Monaco is a Country

Genova

Cinque Terre and Such

Official Date of Return to Israel

Finally, I've got my ticket. I will arrive back home on . . . Monday 04 January 2010.

Can't wait. Can't wait.

Just went for a beautiful ride through Fiesole and off to some very secluded area full of trees changing color. Looking forward to Shabbat and next week! And then . . . England! Shabbat Shalom!

Our Own Music

Last night, I went to the symphony here in Firenze. The National Symphony Orchestra of Salonica played Rachmaninov, including his second piano concerto played by an 85 year-old man! It was incredible watching him walk onstage as if he was going to die at any minute and then play such beautiful music with agility in his hands that is not common for people in their twenties!

But I couldn't help noticing the one thing that always bothers me when I'm at the symphony:

The Best Moments Are When You Don't Take Pictures

Much has changed since my last post. I bought flights to England, Dublin, and France all for less than $75! The best part is, I convinced two people to come with me! Two Israelis who are living here in Florence are studying at the university and have let me move in with them. One is studying architecture, so it's like having a private tour of Florence when walk around the corner to buy milk. I suggested that they come with me to London, and they are! It's nice to be out of hostels, especially because I've been staying in one place, and the people in the hostel kept switching.

Yesterday I went out for coffee with the owner of the kosher restaurant, Simcha. We're on a first name basis now which is cool, and I have yet to pay the full bill for my meals when I walk in there. And that's was I mean by the best moments are when you don't have your camera. Because here's me, having coffee with the owner of my favorite restaurant and one of his friends who owns a juggling store on the same block. His friend treated us, so I said, "La prossima volta, pago io, ah?" (Next time, it's on me). I think it would be a really cool idea to once a day, find a random Italian walking around and take him or her out for coffee in exchange for ten minutes of speaking Italian and hearing about his or her life story. This is definitely the place to do something like that.

We walked around the Boboli Gardens at the Palazzo Pitti. You can just imagine the Medici aristocrats taking their afternoon tea stroll in their private neverending forest full of statues and fountains.

Seth, these statues are for you.

Now this one just reminded me too much of Pirates of the Caribbean and Davy Jones not to take a picture.

I think a bike ride towards Chianti in the afternoon will do the trick (Mom, sound familiar?). Tonight, we're going to see the new movie 2012 at the Odeon, the only place that screens films in their original language without dubbing (Italy is terrible with that, one of the reasons no one knows English; everything's dubbed), and then tomorrow night . . . Symphony!

What?!

I couldn't believe it this morning when my hostel told me I had to clear out. Remember, this is Friday, right before Shabbat. And so I've been wandering around Florence for the last few hours looking for a place that has availability and that are still at a good price. Friday is a bad day to be out of a reservation. I suppose I've found some places though. I haven't brushed my teeth even. Or eaten anything. I can't wait for tonight at Chabad, though. I'm gonna eat like after Yom Kippur.

P.S. I forgot to add to my entry yesterday: I ran out of shampoo, toothpaste, AND peanut butter all in the same day!

From Pisa to Lucca, And Then the Biking Began.

Firenze - Round 2

Well, here I am, yet again in Firenze. Something about this place keeps bringing me back here. It almost seems a shame not to keep travelling, but if you've found some gold, why skip over it? I see people come and go, travellers who are spending a couple days here, and when they head off, I'm still here. Not goin' anywhere yet. Next week there's a concert at the Tuscan Regional Symphony, and I can't tell if that's keeping me here, or if that's just the excuse for not continuing onward (but again, what the hell is onward?). Instead of spending this coming Shabbat in Milano, I'm gonna stay here for the second in a row. And apparently there are no regional trains to Milano, which means no bike transport, which means in short: I'll be biking to Milano. Which will be interesting, because weather hasn't been so forgiving. So if I bike to Milano from Cinque Terre (which I wanna see on the way), I'll need a good few days.

Today I had a nice bike trip north and east of Firenze with probably the longest downhill I've seen yet. It's definitely nice to bike during a day that I wouldn't do anything else new, and I'm considering, if I bike again this week, to go towards chianti even though it would be a repeat of the first day of Mom's and my bike trip.

So something very exciting happened today. I've got plans! Like, the kinds of normal plans normal people with normal lives have, like, "Ok, that sounds fine! Let's meet there at 8". Well, that happened! I met a nice couple from Spain, although the girl's from Michigan and has been living in Spain for four years. They're getting married in a year, and want to live in Florence until then. They still haven't found an apartment, so they're staying in hostels for now. They work as translators, which is awesome, so they can live anywhere they want with an internet connection. And we're meeting up to "watch the game" soon at the local Irish pub. It's such a part of European culture to go to the pub and watch "the game". I'm trying to understand as much as I can about soccer because it seems like so much fun to care about it.

Oh yeah, and we went to the leaning tower of Pisa. It leaned.




These are some of the "randoms" with whom I spent a few days.


Yeah, I can't believe I actually fit it all in. The great thing is that when I pressed the button to go to the sixth floor, nothing happened. I didn't realize you had to pay five Eurocents to make to elevator know you exist! Who's ever paid for an elevator?!

