Friday, May 28, 2010

Perugia - May 28th, 2010

Today's quest to find "the cool street" took us out into the rainy streets of Perugia. Naturally, the rainy streets were much less crowded than their dry, sunny counterparts. There were still a pretty good number of people braving the weather anyway, equiped with umbrellas. Umbrella salesmen roamed the streets, selling umbrellas to tourists and locals alike, anyone who got caught out in the rain. We were offered an umbrella ourselves, but we were happy to share my little blue one as we walked through the tail end of the downpour. For all of its wetness, the rain was light and warm, and actually quite refreshing.

We were sucessful in our quest today, finding "the cool street", a winding, aspalt-paved road that zigged and zagged across bridges as it snaked its way up the hill. The road itself was interesting, but what got it the title of "cool street" is the spectacular views you could see from its railings. We snapped WAY too many pictures up there, many of them covering the same subjects we shot the day before, but from a completely uninterrupted angle. We spent much of the morning running around getting good pictures here.

We stopped into "Coop" (one syllable, pronounced "cope"), which may be the only all-encompassing grocery store in the area. Most of the shopping you do around here is in a tiny, specialized shop. Pastries from the pasticceria, hygeine and medicine from farmacia, sandwiches from paninoteca, gelataria for gelato, bottega di vino for wine. "Coop" is a chain of grocery stores more in the style we're used to in the US, but still a TINY, narrow little shop. The entirety of the store is about the size of a small aisle at a Safeway back home. Here at Coop we got some more bottled water, juice, and pesto. The pesto here is amazingly delicious. In our time here, Elly and I have eaten an entire jar of it spread on crostini bread. Molto delizioso!

Back to the hotel to drop off our bags (and to chronicle up to this point in the blog!) and now we're heading back out to the open-air market for more adventure.

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The open-air market was mostly shut down today. Apparently it is a multi-level shopping extravaganza, but only on certain days of the week at certain times. What was available today when we went was mostly purses, lipstick, dresses, and other girly trappings. It was set up basically like a flea market. We didn't buy anything, and Elly doesn't do much window shopping, so we were in and out pretty quickly.

More random walking around, somewhat directed by gift shopping for friends. We picked up some things, but mostly we just walked.

Blogging a bit before dinner. We're going to go to La Pasteria for pizza in about 20 minutes.

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Dinner was great! We both had pizza. Elly had a spicy diavolo pizza (red sauce, mozz, spicy meat) and I had a caprese pizza (fresh tomato, buffalo mozz, oregano). Very delicious. The service at this place was very good. Our server was this really cute middle-aged man who seemed to have a lot of fun working on his English with us. I got the impression that he may have been the owner of the place. We also had wine, cappucino, and dolce. Dessert was layers of cake, strawberry, and chocolate rolled together and sprinkled with cocoa and powdered sugar.

We have to get to bed early tonight, because we need to be out the door by 7am. We have a treno to catch to Biassa. The train ride will be about 5 hours. We're staying in Biassa 2 nights, then another train ride to Florence for 3 nights. After that we're heading back to Rome for another 2 nights. I'm not sure if we'll have internet access between now and Rome, but I'll continue to blog and take pictures, and upload them when I can.

Photos

Perugia - May 27th, 2010

I'm writing this on Friday. Yesterday was somewhat uneventful, but I'm retroactively blogging it anyway, plus I got some good pictures to post.

Elly and I stayed up a bit late on Wednesday night. We still woke up pretty early Thursday morning and had breakfast in the hotel breakfast room. After eating we both agreed that we were still pretty tired and went back to bed for a couple more hours. I love vacation!

Our quest for the day was to find, in Elly's words, "the cool street". She was awfully mysterious about it, so I'm not sure what we were actually looking for. She was attempting to use Google Maps on her phone to pick out a path, but it just doesn't work like that out here. There are streets on the map that don't exist in real life, or if they do they are possibly underground streets that we were not able to find. We attempted to pick out a path to "the cool street" and wound up just orbiting it for awhile.

At one point, we ran into a mass of school kids and their school. The via we were following dead-ended in a school yard. According to the map it kept going through, but we both felt like we were intruding, so we backed out and took another path. I should have snapped off some photos, but didn't think about it until later.

Up and down Perugian vias. We saw some new sights (new to me, anyway) but never found "the cool street". We're going to try again today. Among the new sights we saw was an awesome, tree-covered via, and Via Appia, a street criss-crossed with bridges and arches.

Another thing we came across that day: the cathedral piazza had a stage and tent set up for a concert of some kind. Live, Italian pop music played from there starting during pausa and continuing through that night. With our windows open we could hear the music all the way back at the hotel.

