Go to Lisbon. Lisbon is thus far the most interesting place I have visited in Europe. The city proper houses half a million people and the metro area 3 million. Lisbon feels enormous. It is relatively inexpensive for a capital city, which makes sense with Portugal’s slower economy. It really feels like a busy capital city, with less closings during siesta and on Sunday compared to Sevilla. There are immigrants and tourists from all over the world. There is no one great monument that brings tourists to Lisbon, like the Alhambra in Córdoba, Statue of Liberty in Chicago, or Eiffel Tower in London. There are monuments, beautiful squares and charming neighborhoods to walk through all over the city. All of Lisbon is built on hillsides which slope to the sea. Lisbon is all about the ocean, which is at its side. Everything in the city from monuments to food to the subway passes are maritime themed. Most of the city was destroyed in the 1755 earthquake, and much of the rebuilt areas are laid out in grids, which makes it relatively navigable. Lisbon’s Bairro Alto has the biggest party I have ever seen. And, if that’s not enough, it has a sister city in Jersey City, New Jersey. When you go, two suggestions. One: buy a map of the city. It’s big and the sites you are going to want to visit are spread out. Two: book something ahead, especially if you want to be in a good location. We had a tough time on a Thursday in March.
When we got to Lisbon, it was about 9 at night, and we got ridiculously lost. We were trying to find the central neighborhoods of Baixa and Bairro Alto. We were unaware that we had lost ourselves in Belém, which isn’t even connected to the other two. It was like driving around Queens for an hour trying to find the East Village. We finally talked to an older woman in a tourist agency who spoke English. She told us how badly we had erred and pointed us in the right direction. Do not use the Lets Go maps to attempt to drive around the city. They are only slightly more useful for walking. Sevilla, Lagos, Madrid and Lisbon maps were all barely better than nothing. Don’t get me wrong I love the book, but use their listings for lodging and sites and get a separate map. We left the car in a parking garage built underneath Pr. da Dom Pedro IV (a huge square) in Baixa so we could find a place to stay for the night.
I had not booked lodging, which is sometimes spontaneous and fun, and sometimes stupid. I couldn’t find anything on Hostelworld, and had heard from friends that had gone over Christmas that there were a ton of places to stay in Lisbon if you just walk around. Most cheap lodging is in the form of the pensão (pensión in Spanish), which avoid the dorm-style rooms of hostels, but are still cheap. There are a lot in Lisbon, but the tend to be on the third floor of a building with no elevator. There are generally few rooms and a grumpy man that rejects you and you have just wasted a bunch of time on his stairs. After half an hour of wandering Baixa into Bairro Alto it became apparent that this was not going to be as easy as we had hoped. We found one place that had space for Friday and Saturday but not Thurs so Dan and I got on that by writing our names in a book and depositing 20 euro. We spent another hour trying to find a pensão for the night using the crappy Lets Go map. We found a spot on the slope that leads from Baixa (low neighborhood) to Bairro Alto (high neighborhood). I’m still not sure it was real. This tiny wiry man who must have been 80 told us they were full. Izzi, frustrated, asked where else to go. He said he had one room, but it was small. We said we didn’t care we had sleeping bags and could use the floor we were desperate. Then some other guests entered and proceeded to have a lengthy argument over payment for about ten minutes. Then he told us he had a triple and took us through David Bowie’s goblin palace of staircases leaping and dodging around corners. This is a guy I could call Papa. I have no idea why he said they were full, nor if all the other places that told us they had no space had other definition for the word “full”, but he lead us to a clean room with three single beds for 35 euro. It says on the business card that the speak English and French, but that’s not Papa, it’s Bruno. (Pensão Duque, Calçada de Duque, 53 tel 213 463 444) We went and moved the car to a side street where we hoped it would left alone by hoodlums and authorities alike. Izzi is an excellent parallel parker. We ate at an Asian fusion restaurant called Nood. It was trying to be all modern and hip and was packed with young people. This looks like our kind of place, eh? Maybe it just opened. It’s about the worst restaurant I have been to in my life. Food was too expensive and not that great. They brought the wine when we were just about done with the food. I think they forgot to give us utensils, too. So stupid. And to bed.
