So... wow... we're on day 5 of our 12 day Mediterranean cruise aboard Legend of the Seas! I want to sum up a bit, as well as talk a little bit more about Rome before I forget all the details.
ROME PART IRome was crazy. When we booked we had no idea that we would be there for the a) Champions' League Finals football game, b) the G8 summit, c) some big Catholic holiday (Vatican, hello?!?!), d) the last day of the Ghiro d'Italia bike race (like the Tour de France, but in Italy)... The city was mad packed. Dan had found it difficult to find lodging for 6 nights in a row, but we hadn't understood why until we got there. We ended up getting this cute studio apartment in Trastavere, in a 400 year old building, which was awesome except for two flaws: first, we had to walk up two flights of winding stairs to get in and out (not that bad overall, but getting the luggage up and down was tricky) and second, there was no blanket. Just a sheet and a sort of heavier sheet with a pattern on it, like a bedspread (only thinner). Since it was chilly when we were there, this meant that we were a little cold most of the time.
Arriving in Rome was a trial. We'd been cramped on an overnight flight from New York for about a million hours, and we had a time change that was really painful to adapt to. Our flight landed at something like 7:30am Rome time. We had paid €55 with the company we booked the apartment through for a car to pick us up at the airport and drive us to the apartment. We came out of the terminal--and as an aside, the only checking they did for "Customs" was to see if we had a passport in our hand; they didn't even ask us to open it--and started scanning through the long line of drivers holding up names. We didn't see our name, so I sat down with our luggage and Dan started scouting around for a phone.
It was over 2 hours later and about a dozen trips through the line-o-names that we finally found our driver, a lying little SOB who claimed he'd been there since our plane landed. He hadn't--we'd have seen him. His ethnicity made him stand out in a crowd. Bastard was just late. He was also rather surly and impolite, and when we finally got to the apartment, after we got our luggage out of the trunk, he got in and drove away without saying goodbye, leaving us on the side of the street, not even waiting to make sure we knew which door was ours or whether or not the apartment people were there to meet us. (We had paid him at the beginning, as per their rules.)
The couple who owned the apartment didn't speak much English, but they were friendly. We were starving so we went back out to find food. By now it was late morning and so anyplace serving breakfast was closed, and the lunch places weren't open yet. We were exhausted--neither of us had slept on the plane--but we needed food. We went into a coffee shop that seemed to have some sandwiches in a case, but we couldn't read the signs. By now I was completely frazzled and at the end of my rope emotionally. I was too tired to think straight and I was really incapable of trying to sort out with an Italian speaker whether or not any of the food was vegetarian. I finally sat down and started crying. Sad and pathetic, I know. It was just exhaustion. Anyway I said to Dan that I was going back to the apartment and that if he found something that I could eat, I'd appreciate it, but if not, I'd just eat after we'd taken a nap. I took the keys and went back to the building we were in. I got in the door, in the gate, and up the stairs... but the stairs were pitch black and I couldn't find the light switch (it was in a weird place) and I also couldn't remember once I was inside which apartment was ours... so I went back down and just sat on the stairs and waited for Dan. He ended up coming back with a spinach panini kind of thing, and we went into the apartment, ate, and fell asleep for many, many hours.
It got much better after that. Trastevere is a really cool part of town. It's very old, with narrow, winding cobblestone streets, little bars and restaurants spilling into the streets everywhere, and so many people. At 2am the streets were still mobbed with people (and yet cars, motorcycles, and scooters would still make their way through, with the sea of people parting for them) eating and drinking and checking out the street vendors and performers. Honestly, we could have had a perfectly awesome vacation without going more than a couple of blocks from our apartment the whole week. We even found a cafe with free wireless internet that we used a number of times.
We didn't, though. We walked all over Rome--more than I thought we would, but somehow I managed to not be in terrible pain or get so exhausted I couldn't go on. I attribute this to my amazing Z-Coil sandals. We did take a couple of busses to get to the Borghese Gallery, which was amazing (the gallery, not so much the busses), but most of the time we just walked to where we were going. The second or third day we were there, I woke up sick. I felt pretty crappy, and we went to the pharmacy to get some over the counter medicine to clear up my sinuses. Except that we had a hell of a time communicating and what they gave me didn't seem to work. I don't even know what it was or what it was supposed to do, because I couldn't read the box. A few days later, I was feeling bad enough that we decided to go to the emergency room, where the guidebook said we could get seen by a doctor for free. By the time we found the emergency room (the hospital is about the size of a small country, and is divided into many, many buildings) I was again on the verge of tears I was so emotionally frazzled. They barely spoke any English there, and waved us into a waiting room. The waiting room was something of a nightmare. There were people sitting in chairs, a drunk guy harassing people, people on gurneys wedged around the room, and it didn't seem like anybody ever left. Just more people kept coming in.
