Marty Stepp

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.

On Saturday 9/19, my birthday, Jessica and I both arrived in Barcelona.  We checked into our hotel, which looks like something sent back in time from the year 3000.  Everything is futuristic and seems to put form above function.  The shower door is too small to be effective; the seating is round and hard, like something out of the Jetsons; the TV is flat and mounted in the wall; there are fake plants directly sprouting out of bizarre angular tables on one wall; everything is made of metal and glass; and the bathroom door is a sliding glass door that has been blurred, so while you can’t REALLY see details of the person inside, you can still kind of tell what’s up in there.  It’s not a bad hotel, but the design is pretty funky.  It’s not in the heart of town, but it’s right next to a major subway line so we can get to everything in short order.

The hotel has a pool, but the whole thing is green and nasty and not usable, unfortunately.  When we complained about the pool being shit, the guy at the counter lied and said it was supposed to be that color, that it’s part of the design of the pool.  Yeah, right.  We should probably complain again and ask for a discount.  The weather isn’t really great for swimming anyway.  It’s partly cloudy and in the 70s, with occasional rain; not quite warm and sunny enough.

For my birthday dinner, Jess and I went to La Rambla, Barcelona’s main bustling thoroughfare.  It’s a huge long street with a central brick walkway, full of shops and restaurants and bars and tons of people.  There were jugglers there, musicians, puppeteers; we got offered a chance to purchase some “hashish o cocaina” (we politely declined).

There are a lot of people in this area, mostly Spaniards but also various tourists.  We got to do a lot of people-watching.  Jess and I decided that Spanish women are pretty, but not drop-dead gorgeous.  Mostly they have great olive skin and good fashionable clothes, but beyond that they are not perfect either.  We said there are a lot of 6es and 7s, but that’s it; not a lot of terrible 3-4s, and not a lot of 8-10s.  Compare that to the USA, where I think there is more of a broad range.

La Rambla connects to a set of roads and alleys named Barri Gotic that I guess was the center of the old city of Barcelona.  There are tons of small restaurants and bars tucked into all these alleys.  It’s a cool scene, not at all sketchy like you’d think an alley would be in the USA.  Lots of people are roaming around having a good time and making noise.

We stopped at a restaurant there named El Salon that came highly recommended by Jessica’s Rough Guide book about Barcelona.  They served us a GREAT dinner that made me very happy on my birthday.  We had some Spanish wine called cava, which is a kind of sparkling carbonated wine from this area.  It was good stuff.  We had yummy salads with serrano ham in them, this delicious duck pate on dry bread, a rare tuna steak, and more.  It was a delightful meal and a great way to celebrate my birthday.  During dinner we waxed philosophical about life, love, politics, and solved most of the world’s problems.  A very productive evening.

On Sunday 9/20 Jessica and I went to Sagrada Familia (“Holy Family”), a huge unfinished Catholic church that has been under construction since 1882.  Apparently it’s the top tourist attraction in Barcelona.  It is not close to being done, and they expect it to take until 2026 or later to complete it.  Part of the reason it’s taken so long is that they stopped working on it during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s; also the economy in Barcelona is pretty terrible, so they haven’t been able to throw as much personpower at it as they might like.  It isn’t yet used for actual church services but is solely a tourist attraction for now.

La Sagrada Familia is considered the masterpiece design of famous Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi (1852 – 1926).  He is huge in Barcelona and designed many famous buildings and monuments and things in this area.  And yes, Gaudi is the guy who gave birth to the English word “gaudy” to describe something that is tacky or unconventional.  That’s the way Gaudi designs things, apparently: the tops of the church spires have these weird round brightly colored fruit ball things on them, and the towers have these weird swooping shapes to them.  It’s a very strange looking, yet very impressive, design.

Even though the place isn’t complete, that doesn’t stop them from fencing it off and charging people 11 Euros to take a tour of it.  Then they charge you an additional 2.5 Euros to go up their elevator to actually be up in its towers and see the view.  Barely any of it is accessible to the public, and it’s full of boards and planks and construction equipment.  There’s a small part of the ground floor area that is accessible, and the lift takes you up a few hundred feet, so you get a neat view of the beautiful city of Barcelona.  But there is very little space up there, and you almost immediately need to start going back down the stairs and exit for lack of space and lack of anything else to see or do up there.

On one side it has a huge carved nativity scene, and its outside also has a huge crucified Jesus.  They have a little mini-museum in its basement that shows lots of little models of what the church *will* look like 20 years from now.  It also has plaques of the various sculptors that Gaudi hired to help design all the statues and sculptures and such around the building.  The museum isn’t all that impressive unless you are a huge Gaudi fan or architecture fan, in my opinion.  Maybe in 2026 it will kick ass.

Jess and I had some late-lunch tapas at a place just outside Sagrada Familia.  We got this tortilla espanola dish which is like a pie made of eggs and potatoes and onions and stuff.  No cheese; perfect.  They also have lots of smallish light sandwiches such as tuna or calamari or thin sliced serrano ham.  That plus a salad makes for a fairly light yummy meal.

After visiting the unfinished church we went back to the La Rambla thoroughfare.  Unfortunately it then started raining cats and dogs.  Everybody fled the center of the street and huddled under restaurant awnings and the few covered sections on the side of the road.

Jess and I camped out there for about half an hour waiting for it to die down.  It didn’t.  Luckily Jess had an umbrella and raincoat that we donned to stay kind of sort of dry.  Out of nowhere TONS of guys showed up trying to sell umbrellas to everybody.  It was crazy; literally every 20-30 seconds a new guy would walk past shouting, “paragua?  paragua?!” (umbrella)

We eventually made our way down the wet street to a restaurant called El Choquito that served us some decent food.  We tried to do things the Spanish way by having a light dinner.  We got salad and mussels and some mini chorizo sausages and some yummy sangria to drink.  If you haven’t had sangria, it’s basically wine mixed with fruit juice, often served in a tall glass with ice, fruit slices in it, and a straw.  It is quite nice.

As we were eating we noticed that on the nearby TV, it was playing the final of the Eurobasketball championships between Spain and Serbia.  Spain kicked Serbia’s ass and won by over 20 points.  It was kind of interesting to watch since Spain’s team has a lot of current and former NBA players including Pau/Marc Gasol, Rudy Fernandez, Jorge Garbajosa, Juan Carlos Navarro, Ricky Rubio, and one or two others.  The players and the fans seemed extremely excited to win.  It’s refreshing to see people get genuinely excited about things.  Why don’t Americans do that?

We lingered at the restaurant for some time, and then we decided to make our way back home to the hotel.  We ended our night probably much earlier than the locals (not long after midnight — they stay up for hours past that), but we want to try to get out earlier tomorrow to see more sights.  We suffered a bit today for starting our travels so late after sleeping in too much.

More photos can be found in my Barcelona photo album.