When Sarah and I started talking about travelling more, the first two locations we discussed were Greece and Japan. I favored Greece in the short-term, as it seemed logistically and financially easier. Sarah favored Japan, because these two locations would allow for Sarah to do some work on her field sites that may lead to those data being slightly more useful, and Japan was the better research choice. Then we were invited to a wedding in Greece, and Greece catapulted into the lead. Once we decided that Greece was financially reasonable, Sarah started talking to some of her other friends to see where they would be. Her friends in Stockholm were out of town during the best time to visit them, and it would be a long way to go for a quick trip. A friend of hers from Australia was going to be in Italy, which seemed like a more reasonable side trip. I had some reservations about the extra cost of essentially three days in Italy, but we decided to give it a try. Accordingly, the trip to Italy was destined to be a different type of trip.
On the morning of our flight to Rome, we said one last goodbye to the bride, groom, and groom's parents, as they happened to be at the airport at the same time we were. We went to our budget airlines, and flew to Rome, ending out Greek travels, though our final flight would leave from Athens, we would spend no more time outside of an airport in the country. At the gate, we both lamented not continuing on with what proved to be a fun group of Australians to Paros to have fun on the beach. That said, we both agreed that we were Greeced-out. We would not be missing the smell of hot animal feces that permeates Athens, nor would we really be missing the slow and vegan unfriendly style of life that we left behind on Milos. With mixed emotions about moving on to a new country, we boarded the plane.
When we arrived in Rome, we headed to the train station to buy tickets into the heart of the city. The automated kiosks for whatever reason were not taking anything but very small bills, for fairly expensive tickets. We had to go to a booth, and talk to someone. Talking to people, particularly people who are trying to sell me something, is a chore that I find most undesirable. As we would begin to learn, the Italians take this displeasure to a level beyond anything I had ever known. Sarah did most of the talking, and after asking for two train tickets to Termini, the teller gave her a sales pitch for the shuttle bus.
"No, just the train."
"Where are you staying"?
"Just two tickets to the train."
"Okay, but where are you staying"?
"Hotel Americana Nardizzi," I regretfully added.
"The shuttle bus will go straight to your hotel."
"The train is fine," Sarah says.
"It is faster, and will leave in two minutes, before the train even arrives." This nonsense continued. In the end, I decided that if the shuttle left sooner, took less time, and cost essentially the same, we could use the shuttle, since this woman seemed completely unwilling to sell us train tickets. We bought the bus tickets, and sat down to wait.
"I hate being bullied into things like this," I say to Sarah.
"Me too, and I like trains better."
"Yeah, I would way rather take the train, and I hate rewarding people for behaving like that, rather than supporting public transit." We stewed on this for a while. Ten minutes passed, the train arrived, but the shuttle bus had not. Sarah offered to go request our tickets be changed. The teller just kept lying. She could have lied and said the tickets were nonrefundable, but she chose to drag out the conversation with lies until the bus was actually ready to leave, again, we were bullied into taking the bus.
We followed the bus driver with a group of other people who presumably were duped into the same situation because they also did not travel with a wad of small bills. We arrived at the bus, and sat in it, waiting for more passengers to show up. We watched the train leave. To pass the time, we lamented our plight, and sat, more and more frustrated with the teller, and our mishandling of the situation. We reflected on it, and decided we should have just walked away, lessen learned.
The bus finally left. The driving was vomit inducing, and took longer than the train (this meant being motion sick for longer). The girl sitting next to me was a reasonably friendly Chinese girl studying art in Germany. She was interesting enough to banter with, except that I was having flashbacks to the Greek ferry, and not feeling that talkative. This lessened my enjoyment of chatting with her, and she started to chatter with her friend instead. They got dropped off first, then it was our turn.
We stepped off the bus, and our hotel was somewhere in a giant wall, with giant locked wooden doors. Next to the door was a sea of buzzers, one was labelled, "Hotel Americana Nadizzi." After we pushed the button, the door slowly opened revealing a massive staircase, and a door into a church (the ground floor). At the first floor are church offices (that is, the first floor above the ground floor). The second and third floors were residences. On the fourth floor was the Hotel Oceania. The fifth and top floor was the lobby to our hotel. As we walked down the corridor to the lobby, another patron offered encouragement, "this is the right place, you're almost there"!