I think we were there a couple of hours. I don't know. Eventually I was again crying in frustration and misery and told Dan that this was worse than being sick, so we just left. A few days later I mostly felt better. Now I seem to be developing a cough, though, probably from the drainage from that sinus infection.
A few notes about Rome, that I hope to have time to write more about later:
Way too many smokers!
Narrow alleys that somehow manage to have thriving restaurants in random places, or that suddenly open into some square with a statue in the middle. Or some nondescript alley that has an amazing, intricately decorated church wedged in among the other buildings...
RomaPass: it is your friend
St. Peter's is much bigger than I expected, and I expected it to be huge.
Ruins everywhere!
The cat sanctuary at the ruins where Caesar was murdered is awesome! Three different times I got to get my kitty-petting fix in, after missing my own kitties back home.
Dogs everywhere! There are dogs in the museums, dogs in the streets... dogs everywhere!
Crappy quality backpacks from street vendors are not returnable.
Absinthe. Devil Water. I know a lot of people who will never again drink tequila because of a "bad experience" with it previously. I think that's me with absinthe now. I will not go into details, but rather will just say that I'm glad I have an understanding new husband, and I'm glad the apartment had a washing machine.
ROME PART IIAfter visiting the Capitoline museum, we walked over by Trajan's column, and then started to walk toward home. We started noticing that there was a rather large police presence. And military. And by large, I mean huge. They were blocking off streets with huge vans--and the vans had guys with helmets and machine guns sticking out of the roofs. There were groups of cops on some street corners, and groups of soldiers with machine guns on others. Groups of 7-10, not just 3 or 4. As we kept walking, we noticed them getting out the riot gear. They had the body armour, they had the big plastic shields... all of it. They had parked military trucks across the tram lines (and blocked some poor guy's car in--that guy was arguing with them when we passed by) and set up barricades all over the place. I think it was the G8 stuff, but we're not sure. I got my picture taken with a bunch of heavily armed dudes.
Later that same walk home, we encountered another traffic snag--this time it was due to a Critical Mass bike ride. Probably 500-1000 (Dan's estimate) people on bicycles, many of them dressed in costume or with bikes covered in decorations, riding through Trastevere, traffic be damned. I even saw a couple of people on bikes sitting still across street lanes while cars piled up, honking. These events are apparently awareness/protest things that are supposed to be anti-oil/cars and pro-bikes... but I think it just makes cyclists look like dicks to the people in the cars. When the mass finally passed through, the backed up traffic that had been behind them was staggering. As with all stopped traffic in Rome, the front was a huge swarm of scooters and motorbikes (they just wind between the cars at red lights until they're at the front).
The final day of the Ghiro d'Italia, we went to St. Peter's, which was one of the points along the race. The last day was time trials, where the cyclists go one at a time, so we didn't get to see the impressive packs of bikes that bike races are so known for, but it was cool anyway. We ducked into St. Peters and tried to go through as fast as possible so that we'd be back out in time to see Lance Armstrong go by, but we missed him by about 8 minutes, according to the Brazilian guy we'd sort of befriended at the fence. He had a cell phone and was keeping everyone updated in real time about who was next and who was how many seconds ahead or behind who, etc.
After the race was over, we started walking back. They had railing/fencing up along both sides of the street to keep people out of the way of the bikes, so we were walking along the fence waiting to get to an intersection with a break so we could cross. Suddenly we heard this strange noise behind us, but before we could turn to see what it was, we were both knocked hard from the left. We both almost fell but managed to stagger clear as the heavy steel railing came crashing down. It continued falling, like dominoes, down the street. Each segment of fence is connected to the next, and so as each one fell, it knocked the next one over. It was surreal watching the fence go down and seeing people getting knocked over or pushed. Many people were knocked flat on the ground. One lady was rubbing her head and took a while to get up, but another woman was flat on her back and not getting up. The police came and were helping her... but 10 minutes later after we'd crossed the street, bought some souvenirs, and used the ATM for more cash, she was still lying there. I know a lot of people say they were robbed/pickpocketed in Rome, but how many can say they were attacked by a fence?
Our last morning in Rome we had a driver pick us up to drive us to the port where the ship was, in Civitavecchia. We went with a different company this time and the driver was great. It turns out that he actually studied abroad in the US for a few months in college, and went to the Ohio State University. We were glad we were leaving Rome that day, as it was pouring rain and we wouldn't have been able to do much anyway. (It had started to rain the day before when we were out and we just walked around wet because we hadn't thought to bring the umbrella from the room.)
