Posts by Jonah

Day 4 (Tues. Nov. 13, Umbria)

Umbria

Today we rented a car at Termini, the big train station in Roma. I always thought Termini was named because it was the end of all the train lines, but it’s apparently named after the ancient baths nearby. Berck, being a better than average American, had made a Thrifty car rental; they were indeed more thrifty than the discount he got with Avis or Hertz. It took about an hour for the clerk to go through all the paperwork. This was after our disastrous discovery that I hadn’t packed the maps of Italy that we’d bought at Borders in Colorado Springs and which Berck had carefully plotted the coordinates of all three Italian campgrounds that were open in winter. I had grabbed the pile of guidebooks and maps from Berck’s desk (I’d wanted to pack them the night before we left, but Berck was still working on them) not realizing there were two maps still on the floor. Berck asked me if I’d gotten all the maps, and I said I’d had, thinking he’d put them all in a pile for me to get. So we ran all over the train station looking for a map of Italy. Finally, we found one in the little bookstore RIGHT ACROSS FROM THE THRIFTY CAR RENTAL. Still, it’s a very good map book, even if it’s all in Italian.

We used it corkscrewing through Umbria today, enjoying the vistas of hilltop towns and hillsides of olive trees, apparently being harvested currently, since wherever we went, there were people spreading nets on the ground around trees and reaching up into the branches with long hooks, plastic crates on the ground nearby at the ready.

As the sun got low in the sky, I decided we would try to spend the night in Amelia, a wonderfully quaint walled town in southern Umbria. We stopped to get gas, and more importantly, use the toilet. This was amusing because it took Berck and the attendant a good minute to figure out where the latch for the gas tank was. I asked the attendant how to get to the piazza where the hostel was. He asked the driver of the truck he was filling, who laughed and shook his head. The attendant ran over to a car that had just arrived and asked the driver, who motioned me over. “Where,” he hesitated in halting English, “are you going?”

“Piazza Mazzini.”

“Who?” he said, and I realized he was wondering what I needed there.

“Hostel,” I said, “Ostello.”

“Ah!” he said.

“Ah!” the gas station attendant said.

“You,” the random guy buying gas said to me, “come with me. I drive you there. But first,” he waived his Euro note at me, indicating he needed to fill up first. We pulled out of the way and waited for him to finish.

“This is way too easy,” said Berck. “Why would he do this for us?” This is the magic of being a traveler. People are much more likely to help out a traveler in need than the guy down the street. And, of course, it helps being a girl.

He led back across the “highway.” Suddenly, we were going up and up steep narrow streets, through city walls, under archways connecting buildings on either side, steeper and narrower until we got to the apex, and the guy in his VW in front of us put on his blinker and continued straight, indicating that we were where he had been leading us. Then he stopped and backed up to make sure we knew we were where we wanted to be. Berck shook his hand as he grinned with his cigarette between his teeth, the joy of a person who has helped a traveler along his path. “This was was too easy,” Berck repeated as we pulled into a parking spot across the street from the piazza that held the hostel.

And it was. The hostel, an HI, was closed from October to April, like so many things in Italy. The weather, however, is perfect, cool and dry. November would be the perfect time to visit, if half the things weren’t closed.

Orvieto

So now we had to figure something else out. We reluctantly left Amelia with its impossibly narrow roads, going down, down, down and got back on the highway, continuing to Orvieto.

Orvieto is nowadays a tourist town, with every shop window a souvenir shop or restaurant. But we got here after dark, and the streets were relatively quiet and empty. Of course, most of the shops selling ceramics were still unnaturally open, spilling their light onto the scalloped cobblestones. We parked in pay parking lot by the Duomo (cathedral) and walked to the Hotel Posta, our guidebook’s recommendation for a good, cheap night’s sleep. Indeed, the hotel is very nice for it’s price being in the middle of a medieval town that seems to exist for tourists alone.

We checked in then retrieved our bags and paid for parking until 10am the next morning. We tried to find two places to eat recommended by our our guidebooks, but one was closed and the other wasn’t there. So we trusted our instincts and wandered up a side street till we found a restaurant with good prices and no English on the menu. Of course, all of the four couples inside were speaking English-plus-“grazie”, but that didn’t stop us from ordering aqua natural, a bottle of Sangiovesa, a plate of cured meats for antipasto misto, two plates of pasta (gnocchi for Berck, “angry” sauce on pasta for me), a secondi (angello cacciatore…I picked it out), another half litre of the house red, and some grappa to finish it off. Then of course, we had to get some gellato. You remember it’s good, but you can never remember just how good it is.