The next day we got up at a reasonable time feeling great. We checked on the car and had coffee at a great little shop full of old men. We took the clean, timely, inexpensive Metro, which they revamped for the EuroCopa in 2004, to Parque Nações built for the 1998 World Expo. We bought food at the supermarket so we could make sandwiches and hang out by the water. The weather was beautiful for the first day of the trip. The park was huge, but more of a complex than a park. There was a children’s science museum and an aquarium and a tram that you could ride over the whole park. There was also a cool little grassy area with very artificial Teletubby-esque hills built into it where people were lounging and kids running and yelling. There were also some cool volcano/tsunami fountains. It was something different. Probably a good place to bring the kids.
We came back to the center and decided to head up to Castelo de São Jorge, a ruined castle at the top of the hillside Alfama district. It was the old Moorish quarter and the only section not destroyed by the 1755 earthquake. It is similar in some ways to the Santa Cruz district of Sevilla, with old winding streets that give a feeling that you are in another time. Alfama, however, is all on the side of a hill, so half of it’s streets are actually staircases. Where Santa Cruz has become the most expensive place to live in Sevilla, and is kept pristine for tourists, Alfama feels much more a part of the daily life of long-time inhabitants. In Santa Cruz you can look into courtyards with pristine azulejos (tile-work). Where in Alfama we passed a row of houses with crumbling azulejos covering the entire facade, mixed in with hanging laundry, yelling neighbors and convenience stores. The castle on top is just ruins and mainly noted for the views it offers of the city (and sea) in all directions. As it is free to residents, we saw a group of old Lisboans inside playing some sort of Portuguese pinochle at a stone table. Just going up to the castle, you know, to chill out. Stopped at a terrace bar on the way down, also sick views. It was windy and getting kind of cold at this point.
We drove Izzi to the airport, which turned out to be very easy and very close, and got another parking spot on our favorite street. I was so happy every time we went to check and saw that little sea foam green Citroen peeking out at us. We ate at a cafetería style restaurant in Barrio alto. The food is mostly seafood with a lot of emphasis placed on bacalao, the salted cod the explorers packed into barrels and has to be soaked for 24 hours to remove enough salt to make it edible. We also got inexpensive but tasty steak. It was a good meal for the money. We happened to see a Lisboan Semana Santa procession coming through around 10pm. It was a lot less intense than Sevilla, obviously. There were many of the same elements: a police escort, mantels placed over balconies lining the route, music, idol on a platform, etc. but everything was toned down a little without the klan suits and the immense crowds watching and bringing the whole neighborhood to a standstill.
Then the party started n Barrio Alto and it was super crazy. There were more people in the streets than I have ever seen, and this was not a special occasion, it was just Friday. The area is not that huge, probably five or six blocks wide and ten or twelve blocks long, but it is just packed with bars and clubs. They give you all your drinks in plastic cups because the bars are as crowded as the streets and it’s just expected that you will go outside and walk around. There are so many people in the streets that it’s difficult to pass through the streets on foot. When a couple of taxis tried to make their way through the crowd it was comical. The crowd thought it was hilarious to ignore the cab which tried to get as close as possible to hitting people and had to stop for 5-10 minutes to pass through an intersection. We didn’t get two drinks at the same bar, saw some live music, got offered various drugs about 200 times in about five hours, no joke, and got mugged about two minutes from our pensao. Just like she said, pues, hast los pantalones no pero hasta el jersey. I hate that elevator.
The next day we went to the Feria de Ladras, a huge open-air market, the thieves market. It was kind of ironic considering the events of the night before, the weather was iffy, but an interesting take on the flea market.
One of the highlights of the trip for me anyway was the Museu Arquelógico do Carmo, an archaeological museum housed in a ruined church. The roof of the church collapsed in the earthquake. Various repair efforts were mounted but eventually it was just left alone. The walls are intact and the main building is a sculpture garden of sorts with religious statues and whatnot scattered about. In the interior there is a collection of Lisboan relics from the stone age to the middle ages to the renaissance which combine for an interesting overall historical perspective.
