On the Cinque Terre path

View the photoset, or check out the slideshow.

Cinque Terre has been hyped to me more than once, each time by trustworthy friends, so I had high expectations when I arrived. I wasn’t disappointed.

I got my first glimpse of the place from the train. I had been seat-bound in a regional train for about six hours, and it was 5 p.m. when I finally boarded the train from nearby La Spezia to Riomaggiore, the first of Cinque Terre’s five coastal villages. During the short trip to Riomaggiore, the train emerged from a long tunnel briefly — for probably a full second at most before entering another tunnel — long enough for me to see that the train had, in its transit, gone from nondescript train station to hillside track perched above the exhilarating waters of the Mediterranean. The view, brief as it was, knocked the breath out of me. The sky was a shocking pink, and the water below, a rippling white and blue. So this was Cinque Terre.

~

The last time I was in a place that similarly bowled me over was Venice (just days ago), and it was there that I had a conversation with two fellow travelers that went something like this. Traveler 1 was glad he didn’t live in a place like Venice because if he had, he would never be able to appreciate its beauty. Traveler 2 disagreed; in his view, not only did Venetians see the beauty of Venice, but the city’s beauty was part and parcel of every Venetian’s being. In that sense, every Venetian is in some way more beautiful, or special, than people of other cities, even if they are entirely ordinary in every other way.

I can see truth in both viewpoints, but I have to admit an affinity for the latter. I like the idea that a people can be marked as extraordinary for the places in which they live. After all, a person’s home is an inextricable part of his identity.

Ruins of the past and present

Naples isn’t a pleasant city, but it does seem familiar. Maybe because it resembles all the mangier parts of cities I’ve seen before, all rolled into one.

There’s also the garbage crisis. Apparently, some time ago, the city’s landfills simply filled up, and garbage has been literally piling up on the streets ever since. I took a brief walk around the evening of the day I arrived — it was as long as I could stand — and let’s say it’s not a very photogenic place.

But it was for Pompeii that I visited Naples. The ancient city that was both destroyed and preserved by a deadly volcanic blast from nearby Mount Vesuvius is only half an hour away by train.

If the ruins of Rome did nothing for me, the ruins of the excavated city of Pompeii was an awe-inspiring experience.

After doing so much walking in other cities, it was a little bizarre to be walking the streets of an uninhabited one, looking for this or that point of interest. There, you can walk into random, private houses, whether they be typical homes or upper-class villas. Paintings on the walls are still intact. You can walk into the town bordello or sit up in the nosebleeds of the Grand Theater.

While I was wandering about, I heard a girl say, for whatever reason (I think she was eating chocolate), “Its like Halloween!”

What a cool thought. On Halloween night, we dress up as ghouls and ghosts and visit the homes of the living. In Pompeii, we are the living, strolling between homes of the dead — occasionally, you even see their bodies, frozen in agony.

~

Places like Pompeii, where signs of a former civilization are clearly visible through the ruins, always remind me of post-apocalyptic scenes from Hollywood movies. Like the Statue of Liberty in “Planet of the Apes” or Manhattan under water in “A.I.”

I think it’s because when you visit a place like Pompeii, you can’t help but be convinced of the mortality of your own civilization. People in Pompeii used to make art, put on plays, worship in temples. Then one day Mount Vesuvius blew up and it was all over. The idea is morbid but undeniably fascinating: What if it happened to us? What if we were laid to ruin?

I imagine strolling through the seaside ruins of Third Street in Santa Monica, or walking without a ticket into the Disney Concert Hall, its curvy metallic roof lying in twisted shards on Grand Avenue. Think of all the empty malls and dead Abercrombies, Starbuckses without latte lines, streets and parking lots full of cars as usual but curiously absent of traffic.

There’s been a book written about this: “The World Without Us.” I’m definitely reading it when I get back.

When in Rome

Las Vegas ruined Rome for me. Either that or Rome was already ruined (yes, a pun too, you like that Zac?) and Vegas just copied them.

So many kitschy, splendiferous things seem to have taken a page from Rome’s history books that actually being here, I feel like I’ve seen it all before. Sprinkle in an obscene amount of tourists, and suddenly you’re at the Venetian hotel or Caesar’s Palace or Bellagio in Vegas. Except instead of international buffets, there are snack bars and pizzerias.

The Fontana di Trevi, for example, is so overbig and overgrand that it makes me think Rome copied a needlessly opulent Las Vegas hotel rather than the other way around. Only someone like Steve Wynn could have come up with a fountain so overbearing.

I guess fake Italian splendor imitates the real thing so well — right down to the throngs of tourists — that the real thing starts to look fake.

~

Via del Corso, the arterial shopping street that forms the east border of the historical center, was buzzing with people Saturday afternoon. More than buzzing, it was packed from curb to curb. People were pouring out onto the road. It looked like a pedestrianized street, only it wasn’t. Every once in a while, some pitiable car would try to inch its way through the crowd. I hadn’t seen anything like it — and it was just a normal Saturday in Rome — since Spring Scream in Taiwan last March.

