Living a Dream

When I last left you, the two Koniecznys were about to arrive and we were going to do...well, something. And a week later we were all going to Vienna for Christmas to see some of my family members who live there (one of them is Norbert, who you might remember from canyoning). Carly and her mom got in on Sunday and we just kinda hung out the first day or two, but they wanted to see the sights and took off to see some nearby things and places, which is something they might tell you about if they were blogging but I don't think they are. Anyway, the real excitement started at the end of the week. Carly and her mom took an overnight train to Vienna on Thursday/Friday and Jenna and I had to wait until Saturday to go. We took a two-layover train; once in Verona to turn to the north and then a second stop in Innsbruck to switch onto an Austrian (OBB) train that would swoop through southeastern Germany en route to Vienna. It was a nearly 12 hour day of trains and, believe it or not, it...

This is a weird stretch of time to write about because a lot of different things happened. The first notable occurrence was that, for the first time since we arrived in Milan three full months earlier, Jenna and I stayed in Milan for the entire weekend of December 6-8. It was unheard of. We went to a big exposition called "L'Artigiano in Fiera" which was a worldwide showcase of kitschy goods from about 70 countries, plus all the regions in Italy (for the record, the USA stand was small and had album-cover-posters, cowboy stuff, and road signs - that was about it). It was crowded. Crazy crazy crowded. And at one point I looked at something before putting it back on a shelf. When I put it back on the shelf I had to kinda reach past a woman's face and she just about stared a hole in my soul - I've never been looked at so angrily, and it was in response to doing something completely normal and pedestrian. I don't understand this country and its people. Anyway,...

One of Jenna's friends from home lives in Stuttgart, Germany on a US military base. Stuttgart is known for having a big Christmas market. We would be free on Thanksgiving weekend, and it seemed like a US military base would be a good place to spend some time around Thanksgiving. Just a few hours away is the famously beautiful Neuschwanstein Castle, where we could day trip. Also nearby, Ritter Sport chocolate factory, also known as one of the greatest places in the entire world. This, it seemed, would be a wonderful weekend. On Thursday (Thanksgiving in the States) I had to cancel my lessons due to some violent illness that left me nearly unconscoius on a train. It didn't get much better. I toughed it out on Saturday morning to get on the flight and spent the majority of the weekend occupying a (rather pleasant) bathroom in our caring host's home. I made a hell of a first impression. It wasn't all disaster from me though. We did go to the chocolate factory and pu...

A man named Parker Fernandez was one of my college roommates during my senior year at Ohio University. We then lived in different areas for a few years, but he would occasionally show up in Chicago and we'd have a hell of a time wandering the city. Not long after I came to Italy, Parker moved to Madrid to teach English through a much-more-official-than-mine program. In mid-November, Jenna and I visited him. This is our story. We had a 6:40 a.m. flight from an airport almost an hour outside of Milan, so we got up at 3, waited outside for an overnight bus to take us nearish the train station, then walked 2/3 of a mile to the train station, got on a shuttle bus, and arrived at the airport around 5:30. That's not a fun start. I stayed optimistic and upbeat, my bride to be was...less enthused. We were both also getting sick. Madrid is big. Like, really big. Just the airport took ages to get through, and eventually we got the train to the appointed meeting location for Parker and...

Welcome to your intro-to-Italian class, where in a few paragraphs I will tell you the worst word in the entire language. A lot of you probably don't know many words in Italian, and the ones you do are the super-simple ones like ciao, arrividerci, grazie, prego, or similar things. You might've even heard words like "capisce" in Italian movies (pronounced cah-peesh-ay, not cah-peesh, for the record), or "mamma mia" instead of "oh my god" or something like that. Well, all of those get used, and I'm going to tell you a little more. "Prego" means everything. It can mean any of the following things: you're welcome, can I help you? Sorry, please, go ahead, can you repeat that? and more. Mamma mia sounds like a joke the first time you hear it, but it's real. And of course, there are the hand-motions. These things are real, and they're used to a funny degree. When Italians almost get into car accidents (which is literally e...

