4-24-09 London Day 3

Today we were set to see Romeo & Juliet at the Globe Theatre. Knowing we had to stand in the cheap seats throughout the entire production, we decided to take it easy most of the day. We visited a few bookstores in the shopping district, one of which was the largest in the UK (called Waterstone's). We might have actually bought something if they carried used books (which I have sworn to buy exclusively whenever possible). We then went to the post office to ship some of our excess baggage back to ourselves - mostly guidebooks and souvenirs. This cost a fortune, as you might expect. After everything we've done on our trip, this little bit was enough to exhaust us, so we went back to the hotel for a midday nap.

We got to the Globe Theatre just in time. The actors and actresses were amazing - this night was the debut for the girl playing Juliet! She messed up one line but did a fantastic job otherwise (so far as I know, as I am not a theater critic). We stood through the intermission, which happened very late in the play, after Romeo's banishment and the beginning of their plan to reunite him with Juliet. Our bodies could not take the punishment of standing in place in the cold for any longer, so we left the play early.

I had a headache when we got back to the hotel, so we went to the drugstore for some pain medication. I was able to buy 100 ibuprofens for 0.35£!!! That's like 50 cents or so! Some things about Europe are just so much better than they are in the US.

Tired and hurting, we opted for a little comfort food at McDonalds, even though we had already gotten our once-per-country visit out of the way. We ordered a sandwich called the "M," which was basically a beef burger with a hard bread bun. It tasted OK, just a little bland because of a lack of condiments.

4-23-09 London, Oxford

Today we took a bus out to Oxford to see the campus and museums. The bus had wifi on board (probably via satellite or something), which worked after some trouble. To our chagrin, we noticed that the camera battery was dead. If we were going to have any pictures in all of Oxford, they would have to be cellphone pics :(

When we got there, we wandered into a cafe to get a drink and noticed that the place had an Alice in Wonderland theme! This is one of Natasha's favorite books (along with the illustrations). Oxford is where the books were written by Lewis Carroll, so the town has some of the history embedded in it. This place even had Alice themed desserts such as "mad chocolate cake."

We paid to get into Christ Church because somewhere in that place was a stained glass window that had Alice in Wonderland pictures in it. Many famous people have studied there, including John Locke. Eventually we found the window - a shame the camera battery was dead, for my cellphone does not do well in low light and far off targets. This is as good as it gets:

We tried to go to the Oxford library but we didn't want to pay the exorbitant fee they wanted for entry and a tour. Instead we checked out some free exhibitions and bought a few postcards at the gift shop. In this picture, Natasha proudly demonstrates that women are allowed inside (which was not the case in Virgina Woolf's time, for instance):

Next we wandered around in a 4 story bookstore for awhile. They had some antiquarian books, which I always like to look at (but would never want to own!). After this it was lunchtime. It was then that I tried the only food item that I really hated in all of my trip - a pasty (the 'a' pronounced as in 'cat'). This is a food that goes back to the days of the industrial revolution, when miners had to eat their lunch down in the mine without washing their hands. The "handle" on the outside was so that they could hold the thing with their dirty hand and eat the rest of it, then toss out the part they were holding without eating (too much) coal or dirt. Anyway, mine was truly awful - I may have just gotten the wrong kind, because Natasha liked hers. I had what was supposed to be lamb & mint, something I absolutely love back home. Instead it tasted like...unsweetened spearmint on potatoes and I couldn't taste any lamb. Yech.

After lunch we went to the Science museum, where we got to see old microscopes, compasses, gloves, chemistry sets, and things like that. They had a glass-framed chalkboard on which Einstein had written one of his equations for a lecture, so we got to see his handwriting in the flesh. While we were there, a teacher was taking a group of boys in school uniforms through, explaining things, but mostly what Einstein's equation was all about. This was really intriguing until he ended his lecture with something about how science is still interesting even though it is eclipsed by theology. Those poor kids will have a tough go of it in the modern world.

After that, there was still the Natural History museum - dinosaurs! They didn't seem to have any real dinosaurs, just casts made from molds of real ones, but they were still awesome. They had a life-size T-Rex skeleton looming over the place! Around the walls the entire history of life was displayed, starting from the trilobytes, winding around the entire room to end up at modern man.

We couldn't stay long, however, because we were worried that the Oxford University Press would close, and it was nearing 5pm. We hurried down to the Press only to find that it isn't open to the public, and their small Print museum is open by prior appointment only. Not only that, but the bookstore that the Press runs is a few blocks away (very close to the Science museum, we had missed it by only a block or so) and was closed.