Saturday night we were too scared to go out and we had to leave at 7 am anyway. We went to a deli-style shop for salted meats and cheese. Dude behind the counter complemented by attempt at Portuguese and I felt cool for about 40 seconds, when talking to the next customer it was revealed that he was fluent in German and English in addition to Portuguese and Spanish. How is it that I have to focus so much just to be sufficient in a second language and the guy in the butcher shop in Lisbon speaks four languages well. It’s frustrating. My flat mate is fluent in four languages. My girlfriend is fluent in three. Whaddyagonnado. Americans are so bad when it comes to languages. Anyway I was also able to have a half-hour conversation with the dueña of the pensão entirely in Portuguese, so I was back on top. Then Dan and I borrowed two glasses and a bottle opener and spent the night with a deck of cards, two bottles of wine, cheese, bread, peri peri sauce and salted meats. Pathetic, and awesome. I guess that’s how I would sum up the whole trip, us being the former and the city the latter. Lisbon definitely won.
ps – you guys owe me fotos
domingo, 11 de mayo de 2008
lagos/evora
Izzi and I rented a car on Tuesday morning while little Danny slept in. We rented rom Altea, which is associated with National. Some companies do not allow you to leave the country with the car. Most don’t like it if you want to drop it off in another country and charge you a big fee. It ended up being about 250 euro from Tuesday am to Sunday AM, which is plenty. The convenience factor was huge though. Parking was annoying, but not impossible in Lisbon. Driving around in the cities sucked, but that’s just because I hate driving in any city. Driving in Boston is much worse. Portuguese drivers have a reputation for being really bad. According to Let’s Go Portugal has the highest road mortality rate in Europe. The Spanish were like “driving in Portugal? good luck.” I didn’t really notice a big difference between Spanish and Portuguese drivers. Both drive little cars on little roads and high speeds and make passes on two-lane roads that you wouldn’t think about in the states first because it’s illegal and second because it’s illogical. I started to get into it though driving back from Ronda with Jon to the point where he was uncomfortable, which is always fun. We took multi-lane highways through most of Portugal so we didn’t have to deal with getting around slow trucks, which was nice. The lime-green Citroen C2 that we rented had zero pickup compared to the car Jon and I had rented the week before so it would not have been fun to attempt to pass slower-moving traffic with this guy. Gas and tolls in Portugal can add up also. Gas was an average of 10-20 cents more per liter. That adds up fast. We paid one toll that was 20 euro, which isn’t as bad as France but it’s not very much fun. The car was purely for convenience and time efficiency. And speedy it was, compared with public transport. I have heard tales of woe concerning the 7-hour bus ride from Lisbon to Sevilla. Dan and I made the drive in about 3.5. We did get kind of lost, ok pretty damn turned around in Lisbon when we arrived, but that was our only real car mishap. It was like driving around Brooklyn for an hour trying to find the Village.
We drove about 2.5 hours along the southern coast at a steady 150 km/hr to Lagos, Portugal. My friends from Sandwich had all pumped this place up as possibly the best place they had gone on their European trip the summer before, so I had high expectations. It was a bummer becasuse we really didn’t have the weather we were banking on. The week before when Paddy and Linni were here it was hot and sunny every day. In Lagos it rained at least some every day. Lisbon was better but not much. We stayed at the Rising Cock hostel, which isn’t as inappropriate of a name as it sounds. The national symbol of Portugal is the rooster and you see it everywhere like the toro in Spain. The hostel is owned by two brothers of Portuguese descent who went to BC and Northeastern and are under 30. Their parents work there too, making crepes and lemon tea for breakfast and helping out at reception, etc. They also own the restaurant across the street, which is not cheap but has good quality food. We stayed in a little room in a separate building away from the actiona little bit, which turned out to be what made the stay so great. It was 18 euro each/night as I had paid for dorm rooms. The room had two double beds. It’s a little more thean I had hoped to pay, having heard that portugal was really cheap. The hostel was full of English-speakers, mostly American, mostly studying abroad somewhere in Spain and on Spring break. Those who were not on Spring break were travel lifers.Frequent exchange: “how long have you been here?” “just a week.” “really? I’ve been here 16 days. I think I might head out next week.” Are you serious? Why did you come here at all? Just go to Daytona Beach! Everyone we talked to said that all there is to do is go to the beach and the same four bars every day. Anyways, we felt old immediately upon entering. The three of also matched perfectly in our zip hoodies, jeans, hipster arafat scarves, sneakers, plastic glasses and haircuts. This place would have been perfect 5 years ago, but we felt a little out of place. Dan cooked an awesome pasta in the kitchen with the chorizo we bought in the grocery store nearby. The common room had a bunch of couches, coffee tables and a porch. There was free internet on the computers in the lounge, and one of the computers was connected by magic t a big screen tv and speakers so you could blast music videos. This helped to turn this lounge into a sort of meat market for 20-yr olds around 1030 at night. Everyone who’s “in” calls it the Hrd Cock Cafe. Cute. We drank our litros on the terraza and watched the show. can’t go wrong. The most ridiculous part is that the employees and pseudo-residents and the parents themselves insist that everyone call them Mama and Papa. That is never going to happen. I don’t even call my own parents that, and I’m not 6, so there’s no way I’mgoing to start using that terminology now.
