Ancient Rome! (fullfilling a childhood dream)

So we arrived in Rome on Easter Sunday, and the train was not nearly as crowded or crazy as we expected, which was great. We had a moment of severe panic when we arrived at our Bed & Breakfast and no one answered the door. Luckily the nice restaurant owner next door was able to hunt down the B&B owner's cell phone number and found out that he was just running late. Once we got inside the B&B via a terrifying 1930's elevator everything got a lot better. The place is super cute, and the owner is really nice and helpful, and even reserved our Vatican Museum trip for Friday. We even have a view of Castle St. Angelo from our room! Everything is IKEA so we feel right at home here. If you know anyone that wants to go to Rome, we would like to recommend our B&B. There are only two rooms, and it's 80 euros a night with a private bathroom. We totally lucked out. We took it easy the rest of Easter Sunday doing laundry and having dinner at the restaurant that had helped us out earlier.

On Monday, we went to Palatine Hill and the Colosseum. Thank you Lonely Planet for telling us to get our tickets at Palatine Hill for both places because we still had to wait an hour, but it was MUCH better than the never-ending que at the Colosseum. This was something Isaac had really wanted to see since he was little, so it was a real treat. This is a photo from inside the Colosseum.



Below is a photo of the Ancient Roman ruins at Palatine Hill. It is amazing that things are still so well preserved.



Afterwards, we went into Vatican City, which is right by our B&B. We had hoped there would be some gate where they would check our passports, or something that would make us feel like we had entered another country, (Vatican City is not even a member of the EU, so in theory they should have a Customs check, and stamp passports). Nope! We were walking around wondering when we would arrive there, and suddenly we were in St. Peter's square. There is a big wall, but no signs, gates, or officials! So weird. We got to St. Peter's square right before it started dumping rain again. Still, it HAILED at breakfast, (no joke), so at least it wasn't hailing! Still we are getting sick of the rain. "Real" restaurants around here don't open for dinner until about 7:30pm, and it was about 6:30, cold and rainy, and we were hungry. We found a decent touristy place that had average food, so that was OK, but nothing special.

Tuesday = Pompeii! :)

Firenze!

(Firenze is Italian for Florence)

Rain, rain go away, come again some other day! It's been raining pretty much non-stop this whole trip, and while we won't let it get us too down, it would be great for those sweeping views and all day walks through cities to have it let up a little. We may get a little break next week in Rome, but it looks like it's cold and wet from here on out. C'est la vie, or whatever that is in Italian (I should really look that one up!).

On our our third and last day in Florence, we did finally get a break in the rain! It was a beautiful mild and sunny day. We saw Michaelangelo's David in dell'Accademia, and Galileo's tomb in Santa Croce.



The bad weather has kept Kerry's cold up full-force, but we still went out for a great Tuscan meal, and she commented that even though she couldn't taste very well, "at least it looked delicious". I had a wonderful meal starting with a duck meat sauce pasta, followed by a few perfectly cooked pieces of pork wrapped in the famous Tuscan lardo, which has a much milder flavor than bacon, but a buttery rich texture that keeps the meat moist and delicious.

Our bed and breakfast here in Firenze has been wonderful. It is a small charming place with a handful of rooms, and ever-present classical music. The decor is a mix of Florentine etchings and kid's art, which somehow works here, and the whole atmosphere is very comfortable and relaxing. The building the bed and breakfast is housed in reminded Kerry and I both of an old college building, in a good way. It is actually in the Swedish consulate building, which was pretty confusing when we first arrived and were trying to figure out if we were in the right place. It is a super-duper charming place, it definitely paid to do a lot of research in advance, (thanks Kerry!).

Overall Florence is much smaller than we expected, you can walk the whole city pretty easily. We expected Venice to be quite small, (and it was), but the size of Florence was a surprise, and a pleasant one given the lack of subway system here!

We are off to Rome in a few hours, it is Easter today, so things could get interesting with the crowds gathering there to hear the Pope's Easter announcement today. We learned our lesson in Paris to book our train in advance so at least we know we have seats on the train. More when we arrive!

On our second day in Venice we made our way to the surrounding islands of Murano and Burano, famous for Venician glass and lace respectively. In Murano we had one of the best meals yet in Europe off the beaten track in the local hub of the island. It was a great meal filled with fish, squid, squid ink pasta, and the best most unbelievably tender octopus I've ever had.

















In Burano, the buildings are even more saturated with color than those in the rest of Venice so we had a great time strolling the quaint cobbled streets and just taking it all in.



