Rome

I'm back! It has been very hard to find a computer with continuously working internet and a USB cable for a while now, but finally I have found one, so here is my belated Rome update. We left Rome about.... a week ago now and have been in Munich and Switzerland already, but that will come soon.
Anyway, back to Rome. Rome continued on from Venice and Florence in that it was very hot and exhausting to be walking around all day long trying to find things to see. Luckily our hotel was lovely with air-con that I was able to set to and artic type temperature to recover in.

The first thing I noticed about Rome was that there were an abundance of teeny little cars around, even smaller than a 2 person Smart car! Most cars in Europe are small, a Corolla looks fairly large actually when you see it. This little car, the Town Life, was one of the smallest cars I saw, and I really liked it. It was super cute, although I'm sure I'd look like a real fool crammed into it in Australia hooning down the highway at 120 German style (the tiny cars have no problems on the Autobahns here!). We also saw some new Fiat 500 models around the place, and if it came in automatic then I would be on the waiting list for it in Australia. It is so trendy! Out in Oz in 2008 apparently.
Here is the Colosseum. We waited for about... 1 hour at least to get in to see it, but it is pretty interesting. Did you know that not only did they fight and kills lions and tigers, but also hippos? I wonder how they got a hippo all the way to Rome though...?

This is the Tivoli fountain. There are lots of other fountains that in my opinion are just as nice, but no surrounded by hoards of people swarming all over the place. We didn't stay here long because it is just too annoying. Not only are there hundreds of tourists, many of whom only look at the fountain (or whatever it is) through their camera or camcorder the whole time, but there are also lots of really annoying people trying to sell little devices that make a cat sounds, or a clicking sound or all sorts of other crazy sounds. So, when you are standing at the fountain all you can see are crazy tourists and all you can hear is the various sounds of stupid things people are trying to see you. Meanwhile it is boiling hot and I just wanted to go back to the A.C.! The Spanish Steps were just as crazy as this. One of the best places we went to was a church that has the bones, yes, skulls and everything, of 4000 monks below the church in about 6 rooms. The bones are arranged like art or decorations, so skulls make up an entire wall of a room, and the little bones of the spine make a chandelier. It was really creepy actually. No photos were allowed, but I will see what I can find on the net. Luckily not many tourists know about this so it was fairly quiet.

See what I mean about the little cars! There are even little utes and TINY little buses going around the city that are the size of a van. So cute!

In Italy there are so many churches to go and see and some of them have fabulous artworks inside. This is the ceiling of one (I've forgotten the name, written it down somewhere). In this church there was also the scupture of Michaelangelo's Christ Bearing the Cross. Quiet too. :)

One day I found that there was a Valentino exhibition on at at museum so we went to have a look and escape the heat. There were dresses from the last 45 years and some dresses that celebrities have worn. I loved it. The funny thing was though that with some of the dresses it was pretty obvious that some other designers, such as Alex Perry, had just completely ripped off the design of some of Valentino's gowns and just put them into their later collections.

Red dresses:

White dresses:

Penelope Cruz, Cate Blanchet and Halle Berry's dresses:

We went to the Vatican 3 times, once to do a tour of St Peter's Basillica, once to go up the dome of the basillica and later do a tour of the Vatican Museum, and the last time to go to the post office. The last time took almost as long as our 3 hour tours we did! The moral of the story is that if you plan on posting something in Italy or the Vatican (using Swiss post) then remember to bring your own box along! You can't buy them anywhere!! And it is just so lovely to walk around in the heat dragging along everything you wanted to post while you look everywhere for a box.

Back to the Vatican though. You have to cross the river to get to the Vatican and there are several bridges you can use. This one is the Bridge of Angels. All the statues of the angels are holding something from Christ's crucifixion, eg. nails, or crown of thorns.

View of St Peter's Basillica. It is SOOOO big, but strangely you can see it until you are fairly close and as you get closer it seems to get bigger. You could fit the statue of liberty inside the dome though apparently. In later photos you can start to appreciate the size.