We headed out to check out the bars around 1. Everyone who had been at the Cock was trashed . The first spot we went to, Three Monkeys had darts which was cool. They also had a funnel, which was not. Patrons there are encouraged to funnel a beer so tha t tally mark can be placed next to your country of origin on a big chalkboard. OK we did it. Izzi has a photo of the board with three tallies next to Kyrgyzstan. The we went t oa bar up the street called Inside Out. They were playing great dance music. For the second straight bar we tried to start a dance party to no avail. Even dancing on some furniture. The young kids were too wasted to even move. Chicks were totally digging us though. They even played some MJ, and to paraphrase Dan, if MJ fails to get the people moving , it’s hopeless.
We drove to Sages, the southwestern tip of Europe, the next day. There was a huge fort and cliffs all around. It;’s where Prince henry the navigator had his famnous (I guess) school for explorers. I went swimming just to prove a point. We had dinner in a little village and went on a wild megaliticos chase. It was a good little excursion. The night was exactly like the one before, and it was Wednesday.
The next day we drove to Evoras, which is about 45 minutes east of Lisbon, specifically to check out the Capilla dos Ossos. Yes we added an extra hour and a half of driving to see a church made entirely of bones. It was totally worth it. So effing creepy. It was made with bones dug up from the old cemetery in town and is probably a good 10x15 meters. Lot’s of femurs, skulls, fibias a nd tibias and good times. There are also the mummified bodies of a father and son hanging from one of the walls. So wierd and awesome. The Catholic church does some really awesome things once in a while.
We drove about 2.5 hours along the southern coast at a steady 150 km/hr to Lagos, Portugal. My friends from Sandwich had all pumped this place up as possibly the best place they had gone on their European trip the summer before, so I had high expectations. It was a bummer becasuse we really didn’t have the weather we were banking on. The week before when Paddy and Linni were here it was hot and sunny every day. In Lagos it rained at least some every day. Lisbon was better but not much. We stayed at the Rising Cock hostel, which isn’t as inappropriate of a name as it sounds. The national symbol of Portugal is the rooster and you see it everywhere like the toro in Spain. The hostel is owned by two brothers of Portuguese descent who went to BC and Northeastern and are under 30. Their parents work there too, making crepes and lemon tea for breakfast and helping out at reception, etc. They also own the restaurant across the street, which is not cheap but has good quality food. We stayed in a little room in a separate building away from the actiona little bit, which turned out to be what made the stay so great. It was 18 euro each/night as I had paid for dorm rooms. The room had two double beds. It’s a little more thean I had hoped to pay, having heard that portugal was really cheap. The hostel was full of English-speakers, mostly American, mostly studying abroad somewhere in Spain and on Spring break. Those who were not on Spring break were travel lifers.Frequent exchange: “how long have you been here?” “just a week.” “really? I’ve been here 16 days. I think I might head out next week.” Are you serious? Why did you come here at all? Just go to Daytona Beach! Everyone we talked to said that all there is to do is go to the beach and the same four bars every day. Anyways, we felt old immediately upon entering. The three of also matched perfectly in our zip hoodies, jeans, hipster arafat scarves, sneakers, plastic glasses and haircuts. This place would have been perfect 5 years ago, but we felt a little out of place. Dan cooked an awesome pasta in the kitchen with the chorizo we bought in the grocery store nearby. The common room had a bunch of couches, coffee tables and a porch. There was free internet on the computers in the lounge, and one of the computers was connected by magic t a big screen tv and speakers so you could blast music videos. This helped to turn this lounge into a sort of meat market for 20-yr olds around 1030 at night. Everyone who’s “in” calls it the Hrd Cock Cafe. Cute. We drank our litros on the terraza and watched the show. can’t go wrong. The most ridiculous part is that the employees and pseudo-residents and the parents themselves insist that everyone call them Mama and Papa. That is never going to happen. I don’t even call my own parents that, and I’m not 6, so there’s no way I’mgoing to start using that terminology now.
