My first impression of Switzerland is that it must be where the myth about dwarves come from. Not because the people there are short and hairy (they're not), but because the entire country seems to be one long corridor of narrow fields with impossibly large mountains on either side, and a iceblue, snowfed river bisecting what little arable land there is. Because of the abundance of water, everything is green. Really, really green grass being eaten by those Swiss cows you see on cheese packaging everywhere, pockets of huge evergreens spring up from mountain ledges, but the most noticeable is me, being green with envy for not being born here.
While we're driving through the countryside (or extremely long tunnels that go through entire mountains), MJ gives us some background on Switzerland, which was pretty interesting stuff. In Switzerland, every male over the age of 18 is required by law to enlist in the military and serve for a minimum of 2 years. I'm not sure if you have to do it right at 18, but I'd bet it's within a few years. You are also given a submachine gun. This might account for the lack of home invasion style robberies there. Who in the hell is going to rob a house when you know for a fact that there's someone with a military grade gun inside? Once you're out of the military, you still have to go to target practice once a month, and do a month long refresher course every couple of years. Because it's required by law, this doesn't count as your vacation time, and you still get paid. As a result, the Swiss can raise it's military to full readiness in less than 36 hours. Pretty impressive. Due to how ridiculously rich the country is thanks to anonymous banking, apparently many of the mountains have been converted into giant bomb shelters (one of which can hold up to 20000 people for 2 years), weapons reserves, satellite monitoring stations, and so on. Oh, and all buildings are required to have bomb shelters. This might account for why Switzerland is so neutral--woe betide any country that decided to invade, because the entire population is essentially the military (women aren't required to join, but most do anyhow), and if they ever got bombed, you'd really only piss them off.
Now, this means that the cities are clean and that the citizens are for the most part law-abiding, but the large anti-authority part of me sort of worries about any government that has that sort of stranglehold on personal choice. Although on the other hand, the benefits from having an entire country on the same basic page seem worth it, at least on the surface. You could never do this with America though, we have a population that is far too large and too diverse to ever make it feasible.
Anyway, it took us forever to get to Lucerne, a small town in Switzerland, because the rain we had left behind in Germany had found us as soon as we got out of Italy, slowing traffic to a crawl on an already crowded road. The bus riding was becoming near-unbearable at this point, although it was mainly due to my skin being so dry (and thus so itchy I was scratching till I was literally bleeding) because of the nonstop recycled air, and my lack of even remotely clean clothes (read: I smelled awful and there was nothing I could do about it).
Once again, we had only a few short hours to wander around Lucerne, made shorter by the fact that every shop closes at around six o'clock. In retrospect I guess thats not that strange, but the city looked deserted by eight. Even still, there was ample time to peruse the Swiss chocolate shops...and then to go back again and again. I'm not a huge chocolate fan, which I think I've mentioned in an earlier post--not that i'm anti-chocolate, just that I'm not a fan of chocolate in the way the sad, lonely lady who has a cat calendar is. But this...this was something else. This wasn't chocolate. This was angel brains coated in children's dreams. The adorably old Swiss lady explained that the reason it was so different was because the cows ate grass that was watered with pure, mountain spring water, so their milk was correspondingly better, thus producing higher quality dairy products. After tasting about 15 different types of truffles, bon bons, and so on, I was inclined to agree with her.
MJ had neglected to mention that the hotel we'd be staying in that night was a refurbished prison. And it was themed, meaning that it still had bars on the windows, bare walls, and instead of room keys, you had a code you had to put into the door to unlock it. It didn't freak me out too bad, although I made it a point not to wonder about how many people had gotten shanked in my room. Given my impressions of Switzerland, though, I think that the majority of criminals were white collar. I hope.
We only had Paris left on our itinerary, and even though it's marked as 2 days, what that means in Contiki-speak is eight hours in a bus and about four or so in the actual city, minus check in time and dinner and all that. I'm not saying that it's bad, I just want to clarify for anyone who might be thinking of a Contiki tour.
