Italy part 2

We left Florence on the cheap train (read really, really slow) for Rome.  All of the hostels in the city center were pretty expensive so we opted for a camping that was a 20 minute metro ride from the city center.  As usual we arrived at the city center having no idea where we were going and hungry from being on a train all day.  After running in circles with our packs for an hour and a lively "discussion" as to where we were, we found the right metro to get us to the camping.  We stayed in a twin room that consisted of 2 cots and just enough room to walk between them.

The next day we went to check out the Colosseum and the roman forum which was very cool, and luckily not very crowded.  The city itself however, was just crawling with tourists and those waiting to rip them off (some were so clueless I was temped to rip them off), so we were glad to be staying outside of the city center.  That night we had a picnic on the Spanish Steps which I am still not sure why they are important but they sure seemed to be. There we were hassled like crazy by Indians trying to sell us roses. Thanks to Istanbul we were pros at brushing them off.

The next day we went to the Vatican.  On the walk towards it there were tons of Australians trying to sell us tours by saying that there was a problem at the gate and the only way to get in was with them.  They were wrong. We got in no problem.  We went to the Sistine Chapel which was beautiful.  It was about an hour and a half wait to get in but it went really fast because the line snaked through room after room of the palace all decorated extremely elaborately with pictures of Jesus.  Lets just say that the church is not hurting for money, and if they are they need a new accountant to tell them gold globes and crosses are not a good investment.  I guess the 16 Euros they charge the thousands and thousands of people who go through there every day doesn´t hurt.  Once in the Sistine Chapel you are just in a sea of people all looking up (with good reason).  There are signs telling you not to lay on the ground to look up and security guards yelling "No Photo" over and over.  (It didn´t work!)

After the Vatican we just started walking and found ourselves in a beautiful park overlooking the city with not one tourist; just dogs and kids.  It was really what we need to relax after our lemming experience with the Catholic church.

We then took another very slow train to Venice.  We fell in love with Venice as soon as we got off of the train.  It was such a nice change having no cars!  I think it helped that Europe canceled all flights so there was hardly anyone there.  It was a really nice change from the busyness of Rome.  The nice thing is that even a traffic jam in Venice is scenic.

We really didn´t do anything in Venice except wander around and explore the city.  I think that we saw about as much of the island as your possibly can in two days.  Our hostel was in the old Jewish Ghetto which was a nice place to stay because it was close to everything but not touristy at all.  The closest thing to a dramatic event was when one leg of my tripod fell into one of the canals when I was taking a picture off of a bridge.  Having no use for a bi-pod I swung under the bridge and hung from it while I used my foot to scoop the leg out of the water.  Lisa was very impressed.

After Venice we took the train back to Milan to catch a flight to Malaga Spain.  When we got there, the night before our flight, they cancelled it due to ash!  We imeadiatly started looking at other options.  Right when we were about to book a 19 hour boat to Barcelona, only half of the way, for four times the cost of our flight; they reinstated our flight.  We made it to Malaga without incident.  (Just the nervous feeling that you are on one of the first flights they allow after saying it was to dangerous to fly!)

Italy (Part 1 of at least 2 but hopefully many more)

We left the chaios that was Thessaloniki behind and flew to Milan, Italy arriving in the pooring rain.  Since it was pooring and Easter so everthing was closed anyway, we didn't even try to see anything.  The next morning we went to the train station to try and buy Eurail passes.  At the train station, which was the size of DIA, no one had heard of Eurail even though their website specifically said that we could get them there.  We cut our losses and just bought a ticket to La Spezia where the Cinque Terre is.  It turns out after all of our Itailan rail tickets we spent half of what a eurail pass cost anyway!

In the cinque terre we stayed in one of the five towns, Riomaggiore.  We spent most of our time just exploring the towns and relaxing.  We spent one day walking the Camino del Rey which is a path that connects all of the towns.  We took our time and stopped at beaches and the towns along the way.  We saw one beach way below, it looked so beautiful that we headed down even though it looked really far.  After 45 min we made it and took out our lunch for a picnic.  Maybe 5 minutes into our picnic a large German man walked 15ft past us, laid out his towl and stripped butt naked and laid out.  He was far from discrete.  We decided to finish our lunch quickily and walk the beach to get away from this guy.  We walked a few hundred feet and came around a corner only to find about 20 nude sunbathers!  All men, all old and all overweight!  Not really worth the hike.  Going back up we decided to take what looked like a shortcut.  After just a little while though, the trail ended and we ended up doing some 5th class climbing up walls and it took an hour and a half.  Plus, we were only half of the way done with the Camino!  The rest of the walk was unreal how beautiful it was, though!

