The return to France wasn’t bad, with a few exceptions. I took the Eurostar (Italian high speed train) from Rome to Milan. While the other Italian trains are pretty sucky, the Eurostars are nice. A lot nicer than the TGV, but then the supplement is 12 euros instead of 3. While I was waiting for the train to leave, a guy came up to me and asked if this was second class. I said yes, then asked if he had a reservation (reservations are always required on high-speed trains, while on most trains your ticket kets you just get on any train you want). He said no, so I tried to explain that he needed one because it was a Eurostar. He started saying no that couldn’t be right, at which point I reached the end of my Italian. So the other people tried to explain it to him too, but he still wouldn’t believe them. They managed to convince him to go talk to the conductor (the train had left at this point), so thanks to us he avoided a big fine, but he was still pissed off he had to pay the supplement (a whopping 13.50 euros), and he never thanked us for saving him the fine. Jerk.

Anyway, I got into Milan, and promptly got crapped on by a pigeon, for the fourth time. The pigeons definitely saved the best for last. I was walking along, when I all of a sudden felt something wet hit my hair. I thought "Goddam, that’d better be water," then stuck my hand into my hair. "Fucking shit," I mumbled, followed by "Literally!" I went to find something to wipe it off, but for some reason when there’s pigeon shit in your hair and you suddenly feel it start to ooze onto your forehead and towards your eyes, it suddenly becomes very hard to remember the Italian word for napkin. So, I ended up just saying "Scusi!!" at a sandwich stand and pointing at my head like an idiot until the woman got a horried look on her face, shoved some napkins at me, and pointed me to the bathroom. I swear, the next time I come to Europe, I’ll be buying some arsenic and mixing it with some pigeon feed.

My train was 45 minutes late leaving Milan, and I had a 30 minute connection to make once it got to Karslruhe. Fortunately, the Germans made up a bunch of time once they took it over, because I ran out of credit on my cell-phone while trying to call Dan to figure out what I was going to have to do to make to Metz before noon if I missed my connection (I needed to get there before noon to take my suitcase back from the office in my dorm).

I made it Metz early Friday morning, got my suitcase, rented a room for a night, and promptly passed out (I think I had slept two hours the night before). I ended up just hanging out, catching up on the news, and writing in my travelogue all day because my feet were incredibly sore and I really didn’t feel like going anywhere else.

On Saturday, I headed to Strasbourg, and basically did more of the same. Everyone had been telling me to read The Da Vinci code, and since I didn’t have anything better to do, I went to the bookstore to buy it. I couldn’t find it except in large-print, so I ended up buying Angels and Demons, the book that came before it. I also got myself my last cheap trappist beer (some Chimay blue… quality stuff). The book turned out to be incredibly good. It had a good plot, and it was really cool because it was set mostly in Rome, so I had just been to a whole bunch of the places it described a few days earlier.

And now here I am, in the Paris airport, waiting for my flight to Atlanta. The airport actually has little desks with power outlets, so people with laptops can use them before getting on their flight without draining their batteries. I thought I was going to have to find an outlet somewhere and sit on the ground, and here I am with a desk and padded stool. Anyway, that’s pretty much everything. I have to go back and fill a bunch of holes in my travelogue, some of which I’ll do now and some of which I’ll probably do back in Atlanta. After I’ve let thing percolate in my head a bit, maybe there’ll even be some deep thoughts that no one cares about except for me.

Wow. I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting in Naples, but I don’t think it was anything like what I found there.

The first day (Sunday) started in Perugia. I was on the way out of the hostel when I held the door for a guy and he said “Appreciate it”. Having lived in the South for four years now, I immediately replied “Uh-huh,” took a few steps and then thought “Wait a minute, that’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say that this trip.” So I talked to the guy, who turned out to be from Alabama. While we were talking a girl came up to us and asked him about Assisi. It turned out we were both on our way to Rome, her to head home and me to connect to Naples. So we hung out for a while in Perugia and then got on the train to Rome.