Sarah dealt with the check-in. We were led by an employee down a corridor, into a stairwell, down two floors, through a locked door that you must be rung into, then down the corridor where our room was. The bed was more of a cot, and the door to our corridor was commonly impossible to get opened without walking back up to the front desk. Rick Steves describes this as an "authentic" Italian experience. We decided to find a hotel a little less authentic for the night before we flew out.
We washed up from our travel day, and went out for dinner. We walked to the restaurant, Ops!, which I highly recommend, and discussed what we should do with our single day in Rome. We decided to ride bicycles around the city, and retired to our cot for the night.
The next morning, we got up, and went to breakfast at a nearby hostel. The food was good, and was made in a space the size of a child's bedroom by a friendly, lanky German with a hotplate. After breakfast, we made our way to the bike rental. When we arrived at the location of Top Bike Rentals and Tours, we were initially disappointed, thinking the business had closed. As it turned out, the closed business was a bike shop, but the Top Bike was just around the corner. We rented our bikes, and rolled into Rome.
Our first stop was the Colosseum. The line was atrocious, not only for tickets, but it would also appear to get into the amphitheatre once tickets had been obtained. Rick Steves recommended getting tickets at the Roman Forum instead, to skip the lines. We decided to ride our bikes around the Colosseum to check out that option, and in so doing, missed the turn, and dedicated our day to riding around the city. From somewhere near the Roman Forum, we headed to a bike path along the Tiber.
We rode under historic arches of the bridges of the Tiber, then up to Ponte Sant'Angelo. At this bridge, we carried our bikes up the stairs out of the channelized river, and took in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Then we headed over to the Vatican City for a bike-by view. We found our way along the Pope's elevated walkway back to the castle, then back to the Tiber. After days of limited exercise, it felt amazing to ride, so we carried the bikes back down the stairs, turned our handlebars north, and road past the end of the bike path. We turned back to get back to the end of the path, and road up into the city. We checked the map, finding that we had ridden well off any map we had, and decided to wind through the ancient city until we could find ourselves, then make for a restaurant for lunch.
On our ride, we saw the outside of essentially every major tourist site in the city. We went into none, but with only a day in Rome, after returning our bikes we felt like we had experienced the city in a way that touring one or two tourist destinations would not have afforded us. After dinner, we headed up to our cot, ready to meet up with Sarah's friend in the morning, then be whisked south on the famous European trains.
We met up with Sarah's friend at Termini, then bought tickets on the slow train to Naples. Having not ever been to Europe before, I was looking forward to experiencing the wonder of bullet trains, and public transit second only to maybe Japan. The train left promptly, but our seven euro tickets bought us seats not on the glamorous coaches, but instead on a train more like something out of Slumdog Millionaire, though I do not think anyone was on the roof.
It turned out that it was not entirely wise to arrive in Naples without a hotel reservation, but in not too much time we found accommodation for very cheap in a hotel that, aside from being an all smoking hotel, was much nicer than the hotel in Rome. We wandered the streets of Naples looking for a restaurant, that turned out to not be open, then into a natural foods store. Judging from the stares, and shopping advice from other patrons and employees, Sarah and I were decidedly a sight to see in this small shop in a gritty neighborhood, which can occasionally be fun.
In the morning we took the train to Pompeii, and toured the ruins. Owing to time constraints we did not make it to Herculaneum. Pompeii was worth the trip, but not really worth writing about. It was amazing how well preserved the paintings, carvings, and frescoes were, by both the volcano, and the archaeologists. After Pompeii, we headed up Vesuvius.
At the train station outside the gates of Pompeii is a tourist kiosk that sells tickets for a bus to the top of Vesuvius. There are, supposedly, two bus services. One that goes up the normal road, in a normal bus. One that goes up a four wheel drive road in a Unimog. We wanted the normal bus. We attempted to buy tickets for the normal bus. We were promised we were buying tickets for the normal bus. When the bus pulled up, it was a normal bus, and we piled in, still skeptical that the person in the kiosk had not been lying to us.