We had another awesome lunch. Every single restaurant we've been to here has been WORLDS better than American Italian food. Fairly cheap, too. Most restaurants have a deal where you can get prima e secondi e contorni (side dish, such as a salad or potatoes) e acqua e caffè e coperto (cover charge, basially the tip) for ~12-16 euros. That's basically $20 US. A burger, fries, and a latte in Denver can easily run $16-20 after tip, and the meals you get here are much better.

Elly's MS fatigue caught up with us today, so we had to take it pretty chill that afternoon/evening. Elly wasn't feeling up to leaving the room so I got to go on an adventure where I bought bottled water and gelato without her assistance.

Today we're going to take it pretty easy, Elly is still pretty fatigued. We're going to head out and try to find "the cool street" again.

Photos

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Perugia - May 26th, 2010, Part 2

After Elly's "pausa" nap we went out shopping. We bought some snacks, two shirts for Elly, a power adapter (for using Italy's electrical outlets), and some "cioccolata". This shopping took place on another long, up-and-down-stairs, meandering walk. Lots of exercise, whew! We also got two small gelatos to eat on the way back, thus negating the benefit of all that exercise. ;)

Our hop from shop to shop took us to a part of Perugia that actually LOOKED like a city, with roads and stuff. I was so shocked I snapped off a three picture photogasm.

Hours later (no exageration) we made it back to Piazza Bella Repubblica and Hotel Fortuna. A bit of freshening up and we went back out for a pizza dinner. Still unaccustomed to Italian eating, we decided to split a pizza. It will probably be best for us if we DON'T get accustomed to Italy's level of food intake, especially since we'll be returning to our sedentary lives in United States of Fatmerica. Amerifat? At any rate, back home if I ate a  two-course pasta lunch, pizza, and ice-cream all in one day I probably wouldn't need to walk several hours up-and-down stairs to get to it.

Home again, home again. Elly's laptop hard drive is filled with some American TV episodes. Watching a couple of those before bed each night has been a GREAT comfort, I highly recommend it when travelling abroad.

Culture Shock #8: Holy CRAP Italians party. Outside our window EVERY night is raucous signing, flirtatous shrieks, and other drunken revelry. The nights we've stayed so far have been Monday through Wednesday keep in mind. This isn't a weekend, or a holiday, or anything. This is SERIOUSLY worse than Boulder on The Hill.

Culture Shock #9: Customer Service. I'm learning things about my own country over here. It isn't that the customer service is BAD here, its that it isn't the finely honed razor of false smiles, "greeted by the hostess within 15 seconds", etc. They aren't the incredible drones of amazing customer service that they are in the US. Again, it isn't that they aren't attentive, polite, friendly, etc, its just... they aren't so "life or death" about how quickly and thoroughly they serve you. Once a waiter has taken your order and brought back your food you have to FLAG THOSE GUYS DOWN to get more service out of them. They're prompt and attentive once you've got their attention, though. Whether or not you need a refill, desert, etc. is entirely your responsibility, not theirs.

Culture Shock #10: The Bill. We finally figured it out today, after half a week of awkward meal endings. They don't bring you the bill here. They take the plates away, and then they don't care HOW long you want to sit at that table chatting. Only ONCE in all our meals in Italy did they bring us the bill. You're supposed to get up and pay on your way out, whenever you are ready.

Photos

Today's Vocabolario
I speak it all now, guys. Totally fluent. Nothing new to report.

Perugia - May 26th, 2010, Part 1

Today was pretty eventful. We started the day with "colazioni" (breakfast) in the hotel. Italians basically don't do breakfast at all, I guess to save room for lunch and dinner. We had some cappucini and yogurt, but they didn't have much else. I stuffed a portion-control packet of nutella and a packet of cookies in my pocket for later, just in case I didn't make it to "pausa".

After colazioni I took some time to post a blog post my backlogged blog posts and photos. You've seen the fruits of that labor by this point. Elly got frustrated because it took me WAY TOO LONG. Hopefully you guys appreciate this stuff, heheh.

Once Elly was able to drag me out of the hotel lobby we went for another long, beautiful walk through Perugia. It is amazing how you can see so many different places in such a small area. The way the streets weave in and out of each other, with all the narrow little shops, there really is a LOT more to see per square foot. Elly took me out to the apartment she stayed in while she was here, and my random wanderings took her to a few hidden nooks in her old neighborhood that she'd never seen before.

One of these nooks was this antique looking garden with a undomesticated, sunbathing cat. Elly spent a bit of time attempting to pet the kitty, but he was too timid. She got a pet or two on his head, but it became pretty clear that he wasn't used to being around people.

