Here’s that quick recap I promised you in the last blog, but if you did bother to read the wife’s, it kind of irrelevant. Hers is much more detailed & descriptive, I get bored with all that so I’ll skip over the details & try to point out the things a guide book, or a wife, forgets to mention.
I can’t remember the last place I told you about, what with all the fucking weather we had then all the moving about. I cant be bothered to read my other blogs, it was painful enough the 1st time so I’ll start with when we left Sestrie Levantie, the place of trains & rains.
We boarded the train & just a few hours later we were in the small city of Pisa. It was a little stroll to our hotel then we was straight out to see the sights, or as we are led to believe, the sight. Pisa is a very small place & we had walked the whole perimeter & criss-crossed the middle by the end of the 1st day but it was a very pleasant place to be. It’s a big university town so we were never far from a few decent bars & the food was good. The big surprise was, as well as being the home of a badly engineered tower its is also the birth place of the camp statue (& I don’t mean university rules). 1st one I saw I dismissed as my immature mind (I know you all think I’m a deep serious person but yes, I do find farts funny!) the next couple drew a more curious look but then the 4th statue I see I couldn’t ignore. It was a big stone carving of a man in a loin cloth adopting the typical ‘I’m a little tea pot’ pose with his hips pushed dramatically to 1 side & a very obvious limp wrist. He had a naked & very busty wench at his knee, which he was ignoring (?) & gazing off into the distance (no doubt where his servant was ploughing the fields & getting all sweaty in the sun. It wouldn’t of looked more camp if the Family Guy crew had drawn him for 1 of Peters cut aways to describe a camp man. It wasn’t just me, even the wife agreed. So there we have it, the camp statues of Pisa.
The next stop was Bologna. This is famed for its amazing food markets & fountain of Neptune with his dozen sirens spraying water from their nipples. What they don’t tell you is that its full of wrong-uns that wouldn’t be out of place in Chatham.
Modena is a city that was shut. Marrinello was a town that was shit (even with the beautiful cars surrounding you). So onto Florence! Everybody loves Florence & I can see why but for me it was just far too hot & far too busy to be loved. It was more like that women from accounts, good to look but far too many people have been in & out of her Doumo! We stayed there for a week & it was the only way I could of got round the place. It was so hot we could only manage a few hours a day before we had to retreat to the comfort of our apartment or, as was more likely, an air-conditioned bar. The thing about Florence that nobody tells you is they are sneaky. It is famous for all the Art its acquired, but the sneaky basterds spread it out into all the hundreds of museums in the city so each place has 1 painting you would recognise & the rest is filled with crappy religious art that has been plundered from some tiny church in the middle of nowhere.
From Florence we moved to Rome. I love Rome, it is an incredible place. So does the wife & she cant see how anybody wouldn’t. I’m not going to do a Venice & tell you you really must go. Rome is a massive, busy working Capital & it was very very hot. No matter how good Rome is you still have to like Massive busy capitals. But Rome is like no other; it is steeped in History & intrigue. Its Architecture is spectacular & the grandeur is monumental, but it’s even more than that. You can kind of feel the hum of the place. When your at the Coliseum, St Peters Basilica, Pantheon or any of the thousand other Fountains, statues or monuments you can imagine how people would of felt when they were new, the awe, the inspiration & the fear. And as many tourists as there are, & there is millions, the place is still dominated by the locals & the locals love a good time. Around every corner is a bar all the squares are filled with restaurants & at Mid-night the place is just as busy as at mid-day. There are very few places I would want to visit again & again & again but on that very short list; probably at the top it would be Rome.
Which brings us to now. I sit here in my little terraced garden next to my lemon tree, looking out on the steep sides of the cliff face that makes up Positano on the Amalfi coast. We liked it so much we decided to spend another week here, but I think you need 2 weeks after the journey from Rome. We’ve done the journey before, we knew what to expect but it is the worst journey we’ve ever had to do. Even worse that the 3 straight days without sleep, shower or even bed it took us to get from Toronto to Fiji, even worse that the death ride we took to get to Istanbul & even worse (I never thought I would say it) than the shear hell & filth that was a tuk-tuk across Bangkok. The train to Naples is no real hardship even if you take the slow cheap train, as we did. You don’t have to see much of actual Naples so that is lucky but from then on its filth, heat, crowds & bad bad bad. You have to get on a local train from Naples to Sorrento. This is like a very old fashioned underground train except its almost entirely over ground. It is slow & boiling hot, you melt into the plastic chairs & you sweat like a fat pig on slaughter day. You are surrounded by the criminals from Naples all trying to part you from you luggage or wallet. Its 50 degrees & your crammed into fat people. Your like this for about 2 hours. Then you have a 40min wait in the scorching Sorrento sun for the bus. By this time there are a far more people than seats so it’s a full out scrum to get on board, if your lucky enough you then have to stand on a packed bus with people trying to squeeze past you to find seats that are already full. Then the bus goes for 20 min in completely the opposite direction you need, does a big circle & goes back the way it came. It makes no stops; no one gets on or off. Then after another hour we arrive in Positano. There are 4 stops but nobody knows which one they need so everybody’s on & of, pushing & squeezing there sweat drenched body’s it is truly disgusting. We made it though & we needed the extra week, we deserve I think after all that!
I've fixed it. Aint I just the lever 1.
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