Capri

This week we went on a tour bus through Naples, Pompei, and Sorrento.  We stayed in a four star Hotel in Sorrento.  The bus never stopped for pictures in Naples or Sorento, and pictures from inside the bus were not so good.  But we took lots of pics in Pompei, which we will post later.

Today we are on the isle of Capri.  We landed yesterday and had a walking tour of the island...we are bushed.  One of the things we did was take a chair lift to the top-most part of the island where you can get almost a 360 degree view.

The rock formation behind Pat is take from a beautiful garden on the northwest corner of the island.  

The formation just above her hat is actually two rocks that tourist like to ride between...the opening is quite narrow, but you can hire a boat to take you through.

The very first excursion on Capri was to visit the Blue Grotto.  This is something we probably would have passed on had we planned the trip ourselves, but Becky put it into our itinerary, and we are glad she did.  The grotto is a huge cave that has a small opening from the sea that is only accessible when the water is fairly calm.  You get on a row boat and actually have to lie down on your back to get through the opening.  The man who rows the boat has to pull us through with a chain that is attached to the wall of the cave and has to do something akin to the limbo to get through.  Once inside, the cave is about 30 feet high and the water glows blue from the light streaming through the small opening that we just came through.  It is beautiful.  The rowers all sing once inside to demonstrate the acoustics...wonderful!

Bellow is a picture from inside looking towards the cave opening.  It is a bit fuzzy, but there is not much light for taking pictures.

Leonardo DeCaprio sends his reguards.  Ciao for now.

Around our place

The living conditions are fine.  We expected a small apartment and that’s what we got.  There’s room for a kitchenette dining table, couch, tv, and some storage on the main level. Upstairs there is a bathroom and loft bedroom that overlooks the main floor (comfy king size bed).  The ceiling is open beam construction (not just for looks, really an architectural feature) and the floors are all tiled.  The large window overlooks the street (alley?) called Via Della Reginella; we are door #6, second floor.  Here is our door.  It is about 9 feet tall and leads into a hallway and then a set of very uneven steps to our appartment.

 Here is a picture taken of our street close to our apartment.

Here is a picture of our apartment from the loft.

 

Here is a picture of Piazza Mattei right at the end of our street.

Everywhere you go there is something neat to look at.  Just around the corner we found ruins of a theater constructed by Caesar called Teatro Marcello.  Interestingly the foundation was still in good enough shape that 15 centuries later another building (I think it is a monastery) was built on top of it.

 

When we visited the Vatican, there were thousands of people there and I felt a bit like a sardine.  The light was not good for photography, so I am not real happy with most of the pictures.  There are so many wonderful things to see, you really don’t know what to photograph.  I decided to just post a few of the better pictures and not worry about the subjects.  I found the ceilings and the floors very interesting.  There is a picture below of a section of the floor tiled in thousands of little dark blue tiles, so fine you can’t pick out the individual tiles.  All of the floors are some kind of stone laid in intricate detail. 

 

There are a couple of pics below of ceilings in the Vatican Museum.  There is a very blurry picture that I included just to show the mass of people we were moving with and the length of the hallway.  This hallway contained mostly tapestry and the entire ceiling was filled with paintings.  I took this pic about half way down the hall.

 

The hallway ceiling looked like this all the way down.

 

This is a picture of a ceiling in the museum that appears to be sculpted figures, but our guide assured us that it was entirely flat figures made to look that way…how about that 3-D way back then.

 

There are tons of statues.  I include the picture below to show just a few.

 

Colosseo

What an experience to actually go inside the Roman Colosseum.  Imagine...it has been standing for over 2000 years, and still the mortar is in place and you can walk on the concourse.  Of course lots of structure is missing but Hell, the Brown's stadium needs $30 million of renovations already!  I can't believe this stadium that held 60,000 people took only 8 years to build, considering the lack of machines that we take for granted today.

We also stopped at the Termini, the main train and bus station...amazing.  It is as big as 4 football fields under roof and is two stories of shops...looks like a mall.  .There are 50 platforms you can use to board trains.

We also visited the Trevi Fountain.  Look at all the people surrounding the pool of water.  Behind the fountain itself is a magnificent wall of statues.

