Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

We’re leaving for the airport in an hour to fly to Mongolia so I have just a little time to polish up some blog posts that have been sitting around in half-baked form and publish them before they become old news. 🙂

One of the things I always like to do after visiting a new destination is to compare it with my preconceived notions. (For example, one of the things that struck me when I went to East Africa was the prevalence of Coca-Cola, even in the most remote village.) So, in no particular order, here are a few items of that nature from Italy:

– The preserved colors in Pompeii and Herculaneum. I knew to expect complete cities with buildings, cooking pots, and mosaics but I had imagined it would all be gray like most ruins. There was plenty of that but the surprise was that the frescoes and mosaics still had rich and vibrant colors.

Above: a richly colored mosaic in Herculaneum

– The omnipresence of gelato. You saw gelato vendors more frequently than you see Dunkin’ Donuts in New England. There was a gelateria on every block and the restaurants on each block sold gelato too. People everywhere walked around with cones of it. So why was everyone there so thin? We saw tens of thousands of people there and I think only about 4 fat guys. And they weren’t the ones eating gelato. Hmmm, I may have gained back the weight I lost in South America…

– The exchange rate. We knew the dollar was terrible but it was truly painful. We saw a $35 hamburger one day (admittedly that was at a gourmet restaurant). If we got away with a lunch of pizza and drinks for less than $20, we were happy. Luckily the villas we stayed at have kitchens and we saved money by buying groceries.

– Before the trip, Meredith (the Art History minor) kept warning me that she was going to inundate me with churches and museums. Then one afternoon in Florence she said she was “art’ed out” and I wasn’t yet. A dubious victory, but a victory nonetheless.

– Breaking my little finger in Pompeii. The streets there are uneven rocks, they’re covered in dust, I wasn’t looking where I was going, and after I started falling, my instincts made me hold the camera in my right hand up in the air so I landed with all my weight on my left little finger instead of both hands. It felt like slow motion, watching it bend back and unable to stop. Of course, people were all around me including a group of school kids. I got right back up, dusted off, and walked away as if I meant to do that. When we were 20 yards away we took a look. It seemed ok but it hurt a lot. By the next day, it was swollen and red, black, and blue. The colors are gone now but it’s still a little swollen and hurts when it rains. We tried taking a picture of it but it didn’t do it justice. Yes, between this and Meredith’s accident, Italy is truly a dangerous place to have a vacation.

– We went to an Internet cafe to have them print a museum voucher for us. I gave them my USB key with the PDF on it. The girl at the desk put it in her machine, pointed to another file on the key and said it was a virus. That was pretty surprising since I’m pretty diligent about that stuff. I did some poking around my machine that night to see what was going on. It turns out the virus was copied onto my key 5 minutes after we entered the Internet cafe – about the time she put the key into her computer. Uh, yeah…if they discovered the virus on their machine later that day, I’ll bet they thought I gave it to them instead of the other way around.

– A few times we saw people popping other people’s zits right in public. A girl went to work on her boyfriend’s face right at a crowded bus stop where we were. Another time a girl was “helping” her friend in public view. Sorry, no picture…

– One of the more interesting day-to-day aspects was watching the mix of old and new. We expected this of course but some times it struck you in odd ways. There were Internet cafes with WiFi next to a 1500 year old church. And sometimes, instead of seeing everyday, modern people living around such amazing history, you saw it the other way around:

Above: Monks at an ATM in Rome

– The house wine was always at least good and was always cheaper than soda. There was that 8 Euro ($13) Diet Coke that one day…

– Dave