The Final Year

The top 10 things I learned while in Europe:

10. Mosquitoes like it when you leave the lights on and the window open.
9. Cars don’t have to be nearly as big as they are.
8. Air conditioning is the greatest invention since en-suite bathrooms.
7. Don’t buy cheap metal sunglasses if you are going to sweat.
6. Traveling during the World Cup is a blast.
5. There are a lot more Canadians in the world than I previously knew.
4. The American way of life is actually very strange.
3. I don’t need my iPod.
2. Never let anyone take your passport from you, even if they have a badge.
1. People are exactly as rude as you are.

This is a very sad blog. It’s the last one about Europe. The End. Goodbye. I’m back home, jetlagged and not just a bit confused. I couldn’t even remember which light switch in my bathroom is the one that doesn’t turn on the heat lamps. But there were a few more days in England that were fun, so I thought I’d just finish it up. Here goes.
   When I last left you it was Friday night, with three more full days in London. On Saturday morning I let my parents go to breakfast without me in order to sleep a little longer. I knew we were going to have a late night and I wanted to get as much as possible. We had three tickets to see a midnight showing of Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe Theater, so we decided to make it an easy day. There were a few things I wanted to show my parents in the area near our hotel. First, after a few minutes searching, I led them to the little quaint neighborhood in Kensington and Chelsea that I’ve previously written about. I was happy to find it again, as it is kind of a small place, easily missed but worth the effort to see. Smack in the middle of the area is a pub, as pubish a pub as any pub has ever pubbed. We stopped for some Strongbows and food that was almost never brought out. On the tv was first a cricket match, and then when the barmaid got bored with that, a music channel that only shows videos of songs from movies. I sat through such classics as "Because You Love Me" by Celine Dion, from the movie Up Close & Personal, "All for One" by the trio of Bryan Adams, Sting, and Rod Stewart from the movie 3 Musketeers, "The New Pink Panther Theme" by Freak Nasty and Beyonce, and "Don’t You Forget About Me" by Simple Minds for the Breakfast Club soundtrack. "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate from the Full Monty was playing when the waitress finally acknowledged my hails and told me that my food order had somehow been misplaced. If I would just wait a few more minutes it would be ready. I asked her very politely if she could please first put my ears out on the curb and then shove sizzling British sausages into my eyeballs. She laughed confusedly and backed slowly away. My food arrived shortly thereafter, while Loverboy’s "Almost Paradise" delivered random love scenes from Footloose to an unsuspecting audience of soon-to-leave pub patrons.
   How could we ask for more? I swear that I could see forever in Kensington and Chelsea. So we went in search of the Notting Hill Portabello Market. Boy did we find it. All we had to do was walk out onto the main street and follow the gathering streams of people. It was an absolute zoo of antique shoppers, so we just pushed our way around for a while until I found exactly what I didn’t know I was even looking for, an early 20th century hand-made level with brass top plate and dual axis indicators that would look great on my desk at school, for only 18 Euros. Score! Portabello Market seen, we tried to decide what to do next. Unfortunately, we were of differing opinions. On the one hand, there was an argument for going back to the hotel and sleeping and/or reading until it was time to get ready for the play. On the other hand, I had been told by an extremely attractive British girl I met on a train weeks ago that an exhibit on Modernism at the Victoria and Albert Museum was bang on. So we split up, my mom and I heading to the museum, my dad back for a well-deserved nap.
   The museum was much larger than I expected, and so was the exhibit, which included some really interesting items focusing on the period between the end of the first world war and the beginning of the second, encompassing the Russian revolution as well. I won’t bore you with most of the details, but the Le Corbusier stuff was amazing, if only for the fact that there were original Corb sketches that I’ve seen reproduced in every introductory Architecture textbook I’ve ever read. There was also a really cool study of how the iconic London Underground map was developed, and it’s various iterations. Anyway, I wish I had been allowed to take pictures, because we just didn’t have enough time to see everything I wanted to. Back to the hotel went we for waking up, cleaning up, and dressing up, then off in a London cab to the theater. As I think I’ve mentioned before, it was built as much as eight years ago, using only tools, techniques, and materials available when the first Globe Theater was built mpfhundred years ago. Or so. The play was really difficult to follow at first, but as time went along (and after we found a synopsis at intermission), it became easier to understand. It was very funny, but that may have been mostly because of the actors’ performances, as I felt like every other joke written by Shakespeare went completely over my head. I was expecting an hour and a half show, but it actually was more than three hours before the riotous curtain calls, and after four in the morning before we walked through the door of our hotel.
   Somehow we woke with vigor, perhaps mostly because we were all excited about our plans for the day. We got it in our heads that the day after staying out until four am would be a good one to take a long trip down to the southern coast of England, to Portsmouth. It was actually quite easy, British trains being as reliable as they are, so that we were smelling the salty air by just after two in the afternoon. The train station doubled as a ferry port, so we hopped aboard and drifted over to the other jaw of the port’s mouth, to where most of the marinas were. Once there we happened upon the very boats sailed in the Volvo Ocean Race I had seen the finish of way back when I was in Rotterdam. They were hauled out of the water and up on lifts in a dockyard, and we found that if we went around to the back side of the place we could stand right underneath them and see the rare view of them from below. It was hard to believe these things that look so fragile had sailed around the whole world. It also provided a nice bookend to my trip, seeing these at the end after watching them near the beginning.
   I wasn’t feeling well for some reason, a similar set of symptoms to the last time I was sick in England, so I sat on a bench while my parents explored the place. They found out firstly that there’s no such thing as a "Yacht Club" in England, but secondly that, inexplicably, there was a "Yacht Club" down the way where we could have a bite to eat and meet some of the locals. It was situated on the aft deck of a light boat, a boat usually anchored outside of a port with a lighthouse-ish thing mounted on the bow, in case an actual lighthouse was unavailable. We had to prove our associations before they would open the gate for us, and when we walked in we were confronted first with a paunchy, pale man in a leather vest, hat, chaps, and no shirt, then by the tiniest bar ever crammed into a "Yacht Club", whose sole type of food consisted of thin potato slices fried and salted and stuffed into a cellophane bag. Not quite what we were looking for, but it did give us a chance to sit out on the deck and watch the insanity that is Portsmouth water traffic. Tiny fishing boats the size of my shoe steamed through the chop, only to be overtaken by enormous naval battleships and automobile ferries, while endless streams of large sailboats turned about in vain attempts to take their sails down in 15 knot winds and a 10 knot current. We left disappointed across the water once again, arriving at the station approximately half an hour after six in the evening. Should we go home? Should we go to Oxford? Uh huh, you guessed it.
   The 7:00 train to Britain’s oldest University (I just made that up, I have no idea how old it is) lasted just over an hour, and when we arrived we found out that trains from Oxford to London left at "half nine" and "half ten". That’s a European term I had to learn early on, and it means "half PAST whatever", not "half OF whatever", something I somehow managed to avoid finding the meaning of the hard way. For some reason the phrase "half nine" indicates to me 8:30, or perhaps in the mathematical sense, 4:30 (which I used my tremendous logic to immediately discard as being too complicated). The half nine train would land us in London at about 10:45, in time to take the underground back to our hotel. The half TEN train would dump us out in Paddington Station with fifteen minutes before the whole system shut down for the night. Could we see all of Oxford in one hour? We could at least try! Except there was really no way. So after an hour and a half of seeing the incredible buildings strewn about the small University town we didn’t buy a pizza at an old, local family-owned restaurant (despite our attempts otherwise), and made it back to the station with just 3 minutes to spare, to find out our 10:30 train had been delayed by 25, then 31, then 36 minutes. Eventually they just re-routed another train that was on its way to London through Oxford, and sent us out only ten minutes late. Of course, ten minutes late meant an 11:50 London arrival, and therefore no Underground, so we hailed a taxi to take us straight home. We arrived at our hotel at precisely midnight.
   That meant, interestingly enough, that from midnight to midnight, the full twenty four hours of Sunday, July 16, 2006, we went to a Shakespeare play in London, went to a Yacht Club in Portsmouth, and didn’t buy anything from a Pizza Hut in Oxford. Sleep.
   The next day was our last, and promised a 7:30 performance of "The Producers" in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane that evening. There was one thing I really wanted to see/do, and one thing I really wanted to show my parents before then (yeeeeshaspiderjustranupmyleg). The latter was the place I lived for my first almost two weeks in London, a little place called Ealing. We took the Tube out west and got off at the Ealing Broadway station, the way I’d done so many times before. First we went down into the shopping district to buy my mom some socks. Don’t ask. Then I forced my parents to march up the long, steep walk to Kenton House, showing them all kinds of interesting things along the way. Ok, by "all kinds" I mean the Ealing Cricket Club. There’s not much to see on the walk. We stopped at my former abode to get some water, and then, as we were now running quite late, we hailed a cab back to Ealing Broadway and took the Underground over to the Victoria station, where we picked up no-wait tickets to the London Eye, then hopped on the tube once more to Westminster, where the big ferris wheel looms over the Thames and the rest of the city. We were treated to a half hour ride up and over in a large 20-person glass room, heating up to lethal proportions under each new minute of the blazing English sun.
   Back aground, there was no time to waste in getting back and dressing up for the theeayter. We Tubed over to Covent Gardens and went through a quaint little piazza before arriving at the doors. It was hot. There didn’t seem to be any air conditioning in the place, so they were handing out "The Producers" hand fans. Later in the show the main character, played by Nathan Lane in the recent movie etc, but played by someone else I’d never heard of here, addressed the audience directly about the lack of air conditioning in the place. I don’t know if it was a clever ad lib or written in, but if it was the latter there is the possibility that they left off the air conditioning just for this joke, which means that I hated The Producers. If that’s not the case, then I loved The Producers. It very amusingly walked the razor-thin line between poking-fun-at-insensitive and being-actually-insensitive. Horribly, shockingly, dangerously insensitive. I mean, a musical about a musical promoting a world war two winning gay Hitler could really ruffle some feathers, but I haven’t heard much along those lines from anyone since Mel Brooks revived his truly awful 70s movie for Broadway. In any case, we all loved it, and after a slight altercation with a drunk and belligerent London cabbie, we made our way home again.
   That was pretty much it for us, as the next morning we spent packing and getting to Heathrow, where my parents flew out non-stop to Los Angeles and I flew out non-stop to Manchester. In Manchester I had a hotel room booked, for a lot of money I didn’t have, that was right in the center of the city. It was a palatial set of rooms compared to the potato sacks I’d been staying in for most of the last two months. It had not just a bedroom but a living room and separate bathroom, and the floors were made of clouds and the sun shone through the ceiling in filtered rays of gold and, oh yeah, there was a fountain shooting out bags of iPods and laptops in the center of my balcony. Totally worth the $90. Anyway, I spent three hours on a cloud in the sun with my new laptop sifting through the pictures I’d taken on my trip, then set out to explore the city a bit. I found a place that didn’t want you to have ever heard of Chipotle to get my very first burrito on European soil, which strangely enough tasted just like the ones from Chipotle. In my later wanderings I found an IMAX theater (which I’m surprised aren’t called iMax now, given the trends) which was playing Superman in 3D, so I went. The movie was great, the 3D was not. Luckily it just happened during the action segments, so I could see Clark Kent and Lois Lane looking forlorn without the glasses on. I made the harrowing journey through the scary midnight Manchester streets back to my hotel and fell promptly asleep, knowing I had a terrible day ahead of me.
   I had the front desk call me a taxi, but when it didn’t arrive for half an hour I snagged one myself and got to the airport by nine in the morning for my eleven am flight. Checking in was quite an affair, but security turned out to be a breeze, so I had plenty of time to sit and contemplate the seven hours of cramped Airbus 330 seats in my future. I struck up conversation with a nice girl from Indianapolis who turned out to be my seat mate, so at least I didn’t have to sit next to a 300lb Air Force grounds-crewman, and with the entertainment center having "16 Blocks" (a movie I’d wanted to see in theaters but hadn’t) and Zelda: Oracle of Seasons available, I barely noticed the time.
   In Chicago I had approximately one hour to get through customs, get my bag from baggage claim, re-check my bag, and sprint from terminal five in O’Hare to terminal one, section C, gate 19. Terminal 1 was five very. very. slow. train stops from terminal 5, and section C began at the end of section B, which began after a very. very. long. security line. If you think there’s no way I would be able to make it, you’d be thinking the same thing I was at the time. Somehow, however, I arrived just as they were boarding the plane. I found my seat, the middle one of the middle section between two unhappy Chicagian women, and squeezed in, breathless and sweaty after my haul. The captain came on the loudspeaker. "Good afternoon folks, you’re flying the On-Time Airlines, United. We’ll be leaving the gate exactly as scheduled, at 2:55, and we have a bit of a southwesterly tail wind caused by some thunder storms over Colorado, so our trip should be much shorter than 4 hours and 20 minutes, more like 3 hours and 40. So, buckle up, because we’re heading out!" We taxied out to the runway and sat for a while. After 20 or so minutes, the captain came on the loudspeaker again. "Well, folks, as you can probably see we’re pretty much stuck out here with everyone else (a cursory glance out the distant windows revealed a parking lot of jumbo jets on either side of us). The traffic controllers have closed down our route due to thunderstorms over Colorado, which is unfortunately the type of delay that could mean minutes or could mean we need to get you on another flight to another city than LA. Sorry folks, but we’re going to be here for a while." Thanks, On-Time Airlines. 40 minutes passed. The captain again. "Well, you know how there are good days and there are bad? Well, today’s not our day. It seems our battery charger has died. At least, that’s what the little light on the console tells me. Now maintenance says that nine times out of ten that just means we need to replace the battery itself, and they actually have one in stock here at the airport, but we’re going to have to return to a gate where they will be waiting with the battery in hand to replace it as quickly as possible. They’ve opened up our route again, so as soon as we get this thing replaced, we’ll be on our way." Just-A-Little-Behind Airlines to the rescue. Taxi back to the gate, wait for the fixin’s. 30 minutes go by. Captain. "Ok, well, they’ve looked at it and are sure we need to just replace the battery. They’re just about to start on that, and they say it’ll just be about a 20 minute job." 40 minutes more. "Ok, folks, we’re back in business! The battery’s been replaced, and that fixed the problem. So once we have the 11 people back who left the plane, we’ll be good to go!" 10 more minutes. Planefull-of-Fuming-Passengers Flight 121 prepare for departure. A man walked into our cabin with a bag of McDonald’s, proclaiming happily that he knew they wouldn’t take off if his luggage were still on board, for security reasons (bombs being left behind, and all that), so he wasn’t worried about being late or anything. I don’t think he realized that I was physically restraining the largest of the two mean Chicagians sitting next to me. After taxiing back out to the runway, I began to hear gasps from the window seats. The smaller mean lady began to babble incoherently, but I understood the "13" she kept repeating was referring to the number of planes in front of us waiting to take off. We sat. 20 more minutes. The now dreaded captain. "Heh. Well. Um. Yeah, so we’ve just had a low pressure system pass through. For those of you who know, that means a front. Unfortunately, we’ve had a 180 degree wind shift, so the controllers are re-routing all traffic to the other end of the runways. Heh. Looks like we’ll have to taxi a bit. Sorry." Thank you for flying Totally-Disastrous-Airlines. Please be sure to take all your belongings with you when you run screaming back up the Jetway. 20 minutes later, we were taking off, exactly three hours to the minute after our original departure time.
   I flipped through the little brochures to find out what we were getting for dinner, as I was pretty much hungry by then, having not eaten in 6 hours. I couldn’t find anything about it, but there was a Flight Attendant pushing a cart in our general direction, so I waited. When she arrived, she had the unmitigated audacity to say, and I quote (which is more obvious when writing than speaking), "Sir, would you like to buy a SnackBox(tm) for five dollars?" *SMILE*.
"Um, excuse me? Did you just ask me to pay for airline food?"
*SMILE* "Well, it’s a SnackBox(tm)."
"Is it full of a steak dinner and champagne?"
*SMILE* "Oh, haha, no sir. It’s got a bag of thinly-sliced fried potato in a gourmet cellophane bag, a fruit cup, and a cracker. PLEASE Ma’am! Stay in your seat!" I wrestled the big Chicagian down again, which I was pleased to note I was getting better at.
"Um, what about a drink? Does it have a drink?"
*SMILE* "Of course, non-alcoholic drinks are complimentary! A cart will be by in about an hour. Would you care to buy a SnackBox(tm)?" She was talking to the smaller Chicagian now, who looked at the state of the two of us and greedily snatched one of the expensive things. In about an hour I poured the contents of a 5oz can of Pepsi into a shot glass and dribbled it onto my raisined tongue. The in-flight movie started. "16 Blocks".
   I was so relieved to be off that damn plane, seven hours later, that I sprinted through baggage check and into my mother’s awaiting car. After almost two months, eight flights, 16 train trips, and 35 nights in hostels, I was absolutely delirious to be home. I arrived to find my room straightened up and vacuumed, my bathroom scrubbed, my car washed and tuned up, and my dog shorn. Then I slept.
   It’s been a wonderful, scary, perplexing, moving, hilarious trip. I don’t think it’s something I could ever forget, but I’m glad I have these things to remind me of the nuances. Thanks for reading them, everyone. I’ve missed you a lot.
No more later.
-C

