Tomorrow

Tomorrow hopefully I'll have wifi and then you'll get a post. For now, hello from Sorrento!

Pre and Post Lunch Thoughts

Pre lunch:

Fucking nuns. They're everywhere! I understand that this is the Vatican and all and that there are necessarily a lot of nuns around, but you'd think if they were important enough to get selected to live at church central that they'd have work to do or something.Don't you nuns have some place to be or is it just your new duty in life to walk extremely slowly in front of me with your goddamn umbrella threatening to poke me in the eye? Move it, Sister!

Fucking umbrellas. I hate them anyway and everyone has them here. And if for some reason you don't well there are about a million dudes trying to sell you one. What really gets me is when a family of four is carrying four and trying to walk abreast on the narrow sidewalk. Do NOT make me walk into moped traffic just to avoid your stupid umbrella parade. It's not even raining anymore!

Post lunch:

I like wine.

I found a pub/restaurant run by some Irish people for lunch. The special was a pretty good deal and as I sat there waiting for the bill (which took FOREVER. I'm beginning to think there's some special signal in Ireland for getting the check that I am unaware of. It was like this in Ireland, too.) I messed around on my phone calendar and realized that I've been gone exactly four weeks. Wow, cool! That only leaves..... SEVEN MORE WEEKS TO GO????? Why didn't anyone tell me I was going to be gone so long?

The Colosseum yesterday was rad. I knew it was near the Metro stop, but I wasn't prepared for it being RIGHT AT THE OPENING. Bang! There's the motherfucking Colosseum! I spent all afternoon walking around that and the Forum and the Pantheon, all of which were really fucking cool. Why were all those people waiting to see the stupid Vatican in the rain? Man, fuck the Sistine Chapel.

I've found a place to watch the Champions League games tonight and tomorrow. I have a TV in my room, but of course there's no important soccer matches on it. "It's all about the money," explained the woman at reception. Indeed.

I forgot to book a room in Amsterdam for my birthday and it's already filling up. Dammit!

Pfff, whatever

I'm already forgetting about the unpleasantness of last night. We'll just leave it at that I had to spend the night on a cot in the hostel's basement where they store linen, cleaning supplies and occasionally staff. It was weird and it wasn't even the weirdest part of it all, but enough about that.

Venice can wipe away all your worries. It may be hot and crowded, you will most certainly be lost and everything's expensive, but there's no automobile traffic, the canals cool the breeze and.. well, it's friggin' VENICE. There really are funnily dressed men oaring boats through narrow canals and waterborne cabs deliver passengers in both the busy canals and in the quieter areas. I didn't take many pictures because you've seen Venice. There are countless photos and movies done by much better photographers than I, who have the option of clearing the streets/viewpoints when necessary.

The mandatory train reservations in Italy are a joke. I was the only one on my 92-person car for the first three stops. At its peak, it held about seven people. Why did I have to plop down fifteen Euro to secure a place instead of just hopping onboard with my railpass? Ok ok, more money, I can answer that. Still, grr.

The hostel here in Florence is a fortress in a warzone-like city. No one comes here to look at the city itself, just a couple of sites. Heat, lawless traffic and pickpockets encourage you to move quickly from site to site, which means it's really nice that the hostel has a both a bar and a restaurant with decently priced, good food. I don't have to venture out into food-poisoning land (hello Youngest Sis) AND they serve BREAKFAST!!! Full English all-you-can-eat BREAKFAST! I'm so excited I don't know what to do.

The Uffizi gallery is free tomorrow, so after BREAKFAST! I'm going to hustle down there and wait in line. Hooray art!

And Now for a WTF Moment

And I'm gonna leave you on that cliffhanger, because I don't really feel like talking about it right now. What a fucking weird night, though.

Oh yeah, and I'm in Venice. Woot?

Ok, so TODAY is the last full day in Spain this time

I thought yesterday was my last day. That's what I get for thinking in this country. I've liked Barcelona so far, but it's a little high-strung, hot and insanely crowded. The problem was the I wanted to catch a night train to Milan this evening, but since this particular train only runs a couple times a week it was already sold out. So the best I could do was book another night in Barcelona and get a Ryanair flight over to Venice to keep all the reservations in Italy I just made. More problems followed in that the hostel I was at in Barcelona was full, so I had to move across town, and the airport I'm flying out of is something like 125km from Barcelona (Girona). Also it's some stupid holiday (again) that involves parades (again) with whistles and men giving roses to women. The sidewalks are shoulder to shoulder people and it's impossible to figure out where you are when you're a midget.