Still, it was an exciting day. We took the bus back to the hotel, which by now had working internet. For dinner we decided to try the famous fish & chips - Natasha *hates* fish and I don't normally care for it, but, when in Rome...

Natasha managed to actually eat some of the fish, and I ate most of my portion. We were given too much :)

4-22-09 Nottingham to London

I don't know if I've let on to this much, but I'd been sick with a cold this entire trip. It was today that I finally woke up without cold symptoms. No more carrying medicine around with me everywhere I go!

We noticed that all the tables in the cafe downstairs have steak sauce bottles on them, each of which touts itself as the perfect accompaniment to all breakfast foods, including eggs, bacon, and everything else. Really? 

The owner of the hotel apparently screwed up our books, and we had to pay for an additional night's stay in cash on the spot because they had only charged our card for one night, and the card reader was back at her main office and not at the hotel. Can you imagine something like this back home? Truly an adventure.

The train ride to London was easy, full of scenery, and relatively short. When we got to London, we were greeted with something we had been warned about - transportation workers on strike. The Underground line to our hotel was shut down for that day due to the strike, so we had to take a roundabout passage, switching lines and going a little out of the way. Not too bad though. We were told to expect more strikes, especially in France, but this was the first one we'd come across.

Finding our hotel was a little troublesome, as we had forgotten to write the address down, and London street names can be a pain (more on this later). When we finally got checked in, we found to our surprise that, for the second time on our whole trip, we could expect to have wireless internet in our room. The first time this happened was back in Munich, and as I mentioned before, that connection was almost unusably slow. Fate being what it is, the hotel's internet connection was down and wouldn't be repaired until the next day. No worries, though, I was basically caught up on everything by then, having learned to get everything done quickly whenever I got the chance.

We went to Westminster Abbey. Outside, there was a huge protest (completely filling a fenced-in open square about the size of a city block). There were cops everywhere. The protest was apparently related to violence in Sri Lanka. Some of the protesters were on a hunger strike. At this point I didn't know much about the Tamil Tigers, only that they were a rebel group fighting the Sri Lankan government for sovereignty. When I did look this up later, I found to my horror that the Tamil Tigers are listed as a terrorist group, and have an abhorrent record as the first group to use suicide bombers, and the first group to use women as suicide bombers, as well as a host of other atrocities. Without more information, I'm not going to delve into that much, suffice to note that it is hard to imagine what the Tamils must have suffered that would justify such horror.

On a lighter note, we noticed on a British TV show that ice cream cones here come with a little chocolate stick in them. We finally found out that this is called a "flake" and that it tastes a little like old cake frosting. Not my thing.

We took a short boat tour across the Thames river. On the boat was an amusing tour guide who kept things humorous as he pointed out sights along the river. He used what I think is the funniest euphemism for prostitutes that I've ever heard: a lady of "negotiable affection." Too funny.

The HMS Belfast

The Tower Bridge

As part of our mission to eat at McDonalds in every country, we tried some from the store in the train station. I was expecting them to call the fries "chips," but alas, in true American style, they were called fries. They tasted exactly the same too. So did everything else. Be warned if you ever go to Europe, eating at McDonalds is not a cultural experience anymore.

4-21-09 Nottingham & Eastwood

I felt a little adventurous this morning, so I opted for the (in)famous British breakfast. This one is a milder form (no blood sausage or blood pudding, thankfully), but Natasha still found it unappealing. It's just baked beans and some other relatively normal breakfast foods! Tons of protein!

Today was our D.H. Lawrence day. For those that don't know, he's a post World War I writer who emphasized nature and emotion in the midst of a dirty and calculating Industrial Revolution. He is one of Natasha's favorite authors. We took a bus out to Eastwood, the town of his childhood, where they keep several commemerative sites in his honor.

We saw a museum set up in the house where he was born, which was stocked with several items from the period. The guide gave us some idea of what life was like for a family back then - dirty, cramped, cold, and rough. We thought we had been roughing it by not having our own bathroom - this would be a whole new idea of roughing it. Think of four kids sharing half a bed, the other half rented out to a vagabond. It escapes my imagination.

They also had a heritage museum that was dedicated mostly to the way of life during the Industrial Revolution. Eastwood used to be a coal miner's town, which greatly influenced everything about life there. We found out about the wages, injury rates (1 in 5 was put out of work for several weeks due to an injury some time in their career) and more.

