Why are archaeologists always doomed to failure?

Their career lies in ruins from the start!

Okay, that was terrible. But archaeology was definitely the theme of my trip further south along the peninsula- I headed down to Naples for a couple of days, and then hopped over to Pompeii for a daytrip. Before going to Naples I had been warned so many times about how it was a terribly unsafe city, full of pickpockets and trash, but I have to say, it was one of my favorite cities. Perhaps I was just really lucky - I caught the weather during warm spell so people were out in the streets, grandmas were taking their grandkids out for a stroll in the park, lots of people were chatting in cafes (bundled up in coats, but still) and walking through the pedestrian part of town, and there was an ice-skating rink set up next to a HUGE castle. Lots of awkward teenaged hand-holding going on there too, it was really cute and reminded me of middle school awkwardness.

For dinner, I had an ENORMOUS pizza margherita - when in Napoli, right? This thing had to have been at least sixteen inches across, it was ridiculous. And I had a terrible stomachache after I finished it (eating an entire pizza, and only an entire pizza, for dinner will do that to you), but it tasted soooo gooood ... I'm never going to be able to look at Domino's the same way again.

The best thing about the pizza though, was that they made it right in front of me. I placed my order, then the guy pulled out a big chunk of dough and rolled it out, then spread the tomato sauce and the basil (?) leaves and mozzarella. There was this groove that had been cut into the edge of the counter, and another guy who had been stoking the fire in the wood-burning stove put a paddle up to this groove and in one smooth motion transferred my pizza from the counter over to the paddle and shoved it into the oven. He turned it around after a while, so the other side could cook, then pulled it out, boxed it up, and sent me on my way! I couldn't resist how good it smelled, and snuck a bite before I got back to the hostel ... mmmm, delicious!

The next morning, I got up bright and early to catch the train to Pompeii. Walking through an entire Roman city is SO WEIRD. It was really easy for me to imagine daily life there, and really difficult at the same time - the buildings are all still standing, and much better preserved than most Roman ruins, but I can't even imagine an entire settlement being covered in ash. There were a couple displays of the plaster casts of the hollows made by people's bodies in the volcanic ash/rock mixture, and one of a dog. I could see the imprint of their shoes' straps, and even the folds in their clothes - it was sobering, yet completely surrealistic.

The Farnese Group is an ENORMOUS sculpture in the National Archaeology Museum in Naples. It was described as a "mountain of marble" back when it was first commissioned ... and I'd say that's pretty accurate. I also saw a small exhibition of the Farnese Cup and the jewels and cameos in the Farnese collection!

Hands down, THE sexiest Aphrodite I've ever seen. I don't really like the Aphrodites in the Capitoline style, I think Aphrodite should and can be much more badass. Yay goddesss of sexiness!

Oh Europe, with your enormous old castles next to parking lots. I love the juxtaposition of Olde and new.

And here's the beginning of my pizza: rolling and flipping the dough ...

Tomato sauce and basil ...

And into the oven!

The restaurant smelled AMAZING. I was about thisclose to drooling the entire time my pizza was baking.

The most delicious 3.80 euros I have ever spent.

The buildings in Pompeii are all VERY well preserved; many still have their original frescoes!

And here's me, on a Roman crosswalk!

Roman Holiday

The next stop was Rome! I arrived on a day with absolutely awful weather - it was pouring rain and freezing cold - and my hostel was hands down the WORST I have ever had the misfortune to stay in. Whatever you do, stay AWAY from M&J Place Hostel if you are looking for a dorm! It has NO redeeming qualities whatsoever - the dorms are tiny and cramped, the showers are filthy, and the entire floor shares two bathroom stalls. Their only redeeming quality was their location - it was just around the corner from Termini train station. However, the lobby area was clean and the lobby bathroom was really nice - it might be worth a look if your budget stretches to private rooms.

