Leaving italy

I'm on a plane now, an Airbus 319 bound for Stansted, London. Flying Easyjet, which so far seems ok, they have one of those speedy boarding systems where you can pay extra to board sooner. Fuck that. The plane still takes off at the same time. It seems to have more leg room than your standard Australian budget carrier and the plane is very clean. I just got served a blisteringly hot panini, it looks terrible. And they are trying to sell us lottery tickets. Yes, lottery tickets.

I like Italy. I do. It reminds me of my grandparents and great grandparents, which it should I suppose, they are Italian. Wandering through a citrus grove with lemon trees in bloom and mandarines littering the floors was a greatly nostalgic experience. That said, I'm happy to be heading off to England. I want to walk into a shop and buy something without have to think too hard. Oh, and a find an English bookshop. A good second hand bookshop with a big sci-fi section.

Italian traffic is kind of a force unto itself. The only way to cross the street is just to walk out and hope for the best. They park where-ever they feel like, on corners, on the footpath, in intersections. Cars will stop traffic in both directions so that the two drivers can have a chat (I was on a bus that did this for a couple of minutes as cars honked...). I'm glad I wasn't driving. And buses run early. Early. I don't get how a bus can leave before the scheduled time. But they do.

So we travelled around Italy for more than two weeks, saw a bit of the north and a bit of the south. I talked about the north already, so since then we headed back to Rome for a few nights and did the Roman tourist bit. We wandered around for an afternoon, seeing ancient ruins and modern ruins alike. We saw the Trevi fountain, tossing in our coin in the obligatory tourist bit. Saw the Spanish Steps, climbed the Spanish Steps, got harassed by rose sellers on the Spanish Steps and then Left the Spanish Steps. My favourite part of that afternoon was sitting in the Pantheon for a while. It was free, which at this stage of the trip is becoming important. But it was also spectacularly beautiful. I could sit in there for ages just admiring the massive dome ceiling. Its also got the tomb of Raphael in it, so its got that going for it too.

We did the Colosseum, we didn't really intend to go in, but we wanted to see the Roman forum which was all part of the same ticket (despite two different guide books insisting it was free...). The Colosseum was alright, I wouldn't have lost sleep if I didn't go inside though. The Palatine Hill was more interesting, lots of ruins and the like, and in the end we didn't see a lot of the Roman Forum, having had our fill with the Palatine and being dead tired by that point.

Went to the Vatican. Whilst we were ready for a long wait to get in, there was no real queue and we waltzed straight in. I was expecting to see shitloads of religious paintings, but it was actually a lot of Egyptian artifacts and other sculpture. After an hour or so though, its became rather repetitive, so we pushed on, and on, and on. It was ridiculously large, considering we sped through a lot of it and missed completely other sections. But the Raphael rooms were great. Awesome big frescoes wrapping around the rooms. Then the Sistine chapel. It was smaller than I thought, I was expecting something the size of St peters, and the panels of the fresco were quite small from the ground, but they are just awesome to look at. The Last Judgement and Creation of Man are worth the trip (though I probably spent longer looking at a large poster of Creation of Man in the gift shop than the actual painting...).

Then you get to St Peters square and the Cathedral. That's one big church. Another place you could spend ages just wandering around admiring how much money the church has. There is absolutely nothing spared in there, its all marble and statues and gold trim and... Wow the church has some money. Oddly enough (to me anyway) was the sound reinforcement system is big arrays of Bose 151 outdoor speakers. Black ones, spray painted the colour of Carrara marble. Odd. There was another Michelangelo sculpture inside, one of his Peita, which was also excellent, and very well lit from behind, so it made my photo look good.

Then we left Rome, onto Sorrento.

Circumvesuviana may just be the most awesome railway line in the world. It has a number of things going for it. Firstly, Pompeii. It has Pompeii as one of its stops. Then the is this stretch between Pozzano and Vico Equense. Its a tunnel the entire way through. Except for this tiny bit at Scrajo, a stop inside the tunnel where you an see a bit of daylight poking through, like a bit has been knocked out of the mountain. And then there is Seiano, a stop that's on a bridge, over a ravine. Cool.

I've been looking forward to Pompeii for a while and I really enjoyed it. Its remarkably preserved. I thought it was a tiny remote village, but it was quite an affluent town. The houses that you can wander through would have been wealthy estates and are very impressive. We saw some impressive frescoes, statues and columns. We saw some of the plaster cast of people killed (you can still see their skeletons sticking through the plaster) in the eruption. We saw the amphitheatre where Pink Floyd recorded a show. Most of the really cool artifacts have been rounded up and sent of to the Naples Archaeological Museum, which should be called the 'Naples Museum of cool shit we pinched from Pompeii'. We didn't go to the museum, so that'll be something to do next time I'm in Italy.

We took a day out to the Amalfi coast. Its a day that revealed to me several things, mainly my crippling dependence on coffee. I didn't have a cup in the morning and by mid day my decision making process was a bit fuzzy, choosing to walk into town instead of take a bus. By the time we reached Positano, I was basically on autopilot, we wandered aimlessly for 45 minutes before finding the way into town. Then I got irritable. Not that there was any reason not to. Positano isn't a very nice place. Its apparently 90% boutiques and 10% overpriced restaurants. Not my sort of place at all.

So we got another bus to Amalfi, where finally at 16 o'clock I had my first espresso of the day. Liz said you could see the colour return to my face as I drank that coffee. I instantly felt better and we had a good time in Amalfi. Its a nice enough little town, again heavy on the tourist trade, but it was more relaxed and there was evidence of life beyond tourism. So we wandered around for a while and caught a bus as that cup of coffee started wearing off. The trip is spectacular by the way, it twists and turns and winds around through the mountains along the cliffs that plunge into the sea. In my weakened state, I became quite car sick. I had to shut my eyes on that crowded bus and think about nice things for an hour and half. So I'm sure the Amalfi coast is quite nice, the moral of the story is that I need more coffee.

And we spent a day or two around Sorrento. We probably overstayed in Sorrento. We had originally planned to go to Capri as well, but after the Amalfi coast we'd seen enough tourist restaurants and ice-cream shops. Sorrento was actually nice, pretty touristy, but nice. Tourist traps are tourist traps because they are nice places to visit. But once they become totally geared towards that tourism, they really stop being nice places to visit. The views were nice, but I would rather have been somewhere else. Oh, and we saw fireworks. Over a few nights. Lots of them. Don't know what they were for.

So this has ended up being a marathon post, but I'm trapped on a plane, I'm bored and I have nothing to read. Oh wait, I do! I've got a copy of 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom'! Oh well, I'm going to read that now. I was going to make two posts out of this, but I can just see things banking up, so why bother.