While we were there, we heard that there was climbing a few towns away.  Having no idea where, we took the train to that town and started asking around.  Amazingly, people actually knew where the climbing was and within a few hours we were climbing.  It was really nice being on some well protected routes, not risking life and limb like Meteora!  We eneded up going back the next day too!

Also the pesto was amazing (that is the region where it originated) and we ate it like 5 nights in a row.  Lisa even found pasta she could eat with it.

After the Cinque Terre we took a train to Florence.  Along the way the train stopped in Pisa so we decided to get off and hike all the way across the city with our packs!  Lisa made me jump through hoops with my 50lb pack to get the stupid picture above!

In Florence we stayed at a hostel with pretty much all 19 year olds trying to get drunk and hook up.  It was ok though.  While in Florence we moslty just wandered around trying to get lost.  We went the the Uffizi Gallery and saw thousands of pictures of Jesus.  It was cool though seeing paintings by all four ninja turtles!  We also went into the Duomo, which is without a doubt the most beautiful building I have ever seen.  (On the outside, the inside was so so, a few too many crucifixes for my taste.)

We wanted to see the Bobli Gardens, but being on a budget we decided not to pay but to try to catch a view from somwhere on the perimeter.  No go; they had that thing completly walled in!  We did however, in the process, get nice and lost on some neat little streets between mansions and ended up high on a hill overlooking the city with some amazing view and no tourists.

We also spent a lot of time trying gelato, and had the most delicious pear gelato that even had the same texture as pears.  While we were there we took a day trip to Sienna which was the perfect example of a beautiful Tuscan hill town.  There we did pretty much the same thing, just wandering around trying to get lost and away from tourits and tourist prices.

After Tuscany it was off to Rome (Blog to come).

The Hamam (Turkish Bath/Scratch) Experience

     It began with a heavy-set man in a loin cloth and a old Turkish lady blabbering in Turkish about my options for the "Bath."  Luckily there were prices listed in English on the wall and showing them cash is pretty universal to understand!  I opted for the 'basic' 1.5 hour scrub with massage.  The woman directed me into a private changing room were she cued me to undress and wrap myself in an oddly similar looking cloth.  I assumed the cloth was meant to cover me from chest to mid-thigh.
     I walked out of the changing room cinching the towel around the top-most part of my thighs, locked my door, and luckily was escorted directly into the 'bathing' area.  After ducking through a low archway, you enter a room which leads to many passageways with fully marbled floors and walls.   I was then passed on to another  lady through one of the passageways who greeted me topless and somewhat frazzled.  She dragged me into a room with a few naked women, ripped my towel off, set it on the marble floor and sat me down.  She turned on a sink and started splashing water on me with a little bowl and the instructed me to continue splashing water on myself.  I did as instructed as I overhead the other ladies speaking English.  So I thought what not a better way to make some new friends then when in the nude!  After a few minutes another new lady came in and directed the seated ladies out of the entry way.  I was left to continue splashing. 
     It was a relatively warm room and the water was nice and warm too.  The sink was beginning to overflow, with no drain.  So I took the initiative to turn it off myself because no one a had come for me at this point .  As I am sitting and patiently waiting, I tried desperately to get the ill thoughts out of my head of being trapped in this tiny marble room with no escape!  I really didn't know if I had been forgotten about!  The room was seriously about 10x10 ft. with a cement dome atop.  The ceiling had tiny little cylinders cut out which maybe only my arm could fit through.
      After about what felt like an hour, one of the ladies returned and said "massage?"  I'm thinking I haven't had my scrub yet and assumed that would come first, so I said "scrub?" and she just flagged me to follow her.  So I did as I didn't want to be left in that room any longer!  Turns out the scrub and 'massage' are combined...  She laid my towel on a solid marble table and pointed that I start face down.  You can imagine the comfort of lying on a slab of marble with only a little piece of cloth underneath.  She splashed yet some more water on my back and proceeded to scrub with a mitt on her hand.  After about 30 seconds, my whole back side had been scrubbed down.  She then took a towel, dipped it in some soapy water and basically just covered me in soap suds.  The massage was a quick (that's being generous!) rub using the suds.  She then rinsed and said "flip, flip."  She proceeded with my front side in the same fashion.  I think the goal is to get down about six layers of skin when they do the scrub.  Lastly, she had me sit up and lucky me got my hair washed out of the deal! 
     Once again I was shuffled away.  This time to the drying station where I was crowned with dry towels and escorted back out to the reception area.  I was presented with apple tea (a Turkish drink pretty much like a packet of hot apple cider) and seated on a couch to sip.  I looked at the clock and realized I was only in there for about 45 minutes, maybe only 10-15 of which was the scrub/rub!  So I took my time with the tea and utilized the lotions and hairdryer on a nearby counter.  Figured I might as well move slowly as John and I were not going to meet for another hour!  Upon my dressing, I discovered a good size scratch mark under my neck for rememberence of my thrashing and abusing experience for the next few days!  I was pretty darn clean though.
(sorry-no photography allowed!)