Sure enough, the normal bus stopped just outside of town, and we were herded onto a Unimog. The salesman also told us that we could take a later bus down, we just had to tell our driver. We spoke with the driver who insisted that this was not possible, ensuring we would not be able to make it to the summit of Vesuvius, just the crater rim. The Unimog lumbered up a gravel road that anyone from the Western US would describe as a highway. We disembarked and wandered the crater rim among the trinket shops. With our time nearly expired, we headed back to the Unimog, and the train station.
Back in the heart of Naples, we had dinner at Sorriso Integrale, including a dessert of fried peaches, which is a culinary divinity. The next morning we went to Solfatara, a phreatic crater in Naples where sulfur-rich steam still rushes from the earth. After Solfatara, we wandered down to the third largest amphitheatre in the Roman Empire. In contrast to the Colosseum, the third largest amphitheatre has no lines, costs very little, and the basement is open for anyone to wander through.
After the amphitheatre, it was time for us to begin our journey stateside. We took the train to the main station in Naples, then to Rome, and spent the night. The next day we took the train to the airport, then flew to Athens, and spent the night. Following that, we flew to Minneapolis, and drove to Babbitt. I spent the night in Babbitt, then drove back to Minneapolis and flew to Seattle. It was a lot of travel. I read A Song of Fire and Ice for well over 20 hours, painting my subconscious with some sort of fantasy Roman Empire.
The travel also provided us with much time to discuss our trip. A major change I would recommend to anyone wanting to go up Vesuvius would be to rent a car. If you are travelling alone, you will lose money on this deal, but with two or three people, especially if you plan ahead and rent from outside Italy, you will save money. What you gain though is enough time on Vesuvius to walk around the crater, which includes summiting the peak responsible for what may well be the most famous volcanic disaster. I think in the end we both regretted the limited time in Italy, but were generally happy with moving out from Greece, as that much time in Athens during the hot season could have easily spoiled much of the great memories from the trip. It is possible that going to Paros would have accomplished this, but riding around Rome was fast paced and fun. While I probably would have traded it for a long run on Mt. Olympus, it is in the top three experiences of the trip.
Photos from Italy can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/113802252094103841878/Italy2012
On the morning of our flight to Rome, we said one last goodbye to the bride, groom, and groom's parents, as they happened to be at the airport at the same time we were. We went to our budget airlines, and flew to Rome, ending out Greek travels, though our final flight would leave from Athens, we would spend no more time outside of an airport in the country. At the gate, we both lamented not continuing on with what proved to be a fun group of Australians to Paros to have fun on the beach. That said, we both agreed that we were Greeced-out. We would not be missing the smell of hot animal feces that permeates Athens, nor would we really be missing the slow and vegan unfriendly style of life that we left behind on Milos. With mixed emotions about moving on to a new country, we boarded the plane.
When we arrived in Rome, we headed to the train station to buy tickets into the heart of the city. The automated kiosks for whatever reason were not taking anything but very small bills, for fairly expensive tickets. We had to go to a booth, and talk to someone. Talking to people, particularly people who are trying to sell me something, is a chore that I find most undesirable. As we would begin to learn, the Italians take this displeasure to a level beyond anything I had ever known. Sarah did most of the talking, and after asking for two train tickets to Termini, the teller gave her a sales pitch for the shuttle bus.
"No, just the train."
"Where are you staying"?
"Just two tickets to the train."
"Okay, but where are you staying"?
"Hotel Americana Nardizzi," I regretfully added.
"The shuttle bus will go straight to your hotel."
"The train is fine," Sarah says.
"It is faster, and will leave in two minutes, before the train even arrives." This nonsense continued. In the end, I decided that if the shuttle left sooner, took less time, and cost essentially the same, we could use the shuttle, since this woman seemed completely unwilling to sell us train tickets. We bought the bus tickets, and sat down to wait.
"I hate being bullied into things like this," I say to Sarah.
"Me too, and I like trains better."