Ok, it’s been a furious bunch of days. It’s also been a long time since I could sit and write. So now comes an abridged version of the abridged version of the past few days.

   I set out from my large, stinky hostel in Geneva to see the lake, one of the main reasons for my stop there. I really oughtta know more about Geneva, but I don’t, so I was content to just go out and sit in the sun by some water. When I reached it, across from me was a water spout of tremendous size. It spouted a hundred feet in the air and looked like it was about a foot around at the base. I strolled around the long end of the lake, which Geneva grips like a baby holding a carrot, and headed out onto the spit of man made breakwater that the spout shoots out the end of. They allow you to walk right up to it, stopping you at about five feet away. In actuality, the spout is about six inches across at the base, and is angled carefully away so that we tourists remain perfectly dry even in such close quarters. A boatload of teenage boys drifted by under the fallout about twenty feet away and were practically blown off the boat under the exceptional downward force of the water. The best part was that occasionally the wind would blow a cool mist of the water onto the pathway, a brief respite from the blazing sun.

   I decided I really wanted to be out on the water, so I found a tour boat dock past an interesting sidewalk that is just inches above the water line where you can hand-feed swans, and boarded the massive vessel for a one hour tour of the buildings that sit along the lake’s coastline. It was an hour of being on the water, baking in the sun, and listening to absolute rubbish. The tour left me unfulfilled, so I went to a nearby dock where they rented motorboats by the hour, and splurged +50 (that’s 50 Swiss Franks, approximately $40) for a self-guided tour. I sat down, got the instructions, cranked the motor, backed away from the dock, and floored it. The engine gave a great bellow and shuddered violently, sending the boat forward at just zippier than a snail’s pace. They had clearly rigged the thing to keep speed down to a minimum, so I had to keep the throttle at maximum just to get past the throng of paddle boats. I putted around at a loud pace for about forty five minutes, then went back towards the dock. Across from the spit of breakwater that has the water spout is a almost identical man made spit of land covered in nude sunbathers. Well, not completely nude, but with the girls laying about in nothing but tiny thongs and the guys laying about in nothing but tinier thongs (no, Nicholas), it reminded me of some of the seal beaches I’ve seen in California. Aurf aurf aurf went the mass as I passed by back into the marina. At the last minute I took a detour to explore a little inlet I hadn’t seen before, but was stopped immediately by sidearmed police men on menacing looking boats. I also was stuck in a current. I didn’t quite realize before that moment that Lake Geneva is just a really wide, gentle portion of a river. A river that begins again right next to that police boat. A river that gets suddenly narrow, converting the great gentle flow of the entire volume of lakewater into a narrow channel in a matter of feet. And I was going down it, past arm waving cops screaming in French. I threw the gearbox into reverse, which successfully buried my back end into the water, and proceeded to fill my fiberglass bathtub at an alarming rate. If I were an inexperienced boatsman, I might have jumped ship at that point. However, I drew from my years on the sea and spun the steering wheel as sharply as I could while simultaneously shoving the throttle past neutral and into full blast forward, the now heavy back end spun around gracefully, and in front of the gaping policemen I did a perfect sliding 180 degree narrow-channel-u-turn. Then I sat in front of them for an awkward set of minutes as my pathetic, loud engine inched me against the current back towards the marina again. I gave them my biggest "Hello, I’m a Tourist" smile and ignored their nonverbal insults until my boat was successfully on the lake. I approached the dock and gently nudged the bow into the rubrail, walked forward and hopped off onto floating dry land, painter in hand, and tied the boat to a cleat as though it was half full of water when I rented it. Hands on my hips and a smile on my face from having been at least momentarily waterbound, I set off to see the rest of the city. I saw it. There’s really not much to see specifically in Geneva. There’s a lot of pretty views of the Mont Blanc mountain range, a bridge to an island in the bay, and that water spout. And the nudists. Other than that, I just sort of sat and took in the place. Eventually I returned to my hostel and had dinner with my Australian roommate who wanted desperately to discuss the declining state of video games, despite my numerous attempts to steer the conversation elsewhere. We also learned that our other roommate from the day before had missed his train because he had returned to retrieve his left-behind cellphone, which turned out to have been stolen by the manager of the hostel, who was forced to return it (sans sim card, which he claimed, inexplicably, was never inside it) and give him a free night’s stay when my roommate called the police and reported the theft. The police in Geneva are scary.

