beauty

So as I am wandering around this cemetary, looking for my great grandparents' graves I come across an old lady who comes into the cemetary and walks over to a particular tomb. She slowly lowers herself down on her hands and knees in the wet gravel in front of the tomb. She methodically and lovingly takes out the old flowers, tossing the old water, and replaces them with new ones. Then, she takes a rag that she has brought and washes down every square inch of the tomb with water so that the white marble really shines in the light. She stops, observes her work, fidgets with the flower arrangement to get it just right, and then takes a moment for herself. She collects her things, and leaves. Don't we all just want someone to love us that much?

I can't stop the tears streaming down my face.

I'm in love

Well it's official. I am in love with this small town of Italy. We are staying in the town of Riomaggiore, the southernmost of the five towns that make up la cinque terre. Since it is off-season it is a sleepy town, glistening from the rain and drizzle. It is right on the coast, and we are in a hostel/apartment about 30 stairs from the little dock and right next door to some type of distillery. The guys came by to move some of their wine and do what they do and filled up a 2 liter bottle for us to try! Delicious. Most of the stores are closed or only open a few hours a day, at the owners discretion of course. This area is famous for the hiking trails that link these five towns together.

We are sharing the apartment with two guys from Pennsylvania (one of whom is an excellent cook) and a girl from Calgary who left this morning. Yesterday she and I took the train to the northernmost town and attempted to walk the whole way home even though the trail is officially closed. We would have made it if we hadn't taken an hour long trek down (and back up) what we thought was the trail at the time! After sliding down a muddy slope on my butt (not intentionally), being attacked by the same vines I am now convinced were the inspiration for the ones in the Harry Potter stories and trecherous river crossings, we decided that maybe we had wandered off the real trail and retraced our steps until we found it again. It was raining in the morning when we left but then stopped raining and even though it was overcast we had spectacular views of the ocean and these amazing little towns.

My granfather was from a town just north of this area and I have made friends with a brother and sister who own a bar and shop in town and who both used to live in San Francisco. Just the nicest people. Sandra has offered to help me find any decendents or relatives of my family and I spent this morning with her calling all of the Tosos in Sestri Levante on my behalf. She should have been a PI the way she works! We will keep calling tomorrow, but at least some people are familiar with my great-grandfather's name, Giacomo Toso. Hopeful!

So today Rahima and the boys went walking in the rain, and I am here, stuffing myself full of nutella, cozied up in a warm apartment overlooking the sea, thinking about going to take a few pictures before walking up to the local market and buying fresh ingredients for dinner and maybe stopping by the bar for a drink or a coffee. Oh, how rough it is. :)

life in the tuscan countryside

So I guess I haven't written much since we got to Italy, which means we haven't slowed down much in the past week! First off, Italy is amazing and I wish I spoke Italian. There are definitely similarities to Spanish, but I only get about every fifteenth word if I'm really lucky. But it just sounds so good that I am mezmerized just hearing it all around me, all day long. Note to self:learn Italian.
So first off, we took a ferry from Greece to Italy and we were, quite possibly, the only women on the ferry. We felt like we were back in a Muslim country for a minute! Being the low season there weren't many people on the ferry at all, but the majority were truck drivers. We made friends with two English guys and a group of Italians (who spoke about as much English as we do Italian) and played cards and talked most of the overnight trip. When we landed, we hopped on a train to Rome (the eurail pass is MUCH better now being in Italy and having an eraseable pen!). Rome was as incredible as I could have imagined. Rahima had been there before, so the next day she did laundry and slept in while I rapidly depeleted my bank account running around and paying ridiculous, but necessary, entrances to Vatican city, the Sistene Chappel, and the Colleseum. It was incredible. Once again I was awed by what people were able to build so long ago and how well it has staved off the effects of time.

The following morning we headed to Pisa, but ended up getting in touch with a gal from SF that we met in Sevilla who is now travelling in Italy (are you all still with me?) and is in Florence. So, with our backpacks in tow, we took a city bus to the leaning tower, took pictures as the sun set, jumped on another train and headed to Florence to meet up with Chloe and the people she had been couchsurfing with.

