Living a Dream

We Americans have a bit of a reputation. We're loud, we're ignorant, and we often make sure everyone around us knows that we're loud and ignorant. On a beautiful April day, a group of family and I visited Pompeii. Like many, we were excited to see the ruins, impossibly preserved areas, and the casts of people who were perpetually stuck in their final moments. It was a very cool place. We did see all that and more, because Pompeii is huge. Most people head to the main points on the tourist map, but there are places where you could easily get lost and not see anyone for 10-15 minute on this particular day. At one point, near one of the main squares of Pompeii, an American woman stopped us and asked us to take a photo. She asked that we take it of her and her...boyfriend? Son? She appeared to be in her 40s and he appeared to be in his 20s, but they certainly didn't give off a mother-and-son vibe. After the photo - they posed in a way that gave no hint of their ...

When the situation calls for it, I am a mature person. I can talk comfortably about reproductive health, I can watch a movie with a sex scene and not make a joke, and I can look at nude statues and think nothing of it beyond art. Hell, my senior yearbook quote was about how maturity is just knowing when and where to be immature. I won't laugh when you fall down because you might be hurt and I absolutely do not laugh when an animal humps something because it's instinct and the animal can't help it. I believe you shouldn't laugh at something if the thing you're laughing at is helpless in the situation. But sometimes you find your limit. The National Archaeological Museum of Naples (abbreviated MANN in Italian) pushed me near my limit. See, Naples is home to brilliant and interesting historical artwork. With the nearby town of Pompeii buried under the ash of Mt. Vesuvius, tons of pristine artifacts which were rescued from Pompeii ended up in MANN. Some of these p...

Italy is so full of wonderful things and places that I've written about 20+ different places that we visited without getting to one of the most iconic structures in the entire country. I'm talking, of course, about the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I don't actually remember our train route to Pisa from Milan, but I do know that I took a photo of the toilet on the train. It was the first time I'd ever seen a train-toilet that didn't even pretend that the waste was going anywhere other than the train track below.                                   (That's the ground) We hopped off the train at Pisa and started wandering, not really knowing where we were going. We sort of assumed that we'd get off the train and immediately see the Tower somewhere off in the distance and just walk that direction. We were wrong. Basically we left the train station and walked straight ahead in a 12:00 direction. The Tower was ...

Jenna had the idea that we should go to Verona for Valentine's day of our year abroad. Thanks to Romeo & Juliet, Verona claims to be the city of love and pulls out all the stops to make Valentine's day extra special despite the fact that Shakespeare had never been there and Juliet's balcony is a sham. In any case, this was our third stop in Verona but this one was on a mission. The city hosts something called "Verona in Love." They basically set up chocolate stands everywhere and put hearts on almost anything in the city that draws people. This is great if you like chocolate and even better if you know, unequivocally, that chocolate is the best thing in the world. We fall into the 2nd category. There's more than just chocolate though: They have photo-ops, rose gardens, markets, entertainers, and much more. A walk through the city is somehow even more alive on Valentine's day than it is on any other day, which is an accomplishment. There's ...

Bardonecchia was not on our "must go here" list in Italy. It was a matter of circumstance, however, as we'd heard it was a very beautiful area in the mountains and we could go quickly and inexpensively. As an added bonus, the tourism website for Bardonecchia showed snow-tubing at the ski resort as an activity. Sign us up. Neither of us really knew what to expect from this small town, but we knew it had hosted a few Olympic events in the 2006 Torino games (photographic proof at bottom). Our hotel was inexpensive and overlooked a small parking lot which turned out to host a market during our snowy stay. This was perfect, because I needed boots and got them for cheap...after I wore them walking around the wet, snowy pavement, effectively buying them without realizing it because you're not supposed to wear shoes outside when you're testing them. The "city" has a bus system that stops in 2-3 places in the town and then goes to the bases of the main ski...

Back when we spent a weekend in Madrid , we stayed with my college roommate, Parker. It was awesome. Since we both were living in Europe, it was just a matter of time before Parker came to us in Milan. As luck would have it, his train wasn't scheduled to arrive until about 9:00 on a Saturday evening, so Jenna and I decided to spend Saturday north of the city in a place called Bergamo. Bergamo only existed as an airport to us, as that's where the airport is which Ryanair flies out of (side note, they should've spelled "air" with a Y and made themselves a palindrome). We'd been there plenty of times, but never left the airport. The town - small city, really - is at the foot of the mountains and signifies the start of the massive valley that Milan rests in. We took a train to Bergamo and walked through the lower part of the city - Citta Bassa, in Italian - which is mainly modern. Many things are older than those you'd find in the States, but that doesn...

I teased this a little about two weeks ago, but now we're here and ready to talk about a little road trip that we took. The plan was simple: Get a place to stay near Florence (but not in Florence), have a good old-fashioned Italian farmhouse meal, and drive around Tuscany, mainly looking for hill towns. In practice, it was at least that simple - maybe simpler. You can't end up in a bad place. Everywhere is beautiful, even if it was a little hazy at times. It was February 28 when we left, so it was supposed to be cold, but we were going south without much knowledge of the elevation at-play on this trip. Our first stop answered some questions. A sign on the highway pointed toward a (maybe) national park of the lakes Suviana and Brasimone. I don't know which on this actually is, but it was beautiful. We had a nice time tossing  rocks into the lake and watching the ice spider-web. Quite a setting. We hopped back in the car, periodically pulling over to take photos, a...

Italy is a pretty cool place, as you might've noticed from all the photos I've been posting and blog entries I've made. With that in mind, we decided to try a road-trip weekend. The plan was to pick out some notable hill-towns in/around Tuscany and just drive. We'd also booked an Agriturismo for two nights because that's something we'd heard about doing. An Agriturismo is essentially a farm-house that rents out rooms. Some are more luxurious than others, including pools, hot-tubs, and more. Others focus on the agriculture aspect and are working farms where wine, jams, meat, fruit, and much more are produced. We opted for a small place outside of Florence because it featured an onsite dinner. We'd heard that the best part about Agriturismos were that they serve seemingly endless dinners for a flat-rate that gets added to the price of your room. We wanted that. The dinner did not disappoint, but that's going to show up in photos in a subsequent post. ...

After everything we covered on day 1 , day 2 , and day 3 , it's hard to imagine there'd be much left for us to do on day 4 in Rome. But, as the eternal city lives on, so does the adventure. The day started off rather gloomy and a bit rainy, but we marched toward the imperial forums again to just...soak it in. We took a walk around the Colosseum and up onto the Oppian hill, where the former "Golden Palace" of Nero stood, and now we saw remains of the Baths of Trajan . One remarkable thing about this area was a set of impossibly green birds, which a stranger pointed out to us on a few brief occasions. He kept trying to get closer, ultimately scaring them away, as if he thought they would just sit there and let him pat them on the head or something. Somehow, more notably, the thing we remember most about this was that there was a man walking a golden retriever, but the golden retriever believed it was a lion. It walked more proudly than any dog I've ever seen: Ch...