We headed out to check out the bars around 1. Everyone who had been at the Cock was trashed . The first spot we went to, Three Monkeys had darts which was cool. They also had a funnel, which was not. Patrons there are encouraged to funnel a beer so tha t tally mark can be placed next to your country of origin on a big chalkboard. OK we did it. Izzi has a photo of the board with three tallies next to Kyrgyzstan. The we went t oa bar up the street called Inside Out. They were playing great dance music. For the second straight bar we tried to start a dance party to no avail. Even dancing on some furniture. The young kids were too wasted to even move. Chicks were totally digging us though. They even played some MJ, and to paraphrase Dan, if MJ fails to get the people moving , it’s hopeless.
We drove to Sages, the southwestern tip of Europe, the next day. There was a huge fort and cliffs all around. It;’s where Prince henry the navigator had his famnous (I guess) school for explorers. I went swimming just to prove a point. We had dinner in a little village and went on a wild megaliticos chase. It was a good little excursion. The night was exactly like the one before, and it was Wednesday.
The next day we drove to Evoras, which is about 45 minutes east of Lisbon, specifically to check out the Capilla dos Ossos. Yes we added an extra hour and a half of driving to see a church made entirely of bones. It was totally worth it. So effing creepy. It was made with bones dug up from the old cemetery in town and is probably a good 10x15 meters. Lot’s of femurs, skulls, fibias a nd tibias and good times. There are also the mummified bodies of a father and son hanging from one of the walls. So wierd and awesome. The Catholic church does some really awesome things once in a while.
miércoles, 16 de abril de 2008
hermanitos
This guy on Calle Zaragosa makes the best helado in town hands down.Linni and Paddy came and spent a week and four days respectively. Linni had the amazing Sevilla weather. Lots of time chilling by the river with some tinto. She discovered that my building has an azotea. A sick one. She actually east food now, which is great. Leadoff dinner at Coloniales, always amazing(ly cheap). Linni did Santa Cruz and the Museo de Bellas Artes. We observed the large population of North American Scum and how ridiculously easy it is to pick out the study abroad kids (GDB), and what stupid crap they seem to be saying in loud voices at all times. I feel like every time i hear English around the city (which is kind of a lot) its some embarrassment saying things like ‘did you see what she was wearing last night?’ ‘oh my gad i was so drunk’ and other things heard around
tienes bailar?
So Jonny came to visit. We chilled in Sevilla for most of the time. It weather was still real nice and warm, so we rented a car named Pepe, a Nissan Micra 5-speed diesel with unbelievable pick-up to head to the beach. Drove down the coast past Jerez and Cadiz to Tarifa, pretty much as far south as you can get in Spain. Further south then Gibraltar. you can see Morocco and its where the ferries to tangiers leave from, although we decided to stay in spain because we would probably die in morocco, knowing us and the combination of bad decisions that would promptly ensue. tarifa, as we found out for ourselves upon arrival is renowned as the windiest place in europe. great. its huge for kite surfing, which is ridiculous, and looks about 1000 times harder than regular surfing (which is already too hard for poeple like us) because it heaps on the complications of windsurfing and flying one of those ridiculous stunt kites. so for all these wind bums its paradise. for us its just too cold to go swimming and sand is hitting me in the face right now. it is pretty cool to stand there and feel the south(?) mistral wind blowing across the strait of gibraltar. thinking about the mythological implications of hercules and ulysses and the warm air blowing accross from Africa. Africa: joder. we spend one night there, supposedly night life is awesome in the summer. it felt like winter on cape cod in march even though the weather was on the upswing already. the other cool thing that the wind has done in tarifa is to create a huge dune. the wind blown in the same direction most of the time so the sand blows accross and piles up on the other side of the cove. there are all these full grown trees that are 2/3 buried. The dune shifts throughout the year. It's pretty cool.we drove, well i drove, down the costa del sol to marbella. its so built up its hideous. we then
turned north to go through the sierra morena mountains. there was this legendary bandit, el Tempranillo that lived up in there and used to stop everyone going through in the early 1800’s on the route to Ronda. Ronda is a cool town. it looks just you would imagine a town with a bandit roaming the hills in the distance. there is a huge natural gorge that cuts the city in half with an ancient bridge, there is a cell under the bridge where they used to keep prisoners, pretty badass. its also the birthplace of modern bullfighting. the bull ring has a museum and they let you go in and see all the inner workings and rooms of the ring. pretty neat. we ate at el porton c/pedro romero 7 semi touristy with an english language menu outisde, but still plenty of locals inside at the bar. lots of food, reasonable price. we got ice cream. twice. of course. la jijonenca c/ espinola 30 was the better one. we tried to go these neolithic caves cuevas de pilota, privately owned caves on park land, outside ronda but we were gonna run out of time to get the car back so we had to go.on saturday yiyi, my intercambio friend from jaen was having a party in alameda in the afternoon to celebrate two of her friends’ bdays and her saint day. since my bday was only a couple days away she invited us along which was cool. this included a bunch of live performances by her friends bands, which were infinitely better than the spanish pop me and jon were forced to listen to on our raod trip. later on sean came up from jerez and anneso and her friend vero joined us as well. izzi and dan arrived via first class high speed AVE around 9pm and i recogered them from the train station. more anything? more everything!
peter cottontail
two of the most important and famous festivals spanish culture has to offer (up there with tomatina, san fermines and las fallas) take place in sevilla. semana santa translates literally to “holy week” It takes place in the week leading up to easter Sunday starting on the previous sunday. the celebration centers around pasos in which the idols from the abundant churches throughout the city are placed on elaborately decorated platforms or palillos, which are then placed on the heads of a couple of dozen of the faithful/penitent (guys with rags tied around their heads. the palillos can be seen in progress in tallers around the city beforehand. linni and i even saw a group marching with a palillo on their heads loaded with sandbags to simulate the weight that they will have to bear once it is completely decorated. The pasos are accompanied by dozens to hundreds of nazarenos, people who pay a nominal some to the church to be involved for whatever reason they might have. These men women and children dress in robes, usually of solid color, with matching hood with eye holes. The hoods contain cones that stand over a meter high atop the head. Like a wizard. A grand wizard if you will. (It’s actually where the kkk got the idea for their outfits.) the processions vary in seriousness. some of the nazarenos walk in silence, barefoot for reasons of penitence. others wear sneakers and life up their hoods to smoke cigarettes and chat with friends in the crowd. There is a band with each pasos. They have been practicing for months. It sounds like something you would imagine hearing at a bullfight if you have never been to a bullfight. or like that trumpet at the beginning of that black eyed peas song. all very minor and melancholy. i mean it centers around the death of jesus so i suppose it makes sense that its not peppy. All the pasos pass through the cathedral in the center, do a 360 and then go home. Some come from pretty far and take routes that lead them around on an 8-hour tour of the city. There are pasos going on 24 hours a day. as you might imagine, this can make it rather difficult for anyone who actually wished to get around the city. the moorish design of the city already makes the roads inefficient and basically useless for anything but foot traffic. which is fine. its great actually. except when they close off a lot of the main through streets for the pasos. there are cops directing traffic and if you wait in a line you can eventually cross a street when the traffic of the paso is stopped for a bit. everything around the cathedral and avenida de la constitution is completely sectioned off and private for the sevilla elite. my bike was rendered completely useless anywhere near the center. we watched about a couple of hours of pasos on Sunday. i must say it was impressive. the palillos are really intricate, one of mary on a throne, another of jesus being abused by some life size roman soldiers, another with jesus just screaming and all kinds of plants all around him. the army of nazarenos is striking at teh very least, especially for someone from the us i think. the men were out in their suits and the girls in their dresses. everyone looked great. especially the girls. then tried to meet up with two friends who were only what is usually a 7-minute walk away. after nearly an hour of trying to find a route to where they were watching a paso, we got out of the madness and went home. we watched another hour on day two. i was glad we already had plans to get out of town on the morning of day three.
my students were baffled when i explained that easter was only one day in the states, and that in addition to the religious significance we commemorate it with the visit of a large basket-bearing rabbit who sneaks into our houses and yards in the middle of the night and leaves clandestine treats around for children to scramble and fight over in their easter bonnets when they get home from church. some of this candy is inevitably discovered during a long-put-off cleaning in august and is disgusting. i felt like david sedaris trying to explain this. but i guess the have the easter bunny in france and portugal so i guess franco kept him out along with progress.
my students were baffled when i explained that easter was only one day in the states, and that in addition to the religious significance we commemorate it with the visit of a large basket-bearing rabbit who sneaks into our houses and yards in the middle of the night and leaves clandestine treats around for children to scramble and fight over in their easter bonnets when they get home from church. some of this candy is inevitably discovered during a long-put-off cleaning in august and is disgusting. i felt like david sedaris trying to explain this. but i guess the have the easter bunny in france and portugal so i guess franco kept him out along with progress.
