Travel Update

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We arrived safely in Cáceres on Monday as planned and I am in the process of recovering from more than a month on the road. Teresa´s home-cooking will ensure a speedy recovery. My Spanish needs time to catch up too, after passing through so many languages. I am getting basic words mixed up with the French and Italian....people in Spain will look at you funny if you say bonsoir to them after speaking entirely in Spanish.

Ok, to make sense of this killer vacation, I will break it down by country and go from there. Probably multiple postings to avoid reader fatigue ;-)

GREECE: Alice and I met in Greece way back on December 16th. We stayed in Athens but did day trips out of the city. I enjoyed very much our excursion to Mycenae, home town of King Agamenon of Iliad fame. Driving west and south of Athens to get to Mycenae, we passed Korinth (whose residents received Paul´s letters (book of Corinthians)), Marathon, (tradition has it that the runner who announced the defeat of the Persian army by the Athenians -5th century BC- ran from Marathon to Athens and after announcing the victory fell dead of exhaustion), Thebes (think Oedipus) and beautiful mountains and coastlines. Most of Greece is rugged mountains of all colors and shapes. Ancient Mycenae is beautifully preserved/ reconstructed with its massive walls attracting your attention from the top of a high hill. Incredible that the place was started so long ago (2nd millenium BC). We also went to Delphi to see the ruins of the temple and massive complex dedicated to the god Apollo. Only a few of the massive pillars are left of the temple where the Oracle of Apollo (actually many women served as oracles over the centuries) lived. Wonderfully preserved theater and stadium at Delphi along with treasury buildings of all the important city states. The temple at Delphi is high up on a mountain with amazing views out to sea and of the vallyes below. In Athens we ate authentic Soulvaki (lamb kabobs) and Gyros from the walk-up windows of little restaurants. Hate to burst anyones bubble, but Athenian gyros beat the Ames gyro guy hands-down. My favorite part about walking around Athens at night is that the Acropolis is constantly peering down at you. You may forget about it for a bit, but turn one way or the other and there it is, lit up a bright white high above the city. Alice and I were lucky in that traveling during December, there were very few tourists. We had the Acropolis nearly to ourselves. It is difficult) (I suppose for a American Midwesterner) to imagine the dramatic little mountain on which sits the Acropolis rising so suddenly out of the middle of Athens, but there it is. Best view of the entire city from the top and the temples are beautiful. Interesting to see how they are carefully taking apart and cleaning some of the buildings and then putting them back together.

ITALY:
Naples: Our flight to Rome from Athens was followed by a train ride to Naples. When we got to Naples, it was dark, raining and chaotic. We got help from the helpful man at the Information desk prior to leaving the rail station (I spoke English and Spanish and he spoke what English he could and switched to Italian when he couldn´t but we got all our questions answered). The information guy asked me to sing a ´popular American Christmas song´ because he liked them so much and as Alice and I had heard Jingle Bells 3 or more times on the train, I thought this is what he meant and he seemed very pleased at me singing Jingle Bells in response to his request. Alice just stood outside the office.
The information guy gave us the number of the bus we needed and which stop to get off at, which seemed sufficient at the time, but what Alice and I discovered upon exiting the rail station was that crossing the main square (rail station on one end, bus terminal on the opposite end) was much more easily done than said. The whole center of the square was torn up due to construction of a new subway stop and a traffic of hundreds of vehicles was being forced at all angles into little slots between the construction fences. And then there taxis trying to get to the train station and people trying to cross the streets and people having conversations in the middle of the streets. My favorite observation was a couple who stopped to gesture and talk in the middle of the street and even though a city bus quickly came upon them, they didn´t even so much as look up. The bus honked a few times and the couple eventually parted ways, but they were in no hurry. Alice and I couldn´t find the sidewalk so we ended up walking through traffic with our luggage to get to the bus we needed which made two passes around the plaza before being able to get down the street we needed. What was a 15 minute walk was about an hour on bus so full no more people could get on--and you better believe more people tried to get on. Ok, so beyond the drama of arrival, I really liked Naples. No order to anything and quite loud at all hours, there is a lot to see. We took an underground tour of the Etruscan quarries turned Medieval wells turned World War II bomb shelters and ate the best pizza ever. A plaque on the wall of one of the pizza places we ate was presented to the owner as ´´a custodian of the True Neapolitan pizza tradition.´´ We also went to Pompeii. Winter hours had a lot of the major buildings closed but the enormity of the site remained and it felt like walking around an abandoned city.

Florence: I loved Florence! More art than you can shake a stick at! We waited in line for less than half an hour to get into the Uffizi Gallery and were able to walk right into the Academia where Michelangelo´s David and unfinished Giants are. The dumo (cathedral) is beautiful, all multi-colored and shiny white. The view from Piazza Michelangelo over the city is well worth the climb (or you can cheat and take a bus). It was very quite in the city as we were there on Christmas eve and Christmas day, but fourtantely the major museums were open. We took a side trip to Pisa one day and it was well worth it. The cathedral and baptistry are just as beautiful (and to me more impressive) than the leaning tower (the bell tower) and I really like the cemetary. Alice found Fibonacci´s statue in the cemetary and Alice and I had an excellent dinner. I ate so much octopus that I think I still don´t need any for another few weeks. It was a dish akin to pulpo a la gallega (Spanish dish with lightly steamed octopus dusted with paprika), for anyone who´d care to know.

