Verona - part 2

Wednesday 7/9/08
On our second day in Verona Kellin, Lara, Sarah, and I did a lot of touristy sight-seeing while our new friend Luca was working. For the mob? Maybe. We're just not sure. Since I neglected to write much down from this trip I can't be sure that these things all happened on the second day. I'm just guessing. I'm just following the order from my camera.
By the way, I must apologize to my three readers for the tardiness of my postings. I only had Internet access one day this week. Unless you count quickly checking emails at work, which I don't.
On with the show.

These are my roommates. They dance like this pretty much all the time. Especially when they see festively designed high-performance vehicles such as this one. There is no music. They just start rocking.

San Fermo Maggiore. I know that I might have said this before, but these churches are so beautiful and my pictures really don't do them justice. There are so many amazing frescoes, sculptures, and other works of art that my two or three pictures per church are inadequate. But too bad. That's all you're getting.

The church was built in the 11th century and has a really interesting and warped ribbed vault wooden ceiling.

This crooked picture is an example of what we are constantly on the lookout for. This shhh-ing silent gesture in Renaissance and earlier art is what Sarah is researching for her symposium. All eight of the grad students are researching different gestures. It's pretty much all they talk about.

The Basilica di Santa Anastasia. It was begun in 1290. This church had a large portion under construction and covered by canvas. It happens a lot over here.

This little guy is upset that his view of a beautiful church has been obstructed by the tarp.

We ate lunch at a neet little restaurant that was in or around the building where Romeo's family supposedly lived or worked. I didn't get the whole story. Again, like Juliette's balcony, it's a little ridiculous since they were fictional characters. This doesn't seem to bother the tourists. Capulet and Montague don't even sound Italian. Come on Shakespeare!

Unfortunately the stranger who took the picture did not take it upon himself to zoom in and only part of Lara's head is visible. Oh well. At least he gave the camera back.

The first course menu (seen above) included Bigoli (fresh noodles) with donkey meat. The second course menu (seen only in my private archives) included Braised horsemeat with polenta, Horse tartar with capers and mustard, Horsemeat frays with parmesan and rocket (not sure what rocket is), and Horsemeat steak. I figured, why not? So I tried the donkey. It was pretty tasty. I did not feel like trying the horse goods. One member of Family Equidae was enough for one day. I opted for the Roast veal with mushrooms. Everything was delicious. The bathroom was disgusting. It was the only "hole in the floor toilet situation" I have seen on my return trip to Europe. So far. That last one I saw was in the Vatican museum. I do not wish to talk about it. It still ranks as my #1 All-Time Most Uncomfortable Bathroom Experience.

Sarah and Kellin enjoy their wine while watching the tourists gaze in wonder at the side of a building. "Ooh! A ficticious character might have lived there!" There tourists and entire tour groups continuously marched by.

The girls try to look interesting. They're probably talking about gestures.

This just in...Apparantly the Capulet (Capelletti) and Montague (Montecchi) families were actually political factions in the 13th century. Whatever that means. My bad. Sorry Mr. Shakespeare.

These are some of the 367 steps to the top of the Torre dei Lamberti. An elevator went up to the level that this picture was taken from, but we decided to ignore modern conveniences. We later regretted it and blame this tower for making us easily exhausted for the remainder of the trip. Stupid elevator. Luca (who had rejoined us) warned us to take the steps, but what does he know? He's only lived there all his life.

The tower did afford some breath-taking views of Verona and the surrounding hillside. The street spurring off to the top of this picture was where Kellin decided to sing and act out I'm a Little Teapot in the middle of the street to the delight of the passersby.

Verona. Kinda nice.

Here you can see the old Roman arena.

I'm done. Kellin and Lara got ready to go back to Florence while Sarah and I went on to Vicenza. More on that later.

Verona - part 1

Tuesday 7/8/08
I have no idea yet if there will be a Verona - part 2. I just thought that is sounded like a good title. Plus, Verona really is a beautiful little city. The few pictures that I chose from the hundreds I took will surely not do it justice. Anyway, I was falling way behind in my posting so here it is. Oh, and by the way, I decided to change things up a little. During this Veneto trip I became really bored with writing in my little black book. I think that it served its purpose on the trip over the Atlantic when I had no access to a computer, but now I think it will be best if I just use it to write little bits of information to help me remember exactly what I did. So my postings might be more picture-driven than prose-driven. Unless something really exciting happens. Anyway, Sarah's postings are much more entertaining so I'll stick to the pictures.
Now, on with the show...

This trip marked the first time that I would be taking a direct train rather than a regional train that makes stops at every little town (unless you count a few years ago when we went from Rome to Paris). They are quite nice, but we didn't get to sit right next to each other. For some reasons the eight seats (four to each side of the aisle) are numbered in a manner that makes no sense. It's something like this:

72 76 77 78 That's not exactly it, but you get the picture. So even though our seat numbers

71 74 75 73 were consecutive, we were accross the aisle and diagonal.

Sarah and I on one of the scenic bridges. I'm the one on the left with the man-purse.

This is supposedly Juliette's balcony which, as Sarah will tell you, shouldn't exist since Juliette did not exist. I don't know how romantic it could have been anyway with all those people in the courtyard.

This is the wall (or one of them) where lovers from all over the world leave their names. So Sarah and I did likewise. First, I wrote our names with the only thing I had. The little pen was not very visible. So Sarah found a better space to write, on someone else's piece of paper. I must apologize to Kellin. I think that half of my pictures have part of her head in them. I never give her any warning either.