But even saturated with camera-happy tourists, Rome wasn’t beyond enjoyment. On Sunday I walked to the Vatican expecting a sparsely populated St. Peter’s Square (based on a tip from a fellow traveler). He was right — it ultimately only took five minutes in line to get into the basilica — but when I first got to the piazza I saw only doom. It was an ocean of people milling about, singing, chanting, and waving signs.

They turned out to be pilgrims, though, not tourists, so I didn’t have to battle them for my place in line. I came out of St. Peter’s Basilica to that sound that big crowds make when expressing pure adulation.

It was the pope. There he was in a window far up, Lego-sized — no, smaller — in all his glory. He spoke, the masses chanted on cue; it was a happy experience.

And now I write this in the Giardini Borghese, a huge park almost empty of people, let alone tourists. Accompanied by a book and a park bench, I’ve found a litte refuge of peace in Rome.

Venice was a shot in the arm

When you’re traveling between countries by train, the transition from one country to the next can go by entirely unnoticed. Even for countries like France and the U.K., which are demarcated by a long tunnel between the two. The bland countryside of one is the mirror image of the bland countryside of the other.

But yesterday I experienced as abrupt a change between borders as I’d ever seen. On the Austrian side, snow-capped mountains and valley bottoms with rolling fog; between, a long-ish tunnel; and on the Italian side, an eyeful of blue sky and piercing yellow sun. I had almost forgotten what it was the warmth of the sun was like. Later, walking in the Piazza San Marco, I smiled from the sheer pleasure of the scene around me, for the first time since Scotland.

Last month in Paris, Zac and Kate got the lucky cliche of the Eiffel Tower view out their hostel window.  Yesterday, I got my own cliche on the waterbus ride from the Venice train station to my hostel on the island of Giudecca. The city is beautiful to the point of surreal, and its whole city-on-the-water concept is mind-boggling. People take to the water to get around — transport is from island to island. The “metro” map here depicts bright, numbered lines servicing various docking points — bus stations — on the islands.

I wonder … if the waterbus drivers went on strike here like so many train drivers throughout Europe, would people here be stranded on their respective islands? Or would gondoliers come to the rescue, charging €50 a person for a leisurely morning commute with a throaty song or two?

~

The bathroom on my floor opens up on its opposite side to a bedroom that is currently unoccupied. In the bedroom is an open window, and through that window, the waters of the Canale della Giudecca and the half-scaffolded dome of the huge Santa Maria della Salute church. Every time I’m in the bathroom, the huge church dome across the water catches my eye and I have to walk over and stick my head out the window.

The air is salty. The water is almost directly below. It’s not just a view, it’s an experience, and a ridiculously gorgeous one.

The last I’ll be hearing any German

The first actual couch I slept on while CouchSurfing belonged to Lija in Vienna. I met Lija in November while visiting my friend Nick in Poland (she was visiting too). Lija had CouchSurfed with Nick in Taiwan before I had become Nick’s roommate; now I was completing some sort of CouchSurfing karmic circle by CouchSurfing with her.

~

Vienna has the sort of high architectural style that one might argue rivals Paris in grandeur. I’ve been viewing all these sorts of ornate, Baroque buildings lately with a jaded eye, but there’s something about the sheer scale and number of Vienna’s stately buildings that moved me.  If not for the H&M and McDonalds on Karntnerstrasse, the main shopping street, I would have been easily able to imagine the city as it was 150 years ago — with big, domed buildings shrouded in fog and the ubiquitous clop of horse-drawn carriages.

Even better — when I took in an opera in the Staatsoper on my second night, though there were tourists dressed in hoodies and jeans like me, there were also elderly, proper women going to the show covered in fur from head to toe. There, swimming in Italian song and violin accompaniment, you get the feeling that the old world has just as much pull as the new.

Unfortunately, I saw no monocled gentlemen.

My convalescence in Munich

Ah, it seems like only a week ago I was vomiting my innocence into a hostel toilet in Prague.  It was only a week ago.

But in the intervening days, I visited Munich (via Nuremberg, where I stayed for a night) to see my friend Audrey, who had herself backpacked through Europe not too long ago, and then returned from San Francisco to pursue a life in Munich.

Shortly after I arrived, I began to feel tired and sick. After a three-hour walking tour the first day — need I say in the bitter cold? — I gave up on any further exploration of the city and retreated quickly back to Audrey’s place. I had come down with a fever. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised; I had left Prague a little overspent.

And so I spent the next several days on a diet of CNN (election fever), Tylenol, leisurely city exploration, Audrey’s home-cooked food, a German board game called Settlers that is sort of like the video game Civilization, and a triple dose of Harry Potter movies. On Sunday, Audrey and her boyfriend Stefan introduced me to the traditional after-church meal of weisswurst, a white sausage made of veal and herbs, carefully boiled before you peal it and dip it in honey mustard. (Superb; I ate too many.) A day or two later, I bought myself a lunch of leberkäse — it means “liver cheese” but contains neither liver nor cheese — a sort of meatloafy thing that goes well with a bun and mustard. (Superb; I won’t be able to get enough of this.)

It was truly, insanely relaxing, and the food was wonderful. Munich with Audrey was just what the doctor ordered.