My first real stop in Italy was Verona. The train ride from Milan was pretty interesting. There were a bunch of people in my compartment, one of whom saw me thumbing through Lets Go, and asked if I spoke English and if I was an American. I replied (in Italian) that I did speak English and I gave him the explanation about my dual citizenship, and we started talking about Italy and Switzerland and stuff (in English at this point, because we’d reached the end of my Italian skills). After a bit, he asked me if I spoke French, so I moved the conversation into French, just because I could. He didn’t miss a beat, so I started to wonder how many languages he spoke, because so far I’d heard flawless English, Italian, and French. It turned out that he spoke around 10 different languages (or so he said). He said he was a writer, and whenever he wrote about a country, he liked to learn their language and their history because he liked to really understand the culture of a place before he wrote about it. At that point we were at his stop, and I didn’t think to ask his name, which was too bad. It would’ve been cool to actually read something by a guy that I had met.

A while later, I got to Verona, and hopped on the bus to the downtown. My first stop was the arena, to pick up my tickets for that night’s performance of Aida. And by arena, I mean the Roman arena, not a modern one. Every summer, Verona puts on a opera festival in their Roman arena. There was no way I was going to miss it, especially given that they were performing Verdi’s Aida the night I was in town. I had no problem getting the tickets, so I headed further into town to start exploring.

So I’m in Italy. I probably won’t normally be this obsessive about posting, but I had to pay for a full hour of internet so that I could get my purchase confirmation for my opera tickets for tomorrow, so I figured I might as well use it and make a post.

I had to stay up way too late last night getting my room cleaned up, so I’m pretty beat. I got into Milan at 7:30 pm after pretty much a whole day on the train. The train ride was really nice. We went through Switzerland, so the scenery was naturally beautiful. There’s just something about riding through a valley seeing mountains disappearing into the clouds on both sides of you. And for some reason, lakes look ten times more beautiful when they’re in the mountains. Once we got into Italy we passed by Lake Maggiore, which looked like a great place to take a vacation. It was kind of overdeveloped, but the scenery was just so incredibly green, and the lake looked pretty peaceful. The city of Stresa looked like a had a little beach on the lake… if only I had time to check it out.

So as soon as I walked out of the Milan train station, I ran into a guy who was claiming to be Hungarian tourist and clearly trying to scam me. It was a pretty nice introduction to Milan. Pretty much all I’ve done in Milan is grab dinner and, of course, gelato. As soon as I got done with the scammer, I saw people eating gelato and tracked down the closest gelato stand. Since I’m running on 5 hours of sleep and it’s incredibly hot even at 10 pm, I think I’m just going to bed. Tomorrow I’ll spend a full day exploring Verona and then go see Aida in the Roman arena, which apparently has amazing acoustics. In case anyone cares, this is my itinerary:

Right here.

Well, after an absolutely horrible week, I’m heading to Cinque Terre, Italy to meet up with Dan and Vickie. Here’s the town (Riomaggiore) where I’ll be staying:

Jealous? I hope so!

Vickie and I went to see the Tour de France, because it was pulling into Nancy, which is just 45 minutes by train from Metz. It was pretty cool. The route was pretty crowded, but it was cold and rainy, so that helped keep the crowds to a reasonable level. I’m not a Tour expert, but I have a feeling that in good weather we wouldn’t have been able to get to the front of the barricades 250m from the finish line.

We had to stand around for an hour waiting for the racers to arrive. Fortunately, there was a bunch of entertainment, with a local radio station announcing the race, a jumbotron just barely in view, and a whole bunch of floats and cars driving the route throwing out promotional stuff. I think the truck with the hose and the foam mallets would have been a bit funnier if it hadn’t been so cold and wet. There was also a bunch of trucks with girls who looked like they should have been wearing bikinis who were instead wearing long sleeves and pants.

After a bunch of cold and wet raining, the riders finally started to get close to the finish line. The leader was a dude from the Lorraine region, so the announcers and the crowd were very excited. You could feel the excitement and the tension building as he got closer and closer to the finish line, but the rest of the pack got closer and closer to him. Finally, when he was 900m meters from the finish line, most of the excitement drained away as he wiped out in a tough turn. One of my professors said he was going to lose anyway, so it was probably better for him to go down that way.

I got to see Lance Armstrong, I think. He was more of a yellow blur than anything else. If he hadn’t had the yellow jersey at the time, I don’t think I would have recognized him.

After the riders went by, we took a half hour to get through the crowd and back to the train station, just making it in time for the next train back to Metz.

So this weekend I went to Barcelona with Nicki, where we met up with Nich and Vickie. We took a night train to Port Bou (on the French-Spanish border), and then took a local train to Barcelona. The night train was pretty nice. I’d had the brilliant idea of buying a sleeping bag that I could use as a pillow on the train, so I slept pretty well on the train. That is, until 7:00 am, when the kids in the compartment woke up and started walking way too much. An hour later, when we were almost in Port Bou, their dad finally told them to go outside. Sigh. Once we got into Port Bou, we waited around for an hour, and then hopped onto an absolutely packed train to Barcelona. The train was pretty much a glorified subway, and there were so many people on it that the seats and all of the aisles were full.

