an apology

you know that feeling when you know its going to be too little too late, then you leave it a time longer and only then decide that maybe you should have done something about it when that original thought popped into your head? and now...well, you may as well not bother.

that's sorta how Ive been feeling the past few weeks, when i think that the last i posted was about Italy, an entire month ago! what adventures i have had since then, but where has the writing gone to? well, some of it is on the computer that was stolen in Madrid from my youth hostel locker, andthe rest is in my head waiting for an opportunity long enough to spit it all out into the page!

Borrowing youth hostel computers has the disadvantage that i do not get to save and come back to my work, and when i have the opportunity to write, it is not long enough to actually produce something. so I'm gonna leave this until i get home and update those of you who can be bothered reading very out of date information, in a couple of weeks!

Just a brief taster if i may though...

Barcelona is now one of my favorite cities and i have fallen in love with their leading artist, Gaudi.

Seville is the only city of have seen that has orange trees growing along the main shopping strip.

Madrid is a city, and in a city there are annoying fellows who steal things, and my laptop, Jamie's phone and all my photos fell victim to such a fellow.

Paris- oh Paris how can i describe you in just a sentence??? it's OK, i will not bother.

Scotland the only land where men are permitted to wear skirts and carry handbags and this be seen as manly, i am sure of it.

to be continued my friends. only a week until i get home!

thank you for reading

all my love xoxox

a paradise for a lover of pizza!

Rome was my highlight of Italy, for obvious reasons. 

It’s  a city I have wanted to go to ever since I saw the Lizzy McGuire movie (as a little kid), where she visits the scenes on the back of some hot Italian guy’s vespa, and eventually gets to sing in front of thousands in the coliseum. While I knew none of that would happen to me, especially cause I lacked the hot Italian bloke, I deffinitly loved Rome anyway.

Firstly, we were planning to be there over Christmas time because...well actually, just because! Rome is as good a place as any isn’t it? So we arrived and had to get to the sightseeing pretty quickly because we were afraid major sights would close over Christmas and we’d leave Rome having missed stuff! So of course, the first stop was to the coliseum. What a monster of a place that is! It was so surreal seeing it for the first time, knowing that this existed in the time of Julius Caeser and the gladiators for goodness sake! We passed the many gladiator wannabes wanting to get tipped for having their picture taken with you, and managed to avoid the many souvenir hawkers to eventually enter the place. It was bigger inside than I thought it would be, but just as crumbled and as grand. Pretty amazing to say the least.

I would love to go through all the different places we saw but really, that would just be boring for you all so I will just say that we explored all the main sights (including the Trevi fountain and the Spanish steps which are majorly hyped up and overrated) and some that we were able to appreciate better just for the mere historical value, such as Palatine hill which had bits and pieces dating back to the first emperor of Rome!

The Vatican is also worth a mention, as it was for both Jamie and I, the highlight of the trip. We decided to take a tour and get all the art etc explained to us, so with the help of Ryan we were taken through the museum full of priceless art ,through a courtyard of statues dating back to BC times, through the popes old quarters and even de Vinci’s living quarters for a part of his life! The highlights were the Sistine Chapel, what an INCREIDBLE feat that was by Michelangelo. He was not a huge lover of painting, sculpting being his main passion, so he basically dedicated 3 and a half years of his life to the hugest task you will ever see, with his neck constantly twisted upwards and with the most talent you will see on any other painting.

of course cant take pics in the sistene chapel but this is one area of the vatican museaum. how elaborate is that ceiling?!

St peters basilica was the other wonder, the most decorative, extravagant church you will ever enter, not to mention the SIZE of the place, HUGE! On show are a number of incredible mosaics that are replacing the original painting to preserve the art, some dead popes wearing wax masks and of course Michelangelo’s famous Pieta statue which was probably the absolute highlight for me. When we first caught sight of her I got a bit disappointed because she was behind glass, which was unlike all the other statues in the area…. I thought it was because she was so valuable, but we found out that a number of years ago they had a psycho enter the church screaming that he was Jesus, and that Mary in the statue wasn’t his mother, and he started hacking at the statue with a hammer he had brought in. Needless to say security stepped up a bit since then, although the pope has been knocked down twice by the same woman wearing the same clothes on the same day two years running…either way, experiencing this incredible place, the smallest country of just 900 people, the richest per capita and the country with the lowest birth rate in the world, was a most fantastic experience!

