Rome-Athens

Dan woke really early today to repack all of our things and condensed the number of carry-on bags of souvenirs to 3 (we have bought way too much stuff!), plus our backpacks and day bags.  We checked out and reception tried to charge Ev for hot water for tea we had organised last night, even though every other time it was delivered free of charge.  We didn’t pay for that, but were happy to fix the bill for the internet.  We have many movies now!  But seriously, hotels should not charge for internet at all because they always get cheap rates and broadband downloads are unlimited throughout Europe so there is no download cap.  Anyway, we ordered the cab for 7:00am and we were ready at 6:40am.  We left as soon as taxi arrived.  We couldn’t get out quick enough.  The cabbie sped most of the way to the airport doing 80 in a 40 zone and 140 in a 100 zone, but hey, ‘When in Rome...’.

We headed straight to the post office in the airport to send Mickey and his friends back to Australia, but it didn’t open until 8:00am.  In Italy bills can only be paid at the post office, not over the internet so we found a cafe for breakfast close to the post office to watch if a line was going to build up.  We had breakfast then joined the queue at 7:45am.  Thankfully they sold boxes so we purchased the biggest one they had as we had our toys, books from the Scotland Castles, Paris Louvre, Rome, Vatican city etc. and magnets.  Boy we have a lot of magnets now.  We’re going to have to buy a second fridge just to have somewhere to put them all.  We were able to pack everything so Ev joined the post office queue again to weigh the box.  The post office didn’t have tape to secure the box (of course they didn’t?!!), so found a newsagent and bought sticky tape (they only had thin tape) and wrapped it around the box.  We were both concerned that we it wouldn’t make it all the way home, but we really just wanted it gone, so Ev went back in the queue ready to send it but they only took cash.  We didn’t have enough cash on us!  We went to the nearest ATM at the other end of the airport on the floor but it was only a cash advance machine which neither of our cards could do.  Not again!!  Dan’s card doesn’t have a pin and Ev’s was only a savings card.  Ev went back to the post office to babysit Mickey and the books while Dan looked for another machine.  There was one upstairs but with the same machine and same system.  Oh well, looks like the box will be on the plane to Athens with us.  Who’s holding it?  We checked our bags on the plane and took the 11kg box to the Additional Luggage area where we were warmly greeted by an arrogant prick who had to finish reading the last paragraph of his newspaper before sniffing to us and grunted.  We asked if this was where we checked the box in and he pointed to the x-ray machine then carried on reading his paper.  Another staff member came in the room and sat behind the computer screen and asked if he could help.  He scanned the box and Ev asked if he could put more masking tape on and a fragile sticker on the box (Mickey is a delicate gift).  That was a real effort to explain.  Once he understood what we were asking for he smirked and said ok, ok.  We were left dumbfounded that we had been treated so rudely.  It’s hard to explain but we both have the feeling we may never see the box again.

Once finding our departure lounge we stood for half an hour as we were a little early, then continued to stand another half an hour in the line as there was a delay.  We and the other passengers were a little concerned and beginning to be impatient.  Finally gates were opened and we boarded the bus and waited another 10 minutes in the bus before it rolled out to the plane where again we waited 5 minutes standing right next to the plane before we could board.  It was such an unprofessional procedure.  The Captain announced in Italian that the wait was because there was a shortage of ground crew.  The English announcement came five minutes after that.  The taxiing was terrible and we slowly rolled on the road for 15 minutes and as we turned the corner ready to take off we couldn’t believe the queue of 13 planes behind us.  Again, this was incredibly unprofessional.  It seems it is always like this.  This is definitely one place we can say we are happy to leave.  We will not miss Italy a bit. 