In Rome, I had about a 40 minute connection, so I went and got myself some food from the massive supermarket (called, for some reason, “Drug Store”) under the station and then got on the train. The train ride was pretty interesting. There was an Italian guy practically molesting an Italian girl he had just met on the train. She was saying no, but in a way that it was obvious he just had to wait until they got off the train. There were the southern Italian teenagers trying to hit on a group of Asian girls who didn’t want anything to do with them and probably wouldn’t have even if they had spoken any English. So, I had some good entertainment and didn’t even have to get out my iPod.

Once I got to Naples, it was what I had been told to expect. The street outside of the train station was really dirty and after a few minutes of trying the normal way, I figured out that the best way to cross the street in Naples is to cross at the middle of the block by waiting for a slight break in traffic and then going across frogger-style, hoping the cars will slow down enough to avoid hitting you. I think you’re more likely to be killed by a scooter on the sidewalk while waiting for the walk sign than by a car while jay-walking. Getting to the hotel was quite an adventure, because I had to cross about 10 lanes of traffic (not all at once) to get there from the train station.

When I got to the street with my hostel, I found out it was extremely dirty. Like, unbelievable amounts of trash in the street. It turns out that there’s a market in that street every day, that the mess gets cleaned up every night, and that no one bothers to try to make the people with stalls at the market clean up after themselves. I’m actually not sure if the market is at all official, since I’m pretty sure the Dolce & Gabbana jeans on sale weren’t real.

So I went into my room, where I found a girl and a guy. I introduced myself and the whole "where’s everyone from thing" started. When I said I was from Canada, the guy started celebrating, so I asked if he was Canadian too. He said "No, I’m just glad I’m not and you two are." It turned out the girl was called Bonnie and that she was from a farm north of Grand Prairie, Alberta (which for you non-Canadians means she’s from a place that’s even colder than where I’m from, and Winnipeg is cold by Canadian standards) and that the guy was from somewhere in Normandy and claimed to be half Swedish and half French. Within less than two minutes he had declared Bonnie and me to be married. This was even before I had a chance to find out his name (which turned out to be Jean-Guillaume). He was travelling with a friend, except that they weren’t friends anymore, who was off seeing some Roman ruins somewhere.

The three of us headed out to eat pizza (what else would we eat in Naples?). The place had really good pizza (and really cheap too… like 4 euros for Margherita con funghi) and really shitty wine. We ate pizza and just chatted for a while and then headed back to the hostel. By that time Jean-Guy’s travel buddy (David) had shown up, so I got introduced to him. That was pretty much it for day one in Naples.

On Monday, Bonnie was going to Amalfi. Since I had wanted to go, I tagged along. It turned out that to get there it took an hour and twenty minute ride on the Circumvesuviano railroad to Sorrento, folled by a over one and a half hour bus ride to Amalfi. To make things worse, there were so many people waiting for the bus that we had to wait for the second one to come before we got a seat. So, we ended up deciding not to go to Amalfi, and instead got off the bus at Positano to save the extra half hour ride to Amalfi.

Positano itself was beautiful. It was your typical Italian Mediterranean coast town: incredibly blue water, pastel-colored houses rising up steep mountainsides, and hordes of tourists. There wasn’t much in the way of a public beach (just a tiny little bit between the private one and the harbor) but it was all good because it actually had sand and the water was a perfect temperature. So we picked a spot and did the beach thing for a while. Bonnie stayed for around two hours and then had to head back to Naples to catch a train to Belgium. I stayed for another hour and then headed to the bus stop. On my way I spotted a granita stand. They had freshly-prepared granite made with real lemons–incredibly good stuff after a few hours at the beach.

The ride back to Naples was pretty much like the one to Positano, just in reserve, and with no shade in which to wait. There was a giant group of Asian tourists at the front of the line, but both times the bus came, everyone suddenly crowded in front of them and they wouldn’t push the people back, so they didn’t get on. I got on the second bus, but who knows… they might still be there trying to get on the bus.