After that downer of an introduction to Rome, though, the rest of my time in Rome was fantastic. I went to see the Coliseo, the Forum Romanum, and the Ara Pacis. It was really interesting to compare what I had learned about Roman arquitecture with the monuments and ruined buildings that I was seeing in person! I also went ot the Pantheon, and of course to St. Peter's Basilica. Now I can add the Vatican to the count of countries that I've set foot in, too!

However, the highlight of my time in Rome was definitely meeting Julien by chance. The top of the Pantheon isn't covered, so the floor has a series of small holes to drain the rainwater. I was walking along and keeping an eye out for the holes, to see how many I could find, and I noticed a guy doing the same thing. We smiled at each other and got to talking, then found out that we were both on Couchsurfing.org! It's a networking website dedicated to connecting "couchsurfers"- travellers on a budget who want to stay with a local - and hosts who have an available couch and want to show their city to a tourist. Julien was couchsurfing with Roberto the next night and invited me along to meet him. Of course, I agreed!

The next day, I wandered around the old part of town for a while, then met up with Julien, Roberto, and Lan, a girl from Malaysia who was also couchsurfing with Roberto. Roberto took us on a walk through Trastevere, then invited us back to his apartment for dinner, even though he was busy studying for his finals. Julien cooked a delicious tuna-pepper pasta and Roberto shared some delicious Italian cheese. Sadly, I had to leave before midnight to catch the last train back to my hostel, but that night was one of my favorite memories of my trip and a great introduction to the couchsurfing community.

This niche on the outside of the baths needed a statue. ;D

The Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forums!

The central statue group in Piazza Navona.

I was just going to take a picture of this lovely fountain, when a cocker spaniel puppy ran up and sat down expectantly in front of it. Then its human picked it up and helped it take a drink from the fountain! So cute! I had a smile on my face for the rest of the day.

Here's me with Julien, a French dude who's currently working in London and wandering Europe every chance he has.

Yay Couchsurfing!

The Tiber River is so beautiful at night.

As is St. Peter's Basilica.

We hung out on the steps for a while ...

Julien was trying different angles and exposure times for his camera, but eventually the security guard came over and yelled at us for sitting on the ground while the Pope was talking, or something like that. Whoops! None of us really understood what was going on, as we didn't speak a word of Italian.

Julien and Roberto, the makers of our delicious dinner!
"Do you have any onions? This recipie needs an onion."
"No, I don't. You French, always cooking with onions! Here, try using this garlic instead."
"... *chop chop chop*"
*pour*
"AHH that's twice as much olive oil we need! You Italians!"

Paris, je t'aime

We got back to Paris just after New Year's, and just in time for me to spend an entire day at the Louvre Museum. Happily for my wallet, the first Sunday of each month is free for everyone at the Louvre! I saw the Mona Lisa and was completely underwhelmed. They covered the painting with a reflective glass case (which I can understand, to control humidity and such, but still), then cordoned off the floor in front of it in about 20 feet in each direction. And it's already such a small painting, in comparison to the others in the same room! Oh well. There was still an enormous crowd gathered in front of it and snapping pictures, though.

I really enjoyed the next gallery over, of large-scale French Romanticism paintings. I recognized Raft of the Medusa, The Coronation of Napoleon, Liberty Leading the People, and Napoleon Crossing the Alps, among so many others. And of course, the Nike of Samothrace, Venus de Milo, and my favorite statue ever, Psyche Revived by Cupid. It was like walking through my AP Art History textbook all over again!

Some dudes practicing their rollerblading skillz outside the Louvre.

This was where the line to see the Venus de Milo usually started. Ridiculously long lines.

After the museum closed I hung out in the lobby under the Pyramid for a while.

The glass and metal grid makes for some interesting effects on pictures!

I played around with the timer setting on my camera for a bit.

The pyramids and the pools also made for some cool pictures.


The Seine is beautiful at night.

The Eiffel Tower lit up at night.

"The more I see, the less I know ...

... the more I'd like to let it go."