This is going to be tricky, because as of today, 17 March (see how European I am now?), we've been to Verona three times. The first was a brief stopover when our train rested there for two hours and we walked into the town center and were shocked to find such nice things. The second was the weekend I'm about to briefly discuss, and the third was Valentine's Day, which was full of chocolate and a bit of rain. The first time we saw Verona and walked into town, all we really knew about it was that Star-Crossed Lovers fictitiously lived there and committed suicide in a comedy of errors known as Romeo and Juliet. Apparently the entire town center is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it's a wonderfully preserved historic town, complete with an intact Roman arena which served as a template for the Colosseum in Rome. As added bonuses, there's a medieval castle with a delightful bridge, a super expensive shopping street full of window-shopping pedestrians all day long...

Not the one in Ohio - I probably would've thought the same thing. No, I'm talking about the one in Greece. However, upon exiting the plane in Greece I happened to notice a man wearing an Ohio State shirt who informed me that his daughter was currently in Athens, Ohio, as a student. On Dads weekend. What a guy, huh? Anyway, he also informed me that he was in town for the marathon, so we accidentally went to Athens on the weekend of the Athens Marathon. Oops. I won't waste much time talking about what the city of Athens represents, because a bajillion websites can do that better than I can, I'll just say that it was the starting point of basically everything that we still use today. They started things, then the Romans tweaked them to become slightly better, and then they pretty much haven't changed in thousands of years, except now the internet tells me that everything in the world is getting worse. So let's talk about 40 hours in Athens instead. First, w...

According to legend, if you visited Italy 20 years ago, you would have never heard of a place known as Cinque Terre National Park. Then some time in the early 2000s Rick Steves mentioned it as one of his favorite little places in Italy, and the tourist revolution was invigorated. Most likely, people had been visiting, but his endorsement tends to put things over the top. These days, it's one of THE stops on an Italian adventure. I can personally count almost a dozen people who've been there, and that's pretty weird considering it has no ancient ruins, no canals-for-streets, no Alps, and no world-renowned art. What it does have is all the majesty of the Italian Riviera: jagged rocky coastline, incredibly steep mountainsides starting at the shore, locally produced wine, tiny villages built into the rock-faces, hiking trails, and some of the best sunsets on Earth. Graham and I visited in late 2012 and it was the first place I've ever been where I thought "if I d...

This is another you've definitely never heard of. During the trip to Innsbruck, I mentioned that we passed lots of towns and areas that just looked lovely - places we thought we'd fancy a visit to at a later point, but didn't know when. Avio was one of the towns I'd written down as a possibility. It had a castle, it had bike paths on the river, and it was nestled between mountains in the Italian Alps. Avio is a classic "blink and you'll miss it" town, and actually staying there made it seem all the more, well, tiny. We booked a BnB that offered breakfast and free bikes, which meant we could ride up and down the valley as long as our butts could handle it, and that's precisely what we did. We got in early in the afternoon and figured we'd find a place to get something to eat or get some bread or...something, and then we'd check in later in the afternoon. Or maybe we'd go see the castle. Good thing we had the castle as an option, becaus...

This past weekend we had the good fortune of being able to rent a car near Milan and to drive around northern and central Italy and see some beautiful things. This post will not be about those beautiful places. This post will be me at my angry-old-man-est because driving in Italy is one of the most maddening things I've ever done. In the USofA, we like to think that the left lane is the passing lane on the highway and the right lanes are for slower traffic, right? In Europe, the passing lane is the place you get killed if you drive less than 130 mp/h. You might think I'm exaggerating, I am not. - Near the highway we took is the high-speed rail that goes from Milan to Rome. We've traveled on this train and it averages about 250 km/h. There were plenty of cars who passed us at the same speeds as the train was passing. I'll save you the math and say that 250 km/h is 155 mp/h. If a cop saw you going that fast, they would never be able to catch you. - The typical w...