Italy

NAPLES, ITALY: Mon, 25 Mar 2002 05:01:21

Walking around Naples, occasionally eating

Buongiorno!  Tortellini!  Sfogliatelle!

We woke up early a couple of days ago in Darwin, packed our stuff, ran some errands and by 4 pm we were on a flight to Singapore.  We were wearing t-shirts, shorts and sandals. We had a 3 hour layover in the monstrosity that is the Singapore airport, and somehow got onto the flight through standby -- we got the last seats on the plane.  The flight left at 11 pm.  That's 3 pm Italy time.  At 1 am Italy time we were woken up for breakfast.  Not only was it disgusting (airplane food and frittata should never be used in the same sentence), but it is also the reason that now we are walking jet lagged zombies.

On the plane, we chatted with Achim from Frankenthal about how funny Italians are.  We're staying at his house to continue the conversation after we have more observational experiences. 

At the Frankfurt airport, we checked in for our flight to Rome, but were told we were not actually confirmed, and that the flight was overbooked so sorry.  We would have to stay overnight somewhere in Frankfurt.  Or maybe not... all of a sudden, some guy with a mustache gives her a piece of paper, she types and types and says, "You can have their seats."  We look at each other, think about asking a question beginning with "what about them" and then decide to follow the dog-eat-dog philosophy of life and take the darn seats.  The flight attendants were funny in a mean sort of way, like when they boxed in a kid on the way to the bathroom and kept shoving him around but didn't let him pee.  And like when they threw down trays of food at us, and then took them away before we were even half way done.  And like how they threw glasses of water at everyone's tables, and caused half the seated guests to look like they peed in their pants.  But such is Alitalia.  Don't fly with them if you can help yourself.

So in Rome we realized that Italians don't speak English, except one guy who kept giving us directions to Napoli: "Go up, go up, to Termini!  Termini!  To Napoli, go up, then Termini!  All to Termini!!" (arms flying everywhere, of course).  We told ourselves, "Hurrah! we are traveling again!"  and we went up stairs, figured out that there is a train that goes to a place called Termini and tried to buy a ticket.  Then we spied on what the other passengers did with their ticket.  They put it into a yellow box.  So we followed suit.  And then we got on the train and went to Termini.  Where we got onto another train and somehow found seats by following an African cloth merchant from Maryland, and bought a ticket and two hours later we were in Napoli with no place to sleep.

We bought a phone card, called sixteen places, got a reservation, and then went with a tout who called to us three steps later.  Touts.  Now we really feel at home.   By the time we were showered and clean from airplane smell, we felt ready to go to sleep, after a respectable 13-hour day.  Upon looking at our watch we realized the daunting truth: It was only 3 pm.  We walked around, trying to stay awake until nine.  We made it to eight, which isn't bad, but we woke up at 4 am this morning.

But now here's the best part... food.  There's a lot of it, it's all delicious, and it's all cheap.  We went to a really nice-looking pizzeria (mange molto bonno!) and split a huge, plate-over-flowing pizza for five bucks.  And then came the gelato.  Heavenly creamy goodness like we have had is not to be had elsewhere.  We decided to take it upon ourselves to try every gelateria in Italy.  For one buck each, we got a scoop of caffe and a scoop of hazelnut, which was so incredible that on the walk back in freezing cold weather, we kept saying "We thud thtop eating thith.  I can't feel my mout."

            Which brings us to the next point.  remember that when we left Australia, we were sweating buckets in minimal clothing.  When we arrived in Italy we almost froze.  In fact, we are not equipped for a European winter/spring.  We are wearing every piece of clothing we own, plus four pairs of underwear (yes, that makes a total of 8), and we are still shivering.  We bought Michael some clothes to make up for his shortage of non-t-shirts.

And we had a weird experience, which we didn't fully appreciate until we put it into words.

We saw a sign in Arabic and walked into the store, chatted with the guy for a bit, then left.  But that's just the superficial look.  Upon telling this man we were from California, he began to serenade us in Italian.  So there we were, in a halal meat shop in Naples, listening to the melodic voice of a Moroccan who speaks Maltese as well as four or five other languages (his German is a bit shaky, he said), staring at half-eaten pumpkin seeds lying in his mouth.  Then at dinner, we went looking for a pizza place, and found it was closed.  In front of it stood a car, and next to it a man with a big dog, and the man seemed to be attempting to break into the car (either that or he forgot his keys and was using his wire-thingy to get into his legally owned car).  "Perfect" we thought, "a guy with a big dog" and so we turned to him and asked him when the restaurant opens.  Somewhere between our Italian and his English we understood that the place opens at 8 am , and then he asked us where we were from.  California, eh?  We were serenaded with the same song as the Moroccan dude.   And then.... Gelato in hand, we walked into our hotel and the guy who was just starting the night shift heard from the other guy that we were from California.  You'll never guess what happened next...