In Civitavecchia, we boarded the Royal Caribbean cruise ship "Legend of the Seas" which is much smaller than the Mariner of the Seas which Dan and I were on several years ago when we went to St. Thomas and St. Maarten. It's still a really big ship and really nice, though. We had gotten a free upgrade to a stateroom with a window, and we're on deck 2, which is close to the water. It's pretty cool.
NAPLESDay 1 on the ship was mostly getting settled into our room, finding our table at dinner, meeting our dinner tablemates, and going to the Welcome Show. Overnight, the ship took us to Naples (Napoli) for Day 2. My impression of Naples: it's dirty. Really, really dirty. Piles of garbage everywhere, grime on everything, etc. Nobody really did anything
in Naples, though. All of the shore excursions you could book through the ship took you to Pompeii, Sorrento, or Capri. We took the cheaper option of walking to the train station and going on our own. It was a chilly day with ominous clouds, so we brought our umbrella and bought a second from a street vendor. Pompeii was neat, though we got poured on a number of times and were glad for the umbrellas.
As we were heading back to the train station to continue to Sorrento, the heel of my Z-Coil sandals came loose. If you remove the insole, there is a Phillip's head screw that tightens it back up. It has come loose before, and for this reason, I carry a screwdriver with me in my humongous purse. I didn't have my humongous purse on me, however. Just a tiny purse big enough to hold the camera, some Tums, and my lip balm. Walking around on the shoe with the heel loose will damage it, so we needed to get it fixed. Ask me how hard it is to find a Phillip's head screwdriver at Pompeii, when you don't even speak Italian. Go on, ask me. I had to keep taking off the shoe, wiggling the heel, then pulling out the insole to show the screw. Finally of all places a little curbside snack stand was where we got lucky and the guy there had a screwdriver. We bought a sandwich to share from him, and went to get the train. It was a surprisingly good sandwich.
Sorrento was gorgeous. It must cost a fortune to stay there, let alone to live there. It's all built up on these cliffs overlooking the water, and there are flowers and gardens everywhere you look. We walked down the looooong winding street to get to the water (Dan wanted to take the steep, switch-backing, million-step staircase, but I said ain't no way). Our plan was to see the shops down there, maybe have a drink or a snack at a cafe, and then take the hydrofoil ferry back to Naples. Great plan, except that the boats were all canceled because the seas were too rough. My initial thought was "well hell, I wouldn't mind a rough ride. I don't get seasick, I could handle it. Damn!" however I'm very,
very glad that the boats were not running because of something we heard later: Some other people had gotten on a boat from Capri back to Naples. Those were still running because they kind of had to--Capri is an island and there isn't another way back. They said that they were handing out bags to everyone and that there was vomiting everywhere. Some were throwing up because they were seasick, some were throwing up because they could see and hear other people throwing up. THAT would have made me throw up.
So glad we didn't get on a boat.
Anyway, so we took a bus back up to the top rather than walking it again, and then went to the train station. The ride back was about an hour and ten minutes-ish and we had time to get back by the 6:30 all-aboard deadline. Just as Dan was getting his change back from the tickets, the train pulled away. We had to wait for 30 minutes for the next one. Just as we got to the platform, the sky opened up and it started
pouring. Fortunately there was an overhang. This 30 minute delay made getting back to the ship a much tighter timeframe. We got off the train and dodged the scam-artist taxi drivers trying to charge us €20 to get back to the ship, and just walked there for free. It was raining and cold, but at least we had umbrellas. We got to the ship with about 10 minutes to spare. We were a little bit late for dinner.
AT SEA / ATHENS / MYKANOSDay 3 we were at sea, and that night we had our first formal night. Dan put on his tuxedo and I got into my dress. I went to put on my black dress shoes and they weren't there. Dan said that when we were packing, we never found the second one. Crap! The only other shoes I could wear were these white canvas heels... totally not dressy, and besides that, the heel strap had broken a couple of nights before! So there is Dan, in his tuxedo, sewing my shoe. What a guy.
Day 4 we were at Athens. We got a late start leaving the ship--we didn't leave until about 1:30 and had to be back by 5:30. We decided to take the train to the Acropolis, as per the guidebook's advice. Train tickets are €1 per person. As we left the port, the cabbies descended like vultures. One tried to charge us €55 each to drive us to the Acropolis and give us a tour of everything. We said we only wanted a ride there, and how much would that be. He told us that most tours would cost €180 and his was a bargain. We again said we only wanted a ride there, not any kind of tour. We finally shook him off. The next taxi was willing to drive us there but wanted €20. The sign in the port said €9 was the fare to the Acropolis so we said no thanks. Outside the port, a taxi in the street wanted to charge us €15. We asked a shopkeeper for directions to the train and kept going. We'd forgotten our map in the room, so we stopped into a shop and bought one.