Berck says I should point out that I picked the lamb randomly without knowing what it was. It was still delicious.

Day 3 (Mon., Nov. 12, Roma)

All museums closed

On Mondays all of the museums in Italy close. A lot of restaurants close too. We hadn’t intended to stay in Rome an extra day, but all the flights out on Sunday were pretty full while the ones on Monday were relatively empty. That extended our vacation by a day, and we decided to spend it in Roma rather than Milano.

Foro Romano

Fortunately, you can still walk around the Forum. Berck had already spent untold hours there and not by choice. While I could have spent hours staring at foundations of ancient buildings imagining them fully built, there’s plenty in Rome to see otherwise.

Piazza Campidoglio

On top of Capitoline Hill we admired Michaelangelo’s trapezoidal piazza that he creates an optical illusion within using different colored paving stones to make it appear perfectly square. In the center was a bronze sculpture of Marcus Aurelius that survived being melted down because Christian Rome thought it was Constantine. It was a marvel until the Renaissance because the horse is standing on only three legs. The original is now in a museum and a copy stands outside in the pollution.

Pantheon

Next we went BACK to the Pantheon. On the third try, I finally got to go in it. It’s a remarkable building. The Romans weren’t really sure how to make a complete dome, so they left a hole in the middle of the ceiling. It was turned into a church soon after Christianity was legalized, so it escaped destruction by quarrying. It was a marvel to all of Europe until the Renaissance when mankind figured out how to make domes again.

Piazza Navona

We also walked back through the Piazza Navona and then to Berck’s favorite pizza place. It was still closed, and the hours sign on the door still said that it didn’t open until 18:30.

Berck wanted to visit the contemporary art museums, but of course, it was Monday. We figured out which bus to take to one of them anyhow, but it was indeed closed. We got wireless outside it, though, so Berck checked his e-mail to see if he was supposed to show up for work anytime soon.

Crypt of bones

We were about out of ideas, with all the museums closed, so we went to see the crypt of bones in the basement of a church. It was weird.

Wine

There was still time in the day, but our legs were still aching from the strenuous hike the day before. We were bushed. So we headed back to the hostel. We found out where the nearest grocery store was and walked over and bought three bottles of wine (a Chianti, a 3.50 Euro Malbec, and a bottle of sweet bottle of Est! Est!! Est!!!), a corkscrew, some cheese, and a fresh loaf of bread. Then we borrowed a couple of cups from the kitchen, sat in our little hostel room and watched Top Gear on the laptop while enjoying our bounty. The hostel had free pasta at 7:30, so we got some, but all the seats in the common area were full, so we just went back to the room and drank our second bottle of wine.

Day 2 (Sun., Nov. 11, Roma)

Hostel Allessandro Downtown

The hostel gave us a double for 50 Euros a night, not bad in a city where the dollar is every day losing value and whose inflation has been checked by Germany’s central bank (as near as we can tell, in any case). The clerk took our passports to fill in the information she needed as required by the Italian police, as I’d read in my guidebook, and we stowed our sacks since our room wasn’t ready yet.

Then we headed off for our first Italian adventure.

Pantheon

I’d been to the Pantheon when I’d been to Rome before, but it was closed for restoration, so I had been able to only put my eyeball to the crack between the doors and see the shapes in the dome above. So as soon as we’d bought day passes for the metro, Berck took me straight there. It was closed, of course, for Sunday mass, but at least I could see more through the open doors than I had before.

Berck got us some gellato, pistachio for me, nearby. You remember that gellato is good, but you don’t remember how good.

Piazza Navona

Next we walked the block or so to the Piaza Navona, but Bernini’s four rivers fountain was dry and boarded off. They’re doing some restoration work to it, but they put in some clear plastic along the boards so you can watch their progress. It was actually kinda neat to be able to see what’s below the waterline. They’d taken out all the coins.

Next Berck wandered down Via del Governa Vecchia and actually found his favorite pizza place, but it was closed. I pointed out to him their hours on the door.

