An Italian List

I’m am around three or more places behind now, and I reckon that it’ll take far too long to catch up if I write a 1500 word essay for each one, so I’m swapping back to the list format to deal with all these Italian towns that I’ve visited over the past two weeks.

The morning after I arrived in Rome, I got up earlier than ever to go and meet Sarah at the airport. She’d come over from NZ to visit me and travel around Italy, have some fun and see the sights. We checked out Rome, Venice and Florence with a few trips on the side – so here we go!

Rome

• Rome is a very walkable city. We  just began to wander and ended up in many interesting places. On the first day, this is all we did. Just walked around and tried to organise ourselves for the coming fornight, figuring what we wanted to see and where we wanted to go. This popped out of nowhere though
  

  One Colosseum please!

• On that first day, we also saw glimpses of the Roman Forum and Palatino (which unfortunately we never made it into). Along with many, many, many churches, there was the Arch of Constintine.
  

  Arch of Constintine

• One amusing thing which we saw was the Running of the Nigerians. In all of the cities which we visited (and also in Athens) you can find shady Africans trying to procure you fake Gucci and Prada bags, sungasses and various other things you don’t really want. This is obviously not legal, as you can see them on the constant look out. Popular tourist spots are a haven for these guys, and there must have been no less than 50 or 60 of them at the Colosseum. They stand around, harrassing you as you pass: “Hello, hello, hello, cheap bag, hello, hello, half price, hello”, etc. Then one spots the police, and it’s the oddest situation I’ve ever seen. Sixty men carrying white sheetss and big blue plastic bags full of merchandise are sprinting through the crowds of tourists, swarming for a place to hide. Very crazy to see, I recommend it if you are in Rome.
• We ate way, way, way too much pizza. I don’t think I could handle one for at least a few months now. Pasta is a bit easier to stomach, but I’m almost over Italian food. A proper breakfast would be nice too.
• We did go inside the Colosseum:
  

  Inside the Colosseum

• Outside there were guys dressed up as ancient Romans trying to get you to pose with them for photos all the while trying to stay out of photos from the public. Must be a very stressful job.
• Ruins are all over and everywhere with in the city. Amazing!
• We took a tour through varioous crypts and catacombs of Rome. This was very interesting. The first place we went to, the Capucian Crypt, was 5 or 6 rooms decorated with the bones of thousands of human bodies. There were chandalliers made of bones, patterns all over the walls, hourglasses with wings made of pelvis bones, the full skeleton with a scithe representing death, and horrifying of all was the numberous mummified bodies of monks set around in positions, one who still had a beard on his face. Also in the tour was the Catacombs of Domitella; 11 miles of underground burial passageways which delve 100ft below the surface. Most graves had been removed, but some were still intact.
• We walked the poo gauntlett. A beautiful riverside walk under huge trees, chriping with the sound of birds. Beautiful until we realised there was poo dropping all around us!
• From Rome we took a day trip to the ruins of Pompeii. This was amazing! I was amazed at how large and intact they are. There was hardly anyone there and you could just walk around, getting lost inside houses and temples. This place is so big you need a map to figure out just where you are.
  

  Pompeii

• On the Wednesday we went to the Vatican and happened to see my good old friend, The Pope.
  

  Mr Pope

• While we were there, we also spent a huge amount of time walking around and getting lost in the Vatican Museums which hold an exceptional amount of paintings, sculptures, and other amazing works including my favourite, and entire gallery of ancient maps, some even made out of tapastries. Also part of this is everyone’s favourite Sistine Chapel which holds the ceiling fresco God creates Adam by Michelangelo. To be honest, after walking  around all this art and through numerous decorated churches and chapels, I found this famous work to be rather underwhelming and no way near as large as I had pictured.
• In Rome, the food was really not that great at most of the places we visited. The Italian style pizza is very bland in most regards, and I felt that the lasagnes that I had in The Netherlands and Germany were much better than the ones which I had in Italy. I wanted it cooked in a little pot damnit!
• We also saw such sites as the Spanish Steps which were covered in people, and Trivi Foutain which was pretty impressive. People throw money over their shoulders once to ensure a return to Rome and twice for a wish. Sarah got hit by flying money from above!

Trivi Fountain by night

Venice

• Venice is made up of 400 little islands separated by canals and connected by bridges. It’s located in the north of the Italy. What a maze this place is! At pretty much all times you can’t look straight down a street for more than 100m without it turning a corner. Most of the streets are about 2 meters wide and you just keep going around in circles or off on wild tangents of incorrect direction. If there was a place to get lost, that is what we did in Venice. Just look at a map to see what I mean.
• The canals were everywhere and awesome. It was impressive to see a city which has it’s main transport by water and absolutely no cars. Even the police , fire and ambulance come by water!
  