I got back to the room to find Jean-Guy and David. We were sitting around chatting, when a girl came in, did a double-take, and said "Oh, c’est mixte?" (Oh, it’s mixed-sex?) Her name was Stephanie and she was French was well, so I suddenly found myself switching gears back into French. She asked if anyone had had dinner. I hadn’t, so we decided to grab some pizza, and the other two decided to come along. There were three Brazilians in the hostel who also needed dinner, so we all went to the same pizza place as last night again.

At dinner, we found out that everyone except for David spoke English, and everyone except Liege (one of the Brazilians) spoke French. Most of the people at the table spoke three or four languages, and it seemed at any given moment during dinner at least three of them were being spoken at once. The French people were off in their French world with one of the Brazilians. Since I didn’t want to the other two Brazilians to feel cut off, I ended up speaking English with them. I kind of pissed me off that David didn’t speak English. He was busy trying to learn Italian when he didn’t know the single most important language in the world. I think it’s much more excusable for a Brazilian to not know French than for a French person to not know English (pretty much every French twenty-something I’ve met has spoken English). It was just annoying getting cut out of half of the conversation because I didn’t want the one Brazilian to be completely isolated. But, aside from that, it was really fun and interesting talking to such a diverse group.

After dinner, Jean-Guy, Stephanie, David, and I went to a nearby bar to have some Guinesses. I quickly started to realize why Jean-Guy was really regretting travelling with David. The guy was so French it hurt. He seemed to be trying to fulfill every single bad French stereotype in existance. First, there was his insistence that English was a useless language. Then, I was pretty sure he made a conscious effort to make his French as French as possible (it’s hard to describe, but Stephanie laughed at him for his word choice a few times, so I wasn’t the only one). The guy was also incredibly arrogant. He kept on going on about how being a teacher was an incredibly noble and respected profession (he was about to take some exams to become a teacher). He insisted on dominating the conversation, and kept on dragging it around to whatever popped into his head. Since I think a lot more slowly in French, it basically meant I had to sit there and listen, because whenever I came up with something to say, he’d always moved the conversation to something else. One of the times that I actually got a chance to make a comment, he actually said it was wrong and then explained what I must have meant! Fortunately, Stephanie and Jean-Guy were both really funny people, so there’d usually be good banter going back and forth between them, and I picked up a whole bunch of new words. Too bad my French still isn’t good enough to be able to make jokes that quickly.

Tuesday morning, I decided to go to Pompeii and Herculaneum, two Roman cities preserved by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. They were both incredibly cool. Pompeii had a really good audioguide with lots of good descriptions, so that by the end of my four hours there, I could usually walk into a house and pick out all of the typical components. I think I’d be pretty at home if I ever time-travelled back to Ancient Rome. "Hey Marcus, how’s it going? I see your impluvium is bone-dry too. Crazy weather we’ve having having lately, eh?" I guess I’d have to learn a few more words of Latin first though. A few of the highlights (like the Colosseum and the brothel) were closed, but there was so much to see it didn’t really matter. Some of the coolest things were plaster-of-paris casts of the cavities left by bodies that were made during the excavation. You could actually see the expression of terror on their faces from when they were buried alive by the volcano. It was kind of unsettling to look at them, but it really connected you with the inhabitants of the city. After I saw those, it suddenly became a lot easier to visualize Romans wandering around the town, going about their everyday business.

Herculaneum was also pretty cool. The guying running the audioguide booth for some reason told me they were closed, even though ten minutes later, I saw people coming into the site with audioguides. It turned out Herculaneum was a lot better preserved than Pompeii, so you didn’t need the audioguide quite as much. It was also smaller and shadier, which was nice. I’d brought a lot of water, and it was about the same temperature as but less humid than Atlanta, but the heat still got to me after a while. After all, I usually don’t make a habit of spending hours at a time outdoors in Atlanta during the hottest hours of the day.

When I got back to the hostel, they were just in the process of kicking some random guy out of my room and putting an extra bed in. Stephanie had been planning on moving to another hostel, but changed her mind (she obviously couldn’t get enough of us). An Italian friend of hers was coming to spend time in Naples with her, and since her friend was in a wheelchair, they decided to stick the two of them back in our room because it was the first one and the hallway was very narrow. After she and her friend got settled, we headed out to check out Naples. The random guy had apparently wanted to come with us, but everyone had forgotten. But, as I pointed out, he only spoke English, so he wouldn’t have fit in anyway. "Yeah," Jean-Guy agreed, "he’s not a polyglot–screw him."

