Loblogomy

We have finally returned from our honeymoon and I think we both need a vacation to recover. I’ve never been on holiday before and had to be up at 7am almost every day, but that’s how this trip was. Since my last post at Lake Maggiore, we were so fully occupied with sight-seeing, traveling, and enjoying the rare occasion to rest, that I never had a chance to update the blog. From the little village of Spresa on Lake Maggiore where we stayed for two days, we went to Venice, stopping briefly in Lugano, Switzerland and Verona, Italy. During the stop in Lugano, I remembered what a pain in the ass it used to be to travel in Europe before the Euro, when you had to change currency upon each border crossing. Switzerland doesn’t use the Euro (they have maintained the Swiss Franc), so we only bought one thing there… on credit card. Verona was a quaint little town, the main tourist attraction being “Juliet’s Balcony”–the Juliet here is the fictional character from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, so I’m not sure exactly how she has a balcony here in the “real world,” but tourists seem to flock there in droves. During our two days in Venice, we found the city to be rather pretty, but, honestly, it didn’t really live up to my expectations. I guess I expected more grandiosity or something, as someone once told me that Venice was so beautiful it made him cry. It rained a little while we were strolling through the labyrinthine Venetian walkways, which might have been refreshing had we not already been drenched in our own sweat. Almost every place we went in Italy was hot and very humid. Apparently, they’ve been having record high temperatures all over Italy during the month of June. In Rome, we were told that on June 14th and 15th of this year, the high beat the last 400 years of recorded temperatures for those dates. Needless to say, we weren’t as comfortable for much of the trip as might have liked. Fortunately, our bus had great air conditioning. Another problem was mosquitos, which we mainly encountered at Lake Maggiore and Venice, due to the abundance of water for their damned breeding. For some reason, the mosquitos had a predilection for biting Natalie’s face and my toes (those mother-F’ers bit one of my toe knuckles twice!). Also, Italian mosquitos seem to jizz a hell of a lot of anti-coagulant into to you when they penetrate, as I developed dime-sized hemorrhages around a couple of bites. Anyways, Venice was very picturesque, but if I never see it again, it will be no big loss. From Venice, we went south to Assisi, which was a peaceful little village where the roads and buildings were all made of stone. After an overnight in Assisi, we moved further south and back to the west coast of Italy to stop for a few hours of excessive sweating and sunstroke while visiting the ruins of Pompeii. I’ve always wanted to see Pompeii, partially because of historical interest, but also because it was both destroyed and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius on August 24, 79AD, exactly 1,895 years before I was born. From Pompeii, we moved on to the seaside town of Sorrento, where we stayed for two days, taking an excursion out to the island of Capri on one of those days. From Sorrento, we went back to Rome for our last night in Italy. All in all, it was a very nice trip, even though it was a bit exhausting. Fortunately, we had a pretty good guide for the entire trip, although I think he didn’t like us much, since we didn’t do many of the optional “excursions” and “dinners” with our traveling companions, as we found that we could get much better food at about 1/3 the price charged by the tour company by exploring the cities on our own. Besides, it wouldn’t have been much of a honeymoon had we spent all our time with the tour group. :)

Oh… yes, I do have a lot of pictures to fill in the gaps in the above narrative and to show what we actually saw in all of those places. I took 1,015 photos, so it will probably take a few days to cull through them and post some of the good ones. Those photos occupy about 3GB of disk space, so I was very happy that I had purchased a Minds@Work MindStor (aka, digital wallet) to pull photos off my compact flash, so that I wouldn’t need to carry a laptop. The MindStor is a great gadget–it’s basically a 10GB hard drive with a socket for a CF reader; I really don’t understand why Minds@Work went out of business, and why no one else has filled that niche of the digital storage market yet. I had to buy mine off eBay, since it’s not available at retail outlets anymore. By far, though, my best purchase before this trip was my 15-30mm lens. I ended up using it a LOT, because of the close quarter shooting required at many of the places we visited.

Coming back was probably the worst part of the entire trip. One thing I learned on this trip is to avoid flying through JFK, if possible. As I mentioned in a previous post, one of our pieces of luggage was delayed at JFK on our way to Rome. Upon our return to SFO late Tuesday night, we were flabbergasted to find that both our bags had been delayed at JFK! It took over 24 hours again for them to get the bags to us. Fuckers! I think the people working there are completely retarded–I mean unemployable-by-Dairy-Queen level retardation. After getting off the plane from Rome and passing through customs, we had to go through security again to get onto our plane for SFO. We were really in a rush, since our plane from Rome had been delayed, and the travel agent hadn’t given us much time to make the transfer at the behemoth JFK. Anyways, it was taking over a minute per person to go through security at JFK! Then, once we got on the plane, we discovered that the agent we had just checked in with, and who knew we were traveling together, put Natalie and I in seats across the aisle from each other. So, we waited for someone to take the seat next to Natalie. It turns out to be a really bizarre man who claimed he was from Palestine. I felt bad for Natalie, because as the guy walked by me looking for his seat, I was immediately overtaken by a stench reminiscent of rotting trash. Now, the people in Gaza may think this guy’s BO smells like a freshly cut rose, but Jesus H. Christ (or Mohammed H. Allah, whichever fits)–smelly people of the world, listen up: When you travel in the US, please take a shower and use some fucking deodorant!!!! After the guy sat down, we asked if he would be willing to exchange seats with me. He said he would be willing to do so in 30 minutes, and he sets a timer on his watch. WTF?! Anyways, from the moment the plane took off, this guy was nervously looking all over the place–out the window, over the seat in front of him, over his back. His figgityness seemed odd. Then, a little before his timer goes off, and just after the captain has told everyone to remain seated as we continue to ascend through a good deal of turbulence, the guy jumps up and basically tries to walk over Natalie to get out. She lets him out, and the dude walks quickly to the back of the plane, where it looked like he stood next to the escape hatch for a few moments, as if he was thinking about opening it. After a few minutes, he comes back and says he’ll switch seats, which we thanked him for, but at this point, I’m trying to keep the guy in my peripheral vision, thinking he might be a god damned terrorist. After he takes the seat I was previously occupying, he quickly becomes engaged in a conversation with the guy in the next seat–this conversation was loud, in Arabic, and lasted the full five hours of the flight from New York to SFO. All the while, the entire coach section of the plane is starting to reek of this loud, nervous-looking Palestinian. What a relief it was to finally touch ground in San Francisco!