   The next morning I awoke with just enough time to checkout (carefully, with all my belongings), and go to the train station. I had the shock of learning that all the trains to Paris were full for the day (a first for me), but found a way to get there by changing trains in Lusanne instead.

   After a few wrong turns in Paris, I found 23 Rue de Godot de Mauroy, walked in the front door, and gave my parents a big hug. I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around it, but there they were, standing in front of me, in a hotel in Paris. After all I’d seen and done, it was odd and wonderful to have them here with me. No more hostels, no more backpacking, no more communal showers. My trip is almost over.

   That night we found a wonderful little brasserie on a little cobbled street across from a gigantic columned building called le Madeline. I still have no idea what it is, of course, but it served as a landmark for most of our feeted (I don’t mean fetid) excursions. The next morning we all set off for the Louvre, the Seine, and Notre Dame cathedral. I was expecting an enormous line at the largest museum in the world, but there was none. None. I don’t know why, but we were allowed to walk straight in, where we saw some incredible stuff like the Winged Victory and Venus de Milo sculptures, the Mona Lisa, and a crayon drawing of a Horcrux done by a child on the back of his ticket while he waited for his family to finally get done staring at boring stuff. We walked around for a couple hours, not even scratching the surface of The Louvre (I don’t know how the French can take words that should have 4 syllables and pronounce only one, then take a word like "Louvre", which has one syllable, and draw it out for three or four), but I had to leave SOMEthing for when I come back to Europe. So, after exiting the museum and throwing away my horcrux drawing, we hit the Seine, lunch, St. Chapel, and Notre Dame cathedrals in quick succession. Notre Dame was particularly disappointing, as inside it just looked like a regular old (old) cross-shaped Catholic cathedral. As everyone was pretty grumpy by the end of the day of walking, we went back home, ordered a pizza, and went to sleep.

   The next day went much more smoothly. We decided to try for the Eiffel Tower and Arch de Triumph. We discovered that nearby was a tour bus that hit those and did a river tour on the Seine for a four hour excursion, so we signed up and headed to the bus station. We sat down in the upper level of the double decker bus, and proceeded to see the bottom 20 feet of some famous Parisian landmarks. I could tell by their footings that they were very old. The Arch de Triumph was especially stone-like at the bottom. Then we were branded and herded like cattle down a gangplank into a floating greenhouse, where we spent an hour looking at the bottom twenty feet of some more famous Parisian landmarks from the water.

   After our trip in the heatbox we disembarked at the Eiffel Tower, which was the first thing I’d seen in Paris that hurt my brain. I just can’t believe how light that collection of hundreds of thousands of tons of steel looked. And I didn’t know this, but it actually reflects the sun, so it positively glimmers in the afternoon sky. We had tickets to the second floor, so again we herded to the impressively complex two story elevator, slid up the inside of one leg of the structure, and took in the incredible Paris skyline. Our day was complete. The bus eventually deposited us back on street level, where we found a nice little brasserie, different from the nice little brasserie from the previous night, to have dinner and some Italian ice cream. Sleep.

   Having completed most of our tasks, my parents decided to allow me to plan the next day, and I wanted very much to see a couple of the famous modern buildings in the city. The first is called Le Grande Arch, and it’s a skyscraper in the business district that is perfectly cubical, with a gigantic gaping hole cut out the middle. It looks a lot like a really deep picture frame. There’s an elevator that shoots right up the middle of the empty area to the top floor, where you can look out over Paris right down the central axis that connects the center of this building with the Arch de Triumph, down the Champs Elises (or however that’s spelled), through the Arch de Carousel, and to the tip of the new IM Pei glass pyramid in the center of the courtyard out front of the Louvre (loovera). It’s such a great way to give the entire city a feeling of connectedness and singularity, unlike, say, Rome, that felt like a hodgepodge of preserved ruins and dirty buses.

   After the Grande Arch, we went to what I always call The Inside Out Building, which is properly known as the Pompadu. It’s a modern art museum that has all it’s structure and mechanical systems on the outside, leaving the inside for the art. The structural system is quite ingenious, converting the downward pull of the weight of the floors to an upward tension handled by thick cables anchored to the ground, but you really don’t care about all that, do you? Outside were some people playing traditional Australian instruments, and amazingly a group of Tibetan Monks doing Tuvan Chants, where they sing two notes at the same time. It’s an absolutely remarkable sound, unlike any other singing you’ve ever heard, and takes years of practice to master. It was beautiful and haunting, and made me reach into my pocket and give them five euros. Then I went inside the massive museum. They were having a special exhibit on Los Angeles in the postwar decades, and also one on Morphosis, the LA based architecture firm headed by recent Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne. It was interesting, but not nearly as interesting as running into one of my SCI-Arc professors, named Roland Wahlroos-Ritter, outside the doors. Talk about uncomfortable. Neither of us knew quite what to say, so we just hemmed and hawed until a sufficient amount of time had passed that we could not-impolitely say our goodbyes.

   The next stop was le Grande Palais, a glass-domed thing built for the Paris Exposition of 1900, but it was closed, so we just walked around it and headed over toward the Eiffel tower, having dinner on a riverboat on the Seine beneath the towering sunset-lit structure.

   We had decided not to just take a train through the Chunnel to get to London, but to find a way across by water. A short taxi ride got us to Gare De Nord, one of the main train stations in Paris. From there, we took a train through Lille to Calais. Another expensive taxi ride got us to the Calais port, where a ferry shoveled us through the English Channel across to the incredibly white, incredibly cliffs of Dover. Pictures pictures pictures. A rough bus ride from the large Port of Dover got us to the town’s main train station, where we caught a final set of cars to London, Waterloo station. Braving the underground (well, my parents braved, I felt right at home, finally), we found our tiny little tiny of a tiny hotel and found spots for all our combined stuff in our tiny little tiny of a tiny room. It has a small cabinet that opens up to reveal a full kitchen, complete with pop-up Soux Chef.

   We found a nice little British Pub and had Chicken Tiki Masala and Guinness, then went back to the room and crashed. Today, we woke up rather late with the intention of seeing Buckingham Palace, Big Ben, Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and The Eye, with a stop off at the famous Harrod’s department store. When we got to Harrod’s, however, we spent two and a half hours there, looking at (and occasionally buying) the amazing things they sell there. For instance, there is an entire room full of fossils you can buy. Yes, fossils. There was a wood-inlaid antique table for sale for £56,000, just sitting out amongst all the other furniture. That’s more than $100,000 out on the floor, in just one item. We also stopped to get tickets to The Producers on Monday night, which I’m very excited about.

   The List sufficiently destroyed, we headed on the Underground to Green Park, near Buckingham Palace. We stopped to get sandwiches and chips and drinks and sat out having a picnic and feeding the pigeons until a gruff man forced us to pay £1.50 each for the chairs we were sitting on. As we strolled through the park I noticed that there was quite a bit more security around than the last time I’d been through there. We arrived, took the obligatory pictures of the guards and their changing, then looked over as a small black car containing a waving Prince Charles and Camilla shot down the driveway and through the rapidly closing gates. That’s right, stunned beyond belief, I got to see the future King and Queen of England today. For about half a second.

   We wandered around in flabbergastion for a while before we headed off on foot for Big Ben. When we got there, it was surrounded by a mile-thick throng of camera’d tourists, all snapping madly at the big clock as it stood over us thinking, "oh, dear, I wish they wouldn’t all push so," in a slow, deep British drawl. We pushed our way past the rest of the Parliament building and Westminster Abbey into the park I’d previously visited for a nice sit on the bank of the Thames. Then we rose, and went back to the Underground for a crowded ride in rush hour subway traffic to our hotel. I have no idea what everyone wants to see tomorrow, but we have midnight tickets to see Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe, so that should be interesting. More later.