This is the view from the dome. We went to St. Peter's at about 8.30am both times and avoided the crowds, but later on it get really busy. In the photo you can see the line of people that goes from the bottom left corner of this photo allllll the way around next to the columns and over the middle behind the obelisk. Remember that they are all in the sun at it is about 38C.

The dome. It is absolutely massive. That is not painting, it is all mosaic.

In this photo you can seethe floor of the basillica and we are standing just above the writing. Everything is still mosaic, there are no paintings inside the basillica. To get an idea of how big this is on the right of the photo in the middle the man is writing with a quill. That quill is 7 feet tall.

Chris and a mosaic.

A small dome at the front of the basillica.

A Swiss guard. The guards are all from Switzerland and must be fluent in 4 languages (Italien, German, French, and English). They are pretty hot actually, even with the uniform! ;)

Everyday ate pizza at the shop around the corner from our hotel. I was too hot to eat much, but I'd have this for lunch, and another slice for dinner. This one had tomato, basil (I think?) and chilli. I also had quite a few Red Orange Fanta's. Fantas is not the awful stuff that it is in Australia, it is just like San Pellegrino, and really yummy. I am going to write to Coke and try to con them into giving it to us when I get home.

Well, that's it for Rome. We are in Munich again now, and are off to St Petersburg on Sunday, so I'll try and get back to update again before that. Who knows the state of internet cafes in Russia.

Venice and Florence

I wish I could say that we had a great time in Venice and Florence, but we did not enjoy our time there that much. From Nice, where I did not really want to leave after our nice days at the beach and comfortable bed with air-con, we got a train to Milan. That train was running late so we missed our connecting train to Venice, and had to wait for an hour. When we did get on the train it was PACKED! Everyone who had missed the train with us was on it, as well as the people who had booked that specific train, so it was twice as full as it should have been. We were squeezed on and had to stand in the aisle. Then an announcement came on that the train would be delayed for 10 minutes... and then another 10 minutes, and then another and another - Sydney style! What is more the airconditioning had stopped working, and there were quite a few French people on the train. What I mean by this, is that the reputation the French have for not having (at least) a daily shower and stinking REALLY badly is completely true. Chris had the luck to be right next to a total stink pot who didn't seem to have washed in 4 or 5 days, and didn't seem to notice. Where ever we have gone in France there has always been at least 1 stinker in close proximity to us. On trains there is usually one person who taints the whole carriage with their awful smell.
Anyway, we finally got to Venice, and that was the last of the French (except for the occasional tourist) and the French water.

I had the idea of Venice being a wet, rainy, flooded sort of place, but when we were there it was oppressively hot. Thankfully our hotel room had air-con, but once you walked outside in the sun you really wanted to just turn around and go back inside. Below is the Basillica of San Marco, and fortunately we did just get in to see it in the afternoon before it closed. We walked there once, only finding out we had forgotten to cover our knees (long pants/skirt only) so we had to walk all the way back home to change. The line is really long to get in too, Venice being entirely filled with tourists. Standing in the sun for 45 minutes did seem to take away quite a bit of the enjoyment of going inside. Never the less, it was a beautiful church. The marble floor inside is all cracked and pushed into all different heights, I assume from constant flooding. Even when we were there with the heat and no rain in sight, water had risen out of the ground in front of the basillica and pooled in front of the stairs outside.

We didn't go on a gondola (not for €100 or there abouts!!) but it was funny to see all the people who did in the evening and then get stuck in a gondola traffic jam. Here is one below, there must have been about 8 gondolas, 1 behind another trying to get through the canal.

We only spent 2 nights in Venice and there were many amazing churches, another one in the picture below. I think I would have preferred to be there when it is cooler, even if it is rainy and flooded.

