Hey all!
Here I am again with another lengthy update on my Italian adventure. Long story short: I'm having the time of my life. Long story longer: read on.
In my last email, I said I was planning to go to Munich for Octoberfest. Well, that fell through, and my friend Jeremy and I went to Cinqueterre (Cheen-qwa-tear-uh), which is the Italian Riviera, on the West side of the country, right around where it starts to curve down at the top of the boot. There are five towns there (the name means "5 lands" or some facsimile thereof), and we saw four of them. We stayed in a little town called Riomaggiore, which is perhaps the prettiest town I've ever seen. It's built on a sheer rock wall coming out of the sea. There are no streets per se in the town, just a maze of winding descending and ascending staircases. These are called roads, and have street addresses, but no know vehicle could traverse them. This is a foot town only! :) We got there at night, and had met up with a couple of gals from the Syracuse U. program that I'm doing,. We went down to the sea in the dark, and saw the stars brighter than I think I have ever seen them. There were worms in the water that glowed like fireflies, and what little light was around was bouncing off the crashing waves. Utterly incredible. I don't have the vocabulary to express it! Just awe-inspiring. The next day we hiked down the coast to a couple more towns, and had a two and half hour lunch at a beautiful cafe overlooking the sea. We took far too many pictures probably. I take tons of postcard-type pictures, and rarely get people in them. I hope they turn out! The sun was shining bright that day, so I'm sure the pictures will be pretty awesome.
The next day, I went to Siena (as in Catherine of). It was a beautiful city, but it was really rainy that day, so not so great of a trip. The cathedral there is very very different from the other churches I've seen in Pisa, Ravenna and Florence. The way our guide described it is this: Florence is Armani, Siena is Versaci. I know little about fashion, but I got the reference. Florence is very classically beautiful, while Siena is very bright, very garish. The cathedral is often called Santa Zebra, because it has black and white horizontal striping all around it, both inside and out. There is little symmetry, but it seemed like they tried to make it symmetrical, but it just didn't work out. Kinda sad, but very interesting. Siena was in a constant competition with Florence over who had the bigger and better cathedral, and I think Florence won. Come and see for yourself if you like. :)
That night, back in Florence, (in accordance with a promise I made to my brother's roommate, Dave) my friend Maggie and I both finished a bottle of wine by ourselves. That's one bottle for each of us. Mission accomplished, and no sickness for me whatsoever. I was rather proud of myself. 750ml of 12.5% alcohol, and pretty good. It was a Chianti, which is incredibly abundant here, and only about 15,000 lire (about $7). Good wine can even be had for around $4, but lower than that is a crap toss. You can buy wine (I think it is technically wine...) for around $1.50 for a bottle, but I wouldn't recommend it. :)
The next weekend, we had planned to go to Sicily, but it turned out to be too expensive for most partakers (involving a plane-ride back, otherwise travel time would be prohibitively long). So instead we settled on Capri and the Amalfi Coast. Oy. We took the train from Florence to Naples, which seemed even dirtier than Florence, and quickly hopped on the boat to Capri, taking about an hour and a half. Once on Capri, we called around, got a room for 8 for the night at 50,000 lire a head (less than $25, very nice). We splurged and took open-roof hatch-back style cabs to our hotel, which was about a 20 minute drive away. Up a mountain. And around it. And down it. And never more than maybe 1000 feet from the ocean. Most of that distance being vertical. Wow, it was an incredible drive! I'm a little afraid of heights, and this drive scared me more than a little! :) We stayed in what can only be described as a seaside villa. We swam in the sea, into a small cave called the Blue Grotto. Inside, blue iridescent light streams up from the sea and sparkles and waves onto the ceiling. Really cool. And to top that off, there were Roman Ruins deeper inside the cave. Sweet.... Had a wonderful dinner that night in the town of Anacapri, and got up early to hike around the island. We took a ferry down the coast to Amalfi and once again got a very swank pad for only 50,000 lire a head. We were right on the main piazza, across from the cathedral (every little town seems to have one...). Again, an awesome authentically Italian dinner and on the cheap. The next day we bussed down the coast to Salerno, and caught our train back to Florence. We had a run-in with truly psychotic soccer fans. The whole train ride between Salerno and Naples, they were screaming from 6 cars down, chanting for their team, who wasn't present. When they deboarded, they marched, screaming at the tops of the lungs, with megaphones and nervous ticks in their necks. Some friends of mine went to a soccer game when I was in Cinqueterre, and it sounded nuts! The visitors section in the stands in surrounded by a 20 foot tall chain link fence topped with barbed wire, for their own protection from the local fans. There are police present with riot gear, very large automatic weapons and tear-gas. Yes, some of my friends got tear-gassed at the soccer game. Sounds fun? Methinks no. Sounds a little stupidly insane? Aye, I say. And it wasn't even a big game. It was tie! Ugh.
Well, I think I shall wrap it here. Happy birthday to my good friend Eric Burns back in Chicago (Thanks Lisa for the heads up on that one.). I'm still keeping up with my geekiness, for those concerned: I downloaded a compiler to my host brother's computer, only then to find that it is incredibly difficult to type some oft-used characters on an Italian keyboard ({,}, and # especially). I just bought a couple books to read (Alice's Adventure in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, been meaning to read them), and I am overall quite occupied. Life is good. I pray for all you guys nightly, and I miss and love you all. See you soon-ish kinda not really. Bye for now.
-Brian