There were a number of locations around town that had exposed Roman ruins. This one was right in the middle of a street with shops all around. It is also near the scene where I would later spill melting gelato all over one of my favorite shirts while taking a picture. It was one of those classically stupid moments similar to spilling your glass of whatever while looking at your watch to see what the time is. Not my best moment. We had to go to a nearby store to get a new shirt. I had managed to completely cover the front of my shirt. By the way, does anyone know how to get gelato out of a shirt?

Again, this one picture from inside the cathedral does not do a good enough job of showing what some of the churches here look like. I probably took 20-30 pictures in the churches we went into. Maybe some day I'll make an entire posting about a church or churches. I just don't want to spend that much time putting pictures of the same thing on here.

Beneath part of the floor in one of the side chapels you can see more Roman ruins. I think that might be distracting during mass to be sitting on glass above Roman ruins.

This is one of the walls of an old castle called Castelvechio, which means...wait for it...Old Castle.

This is San Zeno. It's a beautiful church with an odd set-up. Below the altar is a lower floor accessible by steps visible in the picture. By the way, if anyone ever wants to see more pictures of these places, and we have plenty of them, just let us know. Just drive to our place in Italy and I'll show you.

This was the hotel room Sarah and I stayed in, courtesy of our new friend Luca. A very nice room with a suspiciously translucent sliding bathroom door with no lock or latch.

This fortified bridge was really cool because you could climb up to higher defensible positions and get great views of the riverside. Also, the arrow slits provided a lot of breeze on this hot day. Seen below are Sarah, Kellin, and Lara patiently waiting for me to stop playing in my new fort.

Sarah checks her hair while I look into the wrong end of the camera.

Kellin, Lara, and Sarah salute a plastic bag that this patriotic youngster was ceremoniously raising on the flag pole.

Half of our home

So I have about 600 pictures on my camera from our trip to the Veneto. I know that I really need to catch up with my postings and find a way to put the best pictures on this site, but I don't feel like it right now. Instead I will post some pictures of our place. I think that I took them the day after I got here. Sarah did a similar thing on flickr, but I wanted to do it too. I only took pictures of the kitchen/our bedroom half of the apartment. I guess I'll do the living room/Kellin's room half later. Basically I'm wasting time. I didn't record out trip in my little black book so I can't really remember what we did and in what order we did them. So I'll probably do more of a picture posting than a step by step narrative. Sarah's much better at that anyway.

This noble but terrifying animal is known to us as Little Cat. Here she is showing off her stunning features.

She is really cute. She stops in and visits us whenever she feels like it then vanishes like a fart in the wind.

Kellin really loves her because she loves to jump in Kellin's skylight window (one of her three rooftop access points) right on to her bed at any time she likes, morning, day, or night. She's hilarious. She hides under the couch and then springs out and attacks the legs of unknowing passersby.

Here is the entry to the kitchen from the living room.

Here's Sarah in the left side of the kitchen...

and here's the right side. You can see the hallway down to the bathroom on the right which also curves down to our room.

This is our tiny terrace, accessible from the kitchen, and the view to the east. I barely fit on it.

This is the view of the north from the terrace which is not actually a terrace. You can kind of see two of the five bell towers that are visible from the terrace. We can hear the bells from all of them (and probably more) quite nicely.

This is the five or so story drop from the terrace. It's kind of hard to get a feel for how far it is from a picture.

These are the steps down from the bathroom.

And farther down the steps...

and our room at the bottom. Of course I took the picture when the room was a little messy and we had the pillows at the foot of the bed so that we could watch a moviw on Sarah's computer.

A view back the other way, and our window that looks out at the same drop.

This is out our west window. We always have to be wary of changing clothes since a couple of neighbors can see us.

There you have it. Now you know where we live. Oh yeah, here's a picture of Sarah about to enter our front door. Everything's closed in the picture but there are usually a lot of shops open and people walking around. Quite a festive street.

Arezzo

Sunday 7/6/08
Sarah, Kellin, and I got up and ready to go by 8:30 and headed back to the train station. There we met Sebastian and got our tickets to Arezzo. We were meeting Stephanie (who had stayed in Arezzo overnight) to go through the town to see its monthly antique fair and some of the sights it offered.

Kellin and Sebastian are extremely happy to be on a train

I didn't know anything about Arezzo before the trip so I was in for a pleasant suprise. It is a nice little city with a lot of neat old buildings, beautiful churches, and very steep streets going uphill from the train station. Oh, by the way, we were kicked out of our seats on the train because we had unknowingly sat in a first class compartment. So we had to move back out with the common folk.

As soon as we got to Arezzo we met up with Stephanie who was able to guide us around.

We spent the whole day looking at stalls of antiques and knickknacks that we couldn't afford or didn't need. We also saw five churches (Sarah and I only went into four because mass was being celebrated in one) that had some amazing frescoes and other works of art and wonderful architecture.

The coffee fiends load up

One of the many streets full o'people

We had lunch in a big park at the top of the hill that had some amazing views of the surrounding countryside and towns. Also, somewhere in the park someone was playing some music from Enya, the Braveheart soundtrack, and other such music. It was a really fun and tiring day. The sun really wears us out when we're walking around all day. I only wish we could have afforded to buy some of the goods, oh and that someone would magically transport it back to Ohio for us.

We got home kinda late, ate dinner, and didn't last long before we fell asleep.

This dog was humiliated to be wearing pink shoes

My new job

In one church or another - I'm too lazy to go back and see which one it was

Can you find Kellin?