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.
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