"Sogno California! La dee la dee da."

He serenaded us again.  how fun. :)

So today we walked around Naples eating pastries, pizzas, and other snacks, drinking coffee and occasionally doing some sight seeing.  We also managed to fit in a lecture in Italian about a giant Japanese crab in the zoology department of the University here, because of an apparent miscommunication about the location of a toilet.  About five minutes into it, we interrupted with a repetition of, "Toilet?" and the curator guy stopped talking, looked a little confused, then said, "Ah! Toilette!" and pointed us to the proper place.

Naples is beautiful and we are always amazed at all the old buildings and churches that are found on every corner.

Upon reflection, we have decided that Italy is a lot like southeast Asia: lots of yelling, aggressive, super friendly people who are terrible drivers and great cooks.  The food is cheap, the bargaining is just getting started, and no one speaks more English than, "No English."  Life is good.

 

ON TO ROME: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 06:48:45

Roman Holiday

...starring Michael Peck and Hagar Hepburn!  Sort of.

We had a fine time in Napoli, although an unfortunate incident we choose to call "Passover" interrupted our eating spree, particularly with regard to pizza.  As the Italians rarely say, "C'est la vie."  We joined a Passover seder for the second night.  when we arrived at the apartment that is the synagogue/Jewish Community Center, some guy with crazy curly hair opened the door and asked for our Passports. Safety, we suppose.  Then we were hesitantly allowed to enter, and we sat on the couch for a while as Jews in Italy, like those in the rest of the world, arrive fashionably 40 minutes late.  One more Jewish universal: kosher cooking, kosher *Passover* cooking, especially when prepared en masse, is not very tasty.  Here we are, in Italy, home of everyone's favorite foods, pasta, pizza, gelato, the list goes on.  And we feasted on Matzah ball soup which is usually delicious... unless one pours a bucket of salt in the pot.  And the balls themselves were the size of small marbles.  But vye are vee kvetching?  It was nice, and we were welcomed in, even if not in the warmest of ways. 

On the way back, we met a nice taxi driver... in a taxi. That took us back to our hotel.  He promised us our children will be big because we breathed the air of Napoli.  This communication took several minutes, but finally we all rejoiced at the following: "So... air of Napoli is... good?" "La ARIA, la ARIA di NAPOLI... tu bambino, tu bambino GRANDE... LA ARIA!!!" (to each other) "I think he's saying the air of Naples will give big babies." (to the taxi driver) "Ah, la aria di napoli... um, makes... bambino grande." "Si, amo Napoli!  Napoli Napoli!"  We had such a friendly conversation that upon arrival, he got out of the car and shook our hands and tapped us on the back and said something we didn't understand, but we felt just as warmly towards him.

The next day we got on a train to Termini station in Rome, switched to the metro, then the local train, then walked for three kilometers with our bags to a "tourist village" named Seven Hills.  Why seven hills?  You might think it's named after the famous seven hills of Rome, but in fact it's named after the seven small hills you have to walk over to get there.  First of all, the person on the phone lied to us -- she said it was only 5 km from town center, and what choice did we have?  On Easter weekend, there are no beds in Rome.  Then they almost made us purchase a "village card," and the next morning when we told them our heat had gone off in the middle of the night they said, "Yes, the heat in that cabin does not work."  We asked why we were not informed, and they said, "The night watchman was on duty on the other side of the village.  You could have walked over to his door and asked for blankets."  As a result we both have a cold, and were very very tired because we couldn't sleep all night due to the biting cold of Roman nights in the end of winter. Ugh.

BUT, spring was around the corner.  We escaped that cesspool of evil and grabbed their "convenient" shuttle bus into town and soon found a room at a hotel (there are more converted apartments in Rome that call themselves hotels than there are papal blessings for sale in the Vatican).  After a hot shower and a short rest, we were refreshed and began our exploration of the city.  We saw piazzas, fountains, churches, and basilicas.  We wandered into one, and found three Caravaggio paintings that Michael recognized from his art class!  The thing that's incredible about Rome is that its a big city with lots of people that live their lives like normal human beings without being amazed every time they pass Roman ruins from the 1st century BCE.  But we were amazed, and joined the tourist crowds at the Coliseum, the Palatine, the Roman Forum, and the millions of churches.  And we got blessed by the Pope.

