Marty Stepp

Part 2 of Marty’s travels in Sorrento, Italy, on Sep 23-27, 2009.

We decided after the second day that we wanted to change hotels to a more affordable one; Settimo Cielo had a breathtaking view, but it was setting us back 140 euros times 2 rooms per night.  So we lugged our bags almost 2 miles to another hotel that was more on the discount side of things.  This time all four of us were sharing a room.  We asked for one with 4 beds and they said they had one.  But they gave us one with four BUNK beds.  That’s right.  Take a look:

I don’t think bunk beds were designed to support a 6-foot, 160-lb body.  I took the bottom bunk and Jessica the top.  The thing was made of cheap plywood and thin metal braces and clamps that looked like something from Ikea.  (Did you know a lot of Ikea’s stuff is made in Italy?)  It kept creaking and acting as though it would give out at any moment, sending Jessica collapsing down onto me and crushing my skull.  It was a little hard to sleep that night!

On the third day in Sorrento, after checking in to the exciting bunk bed hotel, we caught a train to visit Pompei, about half an hour away.  I will admit that as a dumb American I had never even heard of Pompei before, but apparently it is very well known and people travel from all over the world just to see it.  It’s the remains of an ancient Roman city that existed as far back as 6-700 B.C.  In 79 B.C., there was a huge eruption of Mount Vesuvius, a large active volcano that sits just above Pompei.  The lava and ash destroyed the entire town, and all the ash and dust covered everything and preserved it for thousands of years.  Some archaeologists discovered it in the 17th century A.D., and they have been continuing to excavate it since.  Apparently it’s considered an extremely dangerous volcano because it is still active eruptions, and roughly 3 million people still live on and around it, the largest population in range of a volcano in the world.

As I said, what makes it such an amazing find and attraction is how well preserved everything is.  You can walk around the entire town.  There are the remains of houses, public bath houses, religious buildings, kitchens, a water gathering room with a funneled open roof and a big pit in the floor to hold rain water, and even a coliseum where people watched gladiator battles.  The houses still have remnants of frescos the people painted on them to decorate and to make their houses look bigger.

There are even entire human beings and dogs and other animals that were encased in volcanic ash and dust and were therefore perfectly preserved until now.  You can see the plaster casts of the people, frozen in the positions they died.  Imagine if you were scratching yourself or picking your nose or lord knows what else right when the lava hit.  There would be tourists looking at you for thousands of years with a placard next to you saying, “We believe these are the remains of the town nose-picker.”

The town and remains just keep going on and on.  There are groups being led around by tour guides speaking all kinds of different languages.  I’m pretty sure I heard tours in English, Italian, French, German, and Japanese, plus one or two more I couldn’t place.  The most popular area seemed to be the public bath house; there was a line to go in to view it.  But the coliseum was cool, and seeing the human beings and dogs was cool.  There was a building that the tour guide book said used to be a brothel.  Do I want to know how they figured that out?  There was also a 2000-year-old dog house, which I thought was the most adorable thing ever:

The best view was from the top of a small hill at the south end of the village.  Here’s me on the hill with the city and volcano in the background:

We almost caught a taxi up Mount Vesuvius itself, to see the actual top of the volcano.  But it was starting to get late, since we’d been walking for miles around Pompei itself seeing everything.  We decided to skip it and get home, since the taxis and trains were about to stop running.  We didn’t want to get stuck up there after dark.  Instead we went back to Sorrento and caught a nice dinner.

The girls wanted dessert afterward, of course.  Italy has lots of delicious sugary desserts.  Besides the usual pastries, they have these Italian twinkies called canolli.  Jess and Meg devoured several of those.  They also have this soft fruity ice cream called gelato that is quite delicious.  I can’t eat dairy products, but I usually steal one or two licks of their cones because it’s just so good.  Many a choco nubbin was filled on this trip (inside joke).

On our fourth day in Sorrento we did something I had been bugging the others to do all along: rented scooters!  For around 30-35 Euro, you can rent a 100-150 CC motor scooter for a day and drive it around wherever you want to go.  This area is much more scooter-friendly than a lot of places in the States.  The cars are generally much smaller, with no SUVs on the road, and there are lots of people on motorcycles, scooters, Smart cars, or other very small vehicles.  I would be terrified to drive a motorcycle in the US, but this was just fine. Here was my “hog”:

We rented two scooters; each held two people.  Toni and Meg shared one scooter, and I drove with Jess on the back of the other.