The Little Bike That Thought He Was a Car

I arrived in Napoli, happy to see Lana (A canadian from the first hostel) had made it. The ride was good, and I'm glad I was able to make the 48km with everything on my back and bike. It makes me feel very portable.

A word about travelling. I think that only when you're lost are you really experiencing something different. When you're not lost, you have a goal, you're moving in a specific direction and you're aware of it, even if you might be taking a vacation from your path in life. Being lost makes one feel that they're not moving towards something (even though they might be). You forget that you have a future ahead of you and have no idea what your very next step in life might be. You might even feel alone. Being lost is scary. But its only when you're lost, when you can't see if you're walking towards a specific something, that you can truly experience a place or a moment without being distracted by why you're really there.

Me, Myself, and Island Capri

I'm sitting on a bench looking out at Capri.
Going my own pace is incredible.
Travelling alone is better than travelling with two people who have known each other their entire lives.
It doesn't cost anything to sit on a bench.

Sukkapri

The real beauty of a place is where the shops are not.


It could rain or snow or in a minute, some volcano could erupt. But all I know is right now, I'm sitting here eating my lunch, looking at this.

Innovative.

Pompeii

A short one for today. Ellie, Belinda and I decided to go to the island of Capri. We met up with some other girls from the hostel on the train, so that was the travel pack for the day. Unfortunately, when we got to Sorrento, Capri looked like this:


Because our train tickets were good for an hour, we got back on and headed the other direction to Pompeii. We had heard some bad things about it (boring mainly), but it turned out to be very impressive. It was raining lightly the whole day, but it wasn't anything my fancy one-Euro poncho couldn't handle.


There were even casts made of bodies of the victims that died in the volcanic eruption in the year 79. The bodies were preserved by the volcanic ash, and some man came along and covered the molds with plaster. To imagine that these are the positions in which people died while boiling lava or tumbling rocks fell on top of them is crazy.

This is me in the Amphitheatre. It was cool. I can't believe men used to kill each other for entertainment. (One could argue the same occurs in our days).


Alright, then. 'Til next time,

Why I had to bike the Amalfi Coast

Today was an awesome day. I woke up in a wonderful hostel in Sant'Agnello near Sorrento. The plan was to go to a nice little town called Positano, so I thought, "Why not do it by bike?" It turned out to be a great decision. The weather started out great, so I left my long sleeveness at home (thankfully), and when the sun hid behind the clouds, the uphill climbs did a pretty good job of keeping me warm. After some exilirating downhills, I made it to Positano!

We (the two Australian girls I'm travelling with and I) got on a bus to Amalfi, which is another 17 kilometers continuing the same way from Sant'Agnello.


About half way through, a conductor came on-board and started checking tickets. I had assumed you buy a ticket from him, but his reaction after seeing my outstretched five-Euro bill made it clear I was mistaken. He started yelling and stuff and I pretty much pretended that I didn't understand him, so he got a piece of paper and wrote:

"38 Eur"

And I was like, hell no you ain't fining me 38 Euro!! I said I didn't have that kind of money, so he went to the bus driver, exchanged some words, and had the bus stopped so that I could be thrown off the bus in all my glory. I looked at him as if I were confused and he said to me in evil Italian, "Start pedeling!" As if I minded! It turned out to be a great deal. The remaining 6ish kilometers to Amalfi were stunning, and I had wind in my face the whole way.


The town of Amalfi isn't really anything more special than Positano. I hadn't decided whether I would bike back half-way or just get a bus back to Sorrento with the Aussies. I started to bike, agreeing that I'd get on their bus when it went by me. I arrived back to Positano, out of breath and full of adreneline. At this point the sun was going down and the sky was turning dark shades of orange. (This picture is actually from the day before, but you get the idea)

I asked someone there where the bus stop going the other way was. He answered in what I was pretty sure was Spanish. After thanking him, he asked me (in English), "Why does it say Israel on your shirt?" Cautiously, I said I had done a bike ride there. Then he asked if I spoke Hebrew, in Hebrew. So I said yes, and yes, I'm also Jewish. "So am I!" He said. He was from Mexico. We conversed about some Jewish sites in Italy to visit and then he boarded his bus, leaving me with a "Be Careful!" and a pat on the shoulder. I waited another twenty minutes just to get kicked off that bus because I hadn't bought a ticket prior to boarding. Forget it, I said to myself. Who needs buses? Who knows when the next one is, anyway?! (Luckily the girls on the bus were asleep so they missed the whole ordeal of loading and then unloading my bike under the bus. So I started to pedal the 14 kilometers back to Sorrento/Sant'Agnello. Some people at the bus stop said I was crazy/brave for biking on the Amalfi Coast. So many people can't shut up about how dangerous it is to bike, walk, or be on the Amalfi Coast, but clearly those people have never been to Israel. It was no big deal. There's a substantial wall separating you from death, so it's not so terrible.

I returned after a well-deserved downhill race in the dark to the hostel, where I stretched, ate, showered, and sat at the computer to type this entry!

Bye! A dopo!