i was kind enough to separate this entry full of actual words and meaning from that one about non-flying pigeons, but i think the series is worth looking at, if only to appreciate my plight.
ok so europes. when we last saw our hero, she was reenacting favorite scenes from
the sound of music. when i was done humiliating myself, we left for vienna. not gonna lie, the city was pretty unimpressive. i mean it was clean and pretty and all, but quite boring. i think a large part of this was due to our really bad tour guide when we went on the bike tour. one really awesome thing about vienna, though, was that our room had a private balcony. now, some might call it a fire escape, but with a chair to jump up on and some maneuvering over the slanted five-foot window, it was definitely a balcony to watch the world go by. check out the sweet view:
our first night i went to the hostel bar with our roommate rachel and then we hung out on the balcony for several hours and took what we thought were really arty pictures, but those are in her posession so you cannot see them.
at one point we went to the top of st stephans dom, where i got to take my token picture of me and the city. see?!?!
it's an artistic series.
oh one cool thing on our tour: apparently there is one statue of a man riding on a horse that is rearing backwards in the entire world that is perfectly balanced without any sort of additional support to the horse besides his legs. this is it:
across the plaza from this statue is another almost identical one, but the artist (along with the rest of the world) couldn't figure out how in the hell he made the first one balance, and spent the rest of his life trying to recreate it. he eventually went crazy and killed himself. also, i don't know his name.
then we got to take another overnight train to venice! significantly less comfortable than our previous train, this one was a six-bed converted to a four-bed. how did they do that?, you may wonder. well! the girl and her mother who got the bottom bunks got exceptional room as the middle bunks were folded up, and then charlotte and i were snugly tucked into the top bunks. see?!
they were nice in the morning, though, and helped us to convert the beds to seats. oh and they also spoke perfect english, lolz europe.
upon exiting the 50-degree train that housed roughly 10% of japan's teen population, we entered venice, ninety degrees and humid. mmmm. i really remember liking venice a lot the last time i was there, thinking that the canals were so cute and such. i was clearly remembering a different city, because this is pretty much what i saw this time around:
BILLIONS OF PEOPLE.
our hostel was pretty sweet, though, because it was out of the main part of town, in this little piazza that's "popular among students." we predominately hung out around there, sitting in cafés and wasting our lives away. the next morning we left for florence, where we met up with my dad and brother, yayyyy.
my first order of business was to make michael take this ridiculous picture with me in front of the campanile:
WE ARE SO COOL.
we went to the accademia, where we had to wait in exactly zero lines, because i'm amazing and we got tickets beforehand. i'd seen the david before, but that didn't make it any less awesome to see again. it's so massive, and perfect. i want to be an artist.
afterwards, we hung around florence for a while, then drove up to the top of a hill to look at the city, because that's how i roll. this is florence from the top of a hill:
that night we went to lucca, an adorable medieval city about an hour outside of rome, and there was an elton john concert happening? that was weird. we had dinner there (which sucked, btw, how does that happen, italy?), and then headed home to pass out. the next day we were off to rome, and on the way stopped in san gimignano and siena, both similar cities to lucca, small and stone and medieval and tuscan and hilly. this is what michael and i would look like if there were a picture taken from san gimignano, and then two different pictures of us were taken at different times in our lives and disproportionately pasted on top of the landscape:
... or are we really there? YOU WILL NEVER KNOW.
the next day in rome was hardcore sightseeing. when we stopped for a break amidst the ruins, i reenacted the pietà:
that's heavenly light pouring over me. we went to the colisseum, forum, trajan's column, pantheon, somehow back to trajan's column, the trevi fountain, back to the colisseum to get on the metro, and then took the train to the vatican. charlotte and dad couldn't go in because they were not modestly dressed, but michael and i did.
the sun was shining through the front windows onto the altar in the most celestial of ways. this was it:
... apparently i uploaded the one with him in it. but you get the idea.
later i bought him this white panama hat that he had been LUSTING after. this is him trying to be suave:
and this is me rocking the hat WAY better. or something.
that night we went up to the rooftop bar in the guys' hotel and watched the sun set for a few hours and had some wine - it was so pretty. i like being high up, and buildings in rome are short.
the next morning we left early for naples because i needed some mozzarella, and went to ostia antica on the way. ostia was a port city that received most goods for rome before they continued up the tiber, but in the 1500s a massive flood re-routed the tiber and ostia became obsolete. tragic, right? it's pretty well-preserved, though, and we got to walk through a bunch of the buildings. here is a mosaic on the floor where the baths were:
not much happened in naples ... i went to the beach, ate a lot of mozzarella, drank a lot of wine. it was
nice.
the day of the baby's baptism in naples, we went to this really awesome restaurant overlooking the ocean and mount vesuvius. there were roughly 4732894 courses to the meal (i only got through two), and there was a great sea breeze and mmmmm italies. there was also a giant steering wheel. this is me driving the restaurant, with panama hat:
for those of you that don't understand why i spent four days in the condo and didn't update or really internet at all, i show you this:
the view from the balcony.
and, in conclusion, i would just like to say:
