Shelf Beds and Piano-Playing Nuns

7/22/08

The night train to Paris was quite an experience. When the train rolled into the station, the large group waiting ran to the cars and started piling on so fast it surprised us. Luckily we sensed everyone's urgency and quickly climbed aboard because the train hardly stopped for three or four minutes at our station.

Once on we navigated ourselves and our luggage towards our assigned car. We arrived at the door to our car the same time as our other four companions and proceeded to play a sort of backwards Jenga game of inserting people and luggage into the car in turns. This was greatly aided by the fact that our car-mates were from Canada and for the first time in two and a half weeks Bobby and I could properly converse with people other than ourselves.

The night-train car consists of three shelf beds on either side of a small aisle about two feet wide. When the middle and bottom shelves are folded in they make a long bench seat on either side of the aisle, allowing all six passengers to sit down, three on each side facing one another. We talked with our companions for a few hours swapping stories about food, hotels, the mosquitos, crazy train travel and the general lack of sleep, food, and hygiene. Eventually we folded the shelf beds down and attempted to hunker down for a bumpy, cold, cramped and long train journey.

Bobby and I were on the bottom shelf beds which only had about a foot and a half of room between the shelf-bed above us at its widest point. The closer you got to the wall, the smaller the distance in space, resulting in Bobby and I literally being wedged into the seat cushions. The train got very cold as it wound itself through the alps and the compartment got quite stinky with the combined foot odor of six travel-weary passengers. I think I managed to get about two hours of sleep during the eight that I was wedged into sleeping position. In the morning, I joined Bobby for a cappucino in the stand-up dining car/bar. I drank my foamy java with one foot angled against Bobby's so as not to fling my coffee all over the car/bar. The view was beautiful despite our lack of sleep and largely aching bodies. We passed entire fields of sunflowers as we traversed the last miles of French countryside before arriving in Paris.

As the train slowed into the station, the all of the cars began to empty into the cramped hallway as we all attempted to get off the train as quickly as possible. Bobby, as he had been the night before, was recruited by the car next to us to help the six ladies in there get their luggage off the racks at the top of their car. One of the ladies was a piano-playing nun who traversed between Paris and Rome playing the piano and keeping the faith. Because of Bobby's good deed and I suspect his boyish good looks, the piano-playing nun blessed our travels and so we felt quite sure the rest of our journey would be much more smooth!

Too Modest for Church

7/22/08

We arrived in Florence last night and immediately took naps after arriving in our Pensione. At night we ventured out for some very greasy take out pizza that we ate while perched on of the many bridges that traverse the Arno River. Florence is like a mini-Rome but definitely has a unique flair to it. It has a very large section of high-end designer stores and there are many fancy cafes. It is very tourist-laden and the main sights, including churches, seem to charge a pretty penny to let you in. Bobby made the clever insight that Florence would probably be more fun if you had a lot of money to spend(this was said as we crossed through an intersection with a Versace, Prada, Louis Vuitton, and another Italian-sounding designer store flanking a corner a-piece).

Among the sights we shelled out the case to see included:
Palazzo Medici - a big, fancy house that once housed the very powerful Florentine family of the the Medici. The place houses the Chapel of the Magi and a couple of nifty exhibitions on sketching and how the chapel was painted. Other than that it was overpriced and not very cool.

Courtyard of Palazzo Vecchio - our guidebook clued us in that you can go into the courtyard of this palacial home for free to see a replica of Michelangelo's David and some very uninterested security guards.

Church of San Lorenzo - Several euro later and a guide to the works of Art in German we wandered around trying to guess which naves, tombs, and memorails were made by Donatello, Michelangelo or nobody famous. The church also had a very strict dress code and my almost-knee-length shorts (although kosher in the church where they keep St. Peter's chains in Rome) were inappropriate and I was given a blue paper-fabric poncho to wear over myself. It was very unflattering, smelled funny, and made it known to everyone in the church what an immodest heathen you were. Sick of my pouting over my silly garb, Bobby graciously procured one for himself and we walked around together with Bobby looking especially ridiculous with his backpack on underneath the poncho (resulting in Bobby looking a little hunchbacked). At one point, the wardens of the church came over to Bobby to tell him that it was not necessary for him to wear the poncho and as he tried to explain his reason for wearing one, they just insisted louder that he did not need to wear it and so, in our poncho-ed state, we drew a bit of crowd as Bobby was chastised for being too modest in a church.

Ponte Vecchio - a very famous bridge covered in gold and silver jewelry stores. Needless to say Bobby didn't let me linger there very long.

Bargello - a sculpture museum featuring many pieces by Michelangelo and Donatello, including the very famous David. Unfortunately the museum had decided to restore the David so all we got to see was his naked butt as the statue was laying face down on the restoration table.

Duomo - the line to get into this famous church, which was left without a roof until Brunelleschi ventured to Rome, climbed up into the Pantheon and figured out the long-lost engineering of dome-building, was so long that we didn't actually get the chance to go inside. It is one of the most striking examples of the stripey-Florentine marble. You can see in the pictures that the church is very geometirc in its contrasing black and white marble. It is amazingly complex, detailed, and actually quite dizzying to look at. Not helping the dizziness while looking at the Duomo was the tripe sandwich that Bobby had daringly purchased and consumed for lunch. The sandwich was bought off a very highly recommended cart that seemed to be a favorite lunch spot for the Florentine businessmen who joked back and forth with the cart owner. This same man took a large piece of stewing cow stomach and chopped it up, covered it in a spicy tomato sauce and put the mixture into a roll for Bobby. Not for the faint of heart. Or stomach.

We finished up our second day in Florence with a trip to an internet cafe where we finally purchased our last plane ticket from Berlin to Glasgow, so we could actually catch our homebound flight to the states. After our last cone of Italian gelatto (apply pictured being eaten next to a Smart Car in the same color as my Frutti di Bosco), we caught the train out of the Santa Maria Novella station to the smaller train station at the outskirts of Florence to catch our night-train to Paris.