Checking in from Tuscano

Writing now from Florence (how does Firenze translate to Florence? it doesn't even sound similar) and still loving Italy. I feel like there's nothing I haven't loved on this whole trip, oh - except Madrid. Europe is just been awesome in general. The food is better, the coffee and wine - don't get me started - are fantastic, the safety is better, the transportation is better (at worst, trains are a little sluggish), the amount of vacation people take here is way better, all the communities are environmentally-efficient... well come to think of it, public toilets do really suck in Italy, and trying to get your waiter to make a second of eye contact when you need to get the check and go can also REALLY suck, but that's about it for any complaints from me.

We both adore everything in Italy so far. People are super friendly whether or not they speak any English, the food and souvenirs are super cheap but high quality, and the scenery is just unbeatable. Kate and I have both taken SO many pictures and bought SO many scenic postcards in the last few days.

We spent last night and this morning in Siena (left) which is the perfect little Italian city in the heart of Tuscany. When I come back to Italy someday, Siena is where I'll go for 3-4 days to relax, but to really experience Italy. Also of course I would take a little regional train over to Cinque Terre the rest of the week. I can't pass up Riomaggiore or Manarola again, visting those towns was the complete highlight of my year, they were really that loveable and their low-key sightseeing gave me lots of time to relax and think. Even with a few too many Americans there for Memorial Day weekend, that area still feels unspoiled. I told Kate in Cinque Terre, "I wish I had brought a book to read or a book to write".

Here's some pictures of the really crazy, or more politely the unconventional duomo in Siena (below). The black and white stripes totally say "Beetlejuice". I love Siena's crazy style.



Oh yeah, really funny - in Venice they make calendars with Preists of the month and Gondoleers of the Month.

Italian Riviera

Wowie, I love Italy. Today Kate and I took a long 6-mile hike along the beautiful coast (yes, I'm not kidding, I actually went on a HIKE, and a strenuous one at that! and even in flip flops and a short skirt!).

This region is called Cinque Terre or the 5 lands, which consists of 5 little cities named Riomaggiore, Manarola, Corneglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso which are almost identical little villages with bright-colored pink, yellow, and green townhome-ish buildings and gorgeous little ports filled with colorful boats. It's as picturesque as you can get here. The hike itself was half-dirt, half-paved trail on cliffs along the coast and it's a National Park.

Above right is one of my favorite pictures on the whole trip so far. Everything is up on 12-story high cliffs here, including the train stations.

The first night when we got in, we spontaneously went kayaking on the ocean for an hour, I got completely drenched (no wet suits or life jackets provided!) but the water was nice and warm.

Ocean water here is an emerald-teal color! I am running out of adjectives for how beautiful it is.

I'd recommend everyone visit here someday, it reminds me of Kauai - it's a different world where everyone's mellow, usually drinking wine, feet up, relaxed, and not even thinking about the weather forecast for tomorrow, because that's too stressful of a thought.

Pictured is the view of our town, Riomaggiore, and if you enlarge it, you can even see our exact window - it's where a tiny little hot-pink shirt is hanging on the clothesline!!

- Lara

Rainy Day in Venezia

Hi everyone,
Sorry for the lack of blogging! The internet has been hard to find and expensive, but oooooooooh, I absolutely loved France, and I absolutely love Italy so far too. (check below for a couple Paris pictures I just posted).

We just got to Venice and today is quite a bit rainy, so I am doing my laundry and taking a few hours to catch up on things. Random photo on the right is a little village / foresty area named after moi in southern France.

We are staying just across the bridge from the Jewish quarter in Venice which it's so funny, is called the "Old Ghetto" on maps and signs, but this ghetto is a beautiful part of town with outdoor fruit markets and pastry shops, and all the store owners shout across the street at each other to chat about the day's news.

Last night when we went to dinner in our neighborhood, we were wondering if we were really in Venice because there were no tourists anywhere! I think we're just in the non-touristy part of town, thankfully. Our little hotel is more like an apartment building that rents rooms, and across the plaza from us, there's a church bell that rings in the mornings and evenings, SO pretty.

and I should catch you up on the last week's events...

After a few days walking, walking and more walking in Paris, we took one relaxing day in St. Remy de Provence (we learned, you have to say "Son Romi de praw-VAWNCE" in French, they don't understand the American pronunciation, "Saint Remee") which was soooooo beautiful.