I had never driven a scooter or motorcycle or any similar vehicle before, and we had literally zero practice.  We just had to push on the throttle and jump out into traffic.  It was mildly terrifying.  But I jumped out into the road, and with a little wobbling, I was on my way.

We set out for the village of Napolitano, around 25-30 km away from Sorrento.  This area had a more accessible sandy public beach.  Part of the appeal of going there was the drive.  We got to take our scooters around these mountain cliffs, with perhaps the most breathtaking view I’ve ever seen.  Just miles and miles of winding, curving, mountain roads on the scooter with vater and fresh air and sunshine all around you.  It was spectacular.

We had lunch at a restaurant right on the beach.  I got pizza, which is kind of stereotypical, but I have to say, actual Italian pizza tastes spectacular compared to USA chain pizza.  I don’t know exactly what it is.  It’s lighter, and the sauce is much better (tangier and thinner and less of it).  They have interesting topics like tuna and olives and fresh artichokes and potatoes and salmon and really good sausage and ham, or basically whatever you can think of, they’ll put it on there for you.  Tastes great.

After lunch we parted ways with Meg and Toni.  They stayed to enjoy the beach longer and travel a bit more up and down the coastline.  Jess and I had to head back to catch a train, since both she and I were flying home out of Rome early the next morning.

We stayed the final night at a pretty crappy “pension” hotel, which is basically a hostel room with a bathroom.  If you haven’t stayed in a hostel, it’s like a cheap dirty hotel but with shared communal areas for bathroom and sink and kitchen and stuff like that.  Hostels are pretty sketchy and minimal but they save money.  We did this one just because we were only staying there one night and wanted to be right by the train station.  Only one of the five light bulbs in the room wasn’t burnt out, and there were vaguely prostitutey women standing around right outside the hostel’s door.  The hotel manager guy told us, if we left the room or went to sleep, for God’s sake lock the door.  That’s comforting.

We had a nice final dinner together, followed by a final pistachio gelato cone for Jess.  At the table next to us, there was a couple where the guy was trying to explain football to the girl in intricate detail.  He was breaking apart breadsticks into a dozen small pieces and lining them up as though they were football players, and he was showing her a nickel formation and a blitz and all kinds of things.  She seemed to be sucking down her wine and being patient with this.  Jess and I chuckled at how lame they were; what a loser!  We then proceeded to spend the dinner talking about software engineering and object oriented design principles.

In the morning Jess and I walked to Rome’s Termini train station and we sadly parted ways.  I’m so lucky I had Jess as a travel companion on the trip.  She made everything so much easier for me and so much more fun.  The moment I left her I became scared I’d get on the wrong train or step on a flight to Germany or something.  However, I’m writing this from my flight from Rome to New York City, which I seem to have successfully boarded, so it looks like everything is going to be okay.

My dad said he feels a great sense of relief once he’s sat down in his seat for the plane ride home from another country.  If you get that far, it means that you have basically passed everything major that you could have screwed up.  You’re going to get home.  Everything is going to be okay.  I have been away from Seattle since 9/11, so I have started to miss my old routine.  Sleeping in my bed, eating my own food, seeing my friends, playing with my own gadgets and toys.  I’m even kind of looking forward to getting back to work teaching this fall, which starts just three days from now on Wednesday 9/30.

That’s it for my blog about my travels to Europe!  I had a great time, and I’m glad I did this while I still can.  Now that I have turned 30, I am starting to think about the fact that I probably won’t have too many more summers off where I am completely free to do as I like: no job, no kids, no family to take care of, and enough disposable income to do something fun.  Not many people are lucky enough to be in a situation where they can just pop off to another country for three weeks.  That is a real blessing, and I wanted to take advantage of it.

Part 1 of Marty’s trip to Sorrento, Italy, on Sep 23-27, 2009.