-C

Phew. I made it out of Rome with all my possessions. I can’t believe it. After all the horrible stories I’d heard, I managed to get out unscathed. Ahead was a rather straightforward train ride to my next destination, a small set of fishing and farming villages called collectively Cinque Terre. Five Towns? Five Lands? Something like that. Anyway, everyone who’s anyone who’s been to Italy has been to Cinque Terre and highly recommends it. So I went. It was on the way to Paris anyhow. I had seen some old, blurred, grainy still photos of the place that led me to believe it might possibly be the home of the Loch Ness monster, but had no other information about it. The towns are on the west coast towards the north of Italy, and are called, from north to south, Monterrosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manorolo, and Riomaggore. My hostel exists in Riomaggore, the belowest one. I arrived with most of the afternoon to poop around the place. There’s a pathway I was told about beforehand that allows walking between the towns, which are nestled into tiny furrows in the sheer Italian cliffs. The pathway was built over a hundred and fifty years ago by local farmers who needed to access their crops and their neighbors. In 1990, much like 1492, Cinque Terre was "discovered", and has been a booming tourist destination ever since. The buildings are old terra cotta squares painted in every Mediterranean color ever seen, so that the sheer cliffs seem to just meld into vertically-stacked cubes of color at each town. There is a fairly reliable train system between the towns, and a ferry that goes between them as well. The walk through all the towns was said to take 4-5 hours, so I left that for the next day, if I felt like it. Instead I went down to "the beach" of Riomaggore, basically some flat places on the rocks that allowed for both sunbathing and getting splashed with big sprays of crashing Mediterranean sea. To be honest, however, the ocean really wasn’t that tempestuous, rather calm and awfully turquoise under the punishing Italian sun.
   It has been a lifelong…um, dream is too strong, I guess interest, of mine to see the Mediterranean. I can’t really explain it except that growing up on sailboats where the smallest body of water I’d ever seen was the Pacific ocean, I wondered as a child quite often whether or not you could see the other side if you looked across this inland sea. I imagined standing on the toe of the boot of Italy and looking across the water to see a hazy Moroccan mountain range rising faintly above the horizon. I just couldn’t quite imagine it in my head, similar to how I couldn’t quite imagine the Midwest, because in my mind I’d always add little hazy peaks in the distance above the flat plains. So, it was a particular goal of mine to dip my feet in the Mediterranean, and to taste it a little, because I also wondered how any salt could make it in large enough quantities through the Strait of Gibraltar to permeate such a large sea. I always thought of the Mediterranean as much more fresh-water-ish than the Pacific. That was, of course, before I learned how the salt gets into oceans, and all that, but still.
   The above-explained beach at Riomaggore, however, left no room for dipping feet in. It was either out or in, dry or jump in to swim. So I left this little item on the agenda for the next day. Instead I walked up one of the spiderwebs of steep carved stone stairways on one side of the Riomaggore bay to a cafe on the point way up high overlooking the "beach" and the rest of the town. Everything in Cinque Terre is way up high or at sea level. There is little in between. This affords absolutely stunning views everywhere you turn, which is why it became so popular so fast as a tourist spot. As I sat there, just across from me on the cliffs on the other side of the inlet, a man climbed up to dizzying height wearing nothing but a bathing suit. Then, inexplicably, he just jumped off. Backwards. I almost had a heart attack as I watched his body tumble helplessly dozens of feet to the ground below, except that instead of ground there was a 3 foot square bit of shallow water. Except that this little tidal pool was not shallow at all, I saw it was incredibly deep as he disappeared into the watery darkness in a small explosion of downward thrusted bubbles. After a few seconds, his head emerged, he whipped his hair back like swimmers do when they know girls are watching, and launched himself out onto a low flat rock nearby. Cliff divers. Eventually he repeated the process, doing various death defying maneuvers in mid air each time, not turning all the vertebrae in his neck to powder again and again as he always managed to hit liquid instead of solid. I knew it couldn’t last for long, so I quickly finished my coconut ice cream served in half a coconut and paid the bill.
   I felt like testing this whole "walking" thing, so I decided to take the trek to the next town over, Manorolo, knowing I could always just hop on the tram back if it got too late or if I was too tired. I took the 200 or so 2′ steps up to the start of the path, which mostly cantilevers out from the sheer cliff face the majority of it’s distance. When I got to the top, a stern woman held me up for €3. I wondered what the world had come to that I would have to pay $4 just to take a walk, but I read the sign next to her which read my mind. "You may be wondering why you have to pay just to take a walk, but we assure you it is a good investment. All proceeds go to the maintenance and upkeep of this hand built masterwork." Sufficiently assuaged, I forked over and got my ticket, and set off. 10 minutes later, I was in Manorolo. So much for a tough walk. The distance had been turned into a sort of Lover’s Lane, with paintings and hand-written dedications (sort of like graffiti, except painted or drawn by hand by average people passing by. Ok, exactly like graffiti.) lining most of the distance between the towns. The stone path was sometimes precariously perched out over the water and rocks below, and sometimes carved into the cliff in a half-tunnel with arched openings looking out over the Med. It was quite pleasant, but I felt a bit out of place as I passed one couple after another trying desperately to eat the face off of their partner using only their lips. These were mostly violent affairs, as though one would eventually pull away to reveal the gaping fleshless skull of the other, and jab his/her hands into the air in triumph. It reminded me of my youth.
   Manorolo was nice as well, if not surprisingly fairly similar to Riomaggore. More steep stairways as main streets, more multi-colored cubes with clotheslines, more big craggy rocks acting as beaches.
The descent into the town was riddled with big signs that had a menacing skull and crossbones and said in several different languages something about an incredibly dangerous pathway. I think it was mostly dangerous because of the bevy of distracting topless sunbathers just beyond your toes 100 feet below. Yes, there were topless sunbathers. No, Nicholas, I did not take pictures of them. Manorolo explored, and the sun rapidly plunging, I set off back to Riomaggore, trying not to get attacked by a roving face gnasher.
   When I returned to my room to deposit my things and get ready for dinner I ran into my roommate, a guy named Dave from Pennsylvania. He asked if I wanted to get some food and then watch the game (France vs Portugal), and since that was exactly what I had planned, and he didn’t look like he wanted to eat face for dinner, I agreed. We went downstairs, a long and tricky process in these parts, and across the "street" (ramp) to an Italian place for some excellent food. Then we stamped our way downhill a few doors to a bar with a big tv and planted ourselves for the remainder of the evening. By the end of the extremely disappointing game (Dave was even wearing a Portugal jersey, so he was understandably upset) we had a group of people from all over the world gathered around us and we all yammered away in various languages until wee.
   The next morning I decided that I would take it easy. From various people I heard that Vernazza was the most beautiful of the Cinque Terre, and I also knew that Manterosso was the largest of the five, so since they were right next to each other I planned to take the ferry (I was seriously longing for a water ride) to the top, then hike down to Vernazza, then take the ferry back. Sounded like a nice day. I’d never get to see Corniglia, but I figured it would be enough. This sounds long written out, but was merely a fleeting thought as I raised my head at eight in the morning and put it down again, passed out. By about 11 I was stirring around the place, which was more like an apartment than a hostel room. I had four other roommates, Dave, who slept above me in the bunk, and in the other room three girls, two from America who were completely awful and one named Myra from someplace else I never discovered who was actually quite nice. The place was decked out with a kitchen, complete with refrigerator, microwave, and dishes, a TV with tons of channels, and to top it all of, the holy grail, a free (!) ensuite (in the suite) WASHING MACHINE. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. It had no dryer, but that was what all the clotheslines were for. I had put a load in before we went to dinner the night before, and now it was all dry and ready for me. It was like a really pathetic Christmas.
   By noon I had eaten breakfast, gotten rained on, went back upstairs to retrieve my umbrella, and was standing down on the craggy rocks as an impossibly large vessel slipped into the impossibly small landing area, where two crewmen tossed loops of thick line onto large cleats from an impossible distance. Then out came a gangway on rollers, one end attached to the bow of the boat on a hinge that rotated in all directions. This was to allow the boat, pitching a full 10 feet up and down in the much larger than yesterday swells, to maintain contact with the ramp, which, due to some laws of physics I hope they had thoroughly investigated, also maintained contact with the flat craggy rock below. I think it has something to do with the length of the lines they were using to tie the boat to the shore, but in any case the gangway bucked and rolled and generally threw enormous tantrums, but never once came close to dislodging. It was a blast. 25 minutes later I arrived at Monterosso. It really was larger, probably fitting 3 or 4 Riomaggores within it’s limits. And, eureka!, a beach. An actual beach, with proper rocks (small and rounded) to walk on. I got off the boat, ran to the end of the dock, stripped off my shoes and socks, and plunged into the water. It was beginning to rain again, which I was worried might throw off the results of my scientific test. I reached a hand into the crashing water, and tasted the end of my finger. Salty. Quite salty. I gazed as hard as I could to the horizon, still visible under the large gray clouds. Nothing. Just water as far as the eye could see. Of course, from where I was standing, if I was going to see anything it would have been France. But I couldn’t. Two life lessons in one minute. My mission complete I returned to my hastily cast off equipment (I had tossed my cell phone and ipod in my shoe, and left my camera with them, knowing I might get quite wet, and I was happily correct). With soggy bottom I wended my way through the expansive set of steep, multicolored cubes with clotheslines. Then a thought occurred to me. I had to catch an 8 am train the next day, and I would probably need a reservation, but I did not know how early the bigletterias would open, so I unhappily had to face the reality that a trip all the way down past Riomaggore to the main train station in La Spezia was in my very near future. I found out how to buy a ticket, hopped aboard, and spent the next hour and a half getting myself situated for the next day, and back up to Vernazza, the walk abandoned.
   Vernazza was quite beautiful, more than the others I do not know. But I still hankered for a walk, and I wondered if I might make it to Corniglia by foot, and in that way round out all five towns. I decided that even though the hour was late (4:30) I could risk it. I reached the entrance to the walkway and paid the one euro entrance fee (why so cheap on this end?!) and walked straight up and up and up to find…a castle. A castle turret, actually, which I ascended and looked out from to see the entire Italian coast line for many miles. But no walkway. I descended again, understanding the price difference, and found another entrance gate. This time I made sure I was in the right place. €3 later, I walked through the gate to find a British man taking a picture of a cat lounging at the base of a red doorway in the last multicolored cube of the town. He looked at me as if I was crazy, which I didn’t quite understand. I checked my fly and wiped my face in case there was some lunch left on it. That didn’t help. Finally I asked what his problem was (in a very very polite way). He sort of gently let on that I was in no way equipped for such a walk. I was expecting a longer version of Lovers Lane, sans face suckers, but he explained that the hike from Vernazza to Corniglia was the longest and by far the most difficult of the treks, beginning with thousands of rocky steps straight up the cliff face. He mentioned that I might at least get a bottle of water first, and tie my shoes really tight to help with traction and ward off blisters. He asked if I had a snake-bite kit, any splints for compound fractures, and whether I had packed a heat blanket in my trousers. Then he pointed to his sat phone and gps, and around the corner ambled his St. Bernard. I thanked him and returned back to Vernazza. Not about to be deterred, however, I bought the largest bottle of cold water I could find, and, ten pounds heavier, returned to the gate. The man was gone, and I laughed at his overcautiousness. I mentioned that he was already gone.
   I set off around the corner and smacked my shoulders into the first step. Hup, I climbed on top of it, feeling the rush of a new challenge ahead, and just kept on climbing until I was so exhausted that I had to take a rest. I gulped some water, now half gone, and stared up at the amazing vertical distance still looming, almost unchanged, above my head. I decided that I would feel better if I looked back to see all that I had already conquered, and marveled with pride at the three steps below me. Hup.
   After four days I wished I had at least thought to bring some toilet paper, as there were few leaves on this section of the trail and the rocks were starting to chafe. Still I climbed. Stair after steep stair, until I launched headlong over the edge, and found a pleasantly down-sloping trail stretching off into the distance, and the most dizzying panoramic view of Italy and it’s marvelous blue coast all around me. I had reached the top. I enjoyed the breeze and the sudden plant life as I strolled easily down the lane, drenched in dusty sweat. This was going to be an incredible walk, now that I had the hard part behind me. I turned a corner and gasped as I smacked my forehead into the tallest, steepest, endlessest stairway I’ve ever seen. I suddenly wanted a lolly.