  Just one canal

• We saw some of the Nigerian bag dealers get chased by under cover police and caught.
• Our very own gondola adventure though the canal was schedualed and on afternoon we were paddled around the city by a man who seemed very disinterested in being a gondola driver. It was cool to see the city from the perspective of the canals, though. It gives a good insight into how the residents actually live.
  

  Gondola ride

• We went on a “ghost walk”-type tour which took us around the back alleys and what are supposed to be the scarier parts of the city where horrible crimes have been committed and ghosts like headless lovers are often seen. It was also a good way to find sights that we hadn’t found earlier, like this cool snail staircase:
  

  Snail House

• On our final day we checked out the 11th International Architecture exhibition which was amazing. Heaps of very interesting ideas were shown by at least 30 countries. One of the coolest displays was the Belgian one, which just consisted of a house with white walls, a few chairs, and confetti EVERYWHERE! It was very cool!
  

  Confetti

• On the day we were leaving, it began to snow and the water began to rise and smell. I hear that they have just had the highest floods in something like 22 years.

Florence

• We visited the Duomo church and it’s baptistry.
  

  Duomo

• We climed the 467 stairs inside the dome of the Duomo church, and came out to an amazing view over the city.
  

  View over Florence

• We spent time each day browsing the endless markets of Italian made clothing and accessories, only to buy nearly nothing.
• We took a day trip to Pisa to check out the leaning tower. It was a beautiful day and the tower was leaning just as much as it should, 4° I’m told.
  

  Leaning tower!

• We visited the Uffizi Gallery which houses Botticelli’s Birth of Venus  and numerous other amazing paintings, all overshadowed by about 5000 images of Christ. We also managed to see Michaelangelo’s statue of David which I thought was the most amazing piece of “important” art which I had seen. Very big and very well made. Truely epic!

And that was a brief summary of Sarah and I’s two weeks in Italy. I’m sorry it began to the more and more brief during the last part, but I am so far behind that I need the time to write the next three posts, let alone getting all the pictures up.

After this, I dropped Sarah off at the airport and headed back to Rome for two nights. Back to CouchSurfing. And then I was off, off to check out Cinque Terre on the recommedation of my good friends Prasna and Frankie.

A Few Days in Brussels

Three days I spent in Brussels. It is both the capital of Belgium, and also the capital of Europe, well, the European Union anyway. The people here speak French rather than Dutch as they do in Bruges so it is a little easier for me to read signs and such, but I still can’t speak to people!

As well as being my first proper city that I have visited on the continent, it is also the first time that I have spend couchsurfing. For those of you who don’t know, couchsurfing is about networking with people all around the world and staying with them instead of staying in a hostel when you are travelling (www.couchsurfing.com). Being my first time I was a little aprehensive, but Alex, the guy who I stayed with, was absolutely awesome. He was extra hospitable, and it turned out that we had a very similar music taste, so we spent a lot of time listening to and talking about music. He also loved the Belgian beers as much as I do!

Unfortunately Alex had to work during the week days so was unable to show me around, but that was ok. I was able to navigate Brussels fairly easily. It is small enough to travel around to most of the interesting sites without having to use public transport, which is good, because that is fairly complex.

In Brussels they have bus, metro and trams. This may sound good, but it is not linked very well. For example, to get from Alex’s place to the central bus station, which is probably about 3km as the crow flies, and on the same side of town as him, we had to take a bus, two trains, and a tram! Ridiculous. Luckily they are all run by the some company so you can buy a day pass and use all of them as many times as you like within the city.

The first night Alex and I just hung out at his place. He cooked a pizza with soggy dough which was pretty funny, him apologising profusely. The next morning I began my wandering. The first site which I stumbled across was the Palace.

Royal Palace in Brussels

From outside, this building is definitely grand, although no more grand than other buildings I have seen. After 10:30 in the morning, you are able to go inside. Now it is very unfortunate that you are not able to take photos inside this building as I’m not sure I can fully explain it in words. The first thing which I noticed was the scale of the interior, it was much much bigger than it appeared from the outside. And the marble, almost the entire interiour was marble. Arches, columns, floors, ceilings, and when there was not marble, there was gold, and plenty of it. Gold adorned everything! The curtains were red velvet, the walls were covered in paintings of former in kings, princes, princesses and queens. Frescos could be seen all over the ceilings, and even one of the ceilings was covered in actaual scarab beetle wings – an amazing thing to see. All I can say more about this building is “wow”. It is more than impressive.