So we wandered around Naples. We made our way to Fantasia Gelateria, which probably had the best gelato in Naples. It was so good, I ended up having two cones in a row. After that, we just sat around on some benches, people-watching and drinking some shitty Italian beer (Jean-Guy said it was "Top" for Italian beer, but it was still shitty). Once we got hungry, David wanted to go back to the same pizzeria as the last two nights (among other things, he was really cheap). I put my foot down and said I wasn’t eating at the same place three nights in a row, so we found another place.

Dinner was interesting, because Stephanie’s friend Lucia spoke about as much French as I spoke Italian. We managed to have a conversation, but I was really sweating at the end of it. I don’t think I’ve ever pushed my language skills that far before. Not only was I trying to have a real conversation in Italian (instead of just buying train tickets or something), but whenever I got stuck, I would have to puzzle things out in French with the help of Stephanie and David. After one particularly long burst, where I someone managed to explain some engineering and marketing concepts in Italian, everyone burst into applause and Lucia wiped my brow for me I was sweating so hard. I really need to have that kind of conversation on a regular basis to really improve my Italian, but it can be so frustrating and humbling.

David continued to show himself to me more French than the French by insisting on accenting the last syllable of every word in Italian. In Italian, the syllable that’s stressed is important and can actually change the meaning of the word. It’s usually on the second or third-last syllable, but sometimes an accent is used to show the stress is on the last syllable. In French, the placement of the stress is less important, but it’s almost always on the last syllable. Anyway, not only would David put the accent on the wrong syllable, he would actually correct everyone else. For example, if I were to say "E’ vieTAto" ("It’s forbidden," said correctly), he would look puzzled for a half-second and then say "Ah, é viataTO!" So basically, the same treatment that some particularly stuck up French people had been giving me for my accent all summer, but this time I knew I was really right. I really wanted to smack the guy.

So that was pretty much it for Naples. I didn’t see a huge number of sites, but I met for really awesome people (and one annoying but sometimes unintentionally funny one) and ended having an incredibly good time. On the way back to the hostel, Stephanie asked me if I’d enjoyed my trip in Italy and I said yeah, definitely. It’s so much easier to meet people like that when you’re travelling (especially alone, because if you don’t reach out, you end up eating by youtself and being incredibly bored) and the nice thing about Italy is, if you don’t find friends for the day, there’s still lots of great scenery and cool sites to see.

Well, I’m doing laundry, so it’s time to fill in more stuff about my travels.

Today was my second day in Florence. I had planned on getting up early, doing laundry, and then going downtown and seeing some museums. Well, I didn’t get up early, and then the desk didn’t have any laundry tokens. So, I headed downtown to see some museums. The first one I went to was the Bargello, which was mainly a sculpture museum. It was alright, but I didn’t think it was anything special. I think the Louvre really killed sculpture for me. The Renaissance sculptors were definitely really good (especially in comparison to what came before them), but the things the 17th and 18th century French sculptors were doing were just amazing. The level of detail they managed to get was incredible, and their work is better preserved (which definitely helps). After the museum, I headed to Vivoli again to get some more of their gelato. It definitely is the best gelato I’ve ever had. It really tastes like you’re eating whatever fruit it is supposed to be (I’ve decided the mark of quality is how good a gelateria’s fruit gelatos taste).

My next stop was the Uffizi. I was dumb and didn’t get reservations, so I went and took a look at the line. It was really long and not moving very much. So, after grabbing a bite to eat, I went and took my place. A French couple from Lyon got in line after me, and we chatted for a while about the different regions of France and Canada. But the husband got impatient so they ended up getting reservations to come back later. So, I turned to the people in front of me, who turned out to be from Toronto. We chatted for a while, but then they gave up too. So, I talked to the people behind me, who were also from Canada. Finally, after close to three hours of waiting, we got in.

