Hey all,
I know this post is a little late but I had some school work to finish when I got back and this is the first chance I've had to write about our big five day weekend. I've already uploaded the pictures to Picasa so feel free to check them out!
Our mid-summer break started last Thursday with a long train ride to Rome through Strasbourg, Basel Switzerland, and Milan. We had only one delay but we managed to get to Rome by 9pm. We didn't have too much time to wander around but we grabbed some dinner and planned out our next day and a half in Rome. We rented bikes on Friday to ride around and check out the sites. Although it was very dangerous because Rome isn't exactly a biking city we did manage to cover a much bigger area of sites in a shorter amount of time. Most of the day was like playing Frogger and trying not to get run over, but on the way we stopped at the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Trevi Fountains, The Pantheon, among others, and took a tour of the Vatican and its museum, as well as the famous Sistine Chapel.
The Vatican was rather expensive, but we took a guided audio tour through the museum consisting of thousands of scupltures, paintings, tapestries, and other works of art. We were told detailed histories of some of the more popular pieces since it would have taken the entire day to go through all of them. I took as many pictures as possible while we strolled through the museum to give you all and idea of its vastness. The Sistine Chapel itself, is supposed to be off-limits to cameras and noise as the frescoes on the walls and ceiling are extremely delicate and are vulnerable to camera flashes and vibrations. I turned off my flash at the recommendation of our guide and snapped a couple of photos, but those few were all I could manage before a security guard told me to put my camera up. We also toured through St. Peter's Basilica and Piazza San Pietro and I was literally amazed by the size of all of it and the fact that it has been standing since 1626.
One of our last stops in Rome that night was not exactly mentioned as one of the top tourist attractions, but Kris and I decided to go visit Villa Borghese. It was a wonderfully designed park with African style trees, long and open bike paths, a zoo, dozens of fountains, and many beautiful ruins and buildings to explore. But before we knew it, it was 6:30 and we had to be back downtown to return the bikes at 7pm. We quickly found the nearest metro station (which we had day passes for) and managed to get our bikes down the series of escalators and stairs. One of which was a downward sloping moving sidewalk, so we couldn't resist riding our bikes down the length of it! Literally one of those moments that doesn't seem like it should be fun but it was unbelievable exciting.
We managed to return the bikes only a couple minutes late after many evil stares on the metro for taking up too much room. We had planned to go on our first pub crawl of the summer that evening and after we had some dinner and showers, we headed down to the metro only to discover that Rome metro workers had decided to go on strike that evening... At least we didn't pay to reserve anything, but we couldn't make it in time so we went to the local Irish Pub (which seems to exist in every major European city). After getting our first round of drinks we sat down with two German guys who had some extra room and talked while the Greece vs. Germany soccer match was on. During the course of the match we made two new friends who bought us all the drinks after that first round which was astoundingly polite. All of this was made even better when Germany advanced to the Semifinals by beating Greece 4-2! (Although I'm watching them play Italy right now and it's not looking too good...) So overall our night turned out much better than we expected.
Saturday morning we only had a couple of hours and the one major site we hadn't seen yet was the Spanish Steps. Since they happened to be next to the Villa Borghese that we visited the previous day, we decided to spend a little more time there afterwards. The steps were amazing with a great view over the city of Rome to the south due to the higher elevation of the park. When we were walking over, we heard some music and assumed that there might be an outdoor market or festival that morning. To our surprise, we happened upon the Italian 2012 Crossfit Championships which is simply put a cross section of many kinds of fitness including weight lifting, running, gymnastics, and overall craziness. We sat down for awhile and watched some of the most jacked dudes I have ever seen in person do some of the most ridiculous combinations of exercises I could imagine. We didn't stay for the whole event, but it still was something I wasn't expecting at all. We then went and explored another section of the park and set up our hammocks before lunch in the shade of a group of trees. All together, Rome is a great city and proved itself as a rival for my favorite city in Europe, on par with Munich.
Venice was the second part of our trip which was a four hour train ride away to the northeast. We showed up on Saturday night and took the waterbus to the outlying island of Lido where I had gotten us into a nice Hotwire hotel for the night. By the time we checked in, it was already 9pm so we just decided to stay on the island and check out the live music and restaurants that Lido had to offer. We ate a very classy three course meal at one place consisting of a liter of the house red wine, two types of spaghetti, a pizza with mushrooms, pepperoni, and avocado, followed by famous Italian gelato for dessert. Needless to say, the food in Venice is well known for a good reason even though it is rather expensive.
Sunday was our day for exploring Venice itself. We started by taking the waterbus from Lido to Piazza San Marco where we toured in the Doge's palace (no cameras allowed unfortunately), and saw the famous Clocktower and surrounding buildings in the massive plaza. We then grabbed a bite of lunch in a nearby restaurant and decided to go visit a local Music Museum (which was an easy choice because it was free). They had many famous instruments of past musicians on display and I was amazed by the curious design of some of them. Including guitars that had three extra bass notes attached above the normal six strings, weirdly shaped mandolin looking instruments, and violins and harps. We also bought student passes to a Vivaldi concert that night there which we were extremely excited for.
The only bad part of the weekend was the second Venice hotel, which we had to book last minute because we couldn't book the night train out of Venice that we had originally planned for. It turns out this place was in the middle of nowhere with a 30 euro taxi ride to get there and a shuttle that was anything but convenient. In the end we decided to skip trying to get there because it would be cheaper for us to just pay the full price for cancellation and stay out in Venice for the night. We ended up walking around to a restaurant for dinner followed by a bar for some lemoncello before the concert.
The Vivaldi concert was amazing in its own right. The group playing was a bunch of ex-symphony players and included three violinists, two violas, a cello, a bass cello, and pianist. They played four works from Vivaldi, one from a composer I didn't know, and one piece from Mozart. All of it was beautiful and enjoyable to listen to (unlike earlier in my life where I would often fall asleep during symphony concerts). If you ever stop in Venice, I would recommend seeing these guys play. After that, we found some local bars where we grabbed some drinks and watched Italy play England in the last Euro 2012 quarterfinal. It was quite uneventful until the shootout at the end but the bar went crazy with Italy's victory! We then found some friends to follow around for the night including a guy from St. Louis, one from Michigan, two German girls, and two British 'Blokes'. Through the course of the night I realized that the British guys were actually the most impolite and drunk of all of us so we managed to get away from them after awhile. We ended up going to Piazza San Marco one last time at 2am and played a couple games of cards with our group to kill some time. We then walked all the way across town to the train station and slept until our train the next morning at 8:30.
The ride back was a story in itself.. sadly. We took a train from Venice to Milan to catch a train to Zurich followed by a one last connection to Metz. We made it onto the Zurich train just fine, but then less than halfway through the ride we were informed that there had been a landslide on the tracks ahead and we would half to get off the train and take another route. We were shuffled onto a train going to a nearby town where the Swiss train company had hired buses to take us to another station where we could catch a train to Zurich. From there we had missed the last connection to Metz, so we had to take a train to Basel where we found a ride to Strasbourg. We were on the final train from Strasbourg to Metz, when at the last stop before Metz we were forced to get off the train because of unexplained 'Security Reasons' on the tracks ahead of us. Needless to say this French excuse was nowhere as good as the Swiss's reason. After boarding the bus, we rode around the country side with a driver who obviously didn't know his way around Metz or the surrounding area. After a 16 hour day of traveling, we made it back to the room at midnight.
Thats why America doesn't do trains.
Brian