Istanbul

We left our new friend behind and took an early morning train to Thessaloniki with the intent of then taking a night train to Istanbul, Turkey. When we arrived at the Thessaloniki train station we went to the ticket window and requested two tickets to Istanbul for that night. The woman behind the counter simply replied, "Strike, no trains today, no trains tomorrow." At that point we tried to ask about other options but she was clearly unsympathetic. We decided to condense our stuff to one pack and leave the rest in a locker at the train station and headed out in search out in search of a bus to Istanbul. We walked out of the train station onto the busiest road in the city during rush hour in a neighbourhood that seemed to consist only of strip clubs and army navy surplus stores. Finally, after a few hours we found a bus station and bought tickets to Istanbul for that night.

After a very poor nights sleep (spending 2 hours in the middle of the night going through customs) we arrived in Istanbul. We caught a shuttle to Sulthinament Square which was near to where we we staying. The square sits between the Blue Mosque (see pic above) and the Hagia Sofia, the two biggest tourist attractions in Istanbul. We walked through the square in search of our hotle and were supprised to find a dozen police officers armed with AK-47s. We thought, shit, more protests or riots? We later found out that the cops were there just to control the massive amounts of tourists that would decend on the square later in the morning.

Our first stop after dropping off our stuff was the Spice Bazar which consited of an open building the size of a train station packed full of market stands selling spices, dried fruit and candy. All the venders were hasseling us, " Come my brother, you can spend your money here. Where you from." We had a great time sampeling all of the candy and dried fruit. We also went to the Grand Bazar which is also a covered market but seemed to be more like the size of Boulder, selling anything you could think of, again everyone hasseling "My friend, I will take your money."

Istanbul was amazing overall, but exhausting and hectic to say the least. Everywhere you went you were being hasseled to buy somthing. To add to the confustion, five times a day was the call to prayer (Turkey is a Muslim nation) when every mosque would have some melodic chanting blaired from load speakers on the minurets on the mosque. The problem is that there are so many mosques at any one time you are in earshot of five or six different mosques, all very out of sync. We did however find the mosques to be a great place to get away from the confustion for a few minutes. Another one of our favorite places was the Helic Bridge which connected the two European sections of the city. The bridge offered a great view of the skyline of the old part of the city. The top of the bridge was full of fisherman packed in shoulder to shoulder dropping thier lines into the sea and the bottom was lined with colorful seafood resturates serving their catch.

Istanbul is the only city in the world to be on two continents, sitting on both Europe and Asia so one morning we took a 20 minute boat ride to Asia for lunch! The street food in Istanbul was worth the trip on its own. There was everything from sesame bread to grilled fish. Ice cream made with orchid root to make it strechy and mussles cooked with rice, served in the shell that are illeagle due to lead in the water but delicious non the less! The other great thing was the tea called çay that they drank all day served in little glass cups.

One thing that struck us as a little strange was that in a culture that expects women to have their heads, arms and legs covered, there were cheap lingre stores everywhere and half of the channels that we got were nothing more than ads for sex hotlines.

Our last full day in Istanbul was interesting. We spent the moring just wandering around the city. The owner of our hotel, Omar, invited us to dinner and asked us to submit a favorable hotel review online. Of course there is no way to refuse a dinner invitation when you can hardly understand each other. Lisa asked him about a Hamam (turkish bath) and before she knew it he had booked one for her to be back in time for dinner. That afternoon Lisa went to her Hamam and I went to buy our return tickets.

After her Hamam, bruised and sore (see next blog entry for Lisa's account of the Hamam!!!) we went to the hotel for dinner. We walk into the dining room and nothing was cooking and there was no sign of anyone! After a half an hour Omar's wife came in making no mention of dinner. She said somthing about Omar being at McDonalds. We decided to go have our usual picnic in the square and to go out to a hooka bar. When we got home, Omar came barreling down the stairs and started appologizing profussly waving his arms around to keep the motion lights on. We assured him it was no problem but he insisted that he would make it up to us anyway.

The next day we were taking the bus back to Greece so we lelft our stuff at the hotel and went for some last minute sight seeing. When we returned we found Omar and his entire extended family sitting down to dinner. He insisted we join them even though we had a bus to catch. We obliged as we really had no choice. Dinner was very good but cold (Greeks and turks do not care what temp their food is) and a little rushed.

Overall Istanbul was unbelivable and I would reccomend it to anyone with extra energy!