay. I talked to a taxi driver about cab fare to Florence (just on the off chance that it wouldn't be hundreds of euros, which of course it was) and he said there was a train to Florence, still that night, from Tiburtina, and I said there wasn't and he said there was, and we got into a whole thing about it, (in Italian, which was by far my best example of speaking Italian this entire trip, it was like being stuck in Rome in the middle of the night woke my brain up, I think for a while there Heidi thought I could actually speak Italian) and finally he said if there's not a train to Florence that night we didn't have to pay for the fare to Tiburtina station. No treno, no paga.

So we went to Tiburtina station, in this unlicensed cab (I could feel the spirit of Yvette cringing), and when we get there the guy goes into the station with me, while Brie and Heidi stayed in the cab with the doors locked, which I'm sure they just loved. And we're looking at the schedule together, me and the unlicensed cabbie, still arguing, because THERE IS NO TRAIN TO FLORENCE. And he's trying to tell me that I should take the train to Milan because he's sure, he's just sure, that it stops in Florence, even though Florence is not listed as one of the stops.

So then I really don't know what to do, so I have him take us to the hotel where the ex-spies were staying so we could see if they have another room. Which they didn't, apparently, even though it was like, a Monday night and I didn't see anyone within miles of it. And the ex-spies weren't there. So I asked to use the internet, which I know they have because I'm looking at it behind the guy, and he won't let me use it, even though it's just a pay internet computer for guests. I almost killed him, but instead I let him live and left a note for the guys.

Heidi, by this time, is over it, in Heidispeak, and doesn't want to get a hotel room, but wants to walk across Rome with her duffel bag and camp out at the station until it's time to catch the first train. And, even though Heidi has never been to Rome before, and she hasn't really slept in five days, I say, yes, let's walk across Rome in the middle of the night and hang out at Termini, adjacent from Rape Alley, that sounds good to me.

Somewhere near the beginning of our trip we stopped at an arcade to use their bathroom. Brie and I went down to the basement, into this weird empty blue room that looked wet but wasn't, to find the bathroom, and Heidi stayed upstairs, where apparently the arcade clerk guy and some other guy got into a fistfight.

While we were in the basement, Coma, who had gotten my note from the clerk, called (surprisingly, since I think I may have called the clerk something not nice in Italian) and said they would meet us. So they did, us dragging Heidi's busting-open duffel bag along. And we took a taxi to the station, Steve McCann following in another cab since the driver wouldn't take five.

And so we get there... and the station is closed. Until morning. It's probably, I don't know, 1 at this point? I asked our cabbie if there was somewhere nearby that was open all night, and he said he thought there was a place on Cavour, so we walked to Cavour, and wandered around and didn't find anywhere, and finally we saw a "Pizza Kebab" place that was still open, and so we went in there and tried to thaw out. We all bought pizza (no kebabs unfortunately) and then the guy gave us all free baklava. Then he was closing, so I asked him if he knew somewhere that was open all night, and he said something like, he would normally close now but he would stay open. And then we waited for a while, maybe 45 minutes, and he was really just going to stay up all night with us, but then after a while we felt bad and said we would go, so he could close up, and he closed up as soon as we left. I was really kind of touched.

Then we were just really out of options. So we went and sat outside Termini. And I was so glad we had the ex-spies with us, because that is not a cool place to hang out. And we were freezing. This is a picture of me and Heidi huddling for warmth.

Finally at about 4:30 they opened the station so we could at least sit on the floor inside, and then we said good-bye to Coma and Steve McCann for the third time, and left for Florence at about 6:30. Without getting murdered or freezing to death or anything.

they got soul but they're not soldiers, or: how we visited florence and didn't see the david

I'm taking some time to catch up a bit on here as Brie proofreads my 30-page arbitration statement that I could not be more sick of. (If she were proofing this I would change it to, 'of which I could not be more sick.') Hopefully they'll think this first draft is outstanding and I will spend no more of my time in Italy working. I will spend it blogging, instead.

We arrived in Florence fairly late in the evening. I had reserved a room in an apartment by email earlier that week, and I called
to say we were going to be late. The woman who answered, Marcella, spoke only Italian, with a little smattering of English, and didn't have my reservation. So that was a fun little test of my Italian. We got it worked out (she said, "oh, Rick Steves!" at one point) and we arrived around nine. The room was nice, a little suite. It had been her daughter's room. After a little while Marcella came in with the phone. She was talking to an American who she couldn't understand and wanted me to translate for her. So that was interesting. Her Italianglish was really cute, but I don't know if I can get across how she talked without being there to imitate her. She kept asking me if I had called my mamma.