From the palace I moved one to one place that I did know about and had planned to see, the Museum of Musical Instruments. This houses the largest collection of musical instruments in the world. This was very cool, you could walk around displays of hundreds of instruments from all over the world and listen to music from that particular instrument through headphones you were given. The music automatically played when you stood in front of the display. I was particularly hoping that I would find what I now know is called a Hanghang as I thought it was a very old instrument, but it was not there as you can probably deduce from the previous post about Bruges. Of everything in the museum, I think that the pianos were definitely the top display for me. Never have I seen so many shapes and sizes, nor such beautiful decoration. Check this out.

Fancy Piano!

Just wandering around Brussels, a few things I noticed were the large amound of beggars in the streets. Different streets seems to have different types, some for young men, some for women wearing burquas, older men, and those playing the accordian. Well, maybe not the accordian, but as a fan of the accordian I am happy to say that every single busker or busking group which I encountered had some form of accordian player, how fantastic! For some odd reason there are also a lot of hat shops, I have no idea why. Oh, and I found a bunch of record shops that sold so much old stuff you wouldn’t know where to begin. It was excellent.

Old Man Busking with Accordian

Later on in the day on I managed to find someething I didn’t know existed. This was the main square in Brussels, and the more touristific spot in the city. All it was was tourist groups, waffle and chocolate shops, and not much else. Oh, and also some terrifically old buildings, one of which was the town hall. I was unable to get a decent shot of the square as they were setting up for some free summer event and there was scafholding everywhere, but take a look at Flickr for some pictures of some of the buildings found there, the architecture is amazing!

Brussels Town Hall

My last tourist stop for the day was probably Brussels most popular icon, the Maniequine Pis. Luckily I had not known about this little fountain before I came to Brussels, or I would most probably be incredibly disappointed like most of the tourists there. It is the statue that Brussels is most known for, and in a town of amazing sculptures, it stands little over two feet high! People are loving it ‘though.

Stories as to why this exists involve one about two enemies at war, and a little boy runs up and pisses on one of the armies, it is a huge joke the the war is called off. Another tells of a small boy who put out a fire by taking a pee on it. Apparantly there are a huge number more of these stories, none of which anyone believes is true.

Manneken Pis

Not long after I had finished viewing this amazing statue, Alex turned up. We then took a walk through the city towards the outskirts to meet up with one of his friends, Eliza, who was a French language teacher. We sat around at her apartment talking for a while, then headed out to bar for dinner where I had a fantastic lasagne. Yum! And also some more interesting Belgian beer! Out next stop was very interesting. Eliza took both Alex and I, for he had never been there before, to a bar which serves over 300 Belgian beers. The menu was a massive folder with beers separated both by type and alphabetically. At a place like this, the beer really is treated like wine. The waiter approached and the conversation went something like this:

Him: “What kind of beer would you like; blond, brown, ale, trapist, white, dark…?”
Me: “Ummm, I think I’ll try a white.”
Him: “Do you prefer a strong or light beer?”
Me: “I’ll try a strong one please.”
Him: “Fruity or Acidic.”
Me: “Acidic.”
Him: “Then you must try the Blanche Du Hainaut , it is an organic beer made close to here, it ois very good.”

Blanche Du Hainaut Beer

And he can do this for every type of beer he has. He knows them all intimately and can help you choose any type of beer you may desire. Oh how I pine for such an establishment in Auckland. After this, Alex and I headed home to bed as we were both extremely tired.

The following day I began with a walk to an arch. Now this is no regular arch. For a city which everyone knows by a statue of a pissing child and something called the Atomium (I will get to this), this arch is vastly overlooked. Move over Arc de Triumphe, you have to check out the sheer scale of this arch which was built to commerate 50 years of indepence.

Arch Celebrating 50 Years Indepencence

My next plan was to try to check out some contemporary Belgian art, so I firstly headed towards a well known train station and graffiti spot, and this is what I found:

Art From Under a Rail Bridge

Graffiti Inside Train Station

The second picture is actaully the inside of the train station and is a truely amazing sight to behold. My next stop was a small art shop and gallery called A.L.I.C.E. which for some reason stands for Artists Living In Constant Elevation. Very strange. Anyway, this was a shop full of zines and interesting art books and, oh my god, Lomo cameras. If I wasn’t travelling for the next 5 months, I totally would have bought one. How excellent.