We’re in Italy!  Jess and I flew from Barcelona, Espana (Spain) to Napoli, Italia (Naples, Italy) on Wednesday, September 23, 2009.  We almost didn’t go because we had been ill and the weather forecast for Sorrento seemed iffy.  But we decided to go forward with it, because the area seemed really promising and beautiful if the weather would cooperate.  The flight was about 1.5 hours and went well.  Barcelona has a gorgeous brand new airport.

Naples, on the other hand, is kind of a dirty, sketchy city.  We were originally going to stay there but we read that it wasn’t the best; a few years ago, all the garbagemen in Napoli went on strike and didn’t pick up any trash for months.  It just piled up and filled the city streets.  Some say Naples has never fully recovered in terms of cleanliness.  Ew.  It’s not an awful place, but we decided to go to a smaller, quieter area instead.

We traveled to a nearby smaller town named Sorrento.  We took a 1-hour train ride to the southeast.  Sorrento is a town along the Amalfi coast, along the southwest part of the “boot” of Italy.  It’s a beautiful area that serves as a popular tourist destination for its beaches and mountains and beautiful views.  We rode there on a train that took about an hour from Naples.  We went through some pretty sketchy neighborhoods.  A sketchy neighborhood in the USA is one thing, but in Europe a sketchy neighborhood has 200-year-old buildings and looks really run down.  Europeans are more affectionate in public than Americans; couples would cuddle or make out on the train.

Once we got to Sorrento we had a quick lunch.  I don’t often drink soda, but in Europe I loved drinking ice cold Coca Cola.  See, in the USA they sweeten Coke with high fructose corn syrup, which tastes like tangy ass.  This is basically because corn farmers lobbied Congress to get lots of subsidies for corn products and taxes on sugar products and such things, so real cane sugar now costs so much more than corn syrup that they can’t afford to use sugar in soda any more.  It tasts kind of sort of like sugar, but terrible.  In the rest of the world, Coke and other soda has real damn sugar in it.  It tastes sweet as nectar of the gods.  It’s delightful.  Best Coke I have had all year.

While I was in Spain, it was hit or miss whether a given person I’d interact with would know English.  But in Italy, *everyone* knows English to some degree.  It’s amazing.  Every store, every station, every restaurant, even random people on the street or on the bus.  You ask them if they speak English and they may say, “a little bit,” but they can completely carry on a conversation with you or answer your questions or take your order or whatever it is that you need.  It makes things a lot easier for a frightened traveler who doesn’t speak a lick of the local language.

About all the Italian I know is simple phrases like good day (“buon giorno”), goodbye (“ciao”), please (“per favore”), thank you (“grazie”), you’re welcome (“prego”), where’s the bathroom (“dov’e el bagno”), and “check please” (“il conto per favore”).  You especially need to know how to ask for the check, because if you don’t ask for it, they just leave you sitting there.  They think it’s rude to bring it until you ask.  Italians always say “prego”; the word seems to mean anything from hello, to how are you, to thanks, to you’re welcome, to excuse me, to pretty much anything else.

Our hotel was this place called “Settimo Cielo” (seventh heaven).  It is built right into the wall of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean.  The view was spectacular.

The room itself was not so spectacular.  Everything was old and small and mediocre.  The pillows were lumpy and the beds were creaky.  The bathroom mostly worked, but the toilet seat wouldn’t stay up.  Guys, isn’t it fun to pee holding yourself in one hand and the seat in the other, leaned at a 30 degree angle forward?  A lot of toilets in Europe have no seats on them, as though to say, #1 only per favore.  The toilets have two flush buttons, which I call “the uno” and “the deuce.”  The former is a smaller button that doesn’t use very much water; you’re supposed to push that when you pee.  The latter is a more powerful flush meant for, well, things other than pee.  Probably saves water; good idea.

The hotel had wifi but it didn’t reach the room.  You had to go up to the lobby to use it.  I hate stuff like this; the hotels will list that they have wifi on their web sites, or on the hotel search aggregator sites like TripAdvisor or hotels.com or whatever.  Then you get there and you discover that it has some terrible catch, like this one, or that you get charged 2 Euros every half hour or something ridiculous like that.  That’s basically why I didn’t do any blog entries for 4 or 5 days, because it was so inconvenient to access the net.  Oh well.