Things to know

OK, here are some things to know if you visit Rome.  There are no Wal-Mart type stores.  All of the stores sell only one type of thing…the pharmacies (Pharmacia) only sell drugs and drug supplies (no groceries, tobacco, candy, etc) and the stores are on about every other corner and all have the same sign, tobacco shops (tabacchi) sell smokes, lottery tickets, bus tickets (huh?) and a few odds and ends, leather shops sell leather products, etc.  Markets sell food (but not peanut butter!) and little else.  There is no such thing as one stop shopping.  In the vicinity of where we are staying there are about 200 restaurants (that is a conservative estimate) and hundreds of single purpose stores.  The stores are tiny by our standards.

Buses are everywhere and if we ever figure out where they go, we will use them. 

Traffic is awful.  It takes a strong stomach to drive here.  There don’t seem to be any rules, except stop at red lights and allow pedestrians to have the right of way.  Most corners don’t have stop signs, so it is every man for himself and the feint hearted will have to wait.  If I were to live my life over, I would buy stock in motor scooters and Smart cars…they are everywhere.  I don’t understand why more people don’t die on motor scooters…they weave in and out of traffic and the auto drivers just seem to expect that and don’t run them down.  Smart cars don’t parallel park, they just back straight into a half a spot.

The roads are very narrow, but that doesn’t slow anybody down.  Park wherever; there is hardly an inch between parallel parked cars.  I watched a guy park in a space waaaay too small…he just backed in until he hit the car behind , then hit the scooter in front, backed into the guy behind again and finally got about 80% into the space and turned off his engine.  Just about all of the cars in the city have some kind of dent.

Dining is expensive.  If you go to a nice ristorante, expect to pay 70 euro (about $90) for a dinner for two (plus tip).  At the other end of the dining scale are the Bars…yes you can buy a drink, but they mostly sell sandwiches (panini), salads, desserts, but are closed by dinner time.   There are also tratoria, tavalo caldo, and other moderately priced places, but I haven’t had a meal anywhere for less than 20 euro for the two of us and that was today’s lunch…two Panini, two waters, one coffee, and two dessert rolls at a really neat bar.

Most of the people here will try to help you, even if the language gets in the way.  They go out of their way to be polite.  It is a pleasure to listen to them talk, even when I have no idea what they are saying.  They seem to sing the words.

Vatican Tour

I hope these posts are in English, because the directions here are in Italian!

The Pope says Buon Giorno.  We spent about four hours touring the Vatican and the Vatican Museum, including the Sistine ChapelI.  It was awe inspiring.  No pictures can do it justice.  It would take several days to see everything.  The tour guide rushed us through what she could in the time we had.  We were basically herded through like cattle for most of the tour.  We were exhausted at the end.

We are still trying to find our way around.  This place is gigantic.  We walked to Bernini Piazza.  It took about 2 hours to walk here.  We are sitting in a ristorante that has wi-fi and having a nice dinner.  Finding wi-fi is still a challenge, so we can't write as much as we would like.  Tomorrow we take a  hop-on-hop-off tour bus.  We aren't sure where we have to walk to get on the bus.  It looks like it will be quite a hike.

Next post we might get some pictures posted if we can figure it out.

Finally, we're here

We are finally in Rome, but not an easy time.  First, the flight from Cleveland to Newark was cancelled.  They assigned another plane for two hours later which was delayed a half hour, but we still got to Newark about 20 minutes before departure to Rome.  The luggage even made it.

Then 8 hours in a plane...finally in the Rome airport.  The service that was to pick us up at the airport thought the flight was cancelled, so the driver left.  Luckily, the service had a booth at the airport and called the driver back (an hour late).  Now we were supposed to call the apartment manager, but had no phone that worked in Rome, so the guy at the booth called for me...no answer, he left a message.

We get to the apartment, no manager.  A very nice woman who owned a cookie shop right down the street, but spoke little English called for me...no answer.  We dragged our luggage down town and bought cell phones...wouldn't work for two hours.  We went back to the cookie lady, she called and got the manager.  About a half hour later we were in.  We left looking for wi-fi.  No luck.

 Today we looked all over, finally, at dinner at RJ Numbs Ristorante the manager hooked us up and here we are!

 We will try to post later.

Ciao.

Safely Arrived

Dad called me this morning to let me know that they've safely arrived in Italy. So far, they're unable to find an internet connection, so they'll be delinquent in posting their adventures until they've found something.