It was time to head to our next destination, the Gallaria Borghese for our 1pm appointment. The gallery is so small that they only let a limited amount of people in at a time. Fortunately, Berck had made reservations for us several days ahead of time. But first we had to get there. We weren’t anywhere near a metro stop, and the nearest metro stop wasn’t very close to the gallery anyhow. So we walked along the Tiber for a while. Every so often Berck would decide we had to take a bus, but there were no buses that came, and we didn’t know which one we should take anyway. So we would start walking again.

Galleria Borghese, Villa Borghese

We made our way to the Spanish Steps, and Berck somehow remembered there were escalators and moving walkways that would take us to Villa Borghese. Berck wasn’t sure which exit to take from the labyrinth of walkways and allowed Joanna to steer him the wrong way, and we exited somewhere just outside the park.

While trying to make it in time to pick up our tickets to the Galleria, a man leaned out of a white Alfa Romeo, and yelled at us to stop. Berck didn’t pay him much attention, but the man yelled some more, and flashed a police badge. He went over to the car while Joanna just continued walking down the street, oblivious to the police. The policeman spoke only slightly more English than Berck spoke Italian. Berck wasn’t convinced the badge was real, and the men in the car were wearing plain clothes and the car was unmarked. The man never got out of his car, and Joanna eventually figured out what was going on. He searched our backpacks, and asked for our passports. In the US, we have a right not to be stopped and asked for our papers. In Europe, this is not the case. Berck presented his passport, but Joanna said the lady at the hostel still had hers. At which point Berck realized that Joanna had been totally oblivious to the fact that the lady at the hostel had returned our passports, and Joanna simply left hers on the counter. Fortunately the policeman didn’t seem to care, and was more interested in examining our money to see if it was counterfeit and smelling everything in our backpacks, presumably to see if it smelled like marijuana. After a good 10 minutes, he let us go, and pointed us in the right direction to Borghese.

This delay was irritating after we’d been walking very fast for a long time to try to get to the museum in time for our appointment. But we were very close by then, and Berck was able to get our tickets quickly inside. He then obliviously cut in front of a huge line of people trying to check their bags. By the time we were ready to go in, we were still ten minutes early. Then at last we got to see Berck’s three favorite Bernini sculptures, Pluto and Proserpina, Apollo and Daphne, and a David that’s way better than famous one in Firenze.

Afterward, we were in the garden out front enjoying the cool damp air after being in the overly heated museum. “I’m worried about your passport,” said Berck, wiping his glasses. “How could you leave it there?” I know for a fact that hotels take your passports and often don’t give them back until you return your key or pay your bill. This happened twice to us later in the trip, and Berck thought nothing of it then, but he sure was mad now. “Why weren’t you paying attention?” In fact, I was just waiting in the lobby while Berck dealt with the clerk. There was no way for me to see what they were doing from behind Berck’s back. “What if someone picked it up? I don’t want to spend a day going to the consulate.” Then Berck’s “unbreakable” titanium glasses split in two. It’s a good thing he brought a spare set.

We walked through the park forming the grounds of the Villa Borghese, watching the Italians enjoying a Sunday afternoon, all the way back to the Spanish Steps metro station, then rode back to our hostel. The clerk indeed had my passport, and our room was finally ready for us. We got our rucksacks out of the luggage room and collapsed on the two single beds pushed together. Berck fell dead asleep while I cross-examined our two Italy guidebooks, looking for a place for supper that we could get to fairly easily and was actually open on a Sunday evening.

Supper in Roma

When Berck awoke, I showed him my choices. He dismissed the Neapolitan restaurant (“That means ‘fish’.”) but decided we could take a bus to my next pick. We walked back over to Termini, realizing that the day’s forced march had rendered our legs, which had not been used that ferociously in a very long time, extremely sore. Somehow Berck remembered that the H bus would take you anywhere you might want to go and confirmed this by looking for its various stops on our Streetwise. We decided we would take it for two stops and then walk back to the proper piazza. Our transportation day passes came in handy. We probably could have just gotten off at the first stop, but then we wouldn’t have been able to take this picture.