On the way to St. Peter's for Easter (what, you didn't know we celebrated Mass for Easter?), we met a guy with what we thought was an Italian accent.  Turns out his story is thus: Born to Syrian parents in the Sudan, learned Italian at a missionary school, moved to England where he's been the last thirty years.  Crazy stuff.  The story was odd and we were suspicious at first that he was an Italian spy following us around for some reason, but now that we spent 2 days with him we think that his accent just got screwed up in a major way somehow, and he really does live in England.

  The Mass was very interesting, we got blessed, and the Pope drove within fifteen feet of us in -- not the Pope-mobile with the glass bubble -- a golf cart.  Well, sort of a stretch limo golf cart.  There was even crowd surfing!  Before you start to doubt the veracity of our claims, let us explain.  People passed their babies across the crowd to the Pope, he kissed their heads, and they were passed back.  A very cute sight.  And we heard him say Bonna Pasqua in a zillion different languages, including Swahili, Tamil, Bengali, Thai (Thailandese, he called it!) and English, if you can believe that.  The sad news is, we were surprised he lived through the ceremony.  He seemed to be doing very poorly, couldn't hold his head up, could barely stand up, and his speech was very slurred.  Still, he seemed happy to be there doing Mass and the atmosphere was pleasant.

So our conclusion of Rome is thus:  The sites are great, the city is very interesting.  But people are worn out of tourists to the same degree that they were on Khao San Road in Bangkok.  That means that they are very unfriendly. Once, we went to a restaurant and asked for the mixed vegetables with no zucchinis.  As a result, we got a plate half full with zucchinis.  We won't bore you with details, but the result of our request for zucchini free plate, the waiter took our food away and threw it angrily into the trash.  We decided we need to leave Rome as it was giving us a bad impression about Italians.

            Our last day in Rome, the plan was to see the Sistine Chapel and catch a train to Florence.  We got on the metro, and off at the Muse Vatican stop instead of the St. Peter's stop... the line for the Sistine Chapel stretched all the way to St. Peter's, about a kilometer back.  That's a lot of people.  We asked a police officer about how long the line would be, and he said maybe two or three hours.  Our train was in two hours.  We sadly turned out backs and promised to be back to Rome.  Unfortunately.  Alas.  So we saw a castle, a wall, a silver shop, and more gelato.  Hello gelato.  We are eating a lot, but not gaining weight.  It's the great wonder of being on vacation in Europe: we walk so much that we need all that gelato to stay alive.

After Rome, we set off for Florence.  We're having a great time walking around Florence, eating and seeing the beautiful sites and arts of the Renaissance.  And the gelato shops of the Renaissance.  Well, actually, they're gelato shops of the post-modern period, but they're really good.  Tiramisu was good today.  Stracciatella-ed out at the moment, but more tomorrow.  Fragola, limone, nocciola, bacio, we've tried it all, baby.  And we're ready to try more! Ha ha ha! gelato here we come!

Today, we walked to the top of the Duomo and had a bird's eye view of Florence.  Beautiful city.  It's also really fun to walk around a city filled with famous names.  Dante, Brunelleschi, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Gelato, Donatello, Fragola, Limone, Tiramisu, the list goes on.

We are tired from today’s walking, so off we go to rest and maybe eat.  Maybe not.

Take care and don’t eat too much gelato; you're not walking as much as we are!  ha ha ha!

 

FLORENCE: Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2002 14:52:27

Subject: Episode V: The Gelato Strikes Back  

Hello Star Wars fans,

We had a really funny email that we wrote.  But it got erased.  After a few days of mourning, we are now ready to write again about our Italy stay.  We’re now in Munich, but we’ll write about Switzerland and Germany next e-mail (hopefully soon).  To give you a sneak peek of Switzerland, we have the following statement:  It may be the country of gold because of its enormous gold deposits.  Or because you have to carry bags of it with you in order to buy dinner.  Who knows.

Ahem.  As you may all know, if you have been attentive readers of our previous emails, Hagar has had a constant battle with gelato, until now quite one-sided.  Due to disagreement over the nature of the fateful events of 4 April 2002, we have decided to use alternate points of view in order to avoid any appearance of modernist, omniscient narrator bias.

Michael: Hagar had been constantly asking for gelato, and it got to the point where instead of asking for a yummy treat, she would say that she needed calcium and didn’t see any other source around for miles.  The point is, things were getting out of hand.  So. In Florence. We were leaving the Uffizi gallery, which has an amazing art collection, and wandering across a little touristy piazza when we spied a lovely-looking gelato place.  I tried to walk Hagar quickly by it, but she saw the mounds of milky sugary goodness, and pushed me in the door. 