Kerry's head cold has persisted, and with it began a little ear stuffage with all the usual sinus junk. She started to get legitimately concerned that the deafness in one ear would be permanent. At various points throughout the day Kerry would tilt her head all the way back so her face was to the sun and then turn her head slightly to shift the fluids and get a little hearing back, and I realized... Maybe Jean de Arc wasn't actually turning her ear to hear the voice of some god, maybe she just had a head cold? I mean, what if she had friends who she just didn't hear until her ears cleared out a bit, and that didn't happen until she had her ear turned to the clouds? It's a theory, I'd like to see some grad student looking for a thesis topic pick up, I see great promise!

Whatever the symptoms of Kerry's cold are (I could read off the contents of her now French and Italian pharmacy in her purse for clues), a scoop of gelato seems to be the best cure, but really, what doesn't it help?!

Cheers,
-Isaac

Venizia

So we made it to Venice, and with that we begin our jaunt through the second and final country of our trip. Recall if you will all of those paintings and pictures of a picturesque town full of vivid colors, and waterways flowing with singing gondoliers and know that they are not exaggerating. The city has gone to great lengths to preserve the city's historic feel, and they have done an uncanny job. Who knows if it will be here forever, but while it is, it is beautiful.



Now, that isn't to say it's all sunshine and lively pealing plaster over jade colored waterways... that's all there, but there are also lots of tourists, (even in March) along with the tacky shops that cater to them, and you have to go to extraordinary lengths to find a restaurant that doesn't break one of cardinal rules of either being next to a train station, near an airport, has a menu in more than one language, and in the worst cases, PICTURE MENUS! In a moment of weakness and desperation brought on by sun and hunger, we convinced ourselves that it was worth the risk to try one against our better jugement near the famous Piazza San Marco. Wow... just wow... we should have known better. For example... the barley soup starter with squid fritti served next to potatoes daphne, finished with desert, was actually, salty can quality soup, diner quality fried calamari with over salted fries, finished with canned fruit salad... ya... we left hungry and were much more satisfied with our later slice of pizza from a street on the walk back to our hotel.

While exploring the small wandering streets of Venice, we had a few destinations we felt we absolutely could not miss, and one was a famous craftshop that makes Venician masks, and boy were we not disappointed! The shop was fantastic-- full of plaster and leather masks from Venice's history, local plays, and mythology.



Many jester and harlequin masks were better versions of what you might find in Mardi Gras down in New Orleans, but others were unique and new to us. After some seriously hard debate, we decided on a the "plague doctor" mask. It looks kind of like a bird mask with a huge beak and round eye holes, and that's what we thought it was, but the shop lady gave us the rich background that it was in fact a historic piece modeled after a mask worn by physicians during the Black Plague that spread through Venice in the 1630's and wiped out a third of their population. The large "beak" of the mask would have been filled with herbs and lots of garlic to both block out the horrible stench and to hopefully cleanse the air before the doctor breathed it in, (at the time they thought the plague was airborne). The round eye holes look like the spectacles they would affix to the mask and hat to seal their head from the bad air. The "current" plague doctor masks around in other shops have stylized that particular style of mask much further and actually has a slit along the mask's beak to make it more bird-like but less true to the original design. Ours is dark and made from leather. We will take a picture and post it when we get back to the States.

Cheers,
-Isaac

Melanie and Hunter's Wedding in Paris

These photos are from Melanie's wedding on Saturday the 15th. She was an amazingly beautiful bride, and since we only brought our point and shoot to the ceremony, the pictures don't really do her justice. The image of the 5 of us (with Silvie, another bridesmaid and good friend from when she was a kid in NY) is at a restaurant a few days before the wedding. The rehearsal dinner was at an amazing restaurant along the Seine, La Peruse, and I was able to say a nice little speech there after dinner. This ended up being fortuitous, because the day of the wedding I developed laryngitides! I blame Paris's freezing rainy weather the week previous to the ceremony. I now have a French pharmacy in my purse for my sore throat, cough, and cold. But I rally on! Anyways, the day of the ceremony itself the weather was gorgeous before the ceremony and started to rain after. Please click on the images to see them non-pixelated, we are having blog formatting issues, and cannot really deal with them overseas.