I'm sitting in the kitchen/basement in my dorm in Paris right now, listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and wondering exactly how the hell I got here. It seems like just yesterday I was worrying about my presentation on Piedras for my Spanish film class, practicing sevillanas, and getting ready for the Féria in Córdoba at the end of May. And of course, neglecting my poor blog ... A lot has happened, so I'll break down the time by the places I went and what happened before and after that.

So as I recounted at the end of the last post, my winter break grand tour of Western Europe began in Brittany with delicious food, incredibly generous family that I didn't know I had, and a perpetually hungry dog.

My uncle's family lives in Landerneau, a lovely little town 20 minutes outside of Brest.


Me with a bunch of cousins-by-marriage I had just met.

And the sweetest old gentleman I have ever met. I want to learn French just so I can go back and actually communicate with him!

We went to see my uncle's ranch one day, where the horses took a liking (and a munching) to my hair.

Bubeau (sp?), the most ravenous black lab I've ever seen. He'd be about a mile wide if he didn't have so much energy.

Crepes and apple cider - my new favorite comfort food.

Me and my uncle at a creperie in Nantes.

We went to see the castle in Nantes a couple days later. The glass on the window had really cool air bubbles!

Journey to the end of the earth (24/12 - 1/1)

Christmas was spent with my uncle's family in Finistère, the westernmost region of mainland France. There's a lovely, tiny little town there called Landerneau, with a fairly famous bridge with buildings on it - kind of like the Ponto Vecchio in Florence. Most of the week was spent indoors though, either eating or digesting. We watched Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (hilarious) and the latest Indiana Jones movie (also hilarious, for being so bad as to go 'round the other way and become awesome), drank this year's apple cider and ate entirely too much chicken with chestnuts and boudin at our Réveillon party on New Year's Eve. I also built up enough French phrases and alcohol tolerance to ask for "un petit peu, s'il te plaît" at dinner. Speaking of eating ... I might have also earned myself the nickname "clementine", due to the abundance of said fruits. >_>;;

Pre-Christmas in Paris

Have you ever walked into a room and instantly felt underdressed? As in that sinking feeling that oh god, everyone else here is dressed several zeroes more expensively than me and that person just gave me the once-over and I'm definitely coming up short and I'm going to be stuck in this place for a while with no means of escape and oh god, so. awkward. ...? Imagine, if you will, rolling out of your first bed in 48 hours (not counting bumpy overnight buses and benches in museums), pulling on the clothes that you've already been traveling in for several days, doing --something-- to your hair without a mirror in sight, and then heading out to door to see what you can of Paris at Christmastime.

You wander over to the center part of town, gawk at the Opera house and smile at the throngs of children crowded around the moving window displays. You stop to pet a homeless guy's dog, and maybe even buy a dozen chestnuts or so. You feel rather at peace with the world and suffused with the Christmas spirit (whatever that means), and wander into the large and sparkly department store to see what all the touristy fuss is about. You wait in line to have your bag inspected, next to the impatient children and the women already digging out their Christmas gift lists. You head to the elevator to check out the view from the top floor, which you've heard is pretty spectacular on a clear day. The elevator opens ... and you realize that every impeccably coifed and styled person in it has turned to stare at your distinctly plain clothes.

You suddenly feel very, very much like an impoverished country mouse.

At least the view from the top was pretty damn fantastic.

(I'm dropping off the internet for ten days or so, to spend the holidays with family on a ranch somewhere in Brittany. Expect updates to resume after the 2nd, and in the meantime - happy whatever-holiday-you-celebrate, and have a wonderful, safe, and warm 2009!)

Rest in peace, Double Tenth.

You were the best puppy a little girl could ask for.  

Adventures off the bottom of the map

Today's post title is stolen from M, fellow traveler extraordinaire who won my everlasting admiration for trekking through northern Spain with me while pulling her own weight and battling a nasty head cold. We parted ways at Madrid's Atocha train station on the 22nd, she to Malaga and I to Paris.