Hagar’s eyes started doing that weird spirally thing you see on cartoons when the character gets hypnotized... the gelato was all covered with yummy garnishes of roasted hazelnuts, fresh strawberries, chocolate swirls, etc.  I calmly ordered a fragola (strawberry) in a small cup and turned to Hagar.  She made up her mind as to her cone after a few minutes of contemplation.  You guessed it, waffle cone.  As she started pointing to her flavors of choice, I noticed a girl leaving the store... or rather I noticed a human body topped with a gelato head, which turned out to be the waffle cone and its one hundred eighteen scoops covering her up.  I turned to Hagar and pointed out the shocking sight, and Hagar looked at it, glanced back to the ice cream lady who hadn’t quite filled her waffle cone, and said, "Oh, well, too late."  An evil glimmer flickered in her eyes so momentarily I still can’t know whether she had scoped the place out while I was sleeping.  In any case, the scoops piled up and up, until two spoons, two pirouette cookies, and a biscuit were needed -- not for garnish -- but for structural integrity.  It took about six hours for her to finish the cone... well, more like thirty minutes, but it was quite a sight.  Other tourists even took pictures of Hagar holding the cone.  "Look, Doris, here’s a girl behind that gelato cone.  Do you see the arms and legs sticking out beneath the bacio?"  Fortunately, the gelato overpowered her craving, and we haven’t had gelato since. 

Hagar has now returned from her five minutes in the silence box, to which I now go.  Hear her but be warned, truth is blinded by milky sugary goodness.

Hagar: I would like to call this story Death of the Gelato.  How Michael lies, lies, lies! So I will start at the beginning. Michael and I, after starving in Australia in the desert, where the only food options are fish and chips (you have to wonder about fish and its whereabouts from the middle of the desert), decided that once we got to Italy we would eat gelato every day in order to sample the many different types and stores.  We also decided that Michael would eat all the pizza he desires, as he really loves it (I personally thought once was enough).  So we set out on a gelato and pizza adventure, marked only by location, what was eaten, and by the few sights seen between eating frenzies.

But then Passover came and Michael decided that Italy is an excellent place to be observant, so instead of pizza he started eating cement (we like to call it matzoh, but everyone knows what it is -- cement in the form of food, made so we can all pass Passover with a horrible case of bad digestion).  So anyway, it was during this period that he started eating ice cream in cups instead of cones.  So he did not suffer as I did.

We kept up with our deal though, and tried to eat gelato at least once a day.  Then we got to Florence, where every morning we passed all the delicious gelato places and told ourselves that we would be back in the afternoon.  But were we back?  NO!  We took a different route!  Aha!   So finally we came back to a delicious store that was colorfully decorated with fruits and chocolates and ice cream cones and mounds, mounds of gelato that resembled the Swiss Alps as we know them. 

And as we all know, Hagar has big eyes but a little stomach.  So it is my nature of course to choose the biggest cone, especially if its one of those waffle cones which you get when you want a waffle cone sundae.  Which is what I wanted -- a modest sized, regular ole waffle cone sundae.  I imagined something like a maximum of three regular sized scoops that make you happy to be alive but don’t destroy your will to live.  Alas, we don’t always get what we wish.  As the ice cream lady started to pile on the ice  cream, I admit that a bit of excitement fluttered in my belly, and I was delighted.  But then Michael pointed to the round girl with the gelato head who looked excited and scared at the same time and must have felt an immense amount of confusion over her mixed feelings about the ice cream cone because she seemed to have tears in her eyes.  But it was too late because the ice cream lady was going for the second flavor.

So the point is that when she was done and all was piled on what now seemed to be ice cream with a cone, I had about a gallon of ice cream on this cone and I had a hard time balancing myself with the added weight.  People took pictures of me and it was very embarrassing, and although the gelato was delicious, it was cold out and by the time I was done I wanted to cry, maybe because I was a tourist attraction, maybe because I realized the gelato won, maybe because it was the beginning of the worst stomachache I have ever had.  The point is that I haven’t had gelato since, and I am very sad.  And as we all know, I have to blame someone for this incidence, so I blame Michael.  Michael, it is all your fault.

Michael: ...Righhhhhht.