Brie and I went for a walk that night but didn't find much since we didn't take a map and didn't really know where we were going. The next day, we decided to take it a little easy, especially considering we had so long in Florence, and just relax and take care of some things. We bought food at the Central Market, where I was rudely clapped at, and then we went to do some laundry. We walked to the laundromat in the neighbhorhood, and then Brie and I went to get some coffee. There were three guys and an older man already in the cafe, who apparently were interested in the fact that Brie couldn't tell what the white substance (shown in the picture at left) was, and I had to taste it before she would put it in her coffee. We have since put "indentifying condiments" on her list of bottom five skills. If you're playing along at home, the answer was... sugar. Sugar, folks.

Brie, utilizing her effortless ability to attract older Italian men, eventually lured the man over. It was his birthday, he told us. This is his line with women. Would we come over and join him? He took Brie's hand so she couldn't really say no. We had been trying to figure out if the guys with him were Italian or not (they looked American but then one of them started speaking perfect Italian to Antonio) and so we had that answered. They were American, but one of them, Dexter, had been living in Italy off and on for years. We talked to them for a while, and after Antonio asked Brie why she was wearing snow boots and asked me why I was covering myself up with a scarf, we decided to rejoin Yvette. But we made plans to meet the Americans, sans Antonio, that night at the Tavern Jock, the Scottish Pub where Dexter worked. Because the guys just finished being special Black Ops spies in the army, I am not allowed to reveal their full names. I will call them only "Coma" and "Steve McCann."

The next day, despite the best efforts of the Tavern Jock, Brie and I were able to make it to Lucca, a little town about an hour away by train. Yvette stayed to explore Florence. There was an incident at the train station which involved me yelling, "Six minutes, Brie, you have six minutes! Go, go, go!" I feel like I should mention it, because it happened, but I don't want to talk about it.

Lucca was lovely. The whole town is encircled by a wall, built during the Middle Ages and fortified during the Renaissance. It's so wide that there's a little paved road along the top of the wall, with trees. We rented bikes for 2.50€ and rode around the top of the wall for an hour. It was so great, a gorgeous day. Definitely one of my favorite things of the whole trip.

We came back that evening and met Yvette and the two ex-spies for dinner at a place called, I think, Marone's, where I had amazing steak, and I don't even like steak that much normally, but it had just been a trip of too much pasta and pizza. But Coma and S.M. wouldn't shut up about the lunch place they ate at every day, Mario's, the best restaurant ever, blah blah blah, they laughed, they cried, it was better than the David.

So the next day we went with them to Mario's. And I have to admit, it was pretty fun, even though by this point in the trip I could have happily fasted for a week. Brie ate from a communal plate of beans, I'm not even kidding with you, so that was exciting in and of itself. It's one of those really Italian places where you don't know what you're ordering and the waitstaff kisses people on the cheek and someone always is filling your wine glass. Antonio got the whole table to sing "Happy Birthday A Te" to me. Maybe he thought I wanted to pick up women.

After lunch I was determined to see some sort of Renaissance Florentine art, so I went to the Bargello Museum by myself. Yvette said she would go but apparently when I said "art" she thought I said "shopping" and managed to lose me somewhere near San Lorenzo's Market. The Bargello's most famous piece is Donatello's David, you know, the kind of froofy one where he looks like he's playing dress up in his Grandmother's Easter hat. It was nice to be in the nearly-empty museum in the cool and quiet. I sat in the courtyard for a while and listened to distant Italian voices bouncing off the cobblestones.

After bidding farewell to the Tavern Jock and Coma and Steve McCann that night, we were up bright and late the next morning, ready to greet the new member of our party and see all that Renaissance stuff we hadn't been doing. But it was not to be.

isle of sand and fog

The morning we had to leave the South, it had become sunny outside, so we decided to go to Capri on our way to Florence. I was nervous about all the connections we would have to make that day in order to get to Florence in time to check in that night, but we thought it was worth it. We checked our bags at our B&B and walked down to the ferry landing at 8. After trying to get on a boat to Naples (it just seemed like the direction everyone was heading in) we found the right landing and boarded our little boat to the island. I took a picture of this man fishing in the harbor because he was just so Driftwood.