St Peters from the enterance :O

Pieta

Since we were there for christmas we went to a christmas eve mass at St Susannas catholic church, which was the only english one we could find but was realy great anyway (our first real catholic experience, not as "interesting" as i was expecting actualy!). Then on christmas morning we skyped with jamies family, then went off to get the popes blessing from st peters square outside the vatican. We got home and skyped my family then went out for a lovely christmas dinner. Presents were not a huge event this year obviously, jamie recieved some Pj pants, deoderant and a bigger SD card for his phone/camera- all necessities. I recieved some shampoo cause id run out, a new wallet cause mine had fallen apart and some money for new underwear since a lot of mine got destroyed in the indian washing sytem! haha

enjoying my panna cotta after christmas dinner

Us skyping :)

 A boring video shot from Jamie's phone, but it shows the surroundings as we were waiting for the pope. it was raining, but like a minute before the pope came out the sun shone through and it was a beautiful day! no joke!

I'll finish off with a couple of tips we picked up.

How to eat pizza the Italian way:

Enter the pizzeria and there will be a selection of 1m x 0.5m rectangular pizzas with oven baked crust and all sorts of different toppings, including oval mozzarella slices, tomatoes, olives, mushrooms, cheese, rocket, spinach, onion…..you name it! Select your flavors. They cut off as wide  a  piece as you desire of the different flavors, then they will, depending on if you are taking away, put them onto a tray for you to take to your table, or place them on top of each other and wrap them in paper for you to enjoy on the run. Either way, this is the best pizza you will ever have, I am sure of it. Man I could go  a slice now…

How to have a latte the Italian way:

Standing up. Order your macchiato, espresso, latte macchiato, Americano, cappuccino or whatever else, then pick out a pastry and just stand at the counter socializing with your barista and fellow coffee lovers.

Scams to avoid.

Those lovely men holding bunches of flowers are not giving the roses away from free. They will pick out a lovely couple and then hand a rose to the woman, as you walk away they will follow and turn to the man for a tip. Mostly the woman will then try and give the flower back while the man looks sternly at the hawker to take the flower and hope his girlfriend won’t be too disappointed she didn’t get a flower… Watch out though, they are persistent creatures, refuse to take the flower in the first place, and he will insist over and over again and even continue as far to put the rose basically up your nose (as was in my case.  I was holding an ice cream at the time also, boy if it hits my gelato buddy, this is gonna get ugly...)

Hold your kids hands tightly if you don’t want toy venders to place a little something into your child’s hand, making your kid cry when you give it back, but the man demand money if you keep it.

We had been very good at avoiding all the scams that we saw other tourists fall into while we were going around sights in Italy, but one we had never seen before suddenly came upon us and we (well Jamie in this case) was powerless to stop it. haha A man walks casually up to Jamie out of nowhere while we were on the Spanish steps, as soon as he started to talk to us I walked away, however Jamie had been sucked in by a compliment to his beard, and was now stuck with a man busily holding his hand in a shake and with the other hand making a friendship bracelet over his other wrist! I scattered off, and took some photos of the secret undercover street hassler that ruined our streak of avoidance. After the  minute operation the guy asked for 5 or 10 euro for the 20 cent piece of string, which of course Jam didn’t give him…Oh well, Jamie is now sporting a pretty bracelet that he adores with all his heart…

From Rome we went onto the beautiful coast of Italy to witness firsthand the beauty of Cinque terre, a collection of 5 tiny little fishing villages that protrude from the side of the cliffs in their stand out bright orange, yellow and pink houses, making the coast line even more marvelous to view. We were there for only a full day, but we enjoyed a hike from our village to a viewing area that looks over the cinque terre then leads to another of the towns, where we explored through the extremely narrow and steep steps. Lovely experience. Did I mention we passed through Pisa on our way from Rome to CT? Well it wasn’t  a particularly standoutish city, apart from seeing the amazing leaning tower, which is indeed, on a lean!