The museum itself was really cool. It was very well laid-out, showing the progression of Italian painting from the Byzantine period to the beginning of the 18th century. It was mostly Italian, but every once in a while they’d throw stuff in to show how other countries were influencing and being influenced by the Italians. Everything was nice and chronological, so you could see for example when people stopped using gold backgrounds and started putting in real stuff, when they started to figure out perspectice, when they started using atmospheric perspective, when they started doing non-religious stuff. Then, right at the end, you all of a sudden started to see things that didn’t even have people in them! That was where the collection ended, which was too bad. I guess the Italians were less important in the 18th and 19th century, so there was less stuff to show.

After the Uffizi, I was pretty much done with Florence. I headed back to the side of the river where the campground is, got off at Piazzale Michelangelo to check out and record the view, and then headed over here to do laundry.

Well, I’m once again wearing down extra internet time, and I’m pretty beat, so it seemed like a good idea to write some more.

So I arrived in Florence around 11h00 this morning. I just barely caught the 10h00 train from Lucca. I got to the station, checked my bag, and then promptly lost the claim ticket. I’m really hoping no one found and went to get my bag, but right now I just really don’t want to know. Since I’d decided to wear pants today, I figured I should knock all of the churches out. I started at Santa Maria Novella, which was absolutely beautiful on the inside (no pictures allowed though). It was pretty crappy on the outside though. The Strozzi side chapel I thought was really cool. The frescoes were very vivid (although not quite so much as the dome of the choir of one of the churches in Verona) and I just thought it really meshed well with the architecture.

On the way to San Lorenzo, I naturally stopped at one of the recommended gelato shops, this one being the Gellateria of the Bermuda Triangle. I didn’t disappear or anything, but the gelato was pretty good.

The next stop was San Lorenzo, which also had a crappy exterior (apparently Michelangelo was supposed to design an exterior but didn’t finish it) and a really really nice interior. The art was actually properly lit, partly because of the design (thanks to the genius of Brunelleschi), which let in a lot more light than you usually get in the Gothic cathedrals in France, and because they actually went to the trouble of setting up nice diffuse lighting that let you view the works from all different angles. There were some really cool sculptures by Donatello.

My final church was the big kahuna, the Duomo (Cathedral) Santa Maria del Fiore, one of the most massive cathedrals in the world. When I walked up to it I thought, “at last, a cathedral with a decent exterior”. It actually didn’t feel all that big from the inside, but it was once again very nicely lit, although not quite as well as San Lorenzo. There wasn’t much in the way of art on the side, which was pretty plain and boring. I decided to shell out for the bell tower outside the cathedral. The climg wasn’t too bad and the view was pretty cool, but there was this damn dome in the way .

After the cathedrals, I went to eat at the Trattoria Anita. They had an awesome lunch menu: two courses and a vegetable for only 5.50 euros. There was an American girl inside who was also eating alone, so I went and introduced myself so that I wouldn’t have to eat alone. Her name was Eleanor a she was a Biology major at Harvard. Turns out she was also studying in France and spending a little bit in Italy before heading back to the US. It was nice having a cool person to talk to at dinner once again (I seem to be having a pretty good record at that so far). After lunch, she wanted to go to the Duomo and I was going to the science museum, so we went our separate ways.

The science museum was really cool. They had all sorts of scientific instruments from the Renaissance onward. There were tons of telescopes, Galileo’s middle finger (which I thought was a particularly appropriate choice), all different kinds of compasses (the geometric, not magnetic kinds), globes, a whole bunch of chemistry things, very detailed anatomy models showing how to do Ceasarean sections, breach births, and all that good stuff, and a whole bunch of electrical stuff that I didn’t have time to look at because the museum was closing. There was also a girl called Rachel who went to Ohio State who was just as interested as me in all the stuff (almost everyone else was just breezing through). We got to talking and after the museum closed we went for gelato together. We went to Vivoli, which very well may be the best gelato place in the world. The flavors were all so rich, and everything was so creamy. Their peach was incredibly peachy. I’m definitely going to have to go back. We were both pretty beat, so we just sat down in a random place and chatted for an hour. Weirdly enough, she had also finished a study abroad in France, was travelling in Italy before heading back to the US, was staying in the same hostel as Eleanor, and recommended all of the same museums.