The town is famous for lots of Van Gogh paintings, including his Irises, because he stayed in an asylum there the last year before he died, and he painted the landscape a lot. All the buildings are little cottages with pale blue shutters and the most common souvenir is little sachets of dried lavender. It was like a real-life Crabtree and Evelyn town.

Where we stayed was a villa just across from Van Gogh's asylum (actually it's just a monastary that offered to take care of him), and we just walked the area, and took tons of photos. After our one day, we took a train to Nice, about an hour west, which is in the center of the French Riviera. (Everyone always comments "why are you staying in Nice? yuck!" because it's a bit like Atlantic City or something, but it's because it's the cheapest place to stay on the Riviera).
When heading to Nice, we noticed that Cannes was only 20 minutes by train, and since the film festival was going on, we headed there our first night and then sat and sipped drinks while watching the tuxedo crowd cruising the main strip along the water. We also caught the tail end of a movie premiere arrival where Bruce Willis worked the red carpet (left, tiny carpet under sign) for like 20 minutes. No idea what movie was premiering though... maybe someone can look it up for me... it was last Sunday night... (turns out later this was Over the Hedge)

Cannes is really beautiful and even without movie tickets, was so worth seeing. I loved especially how they have movie murals everywhere. One of my favorites was a mural that grouped classic film figures together - in one corner was Robert DeNiro, Alfred Hitchcock, Rhett Butler, and Gerard Depardieu... but hmmm, which of these "movie greats" doesn't belong?

The next day from Nice, Kate and I split up and she visited St. Tropez while I visited a little artist village called St. Paul de Vence, both along the Riviera. We wanted to make it to Monaco, but there was no time, and also the annual Grand Priz racecar thing was going on, so traffic was terrible in that direction.

The one thing we did do in Nice itself was see a Marc Chagall museum which was so worth it, Kate and I have both fallen in love with Chagall's art, and I even sent a couple posters of his art home which was a little outrageous to pay for, but I really love them.

Well I can't waste too much more time while in Venice on a computer, Ciao!
Lara

Paris - yeqh bqby

that was supposed to say "yeah baby" but the French keyboard is really messed up; the Q is an A, the W and Z are reversed, the M is where semi-colon normally is!! funny. Welcome to France.

Actually I am loving France so far, the people are WAY polite, don't listen to the stupid Americans that tell you otherwise. The French are only mean when they observe tourists being obnoxious and rude, which frankly in Paris is ALL the time. But when you're nice, they're nice, especially if you address them as 'Monsieur' or 'Madame' which is their custom.

Pictured above is one of a series of intentionally-blurred pictures i took of the Eiffel Tower at night. I love how it looks like a long, colorful dress.

The only thing I don't like is Paris is really overpriced (a normal restaurant dinner is about 100 € for 2), and that being said, I have to make this a short entry. The internet cafe I'm in is 5 euros an hour (most countries are 1 euro an hour) and they are blaring Phil Collins music which I can only take so much of.

so, quick udpate... Kate's dad is here now, we met him in Holland. Monday we just got to Paris just with enough time to see Notre Dame and take a boat tour of the city at night.

Yesterday we walked the Champs Elysses, around the outside of the Louvre (where I hear Matt Lauer was taping the Today Show too), and climbed to the top of the Arc de Triomphe (above). I have taken a ton of pictures, I think like 100 of Paris so far, and that's after deleting the bad ones!

The second day we spent a few hours in the morning at the Museum D'orsay which is so cool, it's a great collection of French artists and especially the Impressionists, it had tons of Monet, Manet, Pisarro, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gaughin, Cezanne, and my favorite thing was the beautiful ballerina pastels by Degas.
And...if walking all of Paris the first day wasn't exhausting enough, I hiked through a huge cemetary to find Jim Morrisson's grave, and it's NOT easy to find, let me tell you. If you come to visit, buy a good map of the cemetary and your hiking shoes. There's like 30,000 people buried there or something, lots of celebritites, and not well marked. When I got to the main gates, I realized I forgot to bring Jim a present - so I hiked down to the main street, past all the flower shops, found a liquor store, and picked him up a flask of whiskey (you can see it on the front right of this picture).

This was probably the day I most appreciated having an ipod again. I'm SO grateful for Jose letting me borrow all his music, although I am like SHOCKED that he has an even more diverse and bizaare collection of 80's and Oldies music than I do (he'll totally deny this) but like it includes Toto, A-ha, Right Said Fred, Duran Duran (Hungry Like the Wolf?!)... shall I continue? No I've embarassed him enough. But anyway, it was cool to listen to some obscure live Doors tracks while walking around the cemetery, and yes, the ipod still has some incredible psychic or supernatural powers, just believe me on this.