"Yeah, I would way rather take the train, and I hate rewarding people for behaving like that, rather than supporting public transit." We stewed on this for a while. Ten minutes passed, the train arrived, but the shuttle bus had not. Sarah offered to go request our tickets be changed. The teller just kept lying. She could have lied and said the tickets were nonrefundable, but she chose to drag out the conversation with lies until the bus was actually ready to leave, again, we were bullied into taking the bus.
We followed the bus driver with a group of other people who presumably were duped into the same situation because they also did not travel with a wad of small bills. We arrived at the bus, and sat in it, waiting for more passengers to show up. We watched the train leave. To pass the time, we lamented our plight, and sat, more and more frustrated with the teller, and our mishandling of the situation. We reflected on it, and decided we should have just walked away, lessen learned.
The bus finally left. The driving was vomit inducing, and took longer than the train (this meant being motion sick for longer). The girl sitting next to me was a reasonably friendly Chinese girl studying art in Germany. She was interesting enough to banter with, except that I was having flashbacks to the Greek ferry, and not feeling that talkative. This lessened my enjoyment of chatting with her, and she started to chatter with her friend instead. They got dropped off first, then it was our turn.
We stepped off the bus, and our hotel was somewhere in a giant wall, with giant locked wooden doors. Next to the door was a sea of buzzers, one was labelled, "Hotel Americana Nadizzi." After we pushed the button, the door slowly opened revealing a massive staircase, and a door into a church (the ground floor). At the first floor are church offices (that is, the first floor above the ground floor). The second and third floors were residences. On the fourth floor was the Hotel Oceania. The fifth and top floor was the lobby to our hotel. As we walked down the corridor to the lobby, another patron offered encouragement, "this is the right place, you're almost there"!
Sarah dealt with the check-in. We were led by an employee down a corridor, into a stairwell, down two floors, through a locked door that you must be rung into, then down the corridor where our room was. The bed was more of a cot, and the door to our corridor was commonly impossible to get opened without walking back up to the front desk. Rick Steves describes this as an "authentic" Italian experience. We decided to find a hotel a little less authentic for the night before we flew out.
We washed up from our travel day, and went out for dinner. We walked to the restaurant, Ops!, which I highly recommend, and discussed what we should do with our single day in Rome. We decided to ride bicycles around the city, and retired to our cot for the night.
The next morning, we got up, and went to breakfast at a nearby hostel. The food was good, and was made in a space the size of a child's bedroom by a friendly, lanky German with a hotplate. After breakfast, we made our way to the bike rental. When we arrived at the location of Top Bike Rentals and Tours, we were initially disappointed, thinking the business had closed. As it turned out, the closed business was a bike shop, but the Top Bike was just around the corner. We rented our bikes, and rolled into Rome.
Our first stop was the Colosseum. The line was atrocious, not only for tickets, but it would also appear to get into the amphitheatre once tickets had been obtained. Rick Steves recommended getting tickets at the Roman Forum instead, to skip the lines. We decided to ride our bikes around the Colosseum to check out that option, and in so doing, missed the turn, and dedicated our day to riding around the city. From somewhere near the Roman Forum, we headed to a bike path along the Tiber.
We rode under historic arches of the bridges of the Tiber, then up to Ponte Sant'Angelo. At this bridge, we carried our bikes up the stairs out of the channelized river, and took in the Castel Sant'Angelo. Then we headed over to the Vatican City for a bike-by view. We found our way along the Pope's elevated walkway back to the castle, then back to the Tiber. After days of limited exercise, it felt amazing to ride, so we carried the bikes back down the stairs, turned our handlebars north, and road past the end of the bike path. We turned back to get back to the end of the path, and road up into the city. We checked the map, finding that we had ridden well off any map we had, and decided to wind through the ancient city until we could find ourselves, then make for a restaurant for lunch.
On our ride, we saw the outside of essentially every major tourist site in the city. We went into none, but with only a day in Rome, after returning our bikes we felt like we had experienced the city in a way that touring one or two tourist destinations would not have afforded us. After dinner, we headed up to our cot, ready to meet up with Sarah's friend in the morning, then be whisked south on the famous European trains.