The ceremony was in the oldest cathedral in Paris, completed in 1100 (take that Notre Dame!), and in some of the photos we will post later you will see Notre Dame in the background. After the ceremony Melanie and Hunter, their parents, the photographer and Silvie and I took a limo to a few different famous sites to take wedding photos. Silvie and I went to help carry and arrange the veil and train and keep them out of the mud- Melanie referred to us as the "fluffers". Enough said. You can see in the photo how fluffy her dress is- We did well. By the time we were headed to the boat that we were having the reception on, Melanie had been in the dress about 5 hours and REALLY needed to pee. It also started raining really hard, which didn't help. At one point in the limo Mel looked at me and said "have you seen the movie 27 dresses? where the bride needs someone to help her in the bathroom because she can't lift her dress?" I hadn't seen the movie, but I said I certainly didn't mind. Once we were on the boat, she really was about to lose it and we raced for the bathroom- only to find it was a boat bathroom the size of an airplane loo. I looked at Mel and said "you sure you need my help?" and she said yes, so in we went. We made it work, and were both laughing hysterically (the dress was huge- Melanie said it counted as at least 3 more people) because it was like squeezing into a clown car. I can only imagine what the captain must have been thinking. The last photo is me and Isaac on the boat at dinner.



He looked cute in his suit as you can see! We made really good friends with all of Melanie's other bridesmaids and their guys, so that was a really nice aspect. At one point Silvie remarked that all of Melanie's friends are just alike. Isaac got along so well with the 2 bridesmaids' boyfriends/husbands that were there (and at one point discovered one of them knows a "secret" hand puppet thing he made up when he was a kid- the other guy had made it up when he was a kid too) that one bridesmaid, Christina, said "not only does Melanie have a "type" of friend, but we are all dating the same guy!"

The day after the wedding we relaxed and went to a huge flea market, where we wanted everything but showed restraint (thank you, lowly American dollar$) and bought only one etching from the 1800's for 30 Euros. It has a bunch of hydras on it- might be the evolution of hydras? At least it's mythical snakes with several heads. Pierre will have to read us the French on it when we get home. We were supposed to catch the 7:45AM train to Venice on Monday, but when we got to the station they said all the trains were booked until 7pm! Suckage. We put our bags in lockup and strolled around a very cold Paris until the train left. And, while I'm glad we tried a sleeper train, it was not comfortable at all. I don't want to do it ever again! 12 hours later, we were in Venice.

--Kerry

Notre Dame

Notre Dame, originally uploaded by craftyK.

So, uh, well, this is Notre Dame! It is a pretty overwhelming structure. We thought this would be our "inside" day, but it turns out, the building is pretty big, so a lot of time was spent walking around checking out the abundant gargoyles, and then a line in the blustery wind and rain, (yes this shot was during a brief break in the weather), to be able to climb the hundreds of stairs exploring the towers of the cathedral.

Once we got inside we spent quite a bit of time checking out the endless supply of alcoves, relics, tourists, and priceless art. The architecture is baffling; I know it took 300 plus years to build, but even then it is a marvel.

Afterwards, we stumbled upon the fact that catacombs are closed this month, (bummer), but afterwards stayed in the Monteparnasse neighborhood to visit the grave site of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir, (shout-out). Good times, but in the end, it was the only slightly disappointing neighborhood in Paris thus far. Not that it was bad, just not quite as impressive and quintessentially French as the rest of the neighborhoods we've spent time in.

Internet access has been spotty so we haven't been able to blog as much as we wanted. The wedding was amazing, we will be able to post more and catch up soon. Tomorrow we take a 12hr. train ride to Venice!

Au revoir!

La Tour Eiffel et Montmartre.

On Tuesday we went to see the Eiffel Tower and it was pretty rainy and CRAZY windy all day. The lines were pretty long even now in off-season and with foul weather, so I can't imagine what it would be like in the summer on a clear day. It was really foggy and we faced gale force winds at the summit, but there were some truly stunning views. There is an unavoidable attraction to the beauty the tower has. It is a modern relic of the World's Fairs of the previous century, and with its sturdy structure and feminine curves it just pulls you towards it, but I'm rambling...


After spending most of the day wondering around the tower and going to the summit, we headed out for Montmartre for the evening. Montmartre is magical at night. We got some amazing, postcard perfect images strolling around the neighborhood and had an amazing meal, (Let's put it this way, they know how to make French onion soup in France, go figure). Also a glass of wine is cheaper than a bottle of water, a coca-cola, or a cup of coffee. At least they have their priorities straight!

Louvre!

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After our rocky relationship with our euros kicked off our bon voyage, it seems our trip has swung into gear. We spent Monday's light hours, (note it was not light here, but rather deep dark and dumping buckets in a maelstrom all-day-long), at famous for a reason Louvre, (the weather was great inside!). They say it would take 9 months to just glance at all of the art there because it's a touch on the large side, so you have to plan ahead and just pick a section or two, and pretend the rest of the galleries don't exist. We chose to check out most of the French and Italian paintings and sculpture including La Jaconde (the Mona Lisa). Most of the museum is moderately to sparsely filled with visitors from around the globe, but the Mona Lisa crowd is absolutely bat-guano crazy, (see coming image for more). Kerry and I both found ourselves drawn to capture the crowd rather than try and take a mediocre photograph of the small master painting. It is pretty funny, it is in a spectacular room full of gargantuan paintings and only a small fraction of the visitors seem even remotely interested in them.