We had tea & coffee at the White Peacock (named for one of DHL's novels). 

After this, we took the bus back to Nottingham, but not before stopping at the IKEA store on the way. Technically there is an IKEA close to Seattle, but we've never bothered to visit. After a quick browse, we hit up their Swedish cafe, and tried some Swedish cakes (two were great, the other had a green frosting that tasted like death). I also tried some lingonberry soda. Not bad!

The University of Nottingham is home to archives of DHL's work, so Natasha wanted to see if we could get access to some of it. We went down to the university library and tried to get in. Turns out the stuff is spread out over multiple campuses, and we didn't have time to get to them before they closed. Still, it was interesting to check out a British university.

We knew now that the whole town of Nottingham shuts down early, so we made it to a Chinese restaurant, ate dinner, and then went back to the hotel to call it a night.

4-20-09 Paris and Nottingham

After a relatively long stay in Paris, it was time to move on to Britain. We had been putting off mailing our postcards until today, and the few hours between breakfast and the bus to our airport were the only time we would have to mail them inside France. The post office happened not to be open yet, so we had to wait about 30 minutes outside. While there, an Egyptian man hailed us and tried to practice his English with us for awhile. He was pretty aggressive and liked to put his face really close to yours (which I hear is typical of Arabs? not sure) which was uncomfortable, but still, it was a neat experience.

The flight to Nottingham was only 45 minutes long, probably the smallest amount of time I've ever spent on an airplane. The flight was really cheap too - Europe has several small airlines (such as Ryanair) that fly to and from small, rural airports for prices in the 10€ to 20€ range. I wish they had this in the US.

On the bus from the East Midlands airport to the town of Nottingham, we passed a nuclear power plant - the first I've ever seen in my life.

We decided to take it easy today. After checking into our hotel, we wandered around for just a few hours. Downtown we found another Muji store. Nottingham is a relatively small town, so we were surprised to see one here. We went to the tourism office to get bus directions for our destinations the next day. We got back to our hotel and relaxed for a few hours, then left again to try and find food and some toiletries that we were running low on.

Lo and behold, this entire town shuts down at 5:30pm. Except for a few pubs, every place of business in the area was closed between 5:30 and 6. Unable to find anything open except for fast food places, we returned to our hotel.

Back at our hotel, we noticed that the building had a lounge with a television in it. We happened to catch the British version of Nigella Lawson's cooking show, which is kilometers beyond its American counterpart in sophistication. At this point, we were very tired and not very hungry, so we decided to save a couple pounds by going to bed early without dinner.

4-19-09 Paris Day 5

Today was our day to check out some historical sites related to some of our favorite French philosophers and other writers living in Paris. We happened across an outdoor bird store as we left the subway station, which was really neat. We then took a short walk around Notre Dame cathedral, and made our way to the left bank of the Seine, where some booksellers sell books from small metal boxes attached to the stone wall beside the river. One of these sellers had a really neat drawing of a cat posing as William Blake’s God. It was a little too expensive and would have been difficult to transport, or else I would have bought it.

From there we visited the Shakespeare & Co bookstore, which has a rich literary history. We then found the two cafes frequented by Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso, and many others. These were the Les Deux Magots, the Cafe de Flore, and the Brassiere Lipp.

After this, we visited the Cimetière du Montparnasse to catch a few more famous tombs. These included Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Charles Baudelaire, Samuel Beckett, Man Ray, and many more.

After this, we had a few hours before our scheduled rendevouz with my old friend from Anarchy Online. We decided we would try to interact with history a little by eating lunch at one of those famous cafes we saw earlier. We picked the Les Deux Magots. This turned out to be the most expensive meal of our entire trip (and all told, in all of my recent memory). We were charged 6.50€ for a single drink - a simple glass bottled Coke Lite (what they call Diet Coke in Europe). Our lunch ended up costing 30€ for two drinks and two simple sandwiches. These people know how to milk tourists with an intellectual bent.

Finally, the time arrive to go and visit my old friend. When I started playing Anarchy Online in 2002, Erik was one of the first people I met and befriended in game. We had played together on and off throughout the years. I'd never heard his voice in person (all chat being done via typing) and hadn't spoken to him in a few years, neither of us having played the game in a long time. Still, we were both excited to finally meet.