That night it rained pretty bad, so Alex and I just hung around in his apartment, listening to music, chatting, and drinking an array of interesting belgian beers, pictures of which you can find in my Flickr galleries.

My last day in Brussels was a Saturday and Alex did not have to work. While I was sleeping, he went to the bakery and bought som croisantes and panne au chocolae which was very nice of him. He then took me to see the Brussel’s famous Atomium, a massive glass and metal sculpture built for the 1958 World Fair. It is based on a Iron atom and the 9 balls represent the 9 parts of Belgium. I decided not to go up because it was pretty expensive, and anyway, there was just a good view at our next stop.

Atomium

After the Atomium, Alex and I headed towards a crazy church I had wanted to see (which I had seen in the distance the day before) but this turned out to be not as exciting as I thought it would. It was also a very commercial church, as you had to pay admission if you wanted to go to certain places in it. I’m not sure that is very right at all. Jesus would not approve. Finally we walked down to the Brussels Court. This was amazing, and too bad it was the weekend because I definately would have wanted to go inside. This building has the 3rd largest floor area of any structure in the world and was apparantly built to show the power of the justice system in Belgium. Absolutly epic building.

Brussels Court

And so that was that. My trip to Brussels had come to an end. Alex and I headed back to his apartment where I packed my things and then headed to the bus station. After thanking Alex and staying good bye, it was onward to Frankfurt!

Statues With Random Posers

I have found that on occassion it is not easy to take a photo of a statue without someone random person always being in the way. This could be annoying but I’ve decided to use it as a project piece. From now on you will see a number of posts of statues with random people posing in them, mainly because I think it’s funny.

Girl With NZ Statue

Boy with Nelson Mandela Statue

I’ve created a Flickr photo-set for all these images which you can see by clicking here.

London Sights

I haven’t written in a couple of days and I probably shouldn’t be now as it’s close to 1am. But never mind, I want to get a few things up.

Yesterday was again, for me, another “hottest day of the year”. This time in London. It is definitely not as hot as Hong Kong but it is still sweat producing if you are wandering around in the sun all day. Nevertheless, I managed to get around a number of the tourist attractions which the city has to offer.

Adam was showing me around, our first stop was the London Eye. This is essentially a huge ferris wheel with enclosed capsules which takes you high above London’s skyline. It was deathly expensive so I didn’t take a trip on it. I also didn’t really manage to get a decent photo of it as there were so many people in the way and  i didn’t want to cross a busy road just for that. You can see it in the corner of one of my photos of the Guard’s House.

We then crossed the Thames towards the central city, only to find everyone’s favourite pie manufacturer, Big Ben. That is one majestic clock.  And boy was I excited to see it (cheers, Brook)!

OMG it's bBig Ben!

Big Ben does not stand alone, and has attached itself to the side of the Houses of Parliment, the place where I gather many big decisions are made by Brown men, but not so many black ones. Racialist jokes! But really, it is another awesome building with incredible attention to detail.

Houses of Parliment & Big Ben

Over the road from the Houses of Parliment was Wesminster Abbey, which again I have no photos of. It just didn’t feeel like something deserved of all the fuss it seems to accumulate! Another church in a city on oh so many.

Next we took a walk down to Tower Bridge, that’s the famous one which always gets confused with London Bridge. It’s around 700 years old and there are so many tourists that it is out of control. But nevertheless, it’s a pretty amazing sight to see. As with many of the other architectural wonders in London, it is beautifully detailed and would have taken a number of craftsmen a long  time to put it all together.

Tower Bridge

We walked on from Tower Bridge towards St. James’ Park. If anything was essentially English, it had to be  this place: cultivated gardens, a false lake, plenty of pathways, and people picnicing everywhere. And more squirrels (and a pelican or two!) :) Sitting neatly behind St. James’ Park is that place which you have all seen before – Buckingham Palace. So now it was about time to visit aunty Elizibeth (although she dosen’t actaully live here). To be honest, it really doesn’t seem to be as majecstic as is protrayed on television and it definitely not easy to photograph. But never mind, it was cool enough to see the Beefeater Guards in their finest comatose-like poses. There was also a number of statues spotted around a larger statue in the front of the palace which a notes saying they were donated by New Zealand, and seriously, these statues were better than anything I’ve even seen back home – crazy!

St James' Park

NZ Dontated Statue at Buckingham Palace

Beefeater at Buckingham Palace

We had now been walking for hours and both my feet and back were sore and I was pretty tired, so off home it was for what was a pretty early night on current standards.