After seeing as many cities as we did on the trip, I have to say that I prefer the northern part of Europe. Maybe its that the cities are slightly newer, but I've had my fill of streets so narrow that they can't accomodate a single person walking and a car driving at the same time. The cities we visited from the north seemed on the whole to be cleaner, safer, and more ascetically pleasing. Then again, maybe that's just my German blood bias talking.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Day 8: The Wheels on the Bus (Make Me Queasy)
Day 8 found us in Florence, which is supposedly an art mecca. However, at this point in the trip, it would be hard to impress me with anything. My legs were sore, I was sunburned, and we had a scant 6 hours to spend here. For lack of anything better to do, a few of us went to a sculpture museum, where it became very apparent that the Italians back in the day were really fond of sculpting male genitalia. Surely there was some cultural reason behind this, but there's only so many life-sized naked dudes you can see before they all look the same. The only thing I really enjoyed about it was guessing the occasional greek myth that the statue was based on. I was right about 90 percent of the time, although no one in the group except me was impressed by this, least of all my little brother.
There was a really amazing looking cathedral in Florence as well, which I would've loved to see the inside of had the line to get in not wrapped all the way around the damn block.
Included in the Contiki tour was a bunch of cool stuff to do (for an extra fee) which ended up being worth it in nearly every case. In Florence, it was a full Tuscan dinner, four courses, with a cool opera singer coming out every so often to do a song. I've never thought of myself as much of an opera fan, but seeing someone up close, singing that beautifully, I could certainly see why it's as popular as it is. Included with the dinner (which was as fantastic as one would have hoped. Italians truly do have the best food in the world, hands down) were two huge jugs of wine, which I indulged in wholeheartedly.
This was a huge mistake.
It wasn't that the next morning I was hungover. I hadn't really drank that much wine. But I don't think my tummy was ready for it, and it was killing me, from our six o'clock wake up time onward. I might have been fine if I had had a decent breakfast and a few hours to recuperate, but no. Breakfast (our only daily included meal) in Italy consisted of a hard, nearly hollow roll with about as much caloric value as a roll of cardboard. Oh, and water. That was it. What the fuck? The inconsistencies involved with a culture that enjoys four hour dinners and three second breakfasts are too great to be explored here.
Anyway, it was a wonderful coincidence that I was feeling really sick that day, as we had a 9 hour bus ride ahead of us, all the way to Switzerland. I might have been fine if not for the winding mountain roads, but instead I said goodbye to Italy by vomiting in the bus bathroom. Classy, I know.
There was a really amazing looking cathedral in Florence as well, which I would've loved to see the inside of had the line to get in not wrapped all the way around the damn block.
Included in the Contiki tour was a bunch of cool stuff to do (for an extra fee) which ended up being worth it in nearly every case. In Florence, it was a full Tuscan dinner, four courses, with a cool opera singer coming out every so often to do a song. I've never thought of myself as much of an opera fan, but seeing someone up close, singing that beautifully, I could certainly see why it's as popular as it is. Included with the dinner (which was as fantastic as one would have hoped. Italians truly do have the best food in the world, hands down) were two huge jugs of wine, which I indulged in wholeheartedly.
This was a huge mistake.
It wasn't that the next morning I was hungover. I hadn't really drank that much wine. But I don't think my tummy was ready for it, and it was killing me, from our six o'clock wake up time onward. I might have been fine if I had had a decent breakfast and a few hours to recuperate, but no. Breakfast (our only daily included meal) in Italy consisted of a hard, nearly hollow roll with about as much caloric value as a roll of cardboard. Oh, and water. That was it. What the fuck? The inconsistencies involved with a culture that enjoys four hour dinners and three second breakfasts are too great to be explored here.
Anyway, it was a wonderful coincidence that I was feeling really sick that day, as we had a 9 hour bus ride ahead of us, all the way to Switzerland. I might have been fine if not for the winding mountain roads, but instead I said goodbye to Italy by vomiting in the bus bathroom. Classy, I know.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Day 6-7: Rome- *Blasphemy Alert*
Days 6 and 7 were spent in that place that all the roads lead to, Rome. I made it a point to use the phrase "When in Rome" as many times as I could, either to myself or others, because where the hell else is that phrase nearly as applicable? The first day was mostly spent getting to Rome from Venice, but we had a nice half-day, seeing the Pantheon, which is mindblowing in its scale, not to mention how ancient it is. It's nearly impossible to not gape as you see stone columns several stories high while your brain simultaneously tries to figure out how it in the hell people would build it now, let alone 2000 years ago. I would get used to this sort of feeling during my time in Rome, as it applies for most of the ancient architecture there.