So, we ended up staying the last three days up in the hills of Tuscany, with a bunch of Italian hippies. As one of them described Galiga, it is a fraction of a fraction of a town. It maybe consists of five houses on a hillside. The house where we stayed has eight bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, a foozball table, and a great fireplace in the livingroom/diningroom (which also doubles as an oven for bread and the waterheater!). At any given point there are between 8 and 25 people there. Some are students, some have jobs in Florence, one is the mayor of Galiga, and so on and so on. When someone cooks, they cook for everyone. Somehow there is always food (most likely pasta). The anarchist philosophy just seems to work. It is "rustic" (aka dirty) but someone is always cleaning something up. They were all so welcoming and really, really nice. One night the parents of the girlfriend of one of the guys (once again, are you following?) came and cooked dinner for everyone. They made delicious polenta and even brought homemade bread and wine. Italians seem to be the happiest people on the planet as long as they are eating, feeding someone else and in a big, loud group. :). I love my people!

So yesterday we spent the day wandering around Florence in the drizzling rain, saw most of the sights famous to Florence, drank some coffee, ate some gelatto, and had an apertivo for dinner. Best deal in Europe. For 7 euros you get a drink, and then all you can eat appetizers which are really good. So Rahima and Chloe and I got to sit around, stuff our little faces and enjoy (and I mean really enjoy because we could afford it!) good company and good food. La dolce vita!

Athens, Greece

This is definitely the country I will come back to as soon as I compromise most of what I stand for and just settle and marry rich...very, VERY rich. Greece (well, really all we have seen is Athens) is beautiful. Beautiful in the sense of both

a)lots of ruins (i.e. the Acropolis on the hill that you can see from almost anywhere in the city) and history

and

b) a starbucks or coffee shop at every turn and newly released (well, new to me) american movies in the cinemas. :)

Like I said. Beautiful.

So, my one complaint about the movies here (we have seen two in the last two nights) is that in the middle of the movie they do an intermission. Yes, an intermission. Lights go up. Movie stops. Everyone takes their little bathroom break or goes to buy more popcorn or soda. WHAT?!?! It is horrifying to me. My "shiny object syndrome", as Luis coined in a few years back, takes over and I totally lose the emotional groove of the movie. I begin to notice the horrible hairstyles of the people around me, or how my chair isn't as comfortable as I originally though. How I like or don't like the decor of the room, etc. I count rows of chairs...anything. It is a 15 minute intermission, and then, when it is time to start up again, there are stragglers still settling back in, climbing over your legs, getting comfortable, etc. and you are trying to hear the movie and remember what Benjamin Button was so sad about 15 mintues prior when you were so rudely interrupted by the intermission.

At this time of year a lot of the islands are closed and ferry routes are limited. So my dream of spending time in those cute towns you always see with the white domed houses overlooking the bluest sea known to man will have to wait for later. I guess it is good to have a few places on this trip that I have to go back too. Wouldn't want to cross them all off my list at once, right?

But I did get to eat some baklava. Yummy. And almost too sweet. :)










Some of the remnants of the recent riots here in Athens. We liked this one.

Getting to Jordan...

is harder than one would think! So, our journey began on a sunny Wednesday. We got up, ate (of course) went for a quick walk around town and then back to the house to (eat, of course) and grab our things and head to the bus station. Long story a little bit shorter (okay, so I'm not really good at holding to that, but it's fun to say) our Lonely Planet book had said there was a direct bus from Alexandria to Aqaba, Jordan. The truth of the situation, is that there is not. Instead, there is a multiple-modes-of-transportation journey, that ended up taking us just over 32 hours. It consisted of a bus to Cairo, a two hour wait, another bus to Nuweiba, Egypt, an 11 hour wait, and then a ferry to Jordan, followed by a two hour cab ride to the city of Wadi Musa, just outside of Petra. Woah.

The good news is that I had time (lots of it and the vast majority in a freezing cold, air conditioned bus driving through the desert at high speeds in the dark, windy roads, with no headlights and a broken speedometer) to contemplate the things that I truly miss about the US. Here are a few:

1-lines. Not only the existence of lines