In Florence, we saw some amazing, amazing art.  It was AMAZING! (Hagar hates that annoying and meaningless word, and would like all readers to disassociate her with its use).  As WE were saying about the amazing art, we saw Michelangelo’s David (quite impressive and worth the hype -- lets just say, we couldn’t do that).  The Uffizi gallery turned out to be the first three quarters of Michael’s art class in college.  No joke, every room we went in, Michael kept saying, "I know that one! That artist got stabbed to death!" or "Aha, that artist uses perspective... in some way."  Hagar thought it was pretty cool too. We had a great time just wandering the streets and  enjoying the old Renaissance buildings and churches.  We even climbed a very high duomo (we think that means a dome on a church) and looked out onto Florence.  Overall it was great, and we came out of the city well fed and happy, but without gelato to call our own.  The best restaurant we went to, by the way, was a traditional Tuscan place run by a Chinese family.  Go figure.

After Florence, we headed to Bologna, but after two hours of calling hostels, hotels, motels, campgrounds, random people in the phonebook (okay we made that one up), we left for Verona, where we had a really nice time.  The town was quite small, and people were really friendly.  We got directions from an old man on a plant-covered balcony who blew kisses at Hagar after we finally said that word to end all communication: "Capitol."  Michael blew kisses back, but all he got was a strange look.  And a closed door. Verona is definitely our favorite city in Italy, as it is pleasant, quite, beautiful and really fun to walk around.  Plus, there are many delicious bakeries where one can replace the gelato void with tasty cookies and hot milk. Juliette’s balcony was laaame.  The entire courtyard was so crowded with tourists that no one could take a picture without someone’s head in the way.  The result is all these people with cameras up and waiting, pushing, shoving, snapping (camera shutters as well as tempers).  The whole time we were there, we wanted to shout to people, "She wasn’t a real person!  She’s just a character in a play!"  but instead we took pictures too. Ha ha.  There was a lot of lovers’ graffiti.  It was cool.  We wanted to add our names to the wall but we were not well planned like these other lovers, and had no white out, only a blue ball point pen.  Next time we will add ourselves to this magical wall. Righhhht.

Next we went to Bologna.  We ate our way through the town, as there is not much else to do there.  OK, there were things to see, which we saw.  And then we ate some more.  We kept walking up to a famous cathedral, walk around the inside, and say, "That was a beautiful fourteenth century gold altarpiece." "Yes, and the paintings were masterful examples of Renaissance art, using interesting techniques on which to focus the viewer’s attention..." "Can we not see any more churches today?" "Yeah, let’s eat." And so we decided, what better way to finish off a perfectly snooty art conversation than with a cup of cappuccino and a biscotti?

So then we went to Venice.  Where we almost died from being so cold.  It was rainy and cold, but it was a beautiful city.  We searched in vain for actual Venetians, however, as it turns out that the odds of anyone who is NOT selling something is actually from Venice turn out to be mathematically indistinguishable from zero.  In fact, not only is everyone a tourist, but half of the tourists are from the same region of New York / New Jersey, and they all buy Rick Steve’s guide to Venice.  How do we know this?  We chatted with a couple, who every few seconds added, "You know, Rick Steve says that if you get the front seat of the vaporetto (water bus), you should ride it all day" and "Rick Steve says that those buildings are just sooo interesting!" Eventually, we had to ask, "Who is Rick Steve?" He writes a guidebook, and is on intimate terms with all his readers. So what we say is thus:  Although we really enjoyed our time there, it wouldn’t be on our list of must see places in Europe.  One may describe the place best as a Disneyland for adults.  But Disneyland is cheaper.

Our hostel was a fun one, although it was really far from the city.  Getting there and back involved a long bus ride and a two kilometer walk, so.. being the enterprising folks that we are, we bummed a ride off an Uruguayan couple with an adorable baby on the way in.  On the way back, the bus driver conspired to drop us off a stop too early.  Hagar slid her sexy skirt up and up until a car stopped and we got a ride.  The driver insisted that we were going the wrong direction, so he turned around and drove a while until in broken Italian we managed to tell him that we really think it’s the other way.  As a result of this mistake, we got a ride all the way to the hostel--door to door service!  Cool beans.

One thing that was quite interesting as well as beautiful was the Jewish ghetto.  It turns out that this is the first ghetto to bear the name of "ghetto," which means molten metal because that was what industry went on there.  And the barbers outside the ghetto bridge thought Michael was orthodox because of his beard.  There was this one Israeli guy selling paper cut-outs, which bore no relation to Venice or Venetian art in any way, and were pretty much all of Jerusalem.  Tourists will buy anything, anywhere.

From Venice we went off to Bern by night train, and you will all have to wait to hear of those adventures.  We will also report on our adventures in German beer halls and gardens that await us for tomorrow.  Ha ha ha. As Rick Steve would say…

PS: In case you are wondering, we seem to be becoming Europeans.  The rule here is, the more bad food you eat, the more weight you lose.  We think its a wonderful continent and plan to move here for this inverse relationship between food and weight.  Life is good.