We were soon joined by our friends Meghan and Toni, who are also visiting Italy this summer.  Meg is Jessica’s sister, so it was especially exciting for them.  We all went out exploring the town together and had a nice dinner at a place that seemed to have artificial turf or miniature golf green as its flooring.  I was able to order my favorite Italian appetizer: prosciutto e melone.  It’s thinly sliced prosciutto ham on top of canteloupe slices.  It sounds kind of gross, but it’s heavenly.

The tourist part of Sorrento has one major street that runs a few blocks from the beach.  There are lots of shops and restaurants and side streets you can go down, full of still more shops and things to do.  Walking around and shopping in Europe makes you realize how much America has killed the mom ‘n’ pop store.  In the European towns I have visited, there really are no “big” stores to speak of.  No giant Borders book stores.  No enormous grocery stores like the big QVCs or Safeways.  Certainly no Walmarts or Costcos or giant malls or department stores.  Everything is little boutiques or tiny stores selling knick knacks or jewelry or snacks or liquor or arts’n'crafts.

The window shopping is kind of fun, but there are some things I would just never buy this way, like digital gadgets or most expensive stuff.  One thing that kind of decreases the fun factor is that the prices are all pretty high.  They know lots of tourists will visit, so they don’t exactly give you a discount.  I didn’t even buy a “place shirt” here because honestly my bags were bursting at the seams by now, so I didn’t think I could fit it in.

Sadly it rained all of our second day in Sorrento.  Rain kind of ruins this area because almost everything you’d want to do is outside.  So we actually spent most of this day just lounging around the hotel.  We ate the hotel breakfast; the gals teased me a bit because I had to eat my cereal with water on it, since I can’t have milk.  If you ever want a fun and flavorful breakfast, try cereal with water.  I’m kidding; it actually tastes like you’re eating Lego bricks.

We went out in the rain and got ourselves some takeout food to eat at the hotel on our balcony with the breathtaking view.  We got some alcohol called lemoncello, which is a lemon liqeur; apparently Italy is famous for it.  It tastes like a lemon Jolly Rancher candy or something, with a kick.

We also got a bottle of Asti, which is a kind of sweet Italian dessert wine.  We met a couple in a neighboring room who were also from Seattle.  Small world.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

More about Marty and Jessica’s adventures in Barcelona, Sep 19 – 23, 2009!

One random drawback to Barcelona I haven’t mentioned yet was the Catalan language.  Apparently back in the olden days, lots of the regions and territories of Spain had their own languages.  Barcelona’s local language was called Catalan.  As these regions were taken over or merged to become the current nation of Spain, most of them have had to adopt Spanish as their official language to get along with everybody else.  But Barcelona’s Catalan is still deeply infused into the town and its people and culture.  The locals all know Spanish, but Catalan is their preferred language.  If you see signs for things, like at the subway or a restaurant, chances are they’re in Catalan.  If you’re lucky, they give you two or three versions of a sign: Catalan, then Espanol, then maybe English.  But it’s confusing, since Catalan is kinda-sorta similar to Spanish, but they’re different.  Lots of words are spelled similarly but with 1-2 letters different, or a different accent, or some such thing.  I don’t mean any disrespect to the Catalan culture or the people of Barcelona; it’s kind of like the Irish Gaelic language when I visited Dublin.  But if you’re a gringo American trying to learn a little Spanish by looking at signs and listening to people, Barcelona is a bad place to learn.  And I wasn’t interested in learning Catalan since it isn’t used much at all outside that city/area.  Oh, well.

The rest of our stay in Barcelona was much warmer than the one rainy day we had previously.  We were able to bust out the short sleeves for the daytime, thank God.  There are a lot of people out walking or on rented bikes or mopeds.  I really wanted to rent a moped for a day (you can do so for 20-25 Euros) but we didn’t find time to do so.  I wouldn’t drive a motorcycle around in the States, but here the traffic just has a different flow that is, while chaotic and busy, more amenable to smaller vehicles such as bikes, mopeds, and smart cars.  I like the complete lack of SUVs and minivans; that’s how it should be.