 We got to his apartment and met his wife, children, and friends. The adults spoke very good English, so we had no problems striking up conversations. Erik's little boy Milan (about 6 years old) was a blast to hang out with. He only knew a few words of English, and didn't seem to understand that I didn't know French, so he would go on and on and I could only chuckle and try to figure out what he was saying. By the end of the night he was dressed in a Batman costume and challenging everyone to swordfights with his Sabre-Laser (pronounced sab-ehr las-ehr, French for lightsaber). Natasha tried to fake death in order to stop the fighting, but Milan repeatedly insisted in rapid French that she was only hurt, which took us several minutes to translate.

Erik cooked us up some barbeque chicken and had us drink some Pastis (a liquor flavored with anise, which I am not keen on, but drank to be polite) and some delicious red wine. I don't drink very often, so this was enough to keep me toasty for the rest of the evening. We stayed up until almost 11 talking about politics and gaming and all manner of things. This was probably the best night of the trip for me. The whole experience was mindblowing.

4-18-09 Paris Day 4

Today we visited the area of Paris called Montemart, recently made famous in the movie Amelie. We made sure to get a picture of Natasha using the viewfinder like Nino uses in the movie, and got some shots of the area from up on the hill.

The way up and down the hill to the church is lined with scammers that try to fit a cotton bracelet around your arm and then charge you for it. I barely missed them on the way up – one of them grabbed my arm and I had to shake it off violently. This put me in a bad enough mood that, when it happened again on the way down, I actually got rough with one of them.

I consider this my “Underground Man” moment (c.f. Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground). I was filled with a feeling of rage and the burning desire to have justice done. A couple was walking in front of us and one of the scammers stopped the female and was trying to prevent her from moving around them. I walked up and shoved the thief right out of the way. To a person thinking more clearly, what happened next was predictable, and we were probably lucky to get out of there unhurt. What was worse was that afterwards the deed felt pointless and stupid, rather than triumphant. Anyways, in the future I will try harder to let things like this go, knowing how fruitless and unrewarding intervention is. At least I didn’t go spend a fortune on a nice outfit first J

Next we visited the infamous Pigalle (nicknamed “Pig Alley” by WWII GIs), which is Paris’ red light district. We were there in the middle of the day, though, so we were only hassled once about tickets to private entertainment. The guidebooks say that at night this can get quite aggressive. Pigalle also hosts a variety of cheap goods in gift shops, as well as the café front featured in the movie Amelie. We went into this café for lunch, but it turned out to be a ripoff – the front was used in the movie but a stage was built for the inside shots. The inside of this café looks nothing at all like the one in the movie. There isn’t even a tobacconist! The food is outrageously expensive as well. We ordered a “croque madame” which is supposed to be a ham sandwich with an egg inside or on top. We got basically an open faced toasted cheese and ham with no egg (which technically makes it an open-faced "croque-monsieur"). It tasted great, but not good enough for the price. If you liked the movie and you’re in Paris, take some pictures outside and move on.

Those who know me well would scarcely believe what we did next. I got a haircut in Paris! I don’t know any French, so all I could do is give the guy my state ID and point to the picture. The shop we went to was gender separated, which was unusual to me. Only men cut men’s hair, and only women cut women’s, and the areas were divided by a wall, so that there was almost two separate shops. The guy did an excellent job, one of the best I’ve ever had, and for a price comparable to what I pay back home. He even used a razor on the nape of my neck instead of close clippers like they do back home. That was a little unnerving when I figured out what that scraping feeling was J

Finally, we went to a market and bought an éclair, another traditional French dessert. This one surprised us by being cold on the inside, but it was still tasty.

4-17-09 Paris Day 3

Today we took a stroll to the Eiffel Tower. The views from the Park of the Field of Mars surrounding the tower are great, so much so that we didn’t feel the need to pay to go up. The tower was a different color than we expected – it is a light brownish color rather than grey.  We got some decent shots from underneath, and then headed toward Les Invalides, which is host to several buildings, including Napoleon's tomb as well as the Musée de l'Armée.

On the way we stopped for a traditional French dessert, a banana and nutella crepe with coffee (aux lait, which is basically what a latte is back home). This was Natasha’s treat, as I have only recently found a taste for nutella. I had a bite, though, and it was good.

My treat was the Musée de l'Armée. Natasha doesn’t really go in for the war and weapons stuff, but this was one of the best parts of Paris for me. We got to see the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, a whole WWI/WWII history museum (which had a decidedly pro-French bias throughout), and a museum of weapons from the ancient world up through the 20^th century. We saw samurai armor, medieval armor, ship cannons, spears, rifles, and everything else.