When we got to the correct piazza, our restaurant was closed. My third choice up the street was also closed. By now it had started raining. Whenever it starts raining in Rome, all the street vendors stop vending whatever it was they were trying to sell and magically pull out a collection of umbrellas to push in tourists. I had on my waterproof jacket, but Berck was just in his shirtsleeves, it not being a very cold night. We set off to find the third restaurant in the area on a little side street, but just then the power went off. For some reason,someone’s parked motorcycle began a screeching alarm at the same time. I couldn’t read the guidebook map in the dark, and it was getting wet in the rain, so we ducked into a store’s doorway while I fished out the flashlight in my backpack. Yet another street vendor offered Berck an “umbrelli,” for only 5 Euro. “Three,” countered Berck . The guy smiled the expression of someone who doesn’t understand your language. I held up three fingers. He said he would take 4 for it, but Berck only had a five Euro note. But at least they stopped bugging us, and Berck could yell at me for not finding the place yet while dry. We finally did, but when we walked in, the man chopping vegetables looked at us like we were crazy. “Come back at seven thirty,” he said. It was 6:30 pm. Italians don’t eat supper until at least 8, and all the restaurants don’t bother opening until 7 at the earliest.

So without any other ideas, we walked looking for open restaurants. We found a place that looked promising that had bags of pasta for sale along one wall. But they said they were out of pasta and could only serve us pizza. We walked some more until I noticed a restaurant down a side street. Berck studied the menu and decided he didn’t want to eat there but continued down the narrow lane. That’s when we found another restaurant that Berck liked the menu. The staff said we could come in and sit but they couldn’t serve us quite yet. But they brought us a bottle of wine and acqua naturale and said we could hit the antipasto buffet. This was a collection of cold dishes on a three shelves over by the kitchen. There were platters of little squids in red sauce and white sauce, grilled zucchini, breaded and fried eggplant, olives, seafood salad, and other delicacies. A man stood by a table next to it ready to cut me slices of prosciutto, Parmesan, and fresh mozzarella floating in a bowl. I was much more excited about the heaping plate of fish and vegetables than Berck was, but he satisfied himself with the ham. While we ate, the entire restaurant staff sat down at a long table and ate themselves before they needed to work. When it was finally time for us to order, we got gnocchi and pasta with arrabbiata (angry) sauce, hot spicy tomato sauce. It was all very delicious.

To go home, we retraced our steps to the Piazza Venezia and suicidally crossed all of the roads entering the madly traffic filled roundabout to reach the bus stop. Berck figured out which buses would take us back to Termini, but none of them came while several we could have taken passed by since this wasn’t a stop for them. Finally, Berck realized that we were within walking distance of the Colloseum and its Metro station. By the time we got home to the hostel, our legs were very tired, as were we. We slept with the window open and got pretty cold that night.

Day 1 (Nov. 10, travel)

It started out pretty much as planned, the way most trips (even those with our lack of planning) do. We got up around 4am in order to be at the Denver airport around 5:30am for our 7am flight. The TSA decided that Berck’s passport was fake, so he demanded to speak to a supervisor, who agreed that his passport was, indeed, fake. The problem seemed to have to do with the fact that the picture was not perfectly centered in its square. Berck finally managed to convince them to ignore the passport (which he’d only presented because it was the easiest thing to get to) and instead produced a Colorado driver’s license which seemed to satisfy the TSA. We’ll note that Berck has traveled using this passport not entirely infrequently for the past 8 years, and this was the first time someone had complained about it.

We arrived at the gate about the time that the flight was boarding, and got boarding passes right away. US Airways does some strange boarding system with aisle/window boarding that probably makes good sense on paper, but in general is confusing. We were assigned a window/aisle pair on the Airbus 319, with Jonah taking the window seat as usual, Berck in the aisle and no one in between. The legroom was ample, the seats reclined plenty.

The flight wasn’t unpleasant, and Jonah watched the inflight movie with a pair of Delta headphones while Berck slept. We arrived in Philadelphia about noon there, but feeling like some breakfast would be nice. We ate some Chick-Fil-A, and then spent the next 5 hours watching various downloaded television on the Macbook–not a bad way to kill time.

The US Airways gate agents put us together for the overseas flight. On those you actually get food, though it takes forever for them to serve it, when all you really want to do is sleep. They also have several movies on demand, so you don’t have to wait for them to start at a particular time. Joanna watched the Shrek the Third, and Berck watched the first quarter of it.