The next day was absolutely exhausting--it was hot, even for me, humid, crowded and filled with nonstop walking. Not that any of that was a surprise, I'm just setting the mood. We started off at St. Peters Cathedral, which I felt I should see simply because I'd never been in a Cathedral before.
The cathedral is big, I'll give it that. It's also gaudy. Really, really, really gaudy. Gold and marble everywhere. The inside has monuments to every pope inside it, and they're running out of room, so it sort of looks like a art museum made love with a marble quarry, found Jesus, and then puked.
"I won't blaspheme, I won't blaspheme..." I told myself, but if you know me at all then you know that that's just impossible. But, let the record show that I only said "goddamn it" only three times while inside, and they were all accidents. I had hoped that the overwhelming spirituality of the place would outweigh my utter hatred of the Catholic church, but sadly, it couldn't. All I could think about as I looked at marble statue after marble statue was how much money this all must've cost, how many cultures were destroyed, how many peoples were turned into little more than slaves in order to feed the beast that built this church. It's supposed to be a monument to god, but it looked more like a monument to cruelty and greed to me.
But the real reason we had gone to St. Peter's rather than the Vatican muesum (other than the fact that I would probably have burst into flames upon crossing the doorway) was for St. Peters dome, which rested on top of the cathedral, way, way, way up. The elevator they have will only take you so far up, and then it's just marble stairway after marble stairway. It was quite an experience, because as the staircase winds up the inside of the dome, the wall on one side begins to curve into the ceiling, and the limited space means that the walkway is such that you have to almost walk sideways up it. The steps seems endless, and their pattern changes seemingly at random, curving along the inside wall, then up some normal flights, then more curved, vertigo inducing stairs, all getting steeper by the step. Finally, you go up a staircase that is so tightly wound that they hung a rope through the middle of it to keep you from falling down it after you get dizzy from turning around. This rope is a sight in itself--imagine how many hands have touched it--it's black, sticky, and throughly disgusting, but if you don't want to die, you've got to hold onto it to get to the top. The view from the dome once you finally get there is worth it though. You can look over the entire city unobstructed by anything except the massive air pollution. It was amazing to me, given how crowded the city is, how much undeveloped land there is, huge tracts of hilly parks. Clearly, the Romans understood something about city design that we have forgotten: people need open spaces.
The roof of the cathedral (lower than the dome, but still way high up) has a gift shop that smells exactly like chicken Mcnuggets. They also sell shot glasses there. If that weren't a disturbing enough image, the likeness of Pope Hitler's Youth the Third glares balefully at you from about a million different postcards, crucifixes, paintings, refrigerator magnets, and so on. He looks like he wants to eat your face.
So: If you find yourself in Rome and you're not deeply religious, skip Vatican city. You're not missing all that much.
What you shouldn't miss in Rome is the pizza and the gelato. Pizza places there are, obviously, far superior to anything we have in the states. For example, they don't serve it by the slice. Intstead, they have one huge square that they cook all the pizza on, making it essentially one giant pizza with different areas of toppings, you point out which kind you want, sort of measure it with your hands, and they cut if off and hand it to the cashier, who weighs it. That's right, you pay for your pizza by weight! The dough is also this light, flaky amazingness that kind of ruins american pizza forever. The gelato there does the same to ice cream. I don't really go for chocolate, but the chocolate gelato I had was far beyond anything i've ever tasted that was supposed to be chocolate. In retrospect, eating anything that sugary was probably not the best choice when the temperature is in the upper nineties and water is roughly six dollars a bottle, but still, it had to be done.