Now, early on in our trip, Dan's shoelace broke on his black shoes. He can still tie them, but he wanted new laces. We looked in many shops in Rome, and have been poking around shops everywhere we stop, hoping to find shoelaces. So when we passed a shoe and clothing store in Athens, we were happy to find shoelaces there! We continued walking and it can't have been more than 3 minutes later when we saw a street vendor setting up his wares on a blanket on the sidewalk. He was laying out piles of shoelaces. Swear to god. So if you need shoelaces, go to Athens!
A couple of interesting things on our walk to the train... the newsstands sell hardcore porn DVDs, which are displayed in the open right there on the street. In big displays. We also saw a man so drunk he was walking in almost a sitting position. He had a newspaper, but he dropped it on the ground. He looked at it for a minute, confused, then staggered off. I hope he didn't wander into the street. The trains in Athens are very clean and nice. The tickets are cheap. The signs are clear. We had been planning on getting off at this particular stop mentioned in the guidebook (also left in the room) but when Dan saw a stop for the Acropolis that only required going one extra stop, then getting on a different train for 3 stops, we decided to take that one.
That put us sort of on the back side of where we needed to be. We started heading in what seemed to be the right direction. We found ourselves on these incredibly narrow white streets lined with white houses... narrow as in maybe 4 feet wide narrow. There were a lot of cats, which was cool. We were a little worried that we were not going the right way, because there was nothing touristy anywhere. Finally we saw another couple and asked if we were going the right way. They said that's the way they went, and that they ended up going in a gate that was probably not the main entrance. We thanked them and kept going. We found the gate, got our tickets, and went in. And up. And more up. And it was hot. And up. When we got to the Temple of Athena, I was so tired... and the marble steps were slippery... and I'd already almost fallen on slippery stones once... so we didn't go the rest of the way up.
On the way down, we stopped for some water and a strawberry slushie drink. We chatted with a couple from Melbourne, Australia who had arrived a couple of days ago without their luggage. They were hoping it would turn up that night. I hope it did. We asked directions to the train station and were directed to the one mentioned in the guidebook, so we went to that one. It would have been closer and easier that way, but we're glad we went the other way because that neat winding white street was so cool. I'd hate to be their mailman, though.
That was yesterday, and last night was the toga party up by the pool. That was kind of fun; they had a midnight buffet out, and more food is always what you look for on a cruise, after all. We sat in the hot tub for a while, then went to bed early. 12:30ish. Which is early for this trip, anyway. Today we're at Mykonos, and we were planning on going to the beach today. Instead, I'm staying in the room writing this and Dan is exploring the island. I just needed the down time, especially since I've got this cough thing developing and I don't want to get sicker. I told Dan to take lots of pictures for me.
Last night's headline act was a comedian who was decent but honestly I'd heard most of his jokes before and most of his humor was aimed at the grandparent generation. Tonight it's a singer I've never heard of. Two nights ago it was an Elton John impersonator who was pretty decent. We have 7 more nights on the cruise, then we have one last night in Rome before we fly home.
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thwack and his better half for dinner on our way. We'll be getting home pretty late, certainly.
By then it was dark so we walked down to see the Falls all lit up. They were beautiful, but extremely hard to photograph. After looking at the Falls for a while, we walked up the hill (ow. Steep hill.) to a bar that had an outside patio and live music. We had a couple of drinks and listened to the guy. He had an electric acoustic guitar and a mic and mostly did folk and classic rock covers. He was pretty good. At one point he said he was going to start doing requests. He said he was going to do one that he'd already done earlier, and one that he hadn't. During a pause between songs I went up and put a few dollars in his tip jar (I think there were only $2 or $3 already in there--not much) and asked him to play "The Boxer" because I love to hear that song live. He gave me an irritated look and said "I did that one earlier, too, but ok." I said "oh, sorry, well we just got here about twenty minutes ago..." When I got back to the table he said into the microphone "I got another request for something I've already played but I'll do it anyway." Gee, way to make one of the only people who's actually given you a tip feel like crap for making a request. 
In the morning we slept in pretty late. We checked out but had the hotel hold our bags and didn't get our car yet from the (mandatory, off-site) valet parking. We walked over to the Skylon Tower and headed up to the Revolving Restaurant for lunch. After we ate we went to the observation deck and took about a hundred pictures. The view was amazing. You could see both falls and the city and the landscape for miles around. I would not normally spend that much on lunch, but it was worth it for that view as a one time thing. 