From Venice we caught yet another train to Florence which was just as hot as Venice. The problem was here that our hotel had NO air-con, only a window and a fan. The problem was that the window let in heaps of mosquitos, but if you didn't open the window it was stiflingly hot. If you did open it you had to cover yourself entirely with the sheet so they didn't bite you all night. This meant that we were really hot anyway and my face still got bitten if I left it uncovered to breath. Even Chris was getting bitten (which I really loved) and he was loosing it, being angry that Florence is the one place in the world that mozzies bite him, and at how annoying the bites are.

Because of this stupid hotel situation we didn't have a great sleep, and on our second and last night we hardly got any sleep at all. We finally got to sleep at about 5 am and slept in until about 9. The Uffizi museum was somewhere we really wanted to see, but the line (again in the sun) to get in was about 2 hours long and we had to get our train to Rome at 2, so we decided to just miss it altogether. A shame, but I suppose not everything can work out on a long trip like this.

Below is a copy of Michelangelo's 'David'.

We did go in to the Duomo, a huge cathedral in the centre of Florence, and it was very nice (and cool). We walked up 414 steps to get to the top of the Campanile next to it and see the view of the city. You can see the top of the Duomo below and some of the view.

Here is the front of the Duomo and Campanile on the right.

Picture above the door, see above and below.

We left for Rome on Tuesday and accidentally got the wrong train, the Eurostar, instead of our slower, cheaper, local train. We didn't book the express Eurostar because the person at the booking office (some trains aren't covered by our Eurail train pass) said it would cost €40. When the conductor came around to us though and had to upgrade our local train ticket to the Eurostar though, it only cost us an extra €8, making it a total of €18! We still don't understand how the same train ticket would cost an extra €22 at the office, but we had a nice, cool, fast journey to Rome and we have a lovely cool hotel room too, with our own bathroom too.

So far we have been having a good time. I am eating mainly gelato and pizza, with a some pasta and granitas thrown in. Rome blog update coming soon... we leave here for Munich on Wednesday night.

Nice!

This is where we have come after Cassis! It is a city, and very loud and hot. On our first day here we went to the city beach which is covered with really BIG pebbles as you can see in the pic below. They look nice, but they are bloody painful when you are trying to get in the water for a swim. The stones get pushed up by the wave so you have walk down a little hill of stones and then once you are getting into the water the wave smashes stones into your feet. It is really not a nice experience. I can understand why many Euros are in the habit of keeping their shoes on at the beach.

Yesterday, our second day here, we took the 20 minute train trip to Monaco. Monaco is a city basically built into the side of a mountain. On one side you can just see the huge rocky mountain and on the other side is the ocean.

In the pic below is the casino, it cost E30 to get in though, and they won't let you in unless they think you are a serious gambler. We skipped it.

The beach in Monaco.

The best thing about Monaco was the harbour with amazing, fantastic and HUGE yachts. I have never seen so many and some were absolutely massive! Look at the helicopter on the boat below.

There were so many nice ones in the harbour, but here are a few good photos for now.

This is a close up of a really nice boat. It was a bit bigger than the one below with me in the pic, but similar in style.

HUGE!!!

Some more huge boats and a A$1,095,000 Rolls Royce Phantom - Chris just looked it up. He loves this car!

The view of the harbour from the Palace on the hill. The palace itself was not that spectacular, but the view was.

Another harbour.

Today we caught the train 2 stops away to a beach we saw out of the train window when we were going to Monaco. The water was cold, but beautiful. The water at the city beach looks really nice, but when you are swimming there is really poor visibility because of the rocks I think - white dusk comes off them, and I think that is what makes the water such an aqua blue colour. There were just little tiny pebbles at this beach and it was much better on the feet. I brough my li-lo with me and had a nice time floating around again. It seems the French people don't swim much, so we had the water to ourselves pretty much. Everyone just lies around on the beach all day, and just dips into the water for 2 minutes to cool down.

The view of the beach from the train station. See how busy the beach is, but there is no one in the water! You can see the train line in the background. It is a great trip to Monaco.