On our last day, we visited Montmartre (above), home of one of my favorite movies ever, Amelie. It was absolutely as adorable, charming, and photogenic as it is in the movie - although the Sacre Coure cathedral is surrounded by scummy African guys trying to put embrodered bracelets on your hand and then make you pay for it.

We enjoyed an unusually bright sunny afternoon in Montmartre though, and finished it with a dinner and a little live music inside Amelie's own restaurant, Le Deux Moulin (the 2 windmills) which is not cheezed up from the movie at all, it's actually probably exactly the same as it was before the movie made it famous, it was totally mellow and full of locals.

Pictured above right is me by the carousel that was in the movie. Love Montmartre.

Holland, Netherlands, or whatever you call it

Well, Kate and I are in Holland now and no major crazy stories about Amsterdam just yet. In fact it's such a lovely, small, peaceful town on the water, it's hard to imagine that the crazy underside that it's more famous for is really the same place! Seriously it's beautiful! We are staying with my friend Jose from Monterey who I've hardly heard from in the last 10 years, so it's been really fun to catch up.

We visited The Van Gogh Museum today which was really well done and for the most part, not tacky or touristy. I came out with a much bigger appreciation for him than I had before, because I think his less famous works are so much more incredible. Also I saw a lot of Rembrandt at the nearby Reijks Museum, and of course Rembrandt is also soooooo remarkable.

Tomorrow we're just going to walk the city and take our time, although my one objective for the day is I've decided to just buy a new iPod at the Amsterdam Apple store. that normally would make no sense, but conveniently now it does because Jose happens to have a fully-loaded iTunes on his computer (about 20G of songs) which I can just upload to my new iPod. And he has good taste in music, so it's all good. finally. music.

the mysterious question is, will my new iPod have as good psychic powers as my old iPod? And does it still work if it's using someone else's music collection???

p.s.
Some later notes I'm adding to this blog...

While in Holland we also stayed with Kate's host family in a small town called Gemert, from the year she spent here in high school, and they have the most adorable children ever - Dan, Sara, and Joseph. The children completely kept us entertained for a couple days (I took tons of photos) but in this sense, our week in Holland filled a major "homesick" void in the middle of our trip. Besides Kate's family, we also met up with her two friends Willem and Jessica, and before that I had met up with a close friend of my mom and dad's, Jerry in Delft. It was such a nice change of pace to hang out with family and friends for a while.

more photos up

While I have some time, I thought I´d post some more photos this afternoon, but I can´t seem to get them to add on to the original blogs that pertain, so just bare with me...

Above is the classic "Lara getting on a camel at 8 a.m., just after getting off the boat in Morocco".

Below is a beautiful shot in Lisbon, such a scenic and beautiful little city.

also this is the cute post office box where we mailed our postcards in Salema.
I find the gummies sold everywhere in Europe really amusing... usually for a snack on the train, it´s either ice cream, gummy candy, or chips, so not really the best low-calorie, high-fiber options. We also eat a lot of croissants and coffee for breakfast.

Anyway... pictured clockwise are the gummy brains at 9 o´clock, a Mannequin Pis (the famous naked peeing boy fountain from Belgium), a swirly something or other, some gummy lips, a gummy egg (yum! actually), another Mannequin Pis, a gummy pink strawberry, and a gummy blue clown fish.

Left and below, are the hike Kate and I took along the cliffs above the water in Salema.

Although now we´re in the coast of Spain for 3 days, the landscape is similarly beautiful, lots of flowers this time of year and the perfect temperature. We´ve collected some shells on the beach and are wondering how we´ll ever get them home.

some photos up

Kate and I are staying with Steve, another friend of my mom´s, and he has a fast internet connection, at last!! We´re spoiled, he´s even got Microsoft Windows in English too.

Steve and his wife Lali live a few minutes from the British colony of Gibraltar, like a little island off Spain, only it´s not an island, I guess it´s a peninsula... here´s a picture of the view from their window.

But I need to get off the computer and go walk on the beach with Kate, it´s too beautiful a day.

Check my entry on Granada below, and also Kate´s site (linked on the right) for photos of Sevilla, Salema, and Lisbon.