Lineup of 13 Planes waiting to leave Italy

Our flight was 1.5 hrs.  The first thing we did was get cash out after our suitcases and the box were collected and we were relieved that Greece had started well.  Finally we sent the parcel with Mickey in off to Australia without any dramas and sighed with relief.  Ev asked for directions to the hotel.  Unfortunately the train staff were on strike today and a taxi for a 20 minute ride was €61 so the public bus was in order for €3.50 each and would take about 95 minutes to the central train station then we’d work out the rest from there.  The first bus we could have taken was jam packed so we waited 10 minutes and hurried on to get a seat to avoid standing the entire way.  Ev had her suitcase on the floor at her feet and sat with her knees up to her chest most of the time while Dan cradled his luggage.  It was comfortable but manageable.  Athens seems fairly easy to drive in (We seem to have chosen the two most chaotic cities in Europe to try to drive in.) but thankfully we won’t be driving on this leg of the trip.  We negotiated a cab fare to the hotel and it took him 15 minutes to drive there.

Baby Grand Hotel

We were blown away The Baby Grand Hotel.  It boasts to be the only Fashion Hotel in the world.  The reception front desk is a custom made converted Beatle car to table, and the waiting/bar area has mirrors and funky retro coloured walls with soft ‘doof, doof’ dance music in the background.  Our room was really nice as well.  Every standard room is decorated and ours was no exception.  Strange to describe the creatures on our wall; they’re kind of like blobs with eyes a mouth and hair.  Some look like sea creatures, another looks like a tooth with a mouth, one is just an eye with arms, and others look like hair with three legs, oooh there’s one that’s like the ghosts in packman.  The drapes are thick black and white vertical stripes.  We have a CD player, TV, fridge and free internet.  Free Internet!!  So we’re pretty happy with this room.  We were given an introductory pack to read, and a letter from the organisers of our Greek Island tour tomorrow confirming our collection time and they gave us extra information about Athens and its sights.  How lovely.  Ok that’s enough about the room.

Baby Grand Hotel, Athens

We were so hungry when we arrived to our hotel at 2:00pm so we asked for directions to the shops. We walked down the street for about 20 minutes and there were a lot of shops.  Awesome fashionable clothes, very bright colours and the restaurants seemed very nice and well priced.  We had a nice lunch at a cool cafe and we excitedly believe we are going to really enjoy our stay here in Athens.  We were actually just looking for a grocery store but our afternoon stroll was still nice.  We recognised a few sights by this point and realised we were closer to the train station than our cabbie made out and overcharged us.  Oh well, it’s good to know we’re close.  We had lunch at a nice cafe then headed back to the hotel looking for a supermarket.  Turns out there is one right across the street our hotel.  Cool.

Now that we have food, time for a bit of TV.  Unlike Italy and France, the TV is in English and they just have Greek subtitles so we’re more at home than we’ve been for a couple of weeks. Sshhhh!  Oceans 13 is on.  Good night Athens.

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Rome City Sights - Villa Borghese

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Rome Rest Day2

Ev’s Achievement for today: With our crappy shower head, Ev has learnt that she can isolate one of the annoying powerful jet sprays to give her bottom teeth a high pressure clean like the dentist.  She is yet to master how to clean her top teeth without spraying water up her nose.  That can be tomorrow’s task.

As you can see we’re having another rest day.  Ev dragged Dan out of bed for breakfast at 9:50am and he was not happy, but he went back for seconds so he must have got something out of it.  We put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign up so Dan could sleep while Ev worked on the journal.  At 1:30pm we received a call from Reception asking if we were ready for Room Service to clean our room.  Aaaa, didn’t we put the sign up..??  Anyway, our bathroom was cleaned with us still in the room...Awkward!  The Post Office closed at 1:00pm so Mickey and our toys from DisneyLand in Paris will be coming to the Airport with us.   

Right this second we’ve split the laptop screened so Dan can watch live sport and Ev has an 1/8 of the screen available for typing this.  Our computer is tiny and Dan is crushing Ev’s arm.  He’s comfortable though, but ‘When in Rome...’.  I don’t know what that even means.  That doesn’t even make sense.  Anyway, time to get back to the DisneyLand journal.

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Rome Rest Day

We’re having a rest day today and have had some time to reflect on our trip so far.