We got off at the wrong station in Barcelona, but it turned out to actually be closer to our hostel than the one we planned to get off at. It ended up being only a few minutes by subway from our hostel, not that I would have minded a longer ride because the subways in Barcelona are actually air-conditioned. When we got off the subway, we ran into some girls from McGill who were going to the same hostel as some as our friends. I don’t think I’ve had a single weekend in Europe without talking to some Canadians.

Nicki and I checked into the hostel, where we discovered that Spanish is pretty much useless in Barcelona because everyone says they only understand Catalan. Nich walked into the hostel just after we checkied in, which was some pretty amazing timing. After he got settled in, we decided to go to the beach. We walked to the beach, and ran into some people from GTL who had a way better hostel than us. It was called Seapoint, it was right on the beach, and it had a bar downstairs. It was cloudy and windy, so we ended up sitting on the terrace of Seapoint drinking some incredibly strong Sangrias.

After we got tired of the Sangrias, we headed back to the hostel to get changed for the evening and then went to the Chris Columbus statue (apparently the Catalans claim he was Catalan instead of Genoan) to meet up with a bunch of other GTL people for dinner. We went to a place called, I think, Ciberon. We all got Paella, and everyone but me got a ton of Sangrias. The Paella was delicious, and there was a live band that was pretty good. It was pretty much a perfect evening. Good food, good company, good music, and a nice view of the sea. The waiter gave me the bill at the end of the evening. I kind of gulped when I saw the total (over 200 euros), but considering that that was for 10 people and the food was incredibly good and plentiful, that wasn’t bad at all.

After dinner, Nicki and I went to meet up with Vickie, who had just taken a train all the way from the Czech republic to meet up with us. Then, we went to a club called Fiesta, which felt pretty much like being in a club in the US, except that the crowd was way younger (like some people who were obviously under 18).

On Saturday, we hit up the beach. On our way to the beach, Nich and I were looking for some cheap food. We finally gave and and grabbed sandwiches, only to find out that half a block later there was a place offering what looked like really good Paella for only 5 euros. Sigh. The beach was pretty nice. The water could have been a bit warmer, and we could have done with fewer people walking along Shouting “Hola. Acqua. Fanta. Cerveza” or offering us messages. We did see one cool vendor who ran around with a tray of donuts on his head while playing a triangle and singing donut songs. We stayed at the beach for most of the afternoon. I kind of got burnt.

After the beach, we went back to the hostel to get changed, where Nich met a girl called Penny who went to school somewhere in DC. We ended up going to dinner with her. The place we went was really nice. They had good food, but the waiter was unhappy that we weren’t spending a lot of money, which is understandable. Of course, he probably shouldn’t have said it to his manager while standing right in front of us and assuming none of us could understand. After dinner, we grabbed some ice cream, some aloe for my sunburn, and then headed out to find a really good bar Nich had heard of. We never found it, so I ended up heading back to the hostel because my sunburn was really started to get to me.

I woke up nice and early Sunday morning to the loudest snoring I’ve heard in my life. There was a big Spanish guy in the next bed over who I swear had sleep apnea, because he would snore incredibly loudly and every 30 minutes or so it sounded like he would choke a bit, after which he’d shift around and start snoring again. To top it all off, he was wearing nothing but bikini briefs.

Most of Sunday was spent doing tourist type stuff. We checked out one of the main parks. We went to the Picasso museum, which was pretty cool. On the way there, we ran into some kind of public performance in Placa San Jaume. We weren’t sure exactly what it was, because it was all in Catalan, but it involved a princess, a giant preying mantis, and a caped guy on stilts.

After the Picasso museum, we went to the Sagrada Familia. It was really cool, because it’s a giant basilica that’s still under construction. It kind of gives you an idea of what people felt like while all the great Gothic cathedrals were being built. Some of those took hundreds of years to build. The Sagrada Familia has only been under construction for around a hundred years, so it’s still pretty young. The church was amazing, even considering that it was a giant construction site. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to go to mass there once the construction is complete. We walked all the way up one of the towers (and they’re really high–lots of steps), which was pretty terrifying at some points because there are decent-sized windows all the way up the tower without bars that really drive home just how high you are.

Once we got down from the Sagrada Familia, we grabbed a snack from a local vendor and then headed back to the hostel to get ready for dinner. We ended up running into some other GTL people on the way to dinner, and they showed us this really good and cheap restaurant they’d found. The place had a great Paella and Sangria deal, so we naturally did that.

Monday was the Fourth of July, which I celebrated on trains. I pretty much spent the whole day getting back to Metz.