We wandered far and wide, up and down Perugian narrow, staircase vias. We walked and snapped photos for almost three solid hours.

Quite tired and hungry by this time, we went back toward the hotel to "al Mangiar Bene" for pausa. Down, down, down a narrow staircase to a cute little restaurant. This time I would not be defeated; I had a prima course (rigatoni in pepper-cream sauce), and a secondi course (prosciutto and mozzarella bufala).  We were both quite stuffed.

Its amazing to me how much Italians eat, but they're basically all so skinny. Then again, with all the staircases around here, I guess they get plenty of exercise.

Between regular tiredness and MS fatigue, Elly almost fell asleep at lunch. Back to the hotel for a nap (for her) and more blogging/pictures (for me).

No culture shocks today. At least not so far. I guess I'm Italian now. ;)

Photos

Vocabolario
"capisco" - understand
"non lo so" - I don't know
"quanto" - how much?

Perugia - May 25th, 2010, 22:20

Today started out by sleeping in WAY too late (nearly 11). We went out and first thing bought some ceramics from a once-a-week street market. We bought a pizza platter, a fridge magnet, and a tea/coffee mug, all hand-crafted, painted, etc. Very nice. Then we headed over to a pasticceria for breakfast. We each had a little dessert that was basically a stack of cocoa-dusted cookies with creamy filling between each one. Elly had one topped with white chocolate and I had one topped with an orange jelly thingie. I had another cappucino, Elly had hot chocolate. It was a far cry from our milk-and-cocoa-powder. It was a think, soupy concoction that began congealing almost immediately. I had two sips, and it was almost too much chocolate for me. So delicious, though.

After breakfast we went for a bit more of a walk and then back to our hotel room for a bit. Elly had a nap and I did some reading. Her MS fatigue was acting up a bit, so she got tuckered out pretty fast today. It's fine, though; the forced relaxation was awesome.

After some hotel-room time, we both went back out for "pausa" (pow-ZUH). I had tortoloni stuffed with mozz and tomato and smothered in basil-spinach pesto. The pesto was subtly creamy, but I can't tell if there was actually milk involved. Elly had chittarini, with a red sauce of some kind. Chittarini (if I have the spelling right) appeared to be a think spaghetti. We sort of half-assed our "pausa", only doing a single "prima" course, skipping the main "secondi" course. I can't imagine eating that much food, though. We'll get another run at it tomorrow, I guess. We did save a bit of room for dessert, though. A scoop of french vanilla ice-cream on top of a bed of fresh, sliced strawberries. Not exactly Italy-specific, but still very good. I had a bit of a culture shock at the restaurant, desribed further down.

After lunch we went on a long walk around Perugia. We just started wandering off in whatever direction our feet took us, which wound up being a bad idea because of Elly's MS. She got to the point where she couldn't really go on, but we didn't know the shortest way back to the hotel. She sat on some steps while I ran around trying to find the way back. I couldn't just go running off, though, because then I wouldn't have any way to find Elly again. I came up with a pretty clever solution, though; as I ran through the twisting maze of Perugian "vias" I took pictures of landmarks with my finger deliberately in the shot to point the way to go. Then, once I found my way to the main city square (and thus close to the hotel) I used my photos to guide me back to Elly. Once I successfully guided Elly back to the hotel we were both pretty pooped (Elly most of all, though I did all the running around). Our lunch plus walk took nearly four and a half hours.

Feeling a bit overwhelmed from the disasterously long walk, we decided to pretty much call it a day. We retired to our hotel a bit early, and used the down-time as an excuse to get a wifi connection and get T-Mobile to enable international calling. All the buildings around here are six stories tall and made of solid stone, so indoor mobile reception is a joke. It is going to be VERY nice to have google maps again, especialy since asking an Italian for directions is basically a lost cause because of the language barrier... and the culture barrier. Italians are apparently notorious for giving crappy directions. And no wonder, with the cities bulit the way they are.

Culture Shock #6: This one takes some explaining... We ate at a SUPER fancy restaurant, "la Taverna". No wine cheaper than 45 euros a bottle, no "secondi" main course cheaper than 20 euro. Remember, Euros are... around 1.3 dollars today. So if we were to eat "prima e secondi con vino" it would have run us $130+ for the two of us to eat lunch. DESPITE the fanciness of our cuisine, our table was still just plopped into some alley somewhere, with cars driving so close to the table that I could reach out and touch them with my fork if I wanted to. The back of my chair was against a mechanical gate, which led to a tiny parking lot. Cars and mopeds zipped by us several times, in and out of the gated parking lot, which I think led to some sort of a multi-residence building.