We’ve been thinking that we took some of our research advice about how to travel way too seriously.  From our observations we shouldn’t have stressed about what to wear in Paris or Rome as people are wearing jeans all the time, and not just tourists.  We have each already posted back zip off pants and Dan has bought some jeans.  We also should have not bought so much Kathmandu clothing as well as we’ve only worn one pair of thermals a few times in Africa on the cold nights, and have posted them back already.

We’re really please we didn’t buy a money pouch or wallet because we haven’t felt the needed for it.  For our day trips we are taking a back pack that has a lock, which we don’t use and often we don’t even take a bag, just Ev’s small handbag and the camera bag. We have been careful not to leave things in our pockets, just in case, but a specific money wallet we think is way over the top.  Walking though the city streets of Paris and Rome with a money wallet is like walking through the nearest capital city back home with a money wallet, and a bumb bag and a huge akubra hat with a sign that says ‘Outback Tourist’.  We’ve seen other 50-60 year old tourists, the kind with socks under their open shoes, and they definitely look like tourists.  We don’t want to look like that, so jeans have been perfectly acceptable and generally you don’t need to wash them everyday either.

And yeah, the Medication we’ve bought has been way over the top.  We ran out of Sudafed because we did need that, and we’ve just bought some more in France.  We found that buying medication, even in China is okay.  The Pharmacist’s generally know what you’re looking for if you can hand them the packet you want because they have translation books at the counters.  We certainly didn’t need two packets each of nausea tablets.  And we have 10 bottles of malaria tablets because we each have to take one daily in Africa and for the Inca Trail.  Our medication bag could have been halved...though the cautious side of Ev says ‘but we still have another month and a half to go’. 

 

We’ve changed our itinerary. We’ve decided not to do the Inca Trail because Ev’s legs are still cramping every day as we head out on day trips.  We asked Karen from Travel Managers to investigate the difference between taking the train up and just seeing Maccu Piccu, but we’ve decided to just cancel Peru all together (that’s 5 bottles of malaria tablets we can take out now, or donate to someone).  Our trip is becoming very expensive and it would be good to have a week at home before going back to work.  As it was, we would arrive home on a Thursday and Dan will have to start work on the Monday and that is really not a lot of recovery time.  We’re feeling pretty homesick here in Rome, but still want to continue with our trip.  We’ve been going non-stop for a full month, everyday going out to see some amazing sights, and this last week of driving and watching our bank account diminish has gutted us.  We’ve planned a lot more rest days coming up, and we’re hoping Greece will be very quiet as well.  We’re both looking forward to NY mostly because it’s a country that speaks the same language, has TV we can make sense of, food that will taste normal, theatres, and sport, Dan is very excited about the American Sport.

Being so far behind with our journal and posting on the blog has also been pretty stressful.  We have a lot of information stored in our minds and things we still want to read from our souvenir books to incorporate in each journal.  Uploading and sorting photos also takes a lot of time.  It’s tiring to think about, but it’s worth it.  We read through our China book all the time and are glad we took detailed notes then in 2006, so we need to make sure we keep up with it on this trip as well even if we just finish uploading things to the blog when we get back to Australia.  There has been so much we have seen and all the days seem to blur into one at times.

We’re having another rest day tomorrow.  Honeymoons are supposed to be relaxing right?

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Vatican City

Today we visited the smallest country in the world: The Vatican City at the centre of Rome. We’d been for a walk the other day and saw a line up to the Vatican that stretched the entire block of 700 metres and would have taken 3 hours to go in. In our down time we’ve come across some great tips, so we booked our tickets online which were ready for collection at the desk inside the building. We were shocked that we waited only 15 minutes to get in! Research is really paying off for us. Thursday’s before lunch is the quietest time of the week and at all costs, avoid lining up at 7:30am because every other tourist is doing it hoping they will get there first. Again we went with the audio guide option so we could explore the whole place on our own without being rushed and we are so pleased we did.