We arrived on the island, which I thought looked like a kind of older, Italian version of Catalina, and found the boats for the Grotta Azzurra... the Blue Grotto. We boarded a boat with a group of high schoolers from a Swiss boarding school for children of diplomats, and a Japanese tour group, and rode around to the other side of the island. Then we climbed off the boat into little canoes in groups of four or five, and a rower took us into the grotto.

We were fortunate that the grotto was even open that day, because it's closed often due to high tides or choppy waves. This actually was a high tide day, though apparently not too high for the rowers to work. We sat on the floor of the canoe, and as we approached the cave entrance, the rower told us to lie down. I couldn't really tell from the larger boat just how small the entrance was, and I had a sudden vision of not being able to get my head down enough and being decapitated. Or worse, just de-faced. I was in the far back and lying down basically meant just leaning back against the end of the canoe, not really getting below head level that much. It was such a weird feeling going through so quickly with the roof of the opening an inch or two from my face, but we got through with no defacements. (I had a little rougher time on the way out.)

Rowing around inside the grotto was really kind of amazing. The limestone on the sea floor reflects sunlight as a brilliant, almost unearthly blue color. The rower sang O Sole Mio and another Italian song that I didn't recognize, and the acoustics made it beautiful and haunting. Apparently after 4:00 in the afternoon, the rowers stop working and you can just go into the grotto and swim. It would be freezing to do it in February but swimming there in the summer is going on my list of Things To Do Before I Die. This is the video Brie took in the grotto, courtesy of my wonderful and talented brother, who sized it down for us. (Ryan, I will buy you a gelato. And by "you" I mean "me".)

On the way out, we had to lie down again, and there must have been a chain attached to the cave wall to let the rowers pull the canoes through, because suddenly I felt a really heavy chain being dragged quickly across my face. It startled me more than it hurt me (I was still worried about losing my nose) but I did have a red welty streak across my forehead and cheek for the rest of the day.

Back on the island, we found a little beach, and saw the sun, the for-real sun, for what seemed like the first time since I got here. It was still pretty chilly so we refrained from stripping down and running around yelling with giddiness. Brie skipped some rocks. I tried to skip some rocks. I think I made one skip once. After a while I started to worry we would miss our bus to Anacapri, one of the two little towns on the island, so I walked up the hill to check. Our bus was just pulling up, so I yelled for Brie and Yvette to run to where I was, and also to bring the coat and camera and bag that I had left on the beach. They thought this was deliberate on my part but I promise it just worked out that way.

We took the little bus up to near the top of the island, with some great views of the town and the water. Brie and I stood up when an older couple got on the bus, but this was nothing doing for Yvette. She did say she thought it was kind of cute and old world of us.

In Anacapri, which was really cute, we walked around for a while looking for the chairlift to Mt. Solare (recommended by the GB), gave up, and then found it. It was a twelve minute ride up to the top of the mountain, and it was supposed to be the best view of the island. We got on these little individual seats and rode to the top. It was fun even just going up, really quiet. We passed houses and some vineyards, and it got slowly colder as we crept up into the clouds. This is Brienne's Mary Poppins picture from the way down, possibly my favorite photograph so far.

As you may have guessed from that photograph, the views of the island from the top of the mountain were not exactly spectacular. I would say they were more... white. It was actually kind of cool, though. It had a very distant and lonely feel, something I haven't seen much of this trip, and it was kind cool to look down and see nothing but clouds. It reminded me of that scene in Magician's Nephew when Jill looks off the edge of the cliff and sees Eustace falling through the clouds. So I pushed Brie off.

After Brie was spirited away by Aslan, Yvette and I went out to eat at a place called American Bar, where the waiter was wearing a sweatshirt that said "Hot Buttered", which I wish we had gotten a picture of. Yvette makes fun of me, but sometimes I get tired of Italian food. So I got a "hamburgher", ok? So sue me. It was delicious. OK, so it wasn't delicious, but it seemed like it was because it was a freaking hamburger.

After that, we waited at the bus stop to go back down to the marina, which involved me yelling frantically for Yvette, who was shopping, when the bus came, and Yvette yelling "Coming!" and grabbing the little limoncello shot glasses she was buying out of the shopkeeper's hands and racing for the bus, and us boarding the bus at the last second, only to find it was the wrong bus. And then we got on the right bus, and then the right ferry, and then the right train to Florence, which seemed even then like an unbelievably lucky string of events... and that is the end of our time in Southern Italy.

so you want to be american

Brie and I are in Rome now, ready to begin the more internal part of the trip. This means more blogging, as I've been reunited with my favorite friendly neighborhood internet joint and I don't feel like I should be seeing the sights all day. I do have an arbitration that I need to start working on, and I will be taking gelato breaks, but I'll still catch you up on all our events, so don't you worry your pretty little heads.