We took the metro to Barceloneta, a neighborhood in southeast Barcelona that is right on the beach.  It was a great sunny day for it.  We walked along the beach boardwalk full of yummy looking seafood restaurants.  I bought a sexy pair of dark blue sunglasses with white flames on them (these were the least bad pair they had for sale, IMO).  We made our way to the beach.  We actually didn’t swim since we wanted to see the sights, but there were a lot of people out on the sandy beach sunbathing and swimming in the Mediterranean.  Jessica says that some beaches in Spain are topless, or at least are fine with people walking around with no tops on.  After careful examination I can say that I did not spot any such women at this particular beach.

After hanging out at the beach for a while we went to the Teleferica, a cable car that takes you from Barceloneta to the top of an area called Montjuic Hill.  Montjuic is an area that has some pretty grassy parks as well as a couple of nice museums and a large castle.  The ride in the cable car was pretty neat, since we got to see a bird’s eye view of the entire city of Barcelona from all angles.  We were close to the water so we could see the shipping harbors and boats and that sort of thing.  We could also see the entire city skyline and on a sunny day, Barcelona is one pretty city.  Probably the only downside of the cable car is that it was standing-only and they cram people into it like sardines, so you don’t get lots of space to look around.  Luckily we crammed ourselves against a well chosen edge of the car to give ourselves a good view.

Once we got to the top of Montjuic, we decided to skip the museums and go to the castle.  It was built in the 17th century and added onto in the 18th; they used it as a lookout and to hold prisoners or something.  It is a pretty impressive sight, and they let you walk right in for free and have the run of the place.  There are several levels you can go up, each with a better view than the last.  The castle has these giant cannon turrets mounted all around it that you can walk right up and stand on.  I got my picture taken in front of one of them, wearing my lightning bolt shades no less; I made it my Facebook profile picture.

One thing about countries other than the USA is they don’t work so hard to try to stop you from being an idiot and hurting yourself.  So for example, there were several parts of the castle that had just a low (shin-level) wall and then an 80 foot drop to the death.  There would be a small sign saying the Spanish equivalent of, “Careful, don’t step this way, you will die.” with a picture of a stick man falling on his head with ouch marks coming out.  (Should have taken a picture of that!)

The view from the top of the castle was spectacular.  Jess and I spent a while just sitting on benches up there soaking in the city as the sun slowly set.

As the evening drew to a close, we hopped on a special slanted metro that took us back down Montjuic Hill, but not to the Barceloneta neighborhood; it took us closer to the southwest end of the Barri Gotic thoroughfare that we’d been to several times.  We turned down some more hashish and passed by more street performers.  One annoying fad here is that they sell these little cheap plastic devices that you can stick in your mouth and it turns your voice really high and squeaky like a chipmunk.  The street perfomers were all wearing them and using them to scream at the top of their lungs in shrill chipmunk voices at everyone.  People were laughing and seemed to think it was funny, but I could have done without it.

La Rambla and the Barri Gotic is the general area of choice if you want a good dinner.  Jess and I went to a really nice place called La Fonda that was recommended by Jess’s Rough Guide book.  We had noticed it on a previous night, but it had a huge line out the door, so we skipped it.  This time, it was half empty for whatever reason, so we went in.

Not only was it really good and had good atmosphere, but it was way cheaper than any other dinner we had in Barcelona.  We got a giant mixed paella along with wine and salad and other such things.  If you haven’t had paella, it’s basically a sauced rice dish with various meats in it.  There are some gross shellfish in there that are hard to pull apart and actually eat, but the meat inside tastes lobstery and is probably worth the trouble of extricating from the shelly nastiness.

The next morning I woke up and for whatever reason felt extremely ill.  I was numb all over my body and could hardly get myself out of bed.  I also felt nauseated and had no appetite and was sweating and feverish.  Not good.  Jess and I decided that we should still try to go do things and have a normal day, since it was our last full day in town and it would be a shame to waste it sitting around the hotel room.

We went back to La Rambla and tried to find a restaurant with mild, safe food that I could eat.  We settled on this vegetarian place.

