Weekend trip to Cinque Terre

We just had another three-day weekend and I went with some friends to an area of northern Italy called Cinque Terre. It is a series of five towns right on the coast and has a lot of hiking trails, some of the best ones being right along the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

We left on Thursday almost immediately after classes ended; we had just enough time to throw some stuff in a backpack, eat lunch and head to the bus-stop. We took the bus into Rome and then took the metro to the train station. The train trip took about 4 hours and we had to switch trains one time. We were sort of unsure about how we would know which stop was ours, but luckily we received help from an elderly Italian lady. She came by our compartment about halfway through the trip and talked to us for a while. It was a rather slow conversation because she only spoke Italian and our Italian is not very good yet. However, she managed to tell us about her son who had studied in England for a year to better his English. She asked us where we were going and it turned out she was getting off at the same stop. She nicely promised to come get us when it was time to go.

Once we actually got to the first station we realized that our second ticket didn't tell us what train we were supposed to get on next. We showed the ticket to the Italian lady and she started walking away after muttering something in Italian. We weren’t sure if we were supposed to following her or not, but considering we didn't know where to go, we didn't have much of a choice. We followed her uncertainly for awhile and then she met up with a younger man who happened to be her son who spoke English. She told him to help us figure out where to go next and soon we found ourselves on the correct train after much shouting of "Grazie."

Unfortunately for us we missed our next stop (why exactly is a long and complicated story involving us not knowing how to force the train door open) and so we had to get off at the wrong station and find another train to backtrack. In order to do so, we figured we would need a ticket, but Italians don't do the whole "open 24 hours" thing and their automated ticket machine was out of order. We ended up waiting for the right train to come and then asking the conductor what to do. We tried to explain that we didn't have a ticket, but the conductor, annoyed that we were holding up the train, told us to just get on board (in order to properly imagine this scene it is important to remember that he was speaking in a thick Italian accent and shouting everything he said). He told us to get off in three stops, but it sounded like one to us, and so after one stop we hopped of the train. The conductor, now standing much further down the platform yelled, very Italian like, "Hey, get back on the train! Two stops!" at which point we scrambled back on the train. After two more stops we hop off the train again after wrenching the door open like our life depended on it. The conductor spotted us and yelled once again in his most rolling Italian accent "This is Riomaggiore!" (the correct stop finally!).

After that we managed to find our hostel and that was that.

The next day we did some hiking, sat on the beach and studied for a while, and then made an awesome dinner from some groceries we had bought in the morning. This dinner consisted of pasta with some tomato/zucchini sauce, garlic bread (made with fresh garlic) and fish bought that morning from a stand selling super fresh fish, and wine. It was delicious and also cost around $6 per person!

What we saw while we were there can best be described with pictures, so here you are:







These pictures do not have any people in them, for which I apologize. I will upload those with people in them as soon as possible (I hope).

The following picture has nothing to do with Cinque Terre. It is of Lori and I standing in front of what is left of the Roman Forum:



Also, if you were to get a facebook, you would have access to infinitely more pictures.

Pompeii and the Capitoline museum

Hi everyone!

Last weekend we had a class trip to southern Italy and we saw the museum in Naples as part of our art class on the way to Pompeii for another class on the art and architecture preserved there. The museum was pretty cool, but Pompeii was by far the best part of the trip. It is amazing how much of it is preserved. Practically the whole first story of the city is intact, with some taller buildings scattered around too. Apparently about 90% of the population of Pompeii was able to escape before the volcano erupted by recognizing warning signs such as earthquakes, and so it was only those who chose to stay until it was too late that didn't make it out. I got to see some really neat plaster casts of the bodies of people that had died. It sounds like the main reason they couldn't get out near the end was that there were a lot of fumes in the air and so people passed out while fleeing and were covered by the ash, which was falling at a rate of 6 inches per hour. Here is one of those casts:

One of the reasons Pompeii was really neat is that you can just walk the streets and not much is roped off. The streets are all paved with closely fitting stones and in some areas there are "crosswalks." These crosswalks are basically large, flat stones in a row crossing the street and you can hop from one to the other. This was done, apparently, because the actual street is at a lower level than the sidewalks and they were used for draining all sorts of unpleasant things, so if you didn't want to step in the muck, you could just hop across the raised cross walks. Just imagine all those Roman citizens in their togas hopping about!

Another thing that struck me about Pompeii was how much like a modern city it was in many ways. There was a problem with graffiti, some talking about the big sporting events (gladiator games) and since Pompeii was destroyed during election season, there were also many political slogans on the walls of buildings. Some houses had mosaics in the doorway warning intruders of their guard dog:

The walls of many houses still had their original paint on them and it was really surprising to see that these walls were not painted white but rather were covered with pictures.

On Wednesday we had another class trip, this time to the Capitoline Museum in Rome. I have never seen such amazing art before! The museum had sculptures like "The Dying Gaul," which I have seen pictures of before and seeing the real thing was really cool. Another neat thing is that for some of the busts of people the head of the person would be regular white marble, but the clothes would be made out of brightly colored marble done in such a way as to make it look like real cloth (see picture)! It was amazing!


Well, I have to go to bed since I'm getting up at 5:00 tomorrow to get to Rome early, but here is one more picture that I think is kind of funny: Me, Lori and Jon surfing the metro...no hands!