Tomorrow morning we head off to Venice for 2 nights. We are going to be on the train for about 8 hours though, I hope we have comfy seats! We've been finding English books all over the place for about a month now so we are not bored. I am getting heaps of reading in actually with these long trips.

I think that is it for the beach for a while though, I am a bit sad to see it go.

Some more news before I go, we have decided to extend our trip and are now going to stay in Germany for about 7 weeks until October and try to find some work. Then we are going to fly to the USA and see a few places there before we fly home at the beginning of November. The company we bought our airfares with gave us an upgrade to round-the-world tickets so it is just a little bit more money to fly to America, and we figured we may as well go there too while we can! Don't know where we are going yet, although I want to go to New York and Vegas. I just hope the A$ keeps going up!

Barcelona and Cassis

We spent an entire day - 10 hours - on trains to get to Barcelona. I don't know what the deal is with Spanish trains, but they really suck! They are super slow!
When we FINALLY got off the last train at our stop and were walking to our hotel I saw the local Mens' Lingerie shop which I thought was facinating enough to go into my blog. Men have an astounding variety of undies to choose from and the man in the shop has hundreds of shelves of undies in boxes so when you make your decision he gets you the undies you want in your size. I tried to convince Chris that he needed some more undies, but he wouldn't go in. I think the local people though I was a bit nuts to take photos of the shops though. He he.
Because we extended our stay on the Canal we had to cancel our trip to Madrid so the 4 days we stayed in Barcelona was all we got in Spain which is a real shame as it is such a great place (except for the trains). The people in Barcelona were really nice and casual like us, wearing havaianas like us too!
On the second day we went to see the Sagrada Familia cathedral. It is so funny that after over 100 years it is still not finished and still construction site. It will be amazing when it is finally finished. I really though it was great, so different from all the other churches you see around the world. Gaudi thought of it from such a different angle.

Oops, I accidentally deleted the top of the cathedral. Oh well, I'll put another pic in my next post, it is too hard to insert it now.

The view of Barcelona. You can see the Sagrada Familia just to the left of the middle, and the ocean in the background. On the left you can see the office building that is lit up at night that I have a photo of later. It is not that exciting with the lights off.

The view and the following pictures were taken in Parc Guell where Gaudi's house is and a lot of other things that he designed.

I found Gaudi's architecture really facinating and interesting. I loved it!

These were on the ceiling inside the building you can see in the above picture.

Me on an elephant in the Parc de la Ciutadella.

This is that office building I was talking about. Really, it is not that interesting, it is just colourful. There is nothing around it at all. Just some houses and highways.

We would have liked to spend some more time in Barcelona and Spain, but we were forced to move on to Cassis, a beach town in the south of France. Barcelona was a welcome break from the awful French water as well. I have figured out what it is that I hate though - the magnesium! Evian and all those other French waters are packed full of magnesium and I just hate the taste. There are only 1 or 2 brands that taste nice, but they are hard to come by.

To get to Cassis took us another day, but it is a really beautiful town. We spent the first day at the beach. You can see the pebbles in the pic below. There is no sand, just pebbles, which makes it a bit painful to actually get in for a swim. The water was freezing too, but I bought a li-lo for E5.00 so I just floated around happily, and kept warm in the sun.

Cassis is based around a harbour, which is really cute. The water is a gorgeous turquiose colour too. The cliffs around are amazing too, especially after the flat land that we have been on for weeks.

The beach.

The cliffs.

Me in town eating a yummy ice cream.

Chris showing off the water.

The harbour again.

On day 2 in the morning, we were leaving for Nice in the afternoon, we went on a boat to see 'Les Calanques' which seem to be the cliffs around Cassis.

It was actually very similar to Thailand with the huge tall white cliffs and the beautiful water. We would have loved to be allowed to stop and go for a swim at this beach.

Huge cliffs, with strange rock formations.

After we saw the Calanques we had lunch and got a train to Nice. But more on that in a few days!