I ordered some soup and a fruit drink.  (TMI alert!)  Before my food arrived I had to go and hurl in the men’s room.  This was embarrassing because the men’s and women’s rooms shared a sink and several patrons got to watch me refunding my various digestive contents.  After that I felt a little better so I weakly ate my soup and drink and stumbled out of there, still with very low energy.

After eating we walked to a cathedral called La Seu that was designed by Gaudi, the same uber-famous Spanish architect who did the Sagrada Familia.  This one you can walk right into for free, which is nice.  It’s a big church with high ceilings and lots of gated-off holy displays along the walls.  Each display has a row of small light bulbs in front of it that look like candles with a coin slot next to it.  If you drop a 2-Euro coin in the slot, one of the “candles” lights up for the day.  I guess the worshipping Catholics like to light candles in front of certain displays to pay tribute.  So this is a watered-down version of that where you can pretend to light a candle by paying 2 Euros.  Most displays had 2-3 candles lit or less.  I guess the public isn’t buying into this particular product today.

The Seu has a central open courtyard with a gated area that includes a pond of ducks and geese.  They swim right up to you and let you take nice pictures of them.  There are also several medium-sized fountains spouting water in this area.  Tourists and locals were filling up their plastic water bottles with this water and holding them with pride, as though this were extremely rare and valuable water that didn’t come from the same pipes as the rest of the city’s water.  Perhaps it has been blessed by the church, but I am not aware.

After La Seu Jess and I did a bit of shopping.  Jess made me wait while she checked out all the admittedly pretty Spanish dresses and clothes for sale.  I think all stores that sell girls’ clothes should have a section in the back for the boys who are stuck waiting.  They could stock it with the usual staples like an X-box and beer and porn and so on.  Or at least a seat would have been nice.

After that I did my usual ritual, passed down from my father, of buying a T-shirt from every new place I travel.  The “place shirts” are mostly pretty hideous, so finding a less-hideous one can take a while.  I settled on an understated brown one that says “Barcelona” and will probably sit in the back of the closet.

Next we walked to the east side of town to a large park called Parc de la Ciutadella.  This was a very pretty grassy park with trees and little rolling hills.  It was another nice day out, so there were plenty of people out just lounging under trees, walking dogs, jogging, and playing frisbee and soccer.  Some guys were working in one corner of the park setting it up for the start of some kind of week-long festival to begin the next day.  They were setting up a music stage and sound system.  They were testing the speakers by playing various music loudly for spans of a few minutes at a time.  They played Hotel California and some old Guns and Roses songs.  I guess if your speakers can handle that, you’re good to go.

Lastly Jess and I went to a bookstore and I picked up some reading for the plane trips to come: The Black Swan: Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Taleb (about extremely rare events / people and how much they shape soceity), and Pygmy, by my man Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and author of choice for angsty early-20s American boys.

After the bookstore I had no energy left, so I went home without dinner and left Jess to do more shopping and to eat her own supper alone.  I went back to the hotel and fell right to sleep.  She showed up a few hours later.  She was a sweetie and brought me some light foods to eat, like a banana and some crackers.  We went to bed early because the next morning was our flight to Serrano, Italy (next blog post!).

On the plane I let Jess read the Swan book, and I took Pygmy.  It’s written from the view of a teenage immigrant boy, and the whole thing is written in pidgin English.  Uh oh.  Chucky, are you sure this was a good idea?  The damn thing is hard to read.

…

That was the extent of my time in Barcelona.  It is a great city to visit, probably more fun overall than Madrid, at least in my experience.  It has beaches, it’s a bit warmer, it seems to have a more clear and accessible food / shopping / entertainment district in La Rambla that is fairly tourist-friendly, and so on. My analogy would be that Madrid is their New York City and Barcelona is their Southern California.

There were also some other interesting sights in Barcelona I didn’t get to see, such as the Tibidabo cathedral and amusement park atop a hill, the Parc Guell which was also designed by Gaudi, the Museo Picasso which is a museum housing many of Pablo Picasso’s best works (we planned to see this but skipped it due to my sickness), and renting a moped, and so on.  I felt like I could easily have spent 3-4 more days there and had a great time.  Plus the weather was great even though Madrid was a bit more cloudy and chilly on this particular visit.