Culture Shock #7: They drive like maniacs here, whipping around at 30 miles an hour, weaving through these tiny alleys, narrowly missing hitting pedestrians, dining establishments... up and down steep stairscases... there aren't "sidewalks" and "roads", just "vias" which, if they happen to be car width, have cars zipping down them. And parking? Very few labeled spots. If a driver gets to a plaza near to his destination he just STOPS DRIVING in the middle of the plaza and gets out.

Photos

Today's Vocabolario
"questo" - this. Useful for ordering. ;)
"ancora" - now.
"e" - and.
"questo e cappucino; ancora! per favore" - Get a move on, Starbucks barista! I know Italian now.

Roma e Perugia - May 24th, 2010, 21:36

This is my first moment of respite since leaving Colorado. When we haven't been sitting in cramped litle seats we've been running around crazy trying to get to the next place. I'm now sitting at a night stand typing to a text doc on Elly's laptop; we haven't figured out how to Internet yet.

Saturday at 4:19pm Colorado time we jumped on an RTD bus to the airport, then at 8:15 flew British Airways 9 hours to London, Heathrow. Two hour layover (feels like 10 minutes, amazingly) then another couple of hours to Rome. Our flight kind of ruled. I don't know if this is the difference between British Airways and other airlines or if the bigger difference is international travel vs US local, or what. The in-flight meal was great. Elly had orange chicken and I had lasagna. Very good. Came with wine, a few sides, some sort of a custardy dessert with mango suace and chocolate chips. I didn't sleep a wink the entire first leg of the flight. Fortunately for me, the in-flight movie selection was pretty good and FREE. I watched Edge of Darknes, Pullham 123, Charlie Wilson's War, and The Princess and The Frog all from the comfort of the back of some guy's head. If the selection is the same on the way back I'm TOTALLY gunna watch Alien.

The downside of our flight was that Elly and I had to sit separately. Within sight of each other, but too far away to chat. Apparently you're supposed to check in online 24 hours before the flight to choose your seats, or something. It totally sucked.

Heathrow Airport is basically a giant mall, with airplanes that take you to your car instead of a parking shuttle. Seriously. DIA has a food court and some gift shops. Heathrow has multi-level clothes stores, candy shops, full-scale restaurant/bars, etc. Our "2 hour layover" wound up giving us 20 minutes between planes, though, so we didn't have much time to check stuff out.

I basically napped off and on from London to Rome. By the time we got on the plane in London we'd been awake almost 24 hours. We got in to Rome around 4pm (8am CO time) and rode a treno (train) from the Fiumicino Airport to Roma Termini station. We wound up taking a VERY wrong way out of the train station and spent well over an hour wandering back alleys, orbiting within a couple of blocks of the hostel we were supposed to be staying at. We finally found it, dropped off our bags, and grabbed some pasta around 10:30pm. The house wine we got with our meal tasted like medicated bathwater, but the pasta was quite delicious. A bit of a culture shock, though. Elly and I agreed that the first few bits of my lasagna and her canneloni were pretty so-so at first, but the meal got much better as we went. American pasta seems to substitute salt where Italy uses fresh tomatoes. It starts out seeming quite bland, but is actually really delicious.

Exhausted, we dragged our corpses back to the hostel and flopped into our beds. Good thing we were so tired, too. The hostel had several rooms, our room had 10 bunks, and at least one of the tiny bunks was hosting a young, amorous couple. Despite the lights, loud noises, etc I was out cold and slept for 11 hours solid. My sleep was punctuated by intermittent dreams where I was the only person capable of saving the world from Plant Man. Plant Man was a pathetic super-villian who used his control over plants to try to take over the world, but was trounced soundly by a real super-hero. After years in retirement, Plant Man was considering going back to his life of crime, and somehow I was the only one in the world who could talk him out of it. Totally bizarre dreams. Back to the real story...

Elly and I woke up, packed our bags, and walked down to Roma Termini to catch a treno to Perugia. After buying tickets we got a cioccolato muffin and a cappucino at a coffee shop in the train station. The train station, much like Heathrow airport, was ALSO a mall. Upscale fashion shops, restaurants, multi-level book stores, cell phone shops, etc all within a few second walk of the train platform. Consumerism is as rampant here as in America. That was a bit of a culture shock.

Beautiful train ride through the Italian country-side, interrupted by MS-related pseudo-medical emergency that I won't be chronicling here.

Upon arriving at the end-of-the-line in Peruga, we hopped a bus up the winding, narrow roads up the hill to the heart of Perugia. Exhausted again, we zombie-walked to Hotel Fortuna, dropped our bags on the bed and took a shower.