   I had really only started the ascent, but it got a bit easier as I found a rhythm. Besides, the views were so breathtaking that I sort of just forgot about the steepness of it. And, eventually, yes, it leveled out again, this time for a good portion of the distance between the towns. The problem is that Corniglia is the only of the Terre that is above sea level. Well above sea level. So you have to ascend to it, either on one end or the other. After the stairs had abated I found myself walking through big steep fields of wonderful smells. The plants in this part of Italy are similar to those of Southern California, tall green brush and prickly pear dominate most areas. The path suddenly reached a forested clearing, and I’m sorry that that doesn’t make any sense, but it’s undeniably what it was. I wandered through this rather odd place, sprouting up out of the rest of the plant life with trees all of the same variety. Moving on I found that these strange forested clearings would crop up every now and then, so I became increasingly curious as to their motives. It wasn’t until I turned yet another corner and came face to face with a small, vertically stepped vineyard that I remembered that these people were farmers. When the fish were out, they caught, when it was time for growing, they farmed, and in their considerable free time in between these, they built incredibly dangerous roadways. What did they farm, do you think? Well, I hate to be cliche, but they grow only grapes, olives, and tomatoes. How Italian is that? Those little forested clearings were olive…um…orchards, I must name them, though I have no idea what a gathering of planted olive trees are called. The rest of the journey went through these spectacular growing areas, until I finally emerged past a vertical stream into the town of Corniglia. I had left Vernazza at 5:15, and it was exactly 6:45 when I arrived, meaning that the whole thing lasted just an hour and a half, and yet I felt as though I had traveled hundreds of miles.

   I went through Corniglia rather quickly, there’s not much to see in this place except vertically stacked multi-colored cubes with clotheslines, and ran into a couple from England from whom I could ask directions to the train station. "It’s quite a walk," they said sceptically, "You have to descend a ton of stairs all the way down to the beach below." ARE. YOU. KIDDING. ME.

"Um, ok, thanks, I’ll just go do that then." Sigh.

These stairs were different than the others, thankfully. They were wide flat brick affairs, and before long I was hopping down at a decent rate. When I got to the bottom, I had a decision to make. I knew that the walk from Manorolo to Riomaggore was a piece of cake, so I decided that if I could find out how difficult the walk from Corniglia to Manorolo was, I might just keep going. I found a nice lady behind the counter of the snack store at the train station and asked her in the best hand-gestured pidgin English I could to tell me how difficult the terrain was from here to the next town south. She gave a single welcome response, a horizontal swipe with her flat hand across her body indicating a completely flat walk. Ok. I was in business. 20 minutes, she said. Well, I have learned to multiply all walking times given by Europeans by three, and sure enough when I got to the trail head the sign said 1 hour to Manorolo. I set off. This time I got to go over a creepy but solid suspension bridge on my seaside trek. The path ascended slightly as it reached the end of the bay and got ready to go around the point, but not before going over a nude beach (no, Nicholas). It was getting late, and the sky was the image of threatening. Grey, dark, windy, oh, yeah, and lightning hitting the water at regular intervals about a mile out. I was worried that I might get caught in some bad weather, which would make this dangerous path downright fatal, but before I knew it I was walking through Manorolo, and this time I knew exactly how to proceed through the vertically stacked multi-colored cubes with clotheslines.

   After a few moments of walking this easy part of the trail, I came to a bar/restaurant I had forgotten about from the previous day. All their seating was outside, on a metal grate cantilevered out over the cliffs. You sit down at a table and look between your knees to the crashing ocean a hundred feet below. It’s quite thrilling, just as long as nothing falls out of your pockets. I looked around at the tables of face suckers around me and decided they were sufficiently occupied so that I could have a bit of dinnerIwasstarving unmolested. Fried calamari. With lemon. Mmm. By then the weather was telling everyone to just get out of the damn way, so I scooted back as quickly as I could to my little town of Riomaggore. Home sweet home. I left Vernazza at 5:15, and arrived in my town at 8:45. A short time for the best hike I’ve ever done. It was absolutely breathtaking, as I think I’ve already mentioned. Please don’t skip Cinque Terre if you ever go to Italy.

   After a big argument with the clerk in the office of my hostel about being late, he finally allowed me to pay and grudgingly gave back my passport, which I thought for a moment I was going to have to wrestle him for. He was mad that I showed up at 8:45 when the office closed at 8, except he was just sitting there on the porch outside not doing anything, not waiting for me, in any case, so there was no problem, but he was upset.

"Why you so late! Come back tomorrow!"

"Sorry, I can’t, I have to-"

"We closed now, why it take you so long?! Where you be?!" as he led me through the door to the office.

"I’m sorry, I was-"

"Yes, yes, you miss the bus! You always miss the bus! Get another bus!"

Genuinely confused, I replied, "But, actually-"

"How many people?!"

"What?"

With a look of isn’t-this-guy-just-the-dumbest, throwing his arms in the air, "How Many People Are You?"

"One." Grr.

"45! CASH!"

I threw the money on the table. He took out my passport from the drawer and looked it over. He opened it, held the picture up to me, scrutinizing the resemblance. The picture was taken about two months ago, so there really should be no problem. He was just being an ass. "How do I know this is you?!"

"Give me my passport. Now!"

He just sat there, looking at it. So I snatched it out of his fingers. He began to protest, but I looked at him in the way that says I’ve had just about enough of your attitude, so he shrank back into his chair. "Check out is at 10 am SHARP. No 45 minutes late!" Believe me, I won’t be.

   I went back upstairs and deposited my things, then took a very welcome shower after I put my clothes from that day in the washer. Hey, it was free. It had begun to rain again, so I went down to the bar where I saw my roommates Dave and Myra flirting with each other. I said hello, but didn’t want to intrude, so after a few minutes I left, realizing that if I wanted a good night’s sleep I’d have to get to bed at 10.

   The next day was going to be a doozy, as my first of four trains was scheduled to leave at 6:45 in the morning from the Riomaggore train station. I set two alarms and went to sleep, being awakened at midnight by the two awful girls who did not know I was there, then again at one by Dave, coming home drunk from the bar and clumsily climbing up on the bunk bed, then again at two when Myra came home, and Dave went back down off the bed to drunkenly hit on her some more. By six the next morning I was fried. I packed as silently as I could, something at which I’ve become somewhat of an expert, and gave the free washing machine a hug before I left for good. I found a key drop box outside the manager’s office and wedged it in there, then picked up the train from Riomaggore to La Spezia. My train from La Spezia to a place called Parma was scheduled to leave at 7:52, but a notice next to it on the board said it would be 35 minutes late. This was bad, so I looked up on my phone how much of a layover I had in Parma. It said 50 minutes, so I was ok. My train actually came 40 minutes late, so I got on hoping the delay would not worsen as we went along. I had to catch a 10:40 train from Parma to Milan, but when I got to Parma I found that that train was also delayed, by 20 minutes. Again, I consulted my phone which told me I had a 30 minute layover in Milan before my train for Geneva left at 12:25. I would still be ok if it didn’t get any later than that. The problem was that I was switching from the incredibly unreliable Italian train system to an incredibly precise Swiss one. I knew that the train to Geneva would leave the station exactly on time. I stepped off the train in Milan at 12:22, and in two minutes had found my next train listed on the departures board and run to the track, sitting down in my seat just as the train pulled away 30 seconds early. It was only then, after 3.5 hours of wrenched gut, that I was finally able to relax.

   Through the Italian and Swiss alps we glided, with views of spectacular cliffs and green trees and deep, clear blue lakes. The largest of which was lake Geneva, which took a full 45 minutes to get around before we arrived in Geneva. This lake is so large that if you look at it lengthwise you can actually see the horizon drop away before the other side. Geneva is situated at one end of it, surrounded on three sides by France. It’s as though Switzerland was a drop of water that landed with a plop in the middle of Europe, and Geneva is situated at the end of one of the tendrils of splattered water. I emerged from the train station after changing some money into Swiss Franks to find a  clean, bustling city full of people of all colors. It was quite different from many of the all-white northern European cities I’d seen. Everyone seemed to be smiling as they went about their business, and I just kind of strolled around looking at things in a non-specific way. I liked it here. It felt safe and crisp in the way Italy felt mean and smelly. I wandered until I found an internet cafe at about 8pm and went inside to see what the news of the world was. I was in there until about 10:30. And that’s when I discovered the real truth about Geneva. If you’ve read The Time Machine, by HG Wells, you know about the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Eloi are a quiet, happy race of people in the future who live above ground and play in temples and fountains all day. But at night, they crowd into a single room to sleep, because it’s then that the Morlocks emerge from underground, evil and strong, destroying everything in their path and eating whatever Eloi they can get their hands on. I walked out of the internet cafe to find riots in the streets. Disgusting old prostitutes and their cigar-smoking pimps mobbed me as I walked down the street, littered with upturned burned-out cars, homeless people under blankets of newspaper, and the distant wail of people being assaulted. A warm and eerie breeze blew through the streets, before quaint and small, now narrow and menacing. I turned a corner to get back to the main street, but it had gone. I was hopelessly lost, confused tremendously by the fact that earlier I had known exactly where I was, but now couldn’t find anything that looked familiar. Tough-looking guys sized me up as I hurriedly walked past, throwing nervous glances over my shoulder, hoping I wouldn’t get hit by a thrown beer bottle or trip over a sleeping foot. I saw a sign atop a large building that said HILTON in big green letters. It was a couple blocks away, but I felt like it might be a safe place to pull out my map to find my way back.  By the time I got there I was nearly in tears, totally turned around and disjointed. The woman behind the counter looked at me, frightened, as I pulled out my map and tried to convey how hopelessly lost I was. I think she thought I was trying to pull something on her, but she was obliged to help me until she knew for sure. She gave a terse look at my map, put an x where the Hilton was, and pointed to the nearest exit. It was all I needed. I hurried back through the screaming mob, ducking projectiles and hopping over impromptu street arson. Eventually, I turned down the dark, scary street of my hostel, completely deserted but for a few thieves competing with each other for my possessions. Before they got it sorted out, I ran for my hostel, slamming the door in their face as I reached the safety of my secure home. Geneva is scary.