By midday the heat was intense, amplified by the pollution that had no breeze to carry it away. I really just wanted to find a shady spot and fall asleep, but the overabundance of pickpockets made that option completely ridiculous, and besides, no matter how uncomfortable, I didn't get all the way out to Europe to fall asleep. Instead, my friend Ryan and I went to the Coliseum, which was...underwhelming. Sure, it's big, but not that big. What I found most intriguing were the unmistakable signs of age--stone steps with giant grooves in them, signs of untold numbers of feet climbing them. I suppose I was hoping to get some mystical sense of history, some indescribable feeling that sitting on a stone ledge that had been sat upon by people whose bones were now dust, but instead, I couldn't conjure up anything except some disappointment at it and myself. My inability to be impressed may have been a mixture of MJ telling us that this wasn't the only coliseum built, that they were built all over the Roman empire, but that this one was special because...it was Rome's Coliseum. So basically, it's special because people say it is. Also, the sewer vent's that surround the outside spew a mixture of urine and feces into the air, making stepping over them a mixed blessing, as the smell makes you instantly gag, but cool air from the sewers is a welcome reprieve from heat.
As the day wound down, Ryan and I headed to the last destination--the Cappuchin monks Monastery. The monastery isn't open to the public, so really, it's more like five normal sized rooms side by side. What makes these monks special, however, is their tradition of only being buried on monastery grounds, which presented a problem a few hundred years back when they grounds ran out of room for all the bodies. Instead, those wily monks came up with a solution: who needs to be buried? And for that matter, who needs to be kept together? Thus, the rooms are covered, nearly from top to bottom, in bones. Skulls are stacked in artful columns surrounding a coat of arms made out of femurs and pelvises (pelvisi?) in one room, in another, a withered, still decomposing monk sits on a bench made out of ribcages. Although the signs were in Italian, I found out later that each room represented a stage in man's journey through death. This was probably my favorite sight in Rome. It wasn't creepy, or morbid, it was a frank display of the human condition, a not so subtle reminder that regardless of who you are, you will one day be indistinguishable from anyone else.
Ryan and I headed back to the hotel around nine, after about thirteen hours of being on our feet. My sandals had compressed so much due to the heat and the constant pressure that I could feel every stone I stepped on. Sandals are not recommended for that level of touristing.
With the caveat that by the point in the trip I was pretty travel worn, both mentally and physically, which undoubtedly contributed to my feelings about Rome here's the bottom line: If you simply have to go to Rome, don't do it during the summer. If you aren't really that interested in Rome to begin with, skip it-- you're not missing anything that pictures won't capture.
The next day was absolutely exhausting--it was hot, even for me, humid, crowded and filled with nonstop walking. Not that any of that was a surprise, I'm just setting the mood. We started off at St. Peters Cathedral, which I felt I should see simply because I'd never been in a Cathedral before.
The cathedral is big, I'll give it that. It's also gaudy. Really, really, really gaudy. Gold and marble everywhere. The inside has monuments to every pope inside it, and they're running out of room, so it sort of looks like a art museum made love with a marble quarry, found Jesus, and then puked.
"I won't blaspheme, I won't blaspheme..." I told myself, but if you know me at all then you know that that's just impossible. But, let the record show that I only said "goddamn it" only three times while inside, and they were all accidents. I had hoped that the overwhelming spirituality of the place would outweigh my utter hatred of the Catholic church, but sadly, it couldn't. All I could think about as I looked at marble statue after marble statue was how much money this all must've cost, how many cultures were destroyed, how many peoples were turned into little more than slaves in order to feed the beast that built this church. It's supposed to be a monument to god, but it looked more like a monument to cruelty and greed to me.
But the real reason we had gone to St. Peter's rather than the Vatican muesum (other than the fact that I would probably have burst into flames upon crossing the doorway) was for St. Peters dome, which rested on top of the cathedral, way, way, way up. The elevator they have will only take you so far up, and then it's just marble stairway after marble stairway. It was quite an experience, because as the staircase winds up the inside of the dome, the wall on one side begins to curve into the ceiling, and the limited space means that the walkway is such that you have to almost walk sideways up it. The steps seems endless, and their pattern changes seemingly at random, curving along the inside wall, then up some normal flights, then more curved, vertigo inducing stairs, all getting steeper by the step. Finally, you go up a staircase that is so tightly wound that they hung a rope through the middle of it to keep you from falling down it after you get dizzy from turning around. This rope is a sight in itself--imagine how many hands have touched it--it's black, sticky, and throughly disgusting, but if you don't want to die, you've got to hold onto it to get to the top. The view from the dome once you finally get there is worth it though. You can look over the entire city unobstructed by anything except the massive air pollution. It was amazing to me, given how crowded the city is, how much undeveloped land there is, huge tracts of hilly parks. Clearly, the Romans understood something about city design that we have forgotten: people need open spaces.