Where was I... oh, yes, I was two weeks ago. Our second day in the South, we decided to take a bus ride down the coast to Amalfi. We scattered through the bus so we could each have a window seat without graffiti (because of the good book we were sure to sit on the ocean side). It was a beautiful, windy hour-and-a-half drive. That's windy as in hairpin turns, not breezy, for those of you reading aloud. Even through my increasingly incapacitating nausea, I could tell it was lovely. Here is proof. When we got off in Amalfi Brie didn't feel so hot either so I felt at least justified in my illness. (Mom, you would have LOVED it.)

We got off in Amalfi, and decided to take a walk into the next town of Atrani. The good book described this as a "stroll", something that Yvette would bring up as evidence against the accuracy of the GB for the rest of her time in Italy. Here are some pics from the walk to Atrani, which was basically 100% stairs in a narrow alleyway between buildings. Tiring but still really quaint. This is the step where Brie fell and nearly broke her elbow. She doesn't read my blog now that she's here so she won't know that I'm posting this.

When we got to Atrani, we ate at a little pizzeria on the water. Waves kept coming up and crashing over the patio edge near the lamppost, which was beautiful, but I couldn't catch it. Brie did discover one of her top five skills ("predicting waves"... full list to be disclosed in a later post), but unfortunately "listening to Brie" is in my bottom five, which is why I don't have a lovely water crashing over a lamppost picture. I had a local pasta, called... sciocolialiagica, or something. It was seafood pasta, it was great. Yvette actually took a picture of it, which I was going to include, but this post is kind of picture-heavy. Probably because this was two weeks ago, so my ridiculously abysmal memory is starting to chip away at the day.

Then we "strolled" back to Amalfi and kind of meandered around the city. Or, Yvette kind of meandered around and Brie and I sat in front of a church. Unfortunately, I think that about set the tone for my energy level for the rest of our traveling. I did get one of several "Brie being introspective" pictures, and this next one, which I kind of like but wish I had some sort of program so I could crop it. In case you can't tell, it's a reflection of a "limoncello" sign in a puddle.

After that we tried to figure out the bus system to get back to Sorrento. (Struggling to figure out how to get around has been somewhat of a recurring theme.) We were standing in the parking lot talking and we started walking back towards the town when Brie said, "I think we're about to get silly strung." We turned around (Yvette was already turned around glaring, she has an uncanny sense of danger, as well as an ability to ward it off with just a look) and a small gang of teenagers was right behind us holding up cans of what turned out to be shaving cream. I don't know what Brie's face looked like, but I was doing my best I COULD DESTROY YOU expression, and they suddenly peeled back, laughing. This is an out of focus picture of their backs, just to capture the moment.

While we were waiting in the parking lot, an older Italian man came up to us and started talking. Yvette was flashing us "danger will robinson" eyes mixed with "I'm bored" eyes, and eventually wandered off, leaving Brie and I to listen to a story that started out ok, about a girl from Los Angeles that he met when he was a front desk clerk at a hotel decades ago, but whom was stolen by his friend Giovanni the bartender who always gave the pretty girls free champagne, and then morphed into something that neither one of us could follow. After the story, he invited us for coffee, which we decided to do, because we're crazy like that.

At the coffeeshop, Angelo, as he was called by about twenty people who said "ciao" to him on the way, bought us cappucini and had himself an extra strong coffee. This is what coffee looks like in Italy. Try to use his fingers as a size reference. The espresso must have perked him up, because he started singing to us. Our favorite was called "So You Want to Be American" about an Italian boy during the war trying to get girls by dressing up as an American soldier, but I'm not sure that we got that one on video. I actually don't have sound here so I don't know which one this was. Maybe someone can watch it and tell me.

After that we headed back to the square, and Angelo said he was going to go wait on the bus. He walked towards the buses, and we found Yvette, who was watching a couple of gigantic, gorgeous half-naked Brazilian women dance in a crowd. (Still Carnevale.) After a little while, we went to get on the bus ourselves, and found all of them empty. We were afraid to ask anyone if they had seen Angelo, because we thought they would say, "Oh, a man named Angelo? With a green coat? But... Angelo died in a bus accident here 45 years ago."