So that’s day one of Florence. For day two, I’ll be checking out the art museums. Of course, I’ll probably also be spending a lot of time checking out the lines because I didn’t get reservations. Oh well.

Well, Lucca ended up being not quite everything I had hoped for, but it was still a nice day.

My problems started on the way from Venice to Lucca. My train from Venice was an hour late, so I got to sit around forever waiting for it to arrive. There were a bunch of Italian teenagers in my compartment, but they didn’t speak much English and I wasn’t feeling up to stretching my limited Italian enough to have a conversation, so we didn’t talk much. Then when I got to Florence, I had to wait over an hour to transfer. So, I ended up getting into Lucca around 3 pm.

I had written down the wrong directions for my hostel, so it took me forever to find it, no thanks to the people who run it (their website said they were inside Lucca, which was untrue, and they were useless when I called them). When I got there, the hostel looked really great, but they told me to go upstairs and “Wait ten minutes so they could take me to the other building.” I thought I was just going next door or something, so I wasn’t sure why I had to wait so long. I found out it was because they were actually putting me in another hotel on the other side of the city. The guy who ran it was even more surly than the people at the place I was supposed to stay at, and the place was just dirty. There were all kinds of marks on the walls, the paint was peeling, and the floor of my room hadn’t been swept. Plus… well, let’s just say the walls were thin. Obviously when you’re staying in a hostel you aren’t always going to get the nicest places, but I think it’s reasonable to expect a place to at least try to be clean. And, it’s just really shitty when you put a lot of time into planning a trip and finding a good place to stay only to arrive and find out that someone’s running a bait and switch on you.

I was just on my way out when my roommate arrived. He was an officer in the US Army called Luke, a few years older than me, and pretty cool. He was definitely much more refined than you’d expect from an army officer. I guess just the fact that he was spending part of his leave in Lucca was a pretty big hint.

So we headed into town and checked out the sights, not that there were all that many. Lucca has a decent cathedral, but it was being heavily restored, so there wasn’t much to see. Plus, it was raining lightly, so we didn’t feel like doing too much exploring. After wandering around for a while, we ended up having dinner at some random tourist trap. I couldn’t believe how bad their Insalata Caprese was–a complete disgrace to Italians everywhere. After dinner we just sat and talked about random stuff for a while. Unlike almost every other restaurant I’ve been to in Europe, the waitress really seemed to want to get us out of there, because she immediately gave us the cheque (I almost always have to ask) and then hovered 5 feet away waiting for us to pay it/.

The nightlife section of the Lets Go profile of Lucca basically was a description of the felateria, which apparently had “throngs” of people every night. We checked it out after dinner, and while there were no throngs in sight, they had some pretty good gelato. Not the best, but still very good. They were the first gelateria where I saw “Zuppa Inglese” (yep, English Soup… still no idea what that means). After the gelateria, we wandered around a bit more, then went to an enoteca (wine bar) recommended by the waitress at the restaurant. I wanted to try grappa, which I tried to order, but they were apparently out of it. I got the gist that the waitress was suggested something else instead, but I had no idea what she suggested, so I just smiled and said, “Si, va bene”. Whatever I got was incredibly alcoholic: even more so than grappa according to Luke. I could feel my stomach rebelling after just the smallest tastes, so I ended up not finishing it.

So that was pretty much it for Lucca. After the enoteca, we headed back to the hotel, got some rest, and then went our separate ways in the morning. Lucca was a pretty cool town, but the hotel really ruined it for me. It’s really a place where you want to go to just relax and unwind. But for that, you need a few good friends, and a place to stay that feels homier and doesn’t make you pissed off about being ripped off. The walls of the city were pretty cool. They’re like 15 yards wide, and they’ve been made into a park that forms a ring around the city, with trees and bike and walking paths. They would have made for a great walk with views of the city and the surrounding hills… if it hadn’t been raining.