We passed through the Galleria Carte Geogrfiche of the Vatican Palaces. This room has scenes with gold frames painted on the ceilings and maps on the walls displaying Roman Army territories. It was a spectacular room to walk through. This corridor led us through more rooms with huge wall tapestries and on to Raphael’s rooms. Raphael's rooms were frescoed by several artists though the existing paintings they were soon replaced by Raphael alone with an aid for minor sections from 1509-1517. Stanza della Segnatura became Raphael’s masterwork being completed from 1909-1511. 

Galleria Carte

Room after room after room walls and ceilings are decorated.

Raphael's Room

Room of Constantine

Sistine Chapel

We stayed in the Vatican for three hours and inside the Sistine Chapel alone for over an hour to listen to the audio guide comments and take in the many scenes that the artists had painted on the ceiling and walls but we’ll get to that soon. It’s a place where you wish there was no one else moving through so you could lay down and just allow your eyes to wander from scene to scene to scene, then back to the start again because you’re bound to see things you didn’t the first time. The audio guides bought great meaning to each scene.  The photos of the book are very clear and probably better pictures than we could have taken inside (photography was strictly not allowed in the room).

Sistine Chapel

Wall Scenes

The scenes on the wall were Old and New Testament bible scenes were brought to life visually by various artists including Perugino, Pinturicchio, Signorelli, Cosimo Rosselli, Piero di Cosimo, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli. Some important scenes include the ‘Donation of the Keys to St. Peter’, the ‘Trials of Moses’, the ‘Temptation’ and the ‘Punishment of Korah’ and ‘Dathan and Abiram’. There are also 24 figures of popes painted. 

To finish the chapel, Michelangelo was commissioned to decorate the ceiling (800 square metres and 300 figures) which represented scenes from the Old Testament including Separation of ‘Light and Darkness’, ‘Creation of Adam and Eve’, ‘Life Events of Moses’ and ‘Christ’s Ancestors’. Michelangelo also painted the wall behind the alter called ‘The Last Judgement’ which displayed the truly artistic creativity of Michelangelo’s finely tuned art of imagination blending with realistic illustrations of drawing the human body.

Ceiling in the Sistine Chapel

Ceiling Detail

Creation of Man

God separating Darkness and Light

Last Judgment

Creation of Man

We are pleased we took our time going through the many halls and rooms that mazed through the buildings and were lead outside to explore the Vatican City at the Piazza di San Pietro. 

Monumental Staircase 1932 in the Vatican Museum

St Peter's Basilica

We joined the hundreds of tourists outside queued to pass through the security checkpoint into St Peter’s Basilica which was built over St Peter’s tomb as a monument in 320AD. Bernini planned the layout and detailing of the basilica and later Michelangelo redesigned the structure of the basilica.   

Outside and in, the detail in everything is of the highest standard with marble flooring and pillars, gold trim everywhere, delicate tiling on ceilings and the flooring mixed with finely painted images and intricate carvings and sculptures including Michelangelo’s ‘Pieta’.  Tourists came through the church in waves as we explored the corners of the rooms.

St Peter's Basilica

A magical moment with the natural sunlight streaming through to the alter.

St Peter's Tomb

The Pietà sculpted by Michelangelo

Back out in St Peter's Square, a red granite Egyptian Obelisk stands in the centre surrounded by navigation stones amongst the cobbled path.  A granite fountain stands to one side at the edge of the piazza.

 

What time was this picture taken?

 

4:00pm

Tired from another full day, our legs dragged us back towards home and we stopped into the shops to restock our food and water supplies.  This afternoon we are both really starting to feel exhausted physically and mentally from being on the move all the time.  Walking everyday is definitely taking a toll on Ev and we’re thinking of cancelling our paid Inca Trail tour without getting a refund, so we’re going to take it easy tomorrow and see how we are after some rest and hopefully relaxation back in the hotel.  The receptionist was kind to give us some ice for drinks and some hot water for tea when we arrived home, the two best ways of winding down.  Although we are really curious to continue exploring some of the districts close to Rome, we need to start pacing ourselves and recuperate.  We’re looking forward to lazing in Greece especially on our Greek Islands tour.

Time to look back over our photos from today and jot down some more notes.

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