Tomorrow, you go see the madonna.
I went to Milan to meet up with the new Mr. and Mrs. Alan and Lauren Bronfeld on Valentine’s day weekend. Tovah came with me. We flew Ryanair to Bergamo for under 100 euro round trip. We then took a bus from the airport to the train station in Milan for 8 euro. It came with a free return trip for one of us but we didn’t use it. We went directly to Bologna on the train which I think was about 30 euro.
Bologna is great. It’s very small for being a internationally known Italian city. The main tourist attractions are a pair of towers in the center, one of which is leaning. St. Stephen’s Basilica is also pretty awesome. Supposedly it’s where Pontius Pilate came to absolve himself of the sin of having Jesus executed. Overall Bologna is just a beautiful city. You can walk around the whole center very easily. There aren’t so many standout sights, but every plaza is cool, and the majority of the sidewalks are covered by collonades. It was an awesome place to just wander without even using the map and just check out the architecture and storefronts, as lame as that sounds.
The food in Italy is totally amazing and cheap. We got pizza twice in bologna, two different styles, both cheap and crispy and delicious. The dinner we got included steak, handmade raviolis and a bottle caraffe of wine and cost around 30 euro which was or course balling out for us but totally worth it. I mean it’s Italy fer chrissakes. Tovah was drawn in by pretty much every window display we saw. We got gelato at this place Tovah’s friend recommended and it was awesome. The pistachio was possibly as good as Nauset Ice Cream. The owner had us try almost every flavor. He spoke pretty much perfect English. It is amazing in Italy how many people speak English well. Pretty much every time we were lost or confused we would ask for directions in Spanish, trying to make it sound a little more Italian. Any Italian under 30 would reply in great English. Even the bartender at the pub we went to in miniscule Azargo. Soooo unlike Spain. That was also not my experience in France. The coolest part was how many people asked if we were Spanish. We were psyched.
Also ended having a English-Italian-Spanish conversation with a guy who worked in a shop that specialized in ancient stringed instruments. They had old guitars and violins, but were more into lutes and other crazy things. He gave me a brochure for my nono.
We stayed in the most hilarious place. It was about 10 km outside of the center, a 10 euro cab ride or a one euro ride on this shuttle that went right to it. The bus schedule was not so clear however, so we missed the last shuttle the first night. It was mainly a camping facility. The receptionist told us he would show us to our chalet. Apparently chalet is the Italian word for “double wide”. It was pretty awesome though. The heat cranked and there was a towel warmer, for some reason.
Nightlife was surprisingly fun. Ended up at a club that actually played hip-hop. That never happens in Seville, it’s always house or some shit. There are a ton of students. We ended up going back relatively early, like 1 or 2 but the streets were starting to fill up.
The next day we went to meet Alan, Lauren and Alan’s friend from his study abroad days at San Siro stadium in Milan. We saw Inter play against another Italian team I don’t remember which one. The Inter faithful were crazy; jumping up and down and chanting that anyone who doesn’t jump is a fan of the other team. I love that. Pointing and repeating “amici” was a surprisingly successful way to get security to let us go down to the first level were the friends were. They put in Luis Figo for the last 10 minutes or so. Everyone went nuts. Guy is a legend.
Alan’s buddy was in a fishing tournament, so they went to a participants’ dinner. With the help of the navigational system (awesome) we made it to Azargo, the tiny t
own outside of Bergamo where Alan’s friend lives. Tovah and Lauren and I got pizza again there, so good. Then on to JJ’s Irish Pub. Hilarious cast of locals. Alan made best friends with one without actually communicating at all. We played darts and hung out until the wee hours when Lauren, the only sober one got to drive us all drunk to the airport in Bergamo. I passed out in the back while Lauren was trying to figure her way around a road block and Alan was arguing with the British woman whose recorded voice accompanied the GPS.
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