Jam with our pizza selections..that was deffinitly a case of eyes being bigger than our bellies!

the amazing cinque terre (view from our hike)

We then spent new years in Nice which was a nice place to just relax for a few days.

Only a month to go until I’m home! Love to you all!! xox

Italy begins

My image of Venice, created from movies is one with permanent orange/red sky and that glow of a summer evening, women in beautiful floral dresses walking the canals, and gondola men wearing horizontal striped t-shirts that compliment their stiff straw hats with a ribbon tied around the brim….

 My first experience of Venice however, was trudging through slush and snow that clearly did not belong on Venice’s cobbled streets, turning them into death traps, especially with a 17kg pack on your back. The boats around the canals were all filing up with snow and it was pelting into our faces as we made our way to our accommodation. Of course there are no cars in sight and buses are also impossible to fit in these tiny canals, so we knew the only way would be on foot weaving through tiny alleys (which, night time as it was, was never gonna happen for fear of getting very lost) or finding a way to move on the water (which we did in the end by ferry). The first morning we woke up however, it was like the snow hadn’t happened at all and the sun was shining, just for me to get my picture of Venice back into focus I think.

First of all, I will just dash all fantasies and confess that we did not ride a gondola, for a few reasons really. The first is that these men are a little freaky looking and their gondolas far too regal for plain old us, the second is that they asked for the equivalent of about $100 for just a 45 min ride and thirdly, it was so incredibly wonderful walking those tiny streets over the little canals with the tiny bridges, staring up at the houses that looked like they belonged only in movies because they were far too cute to be true... I am glad that we never had a particular place that we needed to find cause quite frankly it would have been mighty hard, nearing impossible. Instead we basically discarded the map and just wandered our days away. They have a fantastic sign system that allowed us to find our way back to the main square wherever we wandered so we weren’t concerned about getting lost. The fact that there are about a million tourist shops, mostly selling overly decorative but lovely masks, also made us realise that this town was almost like one big Disney land, who knows where the real inhabitants of Venice actually live (all 60,000 of them). The tourist is well catered for, plenty of overpriced food, gondola men at every footbridge (and there are A LOT of bridges in venice linking up the 150ish tiny islands that make up the city), the flashy designer stores that I swear do not get any more than 1 customer a day maximum, and hotels on every other corner. It is an incredibly amazing city though and definitely a highlight so far. Because it was our first hit in Italy, we did the pizza/pasta/gelato thing breakfast, lunch and tea so by the time we left we were getting a little over the carbs. Well, I was anyway!

On our last day in Venice we thought it had rained over night because the streets were very wet, then as we went we realized that there were huge puddles everywhere and water had seeped through the ground or something…. cause patches around the main square was now ankle deep in water! To enter the main basilica, which is a stunning piece of architecture as most churches in Europe are, or to enter the bell tower which you can go to the top of and get a fantastic view of the city (and I’m told Slovakia and Croatia on a clear day), people were walking on top of these tables which had now been constructed in a long line around the main entrances! I would hate to be here when it gets high enough to really absolutely need these everywhere! Gum boots would be in order I think, although that wouldn’t be too much of a big deal here because they are the height of fashion in Europe at the moment, even channel have their own designer wellies for around $250.

Moving on to Florence now. Jamie what did we do in Florence? Here is your opportunity to see your name in print!

“Saw David.”

Well actually we saw multiple David’s, one was the real one by Michelangelo and the others were fakes scattered around Florence. Jamie was particularly taken by the fine form of David, so much so he received a David puzzle and David playing cards for Christmas. Pictures really speak louder than words when it comes to this home of renaissance, so I will post a few here for your pleasure. The highlight (apart from David of course :P) was walking up to a lookout point over the bridge where you can see a view over Florence and hills surrounding. The marvelous bell tower and basilica stand out spectacularly. Such a beautiful place also in possession of some really good gelato!

st marks basillica GORGOUES (Venice)

view of venice from the top of the bell tower

Me in florence, near the large church

View over Florence with Jamie

YUMMMM lemon and coffee, the best!

the lovely florence bridge

jamie with his new best friend

xxxooo