The roof of the cathedral (lower than the dome, but still way high up) has a gift shop that smells exactly like chicken Mcnuggets. They also sell shot glasses there. If that weren't a disturbing enough image, the likeness of Pope Hitler's Youth the Third glares balefully at you from about a million different postcards, crucifixes, paintings, refrigerator magnets, and so on. He looks like he wants to eat your face.
So: If you find yourself in Rome and you're not deeply religious, skip Vatican city. You're not missing all that much.
What you shouldn't miss in Rome is the pizza and the gelato. Pizza places there are, obviously, far superior to anything we have in the states. For example, they don't serve it by the slice. Intstead, they have one huge square that they cook all the pizza on, making it essentially one giant pizza with different areas of toppings, you point out which kind you want, sort of measure it with your hands, and they cut if off and hand it to the cashier, who weighs it. That's right, you pay for your pizza by weight! The dough is also this light, flaky amazingness that kind of ruins american pizza forever. The gelato there does the same to ice cream. I don't really go for chocolate, but the chocolate gelato I had was far beyond anything i've ever tasted that was supposed to be chocolate. In retrospect, eating anything that sugary was probably not the best choice when the temperature is in the upper nineties and water is roughly six dollars a bottle, but still, it had to be done.
By midday the heat was intense, amplified by the pollution that had no breeze to carry it away. I really just wanted to find a shady spot and fall asleep, but the overabundance of pickpockets made that option completely ridiculous, and besides, no matter how uncomfortable, I didn't get all the way out to Europe to fall asleep. Instead, my friend Ryan and I went to the Coliseum, which was...underwhelming. Sure, it's big, but not that big. What I found most intriguing were the unmistakable signs of age--stone steps with giant grooves in them, signs of untold numbers of feet climbing them. I suppose I was hoping to get some mystical sense of history, some indescribable feeling that sitting on a stone ledge that had been sat upon by people whose bones were now dust, but instead, I couldn't conjure up anything except some disappointment at it and myself. My inability to be impressed may have been a mixture of MJ telling us that this wasn't the only coliseum built, that they were built all over the Roman empire, but that this one was special because...it was Rome's Coliseum. So basically, it's special because people say it is. Also, the sewer vent's that surround the outside spew a mixture of urine and feces into the air, making stepping over them a mixed blessing, as the smell makes you instantly gag, but cool air from the sewers is a welcome reprieve from heat.
As the day wound down, Ryan and I headed to the last destination--the Cappuchin monks Monastery. The monastery isn't open to the public, so really, it's more like five normal sized rooms side by side. What makes these monks special, however, is their tradition of only being buried on monastery grounds, which presented a problem a few hundred years back when they grounds ran out of room for all the bodies. Instead, those wily monks came up with a solution: who needs to be buried? And for that matter, who needs to be kept together? Thus, the rooms are covered, nearly from top to bottom, in bones. Skulls are stacked in artful columns surrounding a coat of arms made out of femurs and pelvises (pelvisi?) in one room, in another, a withered, still decomposing monk sits on a bench made out of ribcages. Although the signs were in Italian, I found out later that each room represented a stage in man's journey through death. This was probably my favorite sight in Rome. It wasn't creepy, or morbid, it was a frank display of the human condition, a not so subtle reminder that regardless of who you are, you will one day be indistinguishable from anyone else.
Ryan and I headed back to the hotel around nine, after about thirteen hours of being on our feet. My sandals had compressed so much due to the heat and the constant pressure that I could feel every stone I stepped on. Sandals are not recommended for that level of touristing.
With the caveat that by the point in the trip I was pretty travel worn, both mentally and physically, which undoubtedly contributed to my feelings about Rome here's the bottom line: If you simply have to go to Rome, don't do it during the summer. If you aren't really that interested in Rome to begin with, skip it-- you're not missing anything that pictures won't capture.
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