Travel to Roma

Flying overseas coach sucks, and there’s just no two ways about it. We were in the middle, unfortunately, though Berck had an aisle seat. His legs were killing him, and he kept bumping into Joanna, who would wake up yet again. Hopefully, we’ll get to stretch out on the way home. Still some O.J. and a “Buttermilk Bar” woke us up before we landed. We managed to cut in front of most of our fellow passengers by taking the stairs instead of the escalator and got through immigration in record time. Berck somehow remembered how to get to the airport train and find us a bathroom and get cash without any trouble, and we were soon chugging along the outskirts of Roma to Termini.

On Monday Berck realized my flight benefits on US Airways had been activated. Since they told us those wouldn’t start until December, we were very excited, especially since Berck is free now and won’t be once he starts working full time. They’re so desperate for pilots, they’ve even canceled vacations.

We decided to go to Italy, rent a car, and drive up to “the best driving road in Europe,” declared by Top Gear. Berck made plane and car reservations and then asked, “You know where your passport is, right?” Yup. “It’s not expired, is it?” I pulled it out. EXP 03 SEP/SEP 07.

Berck was very upset. I scoured the State Department website on how to get an expedited passport. It said this would take 10 days as opposed to 6 weeks. It said you had to appear in person at one of the dozen or so passport agencies around the country, but fortunately, there was one in Denver… Aurora to be exact, which is on the south end of Denver and even easier for me to get to. You have to call an 800 number and go through an automated system that tells you when the next available appointment time is. The nearest one I could get was two days away at 10:30 in the morning. I accepted and got a confirmation code.

Today I left work and drove up to Aurora. It only took me 45 minutes. The security at the front desk made sure I had all of my documents. Then I went through a metal detector and checked in at the INFORMATION desk. The clerk checked to make sure I had all of my documents, stapled my photo to my paperwork, and gave me a number. Then I sat down to wait for half an hour. I should have taken something to read. I finally noticed that at the far end of the huge room were stacks of pamphlets, so I started leafing through “Tips for Business Travelers to Nigeria,” which could also be titled “The millions promised you by a deposed African queen is a scam!”

Finally, my number got called. I gave the clerk my old passport, my renewal application, my marriage license, which he creased and folded in triplicate and stuffed in an envelope, my itinerary of our trip leaving Saturday, my credit card, and my drivers license. He marked all over my application in red pen, stuffed it and my old passport into the envelope, and told me it would be ready at 2 pm. It was 11 am, so I drove back down to Monument, worked for a couple hours, and then drove back up. I wasn’t ready to believe I’d actually have my passport until I actually held it in my hands, but sure enough, after going back through security and sending my shoes through the X-ray machine, the clerk at the INFORMATION desk handed me that precious blue book.

The funny thing is that no one ever asked me for my confirmation code. I could have just walked in and applied for a passport, and no one would have known I didn’t have an appointment. A guy ahead of me had come in from way out of state, even though his closest office was Chicago, because they didn’t have an opening until the 15th.

So I have a brand new passport only two days after realizing mine was expired. All it took was two drives to Denver in a day and $127: $55 for the passport, $60 to expedite, and $12 security surcharge, presumably to pay for the metal detector and three guards at the door. I guess they’re there to keep aliens from breaking in and making their own passports.

While I was busy running back and forth to the Mile High City (which just voted yesterday to make marijuana possession the lowest priority for city police and to take the “Mile” out of its nickname), Berck went down to AAA and got himself an international drivers license.

Berck and I went to Borders tonight and compared all of the Italy guidebooks. Our favorites are Let’s Go, Lonely Planet, Moon’s, and Rough Guide. They didn’t have Moon’s, the Lonely Planet was a year old, and after we compared the remaining, we decided to go with the Rough Guide. Then we had to get Rick Steve’s Italy. Then we had to get one for Switzerland (that was easy; they only had Lonely Planet). Then we had to get a StreetWise Rome and a Michelin Italy map book. We saved $22 with my Borders rewards card.

The tattooed girl who checked us out commented, “You guys planning a trip to Italy?”

I wanted to say, “I just got my passport in two days!” but I instead I asked, “How did you know?”

She grinned and answered, “You just look like the type that wants to visit Italy.”