   This morning I awoke to find a bright, clean, beautiful, sunlit city out my window, with no evidence of the previous night’s activities. The upturned cars were gone, the charred marks on the pavement washed away. No broken glass or graffiti remained, and old ladies walked their dogs as though everything was just peachy. I guess there’s just a normal-person 10pm curfew here. I will not forget. Today I want to take a ride out on the lake, if that’s at all possible. Anyway, I have a lot to do before hell returns tonight. More later!

-C

Well, we’re reaching the end of our time here. I say our because through this blog it’s felt like you all are here with me. Without the smell. I leave Rome tomorrow and head to a place called Cinque Terra (five towns, or something). After two nights there I head to Geneva for two nights, and then into the forbidden land of France to meet my parents in Paris. Then it’s three nights there and four nights in England, and back home. I can unfortunately for the first time see the finish line.

   After stowing my things and locking the room, I went out through the throng of pickpockets, who actually aren’t so bad once you get to know them. I keep slapping their hands away as they reach for my pockets and we laugh and laugh. I bought a fantastic thing at the train station called a Roma Pass, which for €18 gives free (or whatever you call it when you pay ahead) access to all forms of transportation in Rome for three days, and also gives a 50% discount at any Roman museum or attraction, and free access to the first two of these, also for a three day period. Most places cost approximately €12 to enter, so it is a very good deal. But there was really only one thing on my mind at that point. I wanted to see the Pantheon.

   The Pantheon is a large room with a dome on top of it. The inside of the domed room looks exactly like any of the dozens of domed rooms I’ve seen so far on this trip, with one unique exception. It was built 1500 years before them. Yes, one thousand five hundred years before the Renaissance. That’s about 2000 years before now. Two Thousand Years. And it is in basically perfect condition. As you might guess, it being built two thousand years ago and it being in Rome, it was built by The Romans. The dome is 6-19 feet of solid concrete (it varies from top to bottom) mixed so well that after two millennia there is not a single crack in this massive curved roof. It has a hole right in the center of the dome, called an oculus, that allows any type of weather, mostly sunshine and rain, to fall inside 24 hours a day. The floor is therefore shaped ever so precisely to allow for drainage but not make you think you were walking on the surface of a very small planet. After seeing the floor of the Basilica in Venice, which was 600 years old, I was shocked at how utterly perfect that slight curvature still is. There are little drain holes around the perimeter of the room to let the water flow off into the Roman sewers. Also, the dome is so precisely crafted that you could fit a sphere into the inside of the dome, resting on the floor in the center, and it would clear by only millimeters all the way around. This is the most geometrically perfect building made by the Romans, and the dome was the largest in the world until St. Peter’s was constructed in the Renaissance. Thus, the Pantheon is a sort of Architectural Mecca, the penultimate pilgrimage point for all those studying or interested in the field.

   I got to the building at 5:35, knowing that they closed at 6:00. It was enough time, however, to snap a few hundred pictures and investigate this no-crack thing thoroughly before deciding it was indeed true. The mean Italian usher lady began her job of crowd removal at an insultingly early 5:50, but I kind of just hid in the shadows until I was the last one there, standing by the doorway, snapping photos of the completely empty space. The first item on My List checked off, and it being too late to really tackle much else that had an entrance, I looked at my map to see if there was anything else I could see. I found I was across the street from Trevi Fountain.

   This I knew from various pictures and movies and stories my mother told me. I went to the point on the map where it said Trevi was, and was astonished to find a place the size of a small city block, all carved marble and clear blue flowing water. And also a half a million people. There were people throwing coins into the basin, but not like you or I would. Some were throwing them over their shoulder, some were each holding half of a coin and tossing it in together, and I even saw one spinning around in circles until he got dizzy and fell down, forgetting the coin altogether. It was very strange. Not wanting to look like too much of a tourist (a futile gesture as my gigantic camera swung from my neck and I wore my "what the hell is going on here" face), I just sat down and tried to listen in on people’s explanation of the coin tossing techniques. The tossing over your shoulder maneuver is to one day bring you back to Rome. If you like this city, you go to Trevi fountain, turn your back to it, and throw a coin in behind you. The couple thing was if you were going to get married. When you got engaged, you went to the Trevi fountain, each gripping one half of a coin, and tossed it in together. The spinning around until you are dizzy thing is what you do if you’re a 6 year old boy and you’re bored at Trevi fountain, which he was, so that fit. I turned around, giving Rome, in my opinion, quite the benefit of the doubt, and threw five EuroCents in to the massive pool of perfectly colored water.

   I kept walking and found myself in front of an enormous white columned building that stood gloriously over a large grassy circular area that no one could reach because of the 125 or so honking taxis that wended their way around it at 40 miles per hour. Past that massive thing, whatever it was, I found some really old ruins of Roman stuff, with broken columns and decrepit archways on either side of the road. Past that I turned the corner and slammed my face into the Colosseum. It seems like I find all the most amazing, famous things in Europe by complete accident. It was closed, but I walked around it as a little taste of what I would see when I took the tour inside sometime in the next couple of days. The sun was setting, casting a bright orange light on the ancient thing, and I just stood there salivating. Then I ate dinner at a quaint sort of place with very nice waiters, a rarity in Italy, and, it being dark by then, caught a cab back to my place. No muggings for Chris.

   In my room I found a homeschooled daughter from just outside of Baltimore who was 18 and just graduated from college (COLLEGE), and the thing that made her a daughter, her mother, who is The. Most. Annoying. Woman. In. Rome. She is Polish by birth and quite embarrassed about it, and has lived in America ("the greatest land in the world, I mean it’s just the greatest place, and everyone is so wonderful that it just makes it the greatest place I can think of, I mean really it’s just so wonderful.") for more than 20 years while somehow holding on to her accent which I don’t think she knows she still has. During this time, or perhaps before, she got into the habit of saying one thing five times in every sentence. Her favorite subject was the rude Italians and how you have to deal with them. "These Italians are just so RUDE, they don’t have any respect for anyone they meet, and they don’t even respect each other, have you seen the way they talk, they just yell and are so rude, I mean I’ve been to all fifty states in America and I’m telling you that the Italians are the rudest people in the whole world, I’m not kidding at all, but you just have to ignore them because it’s not personal at all, no you just have to let it roll off your back but my daughter Alicia is so sensitive and she just doesn’t know how to deal with these types of people who are just rude all the time, I mean I’m telling you the Italians are the RUDEST people in the whole world and I’ve been to a lot of places let me tell you…" Except you don’t hear the last half of that because by then you’ve locked yourself in the bathroom to cover the sound of her dribbling mouth with the resultant toots of your own gas.

   The next morning I was going to rise at 6:30 am so I could end up near the front of the considerable line at the Vatican Museum, which has the Sistine Chapel at the end. It is called the Sistine Chapel and not the Sixteen Chapel, or even worse the Sixteenth Chapel, as though it is the last one standing after the other fifteen fell down. Despite this I have heard it called nothing else by Americans since I’ve been here. Sigh. So, my itinerary set, I promptly blew it by waking up at 7:15. Also up were the daughter and that mouth "gosh I just really hate Gypsies a lot (x5)," who got to the bathroom before I did, and being female they stayed in there to meditate for 20 minutes each. By the time I got set and dressed it was 8 in the morning. Also by that time the three of us had discovered that we were all going to the same place, which almost made me say "wait I forgot I’m actually going to the other Vatican today" but I didn’t. So I was stuck with them. We went downstairs and ate breakfast, which I wasn’t planning on doing, then they told me they knew a shortcut to the bus station, which surprised me because it is across the street. I followed them anyhow, and five blocks later we at last reached the bus station across the street. I fended off pickpockets in the crowded space, but was not able to keep a well dressed man in a suit from groping my testicles with the back of his hand, which seemed to follow my crotch everywhere I turned. Thoroughly disgusted, I hoped and prayed that the two women were better at finding the end of bus lines than the beginning of them. We departed in the correct place, thankfully, and immediately ran into the back of the line for the Vatican Museum.

   There is a sweet spot for lines, a bell curve if you will, where early and very late in the day are great times to avoid them, while 9:00 am is perfect if you wish to see how long the line can possibly be. It is purely for research, as no one would be foolish enough to actually get in at that time. We arrived at 9:05, well after the peak of the bell curve, and, grateful at our tremendous luck, took our spot in the back. I could see the string of unmoving people turn a corner just before they disappeared over the horizon, so I was unable to determine its actual length, but those around us speculated confidently that we would be inside the Sistine Chapel by 10.

   Ten, eleven, and twelve rolled past before we entered the museum, and by then I knew that the Italians are very very rude and that Gypsies are one mosquito’s eyelash away from actually having demonic blood coursing through their veins. I also knew the order in which Alicia’s mom had gone through all fifty states, and in what years she went. I knew the history of her skin disorders and Alicia’s troubles with the opposite sex and finding a man who could respect her for her mind and look past her physical figure, and I also knew the nationality, ranked best to worst, of every man Alicia’s mother had ever slept with. If you think I am kidding about this you have not met Alicia’s mother (and you are undoubtedly hugging yourself at this fact). I kept looking over at Alicia with that look that says, "don’t worry, I would never judge you by your parent, and don’t be embarrassed by what she says about you even though we don’t know each other, and isn’t this all rather amusing," but she just stood next to Alicia’s mother smiling and nodding vigorously as though the topic was the falling US Dollar or the strange European McDonald’s menu. By noon I had bits of olive tree stuffed so dense into my ear canals that I was sneezing out oil.