Granada

As Kate wrote on her blog, we were pretty unimpressed with a trip over to Morocco yesterday, despite being warned by others ahead of time. It was worth the quick "daytrip to Africa" just because it was only 2 hours by boat from southern Spain, but Tangier´s buildings and neighborhoods were really grimey and not maintained at all. The people were nice, though.

We had a very typical tourist experience of seeing several "presentations" in a carpet store, and a spice store, bargaining like crazy to get souvenirs down to 1/2 or 2/3rd´s the original price, and then a very simple lunch of vegetables, couscous and mint tea with flies buzzing about, and the chef smoking cigarettes while preparing our food (lovely!). Kate even saw the chef carrying a recently-dead chicken through the restaurant to the kitchen (ew!). But we both came home with some beautiful silver jewelry and some cheap Moroccan spices.

Now that I have a good internet connection, and a relaxing day at a friend´s house, I´m posting here - NOT Morocco, but some pictures of The Alhambra in Granada, Spain, the famous Moorish palace from thousands of years ago, that I visited about a week ago before Kate got here.

I was so impressed with the condition of The Alhambra, it hasn´t had to rely on too much modern restoration because thankfully, Spain appreciates, and even admires their Moorish history enough that they have protected the buildings of that period as monuments.













Nearby Cordoba, while it was my favorite city in Spain, their Moorish-era mosque does have a lot of Catholic overtones which to me was "taking sides" too much - for example, the brochure about the mosque is labeled "Mezquita Cathedral (Former Mosque)" and inside the mosque, lots of the Catholic monuments are displayed predominantly. It almost was like saying "Catholicism triumphed in the end, and that´s all that matters." I appreciated much more how the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul which was tired of everyone fighting over which religion it should be for thousands of years, became neutral by becoming a monument to its own history, and it no longer functions as a church or a mosque. But of course not everyone is happy with that, you can never make everyone happy.

Tenido días mejores (I´ve had better days)

Well, the last 24 hours have been the first very low-point on my trip.

Kate and I had a great weekend in the little fishing village of Salema (link over to her page for a summary), but we spent all day yesterday trying various ways of getting back to Spain with little luck, because it was a national holiday here, Labor Day, and no one wants to work on Labor Day.

Most of the buses and half of the trains were not running in Portugal, so we spent 2 1/2 hours waiting outside of various rental car shops (Hertz, Avis, Europcar) in the seaside town of Lagos, with some other American girls we met, thinking we could split the price of a car to Sevilla. It is infuriating that none of the shops posted a sign to say that they were closed for the holiday, and worse - they all had signs saying they took a lunch break from 2pm - 4pm, so we figured they were at lunch. But they never came, so that was a lovely waste of hot afternoon. All the restaurants were closed too, except little train cafes, so I´ve been getting more and more accustomed to eating ice cream, chips, croissants, and gummi candy for meals - ick.

Kate was eager to see Sevilla, though, so we decided to go as far as we could. (Pictured is Kate enjoying the lovely combination of orange curtains and torquoise seats on a little regional Portugese train).

Eventually we took a train to the farthest town the trains go in Portugal, then an hour-long taxi ride around 11PM for 40€ to get to the Spanish border, and then since the Spanish train station was locked, we crashed in a budget hotel for only 6 hours of sleep, then got on the next train to Sevilla at 7am.

Maybe this doesn´t sound too bad, I mean, of all places to be stranded, coastal Portugal or Spain, with the nice, balmy evening weather is nice.

But this morning on our way to the train, my ipod went missing. I had it loosely wrapped in a pillow just before we got on the train, and within 3 minutes, it was nowhere to be found. I looked under every seat on the train, so I think some sucker must have swiped it from me. All I can say is I hope they like lots of Disco and 80´s crap. and I hope they don´t mind an iPod that´s 4 years old with a battery life of only 3 hours. Grrrrr.

I was seriously about to call Chris and have him buy me a new one - like now - and FedEx it over to me ASAP, since all the songs are still on my PC back home, when I realized that perhaps I could buy a book and read that on trains instead. (My iPod is my ball and chain, it´s not even funny, this is really going to be a lifestyle adjustment to not have one, plus I had 8 language CD´s from the library saved on it for this trip!!).

My mood slightly improved around 10am when I realized I can probably claim the iPod on my travellers' insurance as personal property theft. That´s a tiny consollation, but I am so sad I won´t have a soundtrack in museums and on trains anymore. Why couldn´t it be stolen on the last week of my trip??? F$%&!