Next up was the Musée d'Orsay, which is an Impressionist and Art Nouveau gallery, located in an old train station. On the way we had our first occurrence of a car actually stopping for us to cross the road (Parisian drivers are famous for ignoring pedestrians), and walked past the Seine and the French Parliament.

Finally, to top this busy day off, we hit the parts of the Louvre that we missed the day before. I saw the painting on the cover of my copy Rousseau’s Emile, and a painting of Hector handing off Astyanax to Andromache before he goes to his doomed fight with Achilles. We saw the Mona Lisa again, and it was no less crowded this time. They keep you too far away from the painting to get good pictures of it, but we managed to snap a few. We also took some pictures of the cat from the painting opposite.

We had our one and only French McDonald’s experience to wrap things up. Again, the food is mostly the same everywhere, except that here, when they give you “fry sauce,” it turns out to be tartar sauce. Ugh.

4-16-09 Paris Day 2

Today was our first of two visits to the Louvre. It was an especially busy day, apparently because the banks were all closed for a holiday, freeing up thousands of bank employees for a day of recreation, and thus, extra museum visitors.

Having taken a course in Ancient Greek, I was excited to see some of the Greek pottery, which bears inscriptions in Greek. I was hoping to be able to read some of them. It turns out they are almost unintelligible, and they are written in all upper case letters and usually upside down or backwards. They were very interesting though. I noticed a few kalos inscriptions, which meant that the vase was commissioned by a lovestruck patron for the purpose of being given to a love interest as a gift. The word kalos means “beautiful” or “noble” in Greek. The scenes on the vases ran the gamut of Greek history, from Homer to the Peloponnesian war, and some mythology, including the Amazons.

I also discovered that I like Romantic painting. However much I disagree with Romantic authors and some of their philosophers, the Romantics knew how to get a rise out of a viewer of a painting. One artist I took a particular interest in was Jacques-Louis David, who for a time served as a painter (or propaganda artist) for Napoleon.

That was mostly it for our first day to the Louvre. We saved most of the modern art and the Egyptian/Assyrian stuff for a later day. We went off to find some coffee, only to find that the French idea of coffee is the same as that of the Italians – only espresso, and very expensive. McDonalds had a decent café inside, and their word for an Americano was a “café alonge.” It is extremely difficult to find aspartame sweeteners in Europe (I know it is toxic, but it is what we are used to), so I skimmed the whipped cream off Natasha’s drink and put it in my coffee. This turned out to be the best cup of coffee I’ve had in Europe. They still can’t hold a candle to the local Seattle stuff.

The second part of our day was reserved for the Champs-Elysees, which starts at the Louvre and goes all the way to the Arc de Triomphe. Along the way are some fountains and a commemorative obelisk, taken from Egypt, and placed on the spot where Marie Antoinette was made “a head shorter on top.”

When we reached the Arc, we happened to be there just in time for the daily rekindling of the flame atop the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which lies directly beneath the Arc. This must have been a special occasion, as some monks were present in addition to some war veterans, politicians, and soldiers armed with assault rifles and bayonets. We didn’t have a great view but it was still neat to watch. This may have had something to do with the bank holiday, but we scoured the news and couldn’t find any information about it.

4-15-09 Paris Day 1

Today we finally experienced the fabled small European breakfast – just one croissant, juice, and coffee. No matter, it was still enough to get the day started. After finding our hotel, our first order of business was to visit Pere-Lachaise, a nearby cemetery containing the graves of some famous historical figures. Paris has several of these sites, but we were only able to visit two during our stay here.

At this cemetery, we found the graves of Colette, Sarah Bernhardt, Maria Callas, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, and some others. Seeing these graves can be a quieting experience, but it can also be a nonevent, depending on your mood and your connection to the person. Most of the famous people continue to have fresh flowers, poems, and memorabilia placed on their tombstones by fans. Other not-so-famous people’s tombstones are mossy with neglect. Some crypts are littered with trash, their windows broken and carved text fading. Only fame preserves, and even that will be fleeting for all but a very few.

When we were at Proust’s grave, a landscaping crew was noisily shredding some tree branches they had just pruned. Solemnity is not always guaranteed, even in the most solemn of places. Work must go on.

This cemetery was also host to several WWII monuments – one for each of the worst concentration camps that French citizens were sent to, and several more to the victims of terrorist attacks and natural disasters. Even though relatively few French citizens were carted off during the war (I believe it was in the tens of thousands rather than the hundreds or millions), these monuments were extremely evocative and emotionally hard hitting, perhaps even more so than visiting one of the camps itself.