Hotel Fortuna is this amazingly beautiful, ancient, labarynthine building covered in ivy that snakes its way up the hillside in a microcosmic emulation of the rest of the town. I got some beautiful pictures from the terrace/roof, a few of which feature scenery rather than my beautiful wife.

Feeling a bit rejuvinated, we walked around Perugia, seeing some sites. We ate gelato and pizza and are now back at the hotel. Gelato here was basically the same as the gelato I've had in the US, but the pizza was amazing. Elly had a pizza that included sausage, I had basil, tomato, mozz, and buffalo mozz. Buffalo mozz is pretty similar to goat cheese in consistancy, but a bit different in flavor. Both pizzas were "molto bene". I was at first intimidated by the number of cherry-tomatoes on my pizza but they were the perfect firmness and ripeness, and extremely flavorful. I'm definitely going back to "il Bacio" for pizza again before we leave here.

We haven't really had a chance to relax or enjoy anything because of all the insanity involved with travel. I'm enjoying the trip so far, though.

The most incredibly awesome thing about Perugia so far is the design of the city. The whole place is built on the side of a hill, and follows a single basic design philosophy: massive, beautiful plazas connected by extremely narrow alleys.

Culture Shock #1: No real culture shock. They really are almost exactly like Americans, here. The old people dress the same as our old people, the young people dress the same as our young people. The biggest difference in the people is that the kids here that dress like we do are dressing like AMERICANS, as a trendy fashion statement. And the majority of them that dress like super-fashionable hipsters aren't doing so ironically, they're doing so because they're the "euro-trash" that hipsters are in many ways emulating. But peple are pretty much the same here as anywhere in the US.

Culture Shock #2: No handicapped. Not that they don't exist, I'm sure they do. But there are NO allowances for them. The entire world is made of stairs. I was first made aware of this because I was lugging around that heavy ass suitcase, and there was NEVER a ramp option. Now I notice it everywhere. In the US a building that can't be reached by the handicapped is a great offense, but here I have seen one ramp per hundred staircases. I've seen MAYBE MAYBE 5 ramps since getting off the plane in Rome. Which, by the way, is a subtle way of implying that I've seen 500 staircases in Perugia, which is no joke.

Culture Shock #3: NO DOOR KNOBS! OMG, why no door knobs? There are KNOBS, sure, but they don't turn! They come in two flavors: functionless knobs used to grasp the door, and knobs with giant functional buttons that do what a NORMAL knob does when you turn it. As an engineer I can appreciate the simplicity of a knob which, once firmly grasped, performs the function that will always follow, which is to open the door. These "auto-turning" knobs seem to be much less common than the "no-turn" knobs. You have to use a key to open the door in that case. Then again, maybe the fact that I've gone from restaurant to hotel to restaurant to hotel is corrupting my perspective. The same perspective in the US would convince me that all doors opened either with a key card and rotating handle or a door-width push bar.

Culture Shock #4: Toilets. Everything about a euro bathroom seems designed to confuse. The toilets are shaped differently for no good reason. Instead of being a basin that tapers to a narrow pipe, they are a DEEP basin that basical doesn't taper much at all, it just makes a 90 degree turn at such a sharp angle that it took me two flushes to realize anything was actually going on down there. And the tank isn't part of the toilet, it is hung on the wall just below the ceiling. And bidets. They look EXACTLY like a sink you'd need to kneel to use. There is a soap dish with soap, and a towel, and a faucet with hot and cold water, and a drain plug. But it is all DISTRESSINGLY just below knee level, right next to the toilet. I'm fairly sure I know the intended use, but I'm not going to rely upon American heresay to perform such a filthy and intimate task. World, let it be known! The next chance I get I'm going to google "bidet correct usage".

Culture Shock #5: No street signs! Plenty of streets, very few signs. When there are signs, they aren't intersection sign posts like in the US, just plaques set into the walls that you cant read unless you're walking down that street already. Oh, and I have no joke seen a street sign for a staircase. A little, winding staircase connecting two other roads named "via something-or-other".

Well, the sounds of the Perugia street and the fresh, Italian air wafting around my open window-shutters, and my bed calls to me. Or, at least, my spine calls to the bed. Holy crap I'm tired. Elly warns me that the bed is really uncomfortable, but she is doing so in the dream-like, leaden syllables of the already-sleeping. I'm hoping she's wrong, but either way I doubt it will matter much to me.

Photos

Today's Vocabolario
per favore - please
grazie - thank you
permesso - excuse me (I need to get by you)
scuzi - excuse me (oops, I bumped you, sorry)
bagno - toilet
multo/multi - many, much
treno - train
termini - terminal, terminus. End of the line.