   We went inside. In the throng, I found my opportunity, and lost them, sprinting through most of the Vatican Museum with stops only to snap some quick pictures of Raphael’s University painting with all the greatest philosophers and scientists of all time in one place, and burst headlong into The Chapel, slipping precariously on the floor after I sneezed for the last time. I reached up with my camera, snapped a picture of the ceiling, and was tackled to the ground by five armed guards. "NO PICTURES!" they all yelled in unison. Then they quickly turned like a school of fish and dove at a mother with her infant son strapped to her back. They made their way around the room, causing ruckus after ruckus, until an astonishingly shrill, blaring loudspeaker clicked on somewhere and blasted in five languages, "No talking. Please keep silent in the Chapel." I almost oiled myself with laughter. And then I took some more pictures.

   So, here’s the part where I got to play Secret Agent Chris. I knew a secret, a secret so powerful that it threatens to topple the greatest power in Rome. In the Sistine Chapel, a mistake you’d think they would have learned about from the other fifteen, there are two doorways. One leads to a tunnel and is filled with people streaming happily out the Chapel. The other, smaller one has a sign nearby that says simply, "exit for tour groups only". This doorway, this little hole out of Michelangelo’s room, is so amazing that it can cause you to travel forward in time by three hours and still be right when you were when you started. Confused? Well, with no guard stations to pass and no gates to jump and no ropes to cross, you walk out of this doorway down a grand staircase, across a courtyard where every pope who ever lived is buried, and walk straight into St. Peter’s Basilica with no waiting in line at all, and no payment of any kind. I don’t know why they do this, and I don’t know why more people don’t know about it, but it is possibly the best thing in Rome. And there are a lot of cool things in Rome. So it was that by 1 pm I was entering the greatest cathedral ever built.

   St. Peters, the church of the Pope, has a problem. Most of these grand cathedrals have this problem, but St. Peters, being the biggest and fanciest, has this problem the worst. The problem is blasphemy. Every single person who walks in stares up at the ceiling agape and says the same thing. "Holy Jesus! Oh shit, whoops. DAMNit! Oh, just fucking forget it." They go from incredulity to realization to attempted correction to acceptance in the span of just the moment they walk through the considerable door. These types of places are built to create as much initial blasphemy as they can, that way you are forced to come in and confess your sins, Catholic or not. Maybe it’s not a problem after all. Anyway, I’d studied several of the sculptures in this place in my first semester architecture history class, so I was happy to see them in person. Also there’s a bronze Michelangelo sculpted thing towering over the altar, and of course the Pieta 50 feet behind a great wall of bulletproof glass. St. Peters. Damn.

   That done I found a quaint little Italian place and passed by it, preferring instead the quaint little Italian place next door, but obviously not the quaint little Italian place one beyond that. Inside as I was eating the antics of a small child became increasingly disruptive. Her mother kept saying things like, "If you crawl under that table and out onto the floor again I will whip you!" She said this so offhandedly that it took me a second to take in the full meaning of it. Also, by the time she finished, the girl would be under the table and out onto the floor, rolling around in the filth. I decided I’d had enough of this kind of talk.

"Listen, let me say something to you," I said in her direction so she’d know I was talking to her. "This is no way to speak to your child, not just because it’s so very wrong. Look at her. She’s not even listening to you. Do you know why? It’s because you’re threatening her with a whip, of all things! I mean, if you actually whipped her as often as you’ve threatened to in the last half hour, you’d be the worst kind of abusive parent. But I am unwilling to accept that you do that, so all that means is that you are throwing out these rediculous threats that, even by the age of three, your daughter has learned are empty. If you’re going to threaten her, at least choose some consequences you can actually enact. You wouldn’t tell her to stop throwing her lettuce or you’ll make her sleep on the sidewalk tonight. You wouldn’t say that unless she stops picking her nose you’ll withhold food for a week. Pick something bad for her that she likes, like ice cream or something, and start to show her that her actions have consequences! I’m sorry if I’m butting in here, and feel free to loathe my arrogance and presuption as much as you want. Explain to me that I have no right to tell you how to raise your child, I deserve it. But that doesn’t at all mean that I’m wrong." She stared at me dumbfounded, or would have if I’d actually said any of that. Instead I went on pretending to ignore the scene. Lunch successfully consumed I bolted for the Colosseum. As I appeared before the thing, this time careful not to smack into it, I was approached by a nice looking Italian woman who was just hoping beyond hope that I spoke English. I delighted her to no end when I replied in her favorite language, so she cheerfully sold me a ticket to a guided tour that would allow me to bypass the hour and a half line. The man leading it was really great, hilarious even, if you’re into that sort of thing, and we strolled through the complex hearing about all the different ways in which no one was ever killed in there. Unless you had four legs, and then it was curtains. I really liked seeing the inside of this place, because it finally gave some scale to something I’d seen so often. It’s big. There, scale.

   My tour continued on to the Forum and Palatine Hill, but without me, I having learned that I could finish it the next day or any other day for that matter, and I also having learned that my feet were very very upset with me. I went home, nursed my feet, ate at the cheap place across the street (next to the bus station) that the guy who works at my hostel begged me not to patronize (but I don’t like him and my feet were just beginning to stop planning my death), and tucked in early to read my book. I had seen a lot today, and I had taken a big bite out of My List, so I was in the mood to take it easy. I fell asleep at 10pm.

   I woke up at 10 am. Boy was that good. By then my feet and I had signed a tenuous treaty provided I not spend the day slamming them against uneven cobblestones. I was prepared to accept their terms unequivocally. I would also end up going back on my word, but I honestly didn’t know that at the time. I just hung around the room reading and showering and all that morning stuff you usually do hours before then. At 11:30 I felt the time was right to head to the train station, which is also the bus station, which was within the subpoints of our agreement. I stood in line for a half hour to not buy a reservation and not be helped in any meaningful way, so I went into the "International Books" section of the gigantic glass bookstore there in the station and purchased yet another quickly devourable thriller. I think it’s number 14 so far. Then I decided to make the two stop subway trek back to the Colosseum to finish the tour. Boy my feet were about to be angry.

   I walked with purpose through the round courtyard that you spill out into when exiting the stadium, my trusty shirt sticker from the previous day safe in my wallet in case they wanted to see it again. I immediately found a tour group departing toward the Forum. "Is this the tour that goes to the Forum?" I asked the leader.

"Maximus Tours? Golden Dot?" This may seem an odd response, but I knew what he was referring to. The dot in my wallet that had previously clung to my shirt was indeed a shade of gold, actually I would have called it yellow, but I didn’t think it was the time to argue semantics. I fell in step, the rest of the tour group behind me. I found out very shortly thereafter that this tourguide did not hold a candle to my previous one. Actually, he didn’t even hold a turtle to him, which is way worse, believe me. That’s when I turned around and saw everyone else wearing big golden dots on their chests. Big shiny and golden, not yellow in any way. Mine was tiny, and not shiny at all, and so very very yellow. Suddenly I wished I had at least debated a little semantics. I kept it hidden in my wallet and hoped that this was not the "Tour of all the Places in Rome to Get Mugged" or the "Polish Mothers of Alicia Very Slow Tour of Planet Earth". It was not. It was just a bad tour of the Forum, which is quite a place. Quite a place indeed.

   After 45 minutes of incomprehensible explanations of Roman politics, the guide explained that in another 45 minutes his very bad guided tour of the Palatine Hill would begin back at the something or other arch of which there are hundreds. I decided to go it alone. Up up up. The Forum lies at the base of a large cliff, one side of Palatine Hill. I really had no idea what was at the top of Palatine Hill, except that the guide had mentioned something about the word "palace" coming from the word Palatine. I George Bushed my protesting feet into submission up some extremely steep stairways and through a small gate with a confused looking woman sitting beside it. I continued up the stairs through a three dimensional maze of brick walls and crumbling arches. A thought occurred to me as I strolled between these ancient walls, and I will write it as it came to my mind.

The greatest game

Of Hide and Seek

Ever played

By Humankind

The Palatine Hill is so awesome. It turns and rises up and slides down and curves around and suddenly you’re standing above an ancient stadium and then you’re shooting down a narrow hallway past closed-off tunnels that descend into the center of the earth and then you’re high atop a parapet that looks out over the whole city and then you’re staring at the center of a millennia-old garden with a large artificial hill in the center with the tallest straightest tree you’ve ever seen growing out the top of it. There are so many different things to see that it was only after a couple of hours that I began to hear the cries from below my shins, and also began to understand that this was a place you paid to get into. It was then that I understood the confused look on the woman’s face as I strolled confidently the wrong way through the exit below. Oh well, another trick learned. I sat down to alleviate the suffering and just took in the gorgeous 1)Ancient priceless architecture  2) fat wallet  3) gorgeous weather and 4) no tour guide or Alicia’s mother. Then I started thinking what would happen if the tour guide and Alicia’s mother had a child, an got up to leave before I finished.

   I was beat, and it was time to head home for many reasons. I was really pleased with how the day turned out, because when it began I didn’t think there was much left to do, but now I know that if you study architecture (think of the spelling of that word) and you do not go to the Palatine Hill when in Rome, you should be forced into a locked room with no one but Alicia’s mother and Alicia, the latter just for the sheer cringeworthiness of having to hear about her intimate details while she stands there nodding relentlessly in front of you. More later.

-C

ps - sorry about the blasphemy

   The buses in Florence are large, square, newish things with bright orange sides and a forest of metal orange gripping poles inside. The interior contains a ballroom dance floor and five seats, two on each side and one in the back, taken up by four of the tiniest hunchiest wrinkliest sundressiest old ladies in the world, and one young guy who doesn’t know enough to let another of the tiny hunched wrinkled sundressed ladies have his seat. The other inhabitants of the enormous orange jungle are every walk of life in Florence, pressed like Jello(tm) into the mold of the windows. Now I’m sure you’ve heard a bit about the streets of Italy and their famed lack of consistent movement. Bedlam, is how I would accurately refer to it. So, you take 2 (the crammed in populace of the orange Jello mold) and add it to 2 (the hectic, unpredictable street traffic of any city in Italy) and you get, not surprisingly, 4 (pureed orange painted sacks of formerly human-shaped bio matter). I immediately upon arriving at my hostel on the first day in Florence ceased calling it "the bus", which seemed so dramatically understated, and began thinking of it more as a large agitation-type machine designed to pulverize its contents, like a washing machine or an egg beater. I chose a centrifuge, because of that machine’s ability to separate liquids from their solids, and because of the pooling of blood I always noticed around my ankles when I got off at my stops.

   That said, having a reservation to see David at five pm, I awoke on Saturday as late as I could, anticipating the hostel’s closed-door policy starting at 10:30 am by only a few minutes. I managed to catch a centrifuge before it pulled away from the stop and watched for half an hour as people’s limbs were removed and replaced at random. When I arrived in the center of town I traded ears with a girl of six and placed my feet back on my swollen purple legs and just kind of spun around looking for something to occupy my considerable time. First was lunch, then to an internet cafe across Ponte Vecchio, then a look at my map which told me I was on the correct side of the river to see Palazzo Michelangelo. The nice internet guy told me exactly where and how to get up there, so I walked a half mile to the nearest centrifuge stop. With only the four from the wrinkle-sundress brigade and the other punk to cushion my hurtlings, I had a particularly anticoagulating ride up to the top of a nearby hill. I stepped out onto a carefully designed flat white marble sun reflecting station the size of a football field with absolutely stunning views of the entire city and a bronze copy of David at the center. I took some video of the panorama and some video of the pigeons in heat and the pigeons ignoring the pigeons in heat which led to some fleeting amusement not shared by the rest of the throng, but within a few minutes I felt I had adequately experienced Palazzo Michelangelo. I crossed the street and spotted another centrifuge about to leave, so I sprinted madly towards it like a glutton for punishment and hopped aboard, only to discover to my embarrassment that it would wait another five minutes before dismem-barking (<– I’m rather proud of that one). So I sat panting and sweating in the heat until it (the operator) had decided that it (the centrifuge) was ready for some more separating.

   Re-assembled back at river level (The Arno, ha) I had to accept and confront this little nagging itch scratching at the back of my skull. When I had checked in at my hostel, they had charged me approximately $40. It seemed odd, but I had other things on my mind at the time. I was to stay in Florence for 3 nights, so $40 is low, but not so low as to be immediately suspect. I suspected now, however, that when I had first made the reservation for two nights, then an hour later added a third, that maybe, just maybe, they were under the impression that I was only staying for two nights, not able to put together that the Christopher Ward who used my mastercard for the first reservation would be the same Christopher Ward who used my mastercard for the second reservation an hour later. The itch began to spread and converge with the itching of the 100 or so mosquito bites all over me, and so it was that I went back to the centrifuge stop and sloshed back to the hostel at 1:30.

   When I got there and explained that I might need to pay for another night, and they realized who I was, they were absolutely furious. I mean FURIOUS. Over the course of the morning they had gone from polite (a fleeting thing for these people) to rude to mean to, upon my afternoon arrival, positively fuming. I’ll admit that I forgot I had made the reservation in two pieces, and I’ll admit that I had wondered at the time of making the second one if I would have to check out and check back in again, but that was two weeks ago, and as these blogs can attest, a lot happens in two weeks, and I’ll admit that I completely did not consider it again for one moment. So they ripped my card from my fingers and slammed a free breakfast voucher onto the counter in front of me and screamed at me in Italian and at each other in Italian and stuttered through angry explanations of calling my name over the loudspeaker since 9:30 this morning and trying to figure out what to do with my stuff and all kinds of, frankly, completely ridiculous things that could have been avoided by simply looking at the next-day’s reservations under W. So, the abuse handed out, and a condescending lecture about checking out before 9:30 the next morning out of the way, I surveyed the damage in my room. There was none, but there was a youngish chap from Wellington going through his belongings. He was a new check-in, so I gave him my priceless information about how to see the Duomo, Uffizi, and Palazzo Piti in one day. Then, at 3:30, I caught yet another centrifuge back to town.

   I was now so beaten and battered that I heard squishing when I walked, which I did, to the Gallerie Academia, a place so nondescript as would be rendered completely invisible were it not for the 5 deep line of people encircling it like a hideous and unruly boa constrictor. The stupid line. I walked to my appointed velvet rope, first in line, and after a few minutes subjected myself to a strip search, MRI, and lie detector test ("do you or do you not have any hammers up your bum?"), and handed over €6 for a useless audio guide before sliding into the first room that did not have David in it. I went through a second room that did not have David in it, realized I’d gone the wrong way, turned around back through the first room did not have David in it, and stepped through a doorway into The Room that had David in it. Holy. Crap.

  I really had no idea how utterly huge this thing is. In pictures, you sort of think of it as being at most twice normal sized. No. You can see the little places on David’s back where Michelangelo lived as he was carving it, with little windows and little stone cutting tools inside. The audio guide declared ostentatiously and, for once, honestly that this was the greatest sculpture in the world. The Greatest. Not only is it a mastery of anatomy (under his raised left arm you can see where his ribs separate slightly), and a mastery of psychology (typical visions of David standing with one foot on Goliath’s head were eschewed by Michelangelo, opting instead to portray him as quiet, thoughtful, purposefully non-violent, but playing with the natural proportions of hands and feet to suggest a hidden strength and power), but it was also a mastery of technique, the gigantic block of marble having been previously discarded by two master sculptors, whose names I’m not surprised I’d never heard before, as too large, too fragile, and too flawed. That was a long sentence. I circled around the statue over and over again, weaving between equally awestruck (the word had to have been created for this statue) tourists gaping open mouthed at the tremendous white person above. I snapped a few surreptitious pictures until an undercover operative of the museum told me to stop and I had to pretend I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed even though we both knew I did and we both also knew that I didn’t care because I’d flown across the planet to see this thing and their little rules were not going to stop me from recording it for my own posterity. Then I just stood in front and gaped like everyone else, until I heard, "Do you think it’s hollow? It looks hollow to me." Followed by "I don’t know, I guess it could be." I turned around, wiping the spattering of utter ignorance off the back of my neck, and found myself face to face with two American girls and an American guy. I smiled at them carefully, trying very hard not to yell at the top of my lungs, and thought about all the ways that that may have been the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. Then they said, "The hands look wrong. Do you think the hands are wrong? They’re too big." Points for observation. I mentally kicked myself very hard over and over and over as I opened my stupid big fat mouth and replied with politeness, "uh, actually, they’re like that on purpose," kick, kick, kick. Then the dreaded question. "Why?" Oh god. I could feel myself slipping into the nerdiest of places, trying desperately to hang on to some modicum of coolness as I tried to explain the reason without making them laugh at me. I opted for terse cool instead of disinterested cool, which seemed to at least delay the ridicule until I could make my way across the room. I don’t know why I do that stuff. I should have just kept my mouth shut. I should have never listened to them in the first place. But they were just so incredibly ignorant it literally made my vision fuzzy. So I left, keeping my eye on the statue as I rounded the final corner, wondering if I’d ever get to see it again.

   My List complete, I centrifuged back to my hostel, hoping to maybe find a game. England was in the process of being eliminated by Portugal, of all travesties, so I hoped to catch the last half (not knowing, of course, the horrific ending). Instead I ran into an Australian girl I had sat next to the previous evening watching another game in the crowded tv lounge. She was wandering around near the centrifuge stop with a confused look on her face. She explained that she was looking for her boyfriend, who had come down here from on high to watch the game at a local pub, of which there were none. We walked the short path back up to the grounds, and tried to turn on the game in the aforementioned tv room. No go. I had her ask the front desk girls what gives (not wanting to show myself to them again), and she said that the afternoon game was not being played on a channel they receive is what gives. So we just kind of sat and chatted while she waited for her boyfriend and their other traveling companion to return. They did not, and it was time for dinner, so we had some, and then it was time for the evening game, and that’s when they arrived. The four of us found a table close to the action and watched in horror as France destroyed Brasil. Figuratively.

   Time for bed it was, and it suddenly went through my head that oh my I was going to Rome tomorrow, and I was not mentally prepared. I’ve heard two competing reviews of Rome from various fellow travelers. One, it is stunning. Two, you will get your stuff stolen. The next morning I made sure I checked out at the appropriate time and centrifuged down to the bus/train station, finding only an hour and a half train ride on the other end.

   I spent most of it trying desperately to find my hostel on a map, made more difficult by not having the address of my hostel and not having a map. I eventually resolved to find it once I got there, kind of like jumping out of a plane with no chute, assuming you’ll find another skydiver that will let you hitch a ride on the way down. Or perhaps it is like a scavenger hunt, where if you lose you are stripped of all posessions, money, and forms of identification and left in a foreign country by yourself, and if you win you get to lock yourself into a 5th story sweatbox. I sat back in the seat, cracked open my book, and the train stopped at the station. I was in it now. Picturing pickpockets everywhere I looked, I tried desperately to find someone non-thief-like to help me get where I needed to go. But instead I just found pickpockets. Dressed as train captains, nuns, housewives, and backpackers, they circled me waiting to make their move for my passport. A trash collector ventured nearby and I swung at him, spinning for the second attack in case the first was just a diversion. A gaggle of elementary school children ran by and I pushed a particularly menacing girl to the ground, where she pretended to cry to catch my attention so that the elderly couple behind me could steal the cell phone charger out of my backpack. Pretty soon there were pickpockets dressed in fake train station employee outfits and forged Italian police uniforms shouting at me and chasing me down the platform. I ran as fast as I could out of the station pushing pickpockets to the ground as I went, and crossed the street in front of a busload of incoming pickpockets. I raced down the sidewalk and turned the corner into a small street that inexplicably was having a pickpocket convention. I screamed really loud to scare them and pushed my way through, my hands clutching my phone, wallet, camera, and passport simultaneously, and stumbled over the door sill of my hostel. I had somehow run right up to it without knowing where I was going. Safe! More later.

-C