The monuments to members of the French Resistance movement were also moving. They brought to life the ideas of French philosophers such as Camus and Sartre, who were victims of the occupation and worked with the Resistance. According to them, none of us is immune to hard and sometimes deadly choices. Any one of us could be put in the position of those French citizens, under a foreign and tyrannical occupation, and any one of us could be forced to choose between fighting and dying painfully, and cooperating at a loss of all dignity. According to Camus, trying to escape the choice was effectively choosing. Few of us can imagine this predicament, yet we are all susceptible to it.

After this, it was time to take it easy for awhile. The internet was accessible down in the lobby of our hotel (which doubled as a café), so we were able to take turns getting caught up on email and the like, without the rush of timed access as had been the case in all of Italy. We also got to take a shower for the first time in a few days, as the accommodations in Rome had been less than desirable.

In some cities breakfast is made available in the lobby of whatever hotel you are staying in. In some cases this will be included with the price of the stay, as in Rome, and sometimes it will cost extra, as it did in Munich. However, the cost in Paris was a staggering 7€ a plate. After a little wandering, we managed to find a small market and buy some baguettes, nutella, and fruit juice, which was enough to eat breakfast for three days, all for a measly 5€.

We soon discovered that 7€ a plate for breakfast was actually an average to low price for a meal at most restaurants in Paris. The prices for standard meals were usually much higher. There are some exceptions – restaurants will usually sell Paninis for 5€ apiece, and this tends to be enough food to keep you going. There are also Turkish restaurants that sell food at comparable prices. To eat a real French meal was, however, beyond our means on this trip.

4-14-09 Rome Day 3

We checked out of our hotel and made our way to the subway station, catching our last glimpses of the majestic Colosseum. We thought we had left pretty early so as not to wait in a line at the Vatican Museum. When we got there, however, the line was insanely long. It was easily 500m long, extending around a block and a half with a large snaking portion. We thought that this would be one of those “hours long” lines that we hear horror stories about (get reservations for museums, people!), but to our amazement we got all the way through in about 20 minutes.

I’m not sure if we just didn’t spend enough time on the Vatican website or if they just aren’t very good webmasters, but when we got to the ticket office the price was substantially more than we had expected. We’ve managed to cut enough corners on food and such to be able to afford the price, however. The price was 14€ a ticket. It turned out to be well worth it.

Today was the day I saw my first dead human being in person – there was a mummified woman lying in a sarcophagus in the first wing of the museum. I don’t feel any more adjusted to the inevitability of death as a result – something about the age of the corpse gives it a sterilizing emotional distance.

 We found busts of some important ancient Greek personalities:

This golden sphere in one of the courtyards, created for the museum in the 90s, is one of the few pieces of modern art that I’ve actually liked:

The culmination of hours of wandering through this museum was, for us, the chance to see Raphael’s School of Athens in person.

 After this room we were funneled into the Sistine Chapel with large crowds. If you ever visit, bring binoculars – the famous ceiling is very high up and the paintings are relatively small. We weren’t able to get good photographs with the light and distance being what they were. The Last Judgment on one of the walls is much bigger and easier to see.

The Vatican museum actually has some information on its exhibits, so at first we were wondering if our 10€ guidebook was worth the price. Eventually, however, it proved its worth, especially in the Sistine, where it names and describes the paintings and their features. In the Sistine Chapel there are repeated admonitions to be silent and respectful since the room is supposed to be holy, but this is almost universally ignored – the room is a madhouse of chatting crowds and screaming children.

Once outside, we managed to get a few pictures of some Swiss guards:

Finally, we found a laundromat, which was different than the ones I’m used to in that a person actually does your laundry while you wait, and gives you some complimentary internet access time on their computers, all for a slightly inflated price of 10€ for a single load.

Our laundry was done in time for us to catch our night train to Paris. At the end of our time in Italy and in the days since, we’ve reflected on our experience there. We’ve found that Italy is a place of crazy drivers (especially the mopeds), rude and pushy pedestrians, and indolent shopkeepers. The food is delicious but expensive, the lunches long and service slow. There is no such thing as an orderly line at a ticket counter or cashier, only a chaotic mob pushing and shoving to the front. In general, it seems like everyone is in a frenzied, panicky rush to get wherever it is they are going so that, when they get there, they can sit around and relax for several hours. To me, it’s a madhouse. Still, there were great sights to see, and the whole experience was incredible.