Afterwards we treated ourselves to some delicious Vietnamese Pho, (Isaac's bowl containing not just a few animal parts they he cannot name), and some good-ol-times sipping on what could be the world's greatest mojitos at a really fun bar. Au revoir for now, more to come later today.

Paris!

Welcome to Paris., originally uploaded by Simian Cephalopod.

Sooooo. Here we are! This was the amazing view from our hotel room when we got in, which we very much needed to brighten our day. Why you ask? Well, in addition to an unscheduled 7 hour layover in Philadelphia due to "mechanical problems" (errr...yeah, go ahead and fix that, guys), I (Kerry) lost my wallet within 1 hour of arriving. Yes, you heard me- my wallet was either pick pocketed or somehow fell out of my bag, (both seem unlikely, but it had to be one of those things) between the train ride and the hotel. While I was initially devastated, after a while (and after Marc and Lisa helped cancel the cards -- shout out Marc and Lisa) I am (kind of) able to see the humor in losing all of my credit cards, my CA ID, my health insurance card, and a ton of cash all within 1 hour of touching French soil. That's got to be a record! How much money? 500 Euros (about $750). Major suckage. But it does make me wonder- what kind of an evening did my 500 Euros have last night? I would like to think it ran as fast as it could into the arms of some widowed grandmother who is barely scraping by, or even cuddled up with some poor Parisian schoolboy who has never seen, never even SEEN that much money in his whole life and now can finally buy a new suit so that Chloe, the shopkeeper's daughter, finally notices him. That's what I'd like to believe. But you see, I feel like I know my money pretty well. My money likes to spend it's time doing careless, regrettable things. And remember, this is my money's first time in Paris. I'm guessing my money hung out all night with strippers, used lots of drugs, and is just now waking up in a pile of it's own vomit, wondering what happened to it's pants. That's just a guess, but still. You so crazy,500 Euros. I love you, but you so crazy.
Well,we are off to see the Louvre! SOME people like to be productive (I'm talking to you, 500 Euros).
Love,
Kerry

Two by sea.

Two by sea., originally uploaded by Simian Cephalopod.

About a week ago, Kerry and I went to the Half Moon Bay's Fitzgerald Marine Reserve for the minus tide they experienced that Sunday. With the tide so low, it allowed us to walk out hundreds of feet further than usual. It exposed gobs of marine life in small tide pools scattered about the rock. Speaking of rock, I banged my knee on one which hurt nothing more than my pride. Good times.

New Year's Day

power lines, originally uploaded by craftyK.

After a very nice and low-key New Years eve spent at home, Isaac and I decided to go for a hike near the salt flats that we went to when mom and John were visiting. Too bad the trails were closed off because of the holiday. So we drove around a bit, and saw the trails at Ravenswood Trough. As we were approaching the gate to the trail, I saw a "trail closed" sign. :( not to be deterred, and getting antsy at having our original plans dashed, Isaac suggests that we go on the trails anyway. We even saw two people in the distance on the trail., which helped convince me that it wasn't a major crime. As we are getting closer to the sign, I saw a smaller sign behind the first that said "closed for waterfowl hunting season". Ohh. then we noticed the two people on the trail had what appeared to be shotguns. double oh-ohh. (Did I mention the entire area is on/near a waterfowl refuge? WTF?) So we decided the "trail closed" sign got the final say, and took some photos of all the power lines around the area (did I mention that this is supposed to be a wildlife refuge? oh wait, yes I did). Isaac and I got a few nice shots with our Harblei lens, which we will be posting over the next few days on flickr. I LOVE the Harblei lens. Seriously folks, you can't afford NOT to buy this lens! :)
At any rate, we ended up having a nice peaceful new year's day and Isaac made a kick-ass Shrimp Etouffee from scratch (thanks for the recipe Lisa) That was scrumptious. And I peeled the shrimp, so I even get to say i helped. How's that for starting the new year right?

Jess and Leonard's wedding

Jess and Leonard wedding-37, originally uploaded by craftyK.

Back home in Indiana! We just went to Isaac's sister's wedding and it was really nice. They are the most relaxed couple I have ever seen at a wedding- I think I was more stressed picking out an outfit than they were. Now they're in Puerto Rico so Isaac and I have some serious envy seeping in. Not that Indiana's not great...
Bu anyways, it is nice to see all the family this week. Time to eat my fill of vegetarian sides!