Europe, Part One/Uno/Un/Eins

(Those allergic to travel diaries in blogs should stop reading now.)

So a week and a half ago, I woke up at 2 in the morning, threw together the last scraps of food in the kitchen (which meant a fish sandwich and some biscuits for breakfast), hopped on a bus, climbed on a plane, and went to Rome! There I met Becky at the main train station, and we headed out to explore. Rome is just so... old! I was impressed by its color palatte, a range fom cream to salmon, its omnipresent graffiti, its embarassment of ruins. We saw the "Colo-frickin´-sseum" (as we called it), the Sistine Chapel, went to the Vatican museum (and sang Tom Lehrer´s Vatican Rag, of course), saw St. Pete´s Basilica, Michelangelo´s Pieta, and the Pantheon, and ate the best gelato ever, handmade by a friendly guy who gave us free samples. And Becky got a Roman haircut, which was pretty much like any other haircut except that it was in Rome. The hostel that we called home during this part of the trip was kind of bizarre, like Sandy Island full of strangers, for those in the know. Swimming in their Olympic sized outdoor pool surrounded by tropical greenery, with an Italian moon overhead and "The Girl from Ipanema" playing in the bar, we could almost forget that we would be sleeping in a tent on rickety bunk beds, and that we´d payed approximately 6 euro a night for this privilege (an incredibly good deal).

The next stop on our journey was Venice, and after getting the best coffee of my life at a coffee shop near the station in Rome (I didn´t sweeten it at all, which is saying something!) we hopped on a train. Golden green hills spattered with red roofed villas and their farms gave way to flatter land, and eventually vast stretches of water, and then a warm-hued city that seemed to rise up out of it. After spending a night at a hostel that was full of Australian touists and where we slept yet again in a tent and were bitten by exceptionally vicious mosquitos, we set out to explore the city. Since we´d decided we were "churched out", we spent the day wandering in alleys that felt like hugs, going anywhere that the other tourists weren´t going, which meant that we often ended up at a dead end at a green alley of water, with a striped shirted gondolier going by with his cargo of tourists. The city felt, as Becky put it, like Disneyland: for every resident we probably saw about a hundred tourists. If I go back to Venice some day, I want to go in the winter, when real people are there. So far we´d been living mostly on amazing local bread, cheese, and tomatoes, but before leaving we had a proper dinner at a restaurant near the train station: pasta with mushrooms in cream sauce, bread, fried fish, salad, and the most amazing berry-ricotta cake.

Next was Salzburg, and to get there we went on an overnight train, where we shared a compartment with three frat boys from the Netherlands who offered us beer, and when we declined didn´t bother us again the whole night. We arrived at 4 in the morning, and while Becky slept I read a book and watched the sun rise on the Austrian mountains. Salzburg smelled like herbs, was full of Mozart-kugelen, mountains with castles on top of them, and women wearing traditional Austrian dress completely unironically. It felt much colder somehow, despite being just as hot as Italy in temperature, and it was strange to be hearing German on the street. Our major goal of the day was to find the gazebo from the Sound of Music, but we didn´t have a map or a real idea of where we were going. After much extrapolating and 10 miles of walking, exhausted and with sore feet, we finally found it, and it turned out to be the most anticlimactic gazebo we´d ever seen. So we promptly got on a bus, went to our next hostel, collapsed, and slept for about 17 hours, with a brief shower and dinner break in the middle.

The adventure continues in our next episode... stay tuned!