Oh, god, Bilbao was so much walking. Entirely too much walking and standing still and walking some more. The youth hostel is in the suburbs on the southwestern end of town, and the Guggenheim is on the northwestern end. So. Much. Walking and getting lost and walking some more ... and it didn't help that we started out on the southern edge of the map, then took a wrong turn (damn highway construction!) and fell off the map for a while. Whoops.

We did eventually make it to the Guggenheim though, and seriously, this place is mind-bogglingly (or bloggingly? heh) awesome. We spent a total of about six hours wandering in and around the museum, taking in all the installation pieces and admiring Frank Gehry´s architectural genius. Although the building is mostly made of limestone, titanium, and glass, inside I felt lightness and movement rather than heavy industrial building materials.

There was a special exhibit on Cy Twombly and his work at various stages of his life, which showed the influence of different artistic trends on his style. I really liked his latest Pop Art-inspired pieces, big red flowers on a bright yellow field. There was also a selection of items from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, organized by Portraits, Landscapes, Coins/Medals, the Nude, etc. I can't wait to visit the KHM itself, later this trip!

Lunch was sitting outside on the museum terrace and dodging bemused waiter´s glances. Baguette, carrots, chorizo, clementines, and taking pictures for other tourists. A group of children on a field trip stopped by the terrace to get out of the rain while their chaperones negotiated tickets downstairs.

The festival the next day was delicious, and so much fun! There were far more people than I thought lived in Bilbao, and the women and children all dressed up in traditional clothes. Of course, this being Spain there were also living statues performing, including this cowboy who was spray-painted silver all over. He had a really good act going on and interacted with his audience using whirrs and clicks and whistles, and had candy for the children who were brave enough to go near and give him money.

The smells of grilled meat and roasted chestnuts was pervasive, and oh so enticing. Lamb in tortilla is seriously tasty, and I really want to try murcillo (blood sausage) someday. We sat on a bench in the middle of the fair to eat lunch, and all around us were people eating, chatting, and (in typical Spanish fashion) boozing it up at 2pm. (The food stalls cut a channel into the corks of the wine bottles to making pouring easier for their customers.) We happened to be next to a foursome of loud and tipsy women, who liked the fair so much they started singing and dancing sevillanas. This was only slightly hampered by the half-eaten tortillas in their hands, which they ended up waving around like fans ... I love Spain.

We spent most of the day at the fair, poking around the craft booths hosted by local artisans and sampling award-winning cheeses. There's a turrón shop in the old part of town that's been in existence since the 1800's, that sells excellent turrón and marzipan candies - their marzipan puppies are almost too cute to eat! I also tried pastel vasco for the first time, and good lord it is tasty. It has a cookie-like outer covering, and the inside tastes kind of like vanilla pudding but the texture is a bit firmer. Delicious!

This is Basque country though, and the festival was a celebration of entirely un-Spanish identity. So considering the steadily rising BAC of the general populace, perhaps it wasn't surprising that the fair went BOOM periodically. We never could figure out where it came from, but my guess was that readily available alcohol + (also readily available) cigarette lighters = charred and gently smoking garbage bins.

The next day we headed to Portugalete and Getxo, two small, lovely towns separated by the Nervión River in the suburbs of Bilbao. Their main claim on the guidebooks is the Vizcaya commuter bridge, which was the first of its kind at the end of the 19th century and costs five euros to walk across but 0.30 cents to ride the ferry (wtf?!). The architect was a disciple of Gustav Eiffel, and you can really see the influence of the Tower on the bridge. While looking for the tourist information booth, we stumbled onto the Sunday afternoon promenade crowd along the beach, with grannies and prams in tow. The Spanish (or is it European?) penchant for dressing their offspring in identical outfits is ridiculously cute, and gave an early 20th century air to the whole afternoon.