Rome: Alice and I were in Rome for a week and we still didn´t see quite everything we had planned. Rome is a life time of discovery kind of city, but a too many people for me to seriously consider a life time in it. Unfortunately, our hotel was a 20 minute metro ride outside the center of the city and our metro line closed at 9 pm. Lame! It makes no sense that a city of 5 million people has only 2 metro lines and that one closes at 9pm and the other at 11:30pm. I cannot for the life of me understand why Romans and Madrileños and Barcelonians and the citizens of all the other large European cities with insufficient metro hours don´t rebel....but I guess there´s some part of the European ethos there that I have yet to grasp. So that gripe aside, lots to see and do in Rome. I enjoyed the Trastevere (neighborhood of the Oldest Jewish ghetto in Europe) tour we took and also the Appian Way. Going to the Christian catacombs outside the city walls was definitely worth the bus trip to get there. The catacombs we visted only ever housed bodies set into the walls behind marbles plaques but during some sack of Rome invaders were convinced that there was gold down there and most of the marble grave stones were smashed. Most have been restored, but there are random fragments on display all over Rome. The Pantheon of Rome is definitely a cool building and if you are there when it is not packed to the walls, I do suggest standing in the center and looking up and spinning around. The perfect roundness of the ceiling and high vault make for some fun optical illusions. The Colesseum is huge, the Circus Maximus is a big oval green space (the Circus in the Spanish city of Mérida is much, much better preserved, complete with seating) and the Vatican is awesome. We went to the Vatican museum on the last Sunday of the month (which happened to be December 31st) because every last Sunday of the month is free admission for all. Very helpful! But of course, everyone else in Rome knew this and the line for the museum wound half way around the country of Vatican City, all the way back to St. Peter´s Square. We stood in line for 2 hours or so but did make it in and got to see some neat maps, the Raphel rooms, and of course, the Sistine Chapel. The Sistine Chapel is absolutely amazing! We attempted to get into St. Peter´s Basillica the evening of the 31st and did indeed make it in, but we quickly realized that the New Year´s Eve mass presided over by the pope himself was about to start and that we needed an invitation (we got past security but Alice didn´t want to stay for Mass so I swiped a bulletin and we were back in St. Peter´s Square). I asked Alice if we had just stood up the pope. Maybe, but there were lots of other people who wanted a seat so I don´t think he would mind. We returned to St. Peter´s the next day and got to see all of it that we could---enormous, enormous, and marble marble everywhere--neat that on the floor of the central nave there are markers for how far other cathedrals of the world would reach if lined up door to door with St. Peter´s.

We took day trips to Orvieto (a beautiful little mountain top city still completely surrounded by its medieval walls) and Assisi, home town of St. Francis and St. Clare. Assisi is very beautiful and it´s walls and buildings are made out of a lovely pink stone, the color of which I had not seen before. The whole city is pastel washed with very steep streets. The basillica of St. Francis is about all we had time to see as we had to catch the train back to Rome but just the views from the city walls were well worth the trip. And we went to Orvieto because our train to Assisi was canceled the first time we tried to go. For future reference, if regular route trains are delayed in Italy for more than half an hour, I think it is safe to assume that they will end up canceled.

On the 3rd of January, my friend Dionne joined Alice and me in Rome and Alice flew back to Georgia on the 6th, which left Dionne and me to begin our trip north and east. It took all day, but from Rome via train with one transfer in Venice, we got to Vienna, Austria. The Adventures of Clair and Dionne will be coming soon.

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Photos

Temple at Delphi
Looking down at the Oracle´s Temple from the path going up to the stadium.

View from Mycenae
Looking out towards the Behive Tombs from the top of the ancient city of Mycenae. Those clever ancients were even able to pump water all the way up here from the river below....amazing...

Acropolis at Night
The Acropolis peeks down at you no matter where you are below it. Seeing it lit up at night from below makes all of Athens seem a bit smaller because you see it from almost everywhere.

Acropolis Posers
Alice and me in front of the Acropolis. Fortunately there was another person around to take our picture. I appreciated that there were a few people up there with their sketch books diligently consulting the buildings before drawing.

Poetry in Motion
Coolest display of public art I have yet to see in Europe. Walking around Naples to find dinner, Alice and I ran into a plaza in which poems were projected in huge letters on some of the buildings. Two poems in Italian and two in English. I was super excited because one was a poem I know and love

Il Duomo of Florence
The beautiful cathedral of Florence. Alice has most of the pictures we took of Greece and Italy, so these few must suffice.