We met up with Sarah's friend at Termini, then bought tickets on the slow train to Naples. Having not ever been to Europe before, I was looking forward to experiencing the wonder of bullet trains, and public transit second only to maybe Japan. The train left promptly, but our seven euro tickets bought us seats not on the glamorous coaches, but instead on a train more like something out of Slumdog Millionaire, though I do not think anyone was on the roof.
It turned out that it was not entirely wise to arrive in Naples without a hotel reservation, but in not too much time we found accommodation for very cheap in a hotel that, aside from being an all smoking hotel, was much nicer than the hotel in Rome. We wandered the streets of Naples looking for a restaurant, that turned out to not be open, then into a natural foods store. Judging from the stares, and shopping advice from other patrons and employees, Sarah and I were decidedly a sight to see in this small shop in a gritty neighborhood, which can occasionally be fun.
In the morning we took the train to Pompeii, and toured the ruins. Owing to time constraints we did not make it to Herculaneum. Pompeii was worth the trip, but not really worth writing about. It was amazing how well preserved the paintings, carvings, and frescoes were, by both the volcano, and the archaeologists. After Pompeii, we headed up Vesuvius.
At the train station outside the gates of Pompeii is a tourist kiosk that sells tickets for a bus to the top of Vesuvius. There are, supposedly, two bus services. One that goes up the normal road, in a normal bus. One that goes up a four wheel drive road in a Unimog. We wanted the normal bus. We attempted to buy tickets for the normal bus. We were promised we were buying tickets for the normal bus. When the bus pulled up, it was a normal bus, and we piled in, still skeptical that the person in the kiosk had not been lying to us.
Sure enough, the normal bus stopped just outside of town, and we were herded onto a Unimog. The salesman also told us that we could take a later bus down, we just had to tell our driver. We spoke with the driver who insisted that this was not possible, ensuring we would not be able to make it to the summit of Vesuvius, just the crater rim. The Unimog lumbered up a gravel road that anyone from the Western US would describe as a highway. We disembarked and wandered the crater rim among the trinket shops. With our time nearly expired, we headed back to the Unimog, and the train station.
Back in the heart of Naples, we had dinner at Sorriso Integrale, including a dessert of fried peaches, which is a culinary divinity. The next morning we went to Solfatara, a phreatic crater in Naples where sulfur-rich steam still rushes from the earth. After Solfatara, we wandered down to the third largest amphitheatre in the Roman Empire. In contrast to the Colosseum, the third largest amphitheatre has no lines, costs very little, and the basement is open for anyone to wander through.
After the amphitheatre, it was time for us to begin our journey stateside. We took the train to the main station in Naples, then to Rome, and spent the night. The next day we took the train to the airport, then flew to Athens, and spent the night. Following that, we flew to Minneapolis, and drove to Babbitt. I spent the night in Babbitt, then drove back to Minneapolis and flew to Seattle. It was a lot of travel. I read A Song of Fire and Ice for well over 20 hours, painting my subconscious with some sort of fantasy Roman Empire.
The travel also provided us with much time to discuss our trip. A major change I would recommend to anyone wanting to go up Vesuvius would be to rent a car. If you are travelling alone, you will lose money on this deal, but with two or three people, especially if you plan ahead and rent from outside Italy, you will save money. What you gain though is enough time on Vesuvius to walk around the crater, which includes summiting the peak responsible for what may well be the most famous volcanic disaster. I think in the end we both regretted the limited time in Italy, but were generally happy with moving out from Greece, as that much time in Athens during the hot season could have easily spoiled much of the great memories from the trip. It is possible that going to Paros would have accomplished this, but riding around Rome was fast paced and fun. While I probably would have traded it for a long run on Mt. Olympus, it is in the top three experiences of the trip.
Photos from Italy can be found here: https://picasaweb.google.com/113802252094103841878/Italy2012
I meant the Italy pictures are wonderful.
ReplyDelete~Jessi
Thanks! I was actually just recently accused of being the laziest picture taker ever. While I am probably guilty of being lazy, I think some of them turn out okay.
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