My host mother in Cordoba had likened going to Bilbao to visiting a different country, and after those three too-short days I have to agree. The architecture of the old town is more reminiscent of Swiss townhouses than the traditional Spanish houses with central patios, and the feeling of the city is different from any other Spanish city I've been in. Also, the near-constant rain coats everything in GREEN, the only other place I've seen that much green is in Ireland. We were lucky though - in our three days we caught the first two days of sunshine they'd had in two months!

Arrival in Bilbao

Woke up this morning before the sun, in an enormous bed in a hotel in Madrid. After taking the bus to the airport with the rest of the program, M and I took the subway from the airport back into the city. And then we walked around Madrid for *hours* trying to find the damn bus station that ran buses to the north of Spain. We ended up at the bus station on the entirely wrong end of town, and nearly ended up going to Valencia (of the tasty oranges) rather than Bilbao (of the Guggenheim museum).

So a five hour bus ride later, we've gotten to Bilbao and settled into the hostel. M and I have a quite nice six-person room to the two of us, since it's definitely off-season for this part of the country. I jumped at the chance to wash all my clothes so there's a little tent city going on in the room right now.

I'm very glad M's on this leg of the trip with me, since she's an extra pair of eyes to look for signs and other important things, and keeps me from having to sit next to sketchy people on buses and such. She also saves food money the same way I do, by buying from a supermarket rather than a restaurant. For dinner we bought 6.10 euros worth of food for the two of us and that was more than enough. She also introduced me to chorizo, which is this kind of long, skinny sausage-ish tube of pepperoni-like cured ham. It is salty and fatty and deliciousness incarnate (no pun intended ;)

However, the hostel being nice and clean doesn't mean that the clientele isn't slightly sketchy. I *think* I got hit on earlier tonight while I was writing postcards, but I'm still not entirely sure. I was writing on a table in the empty dining room, and a guy came over from a birthday party in the other room. He sat down and introduced himself as Luis from Chile, hospitality student here to study as a chef. We talked a bit about Spain and where we each came from, then he asked me what floor I was staying on. I didn't want to tell him where I was sleeping, so I picked a random floor and said the fifth. Turns out that's his floor and he immediately asked me which room I was in ... awwwwkward. >_>;;;;; Later he came back and complimented me on my smile and asked me if I liked to dance ... *sigh* if it hadn't been 2:30 in the morning and I hadn't been ready to keel over from exhaustion, I might actually have taken him up on that. Maybe.

Tomorrow we're going to the Guggenheim museum, and probably doing somemore wandering around the city. The 20th there's a big traditional celebration of some sort, historically it was the day the tenant peasants would pay their landlords. These days it's more of a gathering of food, beer and artisan crafty things. And then we're taking the midnight bus back to Madrid to save on a night of board ... 13ish euros a night is fairly cheap, but it still adds up!

The End of the Beginning

Classes ended on the 11th, and finals started immediately after. These past few weeks have been a whirlwind of final exams, projects, presentations, and packing. I'm most proud of my photography project and presentation, but I really enjoyed all four of my classes this semester. Roman history especially gave me a very solid base from which to learn about Cordoba, Spain, and Europe in general, and Archaeology taught me to appreciate the material culture of the past.


While the material is still fresh in my mind, this January I'm going to travel around southwestern Europe and use my photography skilllz on whatever Roman ruins I come across. Between now and February 17th (beginning of next semester's classes), I'm planning on visiting five countries and about 20 cities:


December:
17 Madrid
18 Bilbao
22 Paris (France)
24 Brittany


January:
01 Paris
07 Rome (Italy)
10 Florence
14 Milan
15 Vienna (Austria)
18 Salzburg
20 Zurich (Switzerland)
24 Malaga (Spain)
...
Wandering around southern Spain for several weeks ...
...


February:
15 Cordoba


While I'm wandering though, internet is probably going to be spotty at best and updates might not have many pictures. I can promise lots of good stories though!


Also, if any of you have any suggestions as to what to do in any of these cities, please comment or email them to: abearincordoba "at" gmail "dot" com. Thanks! :D