Part 20: Dragons, donkeys and finally a little sun in Genoa

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Continued…

I picked myself up off the road. No significant damage, just some deeper scratches on the side of the bike. I made it to Genova (Genoa) without further incident. Of course the rain began as I pulled into town, which is starting to look like a recurring pattern.
I wandered through the city until I reached the suburb of Sestri Ponente. Even though I had started out early, I was now behind the time I had promised Alex I would meet her at the train station.

Getting situated

I couldn’t find the station, but she miraculously saw me in the street and I heard her call my name from across the way while I was searching for her.
I don’t know if you have much experience wearing helmets, but the origin of sounds is a constant mystery, and her voice calling out sounded like some kind of ghost calling you from another plane of existence. It sounds quite haunting actually, and slightly unsettling because you aren’t sure if you are imagining the sound. We would replay this scene days later when we met at a hostel in Florence.
Alex has a sweet tooth. While we tried to contact our hosts in Genova, she suggested we relax at a local coffee shop. We ordered this chocolate pudding drink, so rich that you could stand a spoon in it, and it came with free chocolate donuts. What a score!
Since we didn’t have a city map, we had to find an Internet café to locate our hosts’ home. I found their home was only a kilometer away, and rode off to knock on their door. They opened, welcomed me, and we drove back and got Alex.

Our Genoese hosts

Our main host, Marco is a kind man with a textbook nutty professor appearance. He has a wandering eye, and a goofy grin like he just served you a potion that is going to turn you into a dragon in a week, but only he knows it. His wife, Emanuela, may well be a very nice woman; their 5-year-old daughter is adorable. Alex had the constant impression that Emanuela hated her until the last night we were there, when the two of them bonded over Coldplay videos (of all things). Emanuela insisted on watching ALL of them.
Alex has this way of speaking to foreigners, slowly chopping her syllables like you would feed soft carrots to an infant. It’s actually quite endearing, but it doesn’t necessarily help them understand anything. We would laugh because when they didn’t understand what she said, I would turn around and say the same exact thing, but throw in a hand motion and accent it like The Count on Sesame Street and suddenly it all made perfect sense.
Marco fed us a special family recipe that first night. It was a Genoese dish with meat and vegetables sewn into some kind of pouch (by Marco’s grandmother, no less).

Into the city

The next day we took the train to centro and walked all over the city. I picked up a pistacchio snack and some socks at a market near the station, and we started to wander. We would subsequently see essentially the exact same market at the next half dozen cities we visited.
We watched the sunset over the Mediterranean, though he Genoese have done their best to build ugly concrete walls that prevent you from appreciating the sun going down at their harbor.

Crazy amusement park at the harbor

Afterward, we wandered about in an amusement park near the wharf, and it began to look like we would never reach the end. What had appeared to be a small platform along the water quickly grew into a massive city once we were inside. In every direction, twisted faces of pleasure. A slight claustrophobia came over me in this adolescent fantasyland and I began to feel like Pinocchio on that island where everyone turned into a donkey.
Some of the rides were freaking crazy. Both Alex and I decided liability insurance costs would make an amusement park like this one impossible in America. Violently turning wheels with teenagers and no safety belts were common themes. There was lots of noise and very loud music. In fact, there were DJ booths located at about every third ride, staffed by live people and huge catalogs of CDs.

Laboring over butter

Vendors sold beer and corn on the cob at booths along the walkway. I bought a piece of corn for €2, simply because it was the first piece of corn on the cob I had seen in Europe. This old man who sold it to me spent what seemed like three minutes laboriously trying to cut a small slice of butter out of a jar with one hand so that he could rub it on my corn (in his other hand). At first I wondered what he was doing, as butter seldom comes in jars in America. When I realized what was happening, I began to take interest, considering that I had paid €2 to be served this common American delicacy - and part of me wanted him to work for it. However, Alex took pity and intervened, offering a hand to steady the jar, and soon I had consumed my novelty.

Best beer selection

We found dinner at a small pizza café nearby, featuring the best beer selection on the entire planet. The entire beer list was exotic. After giving up the search for a dark Italian beer (impossible, just like in France), I settled for a dark German. We ate a meal, shared a coconut gelato, laughed at some of the kitschy-classic décor, and called it a night.

Time to find a new home

Our hosts had been fluctuating on whether or not they would be staying or leaving town on the third day of our visit. They couldn’t make up their mind, saying it depended on the weather. It was very important to us of course, because if they left, we didn’t know where we were going to stay the next evening.
They finally told us they were leaving, and we made emergency plans to stay at an inexpensive hotel in the historic, walled city of Lucca in Tuscany.
Next day we left early. Alex went to Pisa (to photograph some building or something), while I crossed the most fantastic highway (A12/E80) I’ve ever seen. It must have cost a fortune and taken a generation to build. For the first 50km, it seems I was constantly either crossing a ridiculously beautiful valley on an elevated bridge, or burrowing through a mountain in a tunnel the entire time. The only other freeway that comes close to this level of scenery is H3 on O’ahu, which is totally unreal. Both A12 and H3 give you the creepy feeling that the highway should never have been built - too historically invasive. I always get this feeling while experiencing the high-level confluence of 1) convenience, 2) luxury, and 3) untamed nature.
It started raining as I arrived in Lucca (that pattern again), but I found us a hotel and went to train station to wait for Alex.
And this is where it all hit the fan.

Torture thy name is Annie

Without knowing which train she was coming in on (her Spanish cell phone didn’t work), the only way to make contact was to wait in the cold for her train to arrive in Lucca.
By itself, I could have handled that. But there was something else, something unexpected and sinister. Repetitive advertising. Three ads repeated themselves in an endless cycle on the 20 closed circuit television screens around the station. One of them I can’t even remember.
Another had a white guy speed-rapping about Kit Kat bars in Italian.
But there was nothing that could prepare you for the final, most intolerable annoyance that was the third advertisement. It was an ad for Sky (owned by FOX) Television, featuring Little Orphan Annie singing five off-key bars of “Tomorrow.”
After all of the cold, the rain, the snow and the stress, it was two hours of Little Orphan Annie that finally forced me to take out my revolver, place the barrel against my head, and blow my brains all over the bench.
Continued…?

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Photos

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Brennan at a Genova sunset

Genova
Genova Skyline

B-Sunset
Brennan watching the sun go down

Sunset
Sunset in Genova

surprised me
Alex took this as I parked my bike in Genova

main square
A main square in Genova

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Brennan and Alex in Genova

Comments

[Brandy]

Yay! Finally a picture of the famous Vespa. I was wanting to see this darling little machine that has been taking repeated thrashings. :P