I was so stressed out by the time I got here (and moved rooms/beds/floors due to a mix-up) that I thought I was going to pass out from dehydration. Fortunately, there was a friendly Canadian girl in the bunk below mine and we conspired to charge our computers and do laundry up on the 7th floor terrace bar. Naturally this involved drinking large amounts of sangria, some of which was free by way of apology of the guy at reception. Sure there are famous buildings and churches and museums, but all I wanted to do was chill out for an afternoon. We did manage to make our way to the beach where I solidified the sunburn I had brewing from the roof and watched some shirtless boys play soccer.

And of course, this being Spain, the day is practically beginning. I've just been informed that the hostel bar is open until 4am, so after acquiring some patatas bravas and maybe a sandwich I think I'll retire here and drink myself to sleep. Should take about two drinks.

Last Full Day in Logrono

It's time to move on so I don't end up actually moving in here. I'm getting too used to staying up 'til three, sleeping 'til noon and taking a siesta every afternoon. I'm never going to leave if I don't run away and soon. So tomorrow I'm off to Barcelona for a day, then an overnight train (hopefully) to Milan and then Venice. Yeah, Venice! There was an Indiana Jones AND a Bond movie filmed there! Oh and of course there's other stuff too. I'm sure it's all important.

Afterward, I'll be a couple days in Florence and then three days in Rome. I'd also like to see Pompeii, but Naples and the surrounding area sounds like a huge pain in the ass, so we'll see. I'm personally really excited about heading up north again to the land of sensible people that understand the concept of breakfast.

Last night we went out for a couple of drinks and ended up being mobbed by a group of Catalans who had spent the day touring bodegas (wineries) and were consequently nearly destroyed by the time midnight rolled around. For anyone in such a state, shots are probably not the wisest idea, but always seem to sound that way, so the kids put back some more and pretty soon they were practically puddles, groping, slurring and dropping their drinks. Honestly though, it was a fun night. They were at the bar solely to have a good time and get laid and I absolutely can't fault them for that. It was also one of those times that being a foreigner is fuggin' AWESOME. Despite the fact that there were much cuter girls in the bar and that the language barrier was definitely huge, I had my pick of adorable Barcelonians (er, whatever they're called).

Unfortunately, during the melee my cousin attempted to take embarrassing pictures of me and when she tried to get the flash to work, accidentally erased all of my pictures and videos. I'm currently trying to recover those, but it's taking forever. Meantime, I'll post some pics of those I have.

Some Funny Stuff

Spain is strange, of course. It's a foreign country; it's supposed to be strange. If I didn't like strange, I wouldn't travel, right? So here's a list of things that have struck me as particularly funny or odd.

- In case you simply can't make it through a trip to the grocery store without a beer, there is a bar in the front of Simply market.

- As we walked out the door to head to the soccer game on Sunday "morning" (that's about 2pm) we accidentally caught sight of a young man, probably in his mid to late twenties, bent over to tie his shoe, exposing his entire underside. He was wearing a thong. A hot pink thong.

- There is an underwear store in Logrono whose display case is lit up at night and features rotating torsos to model the underwear. I have a video and if I have enough bandwidth later today I may post it. There are no thongs.

- There is a rad bar here called Jake. It's dark and grungy, usually uncrowded (and therefore unsmokey) and has good music and an arcade with tons of great old games. The thing is, "Jake" is not how you and I would say it. It's pronounced "haw-kgay".

- On the way back from Vitoria, we had to change trains at Miranda de Ebro. MDE is apparently THE hub for this part of Spain and as far as I know the train station is the entire town. We couldn't see our next platform so we followed and elaborate set of signs, down and up stairs, and through a tunnel only to come out about twenty feet from where we started with a clear path back to the original platform. How much money and effort went into creating tunnel access to platform 4?

- They have these cheap stores here that sell crap like notebooks and flip flops and all sorts of knickknacks. They're called Chinos. Really. Anyway, I needed a new towel, so we went to one when I first got here. We then found, across the aisle from the school supplies, a collection of figurines featuring women sitting on giant (proportional to the women) penises, plain ol' penises, and funny-looking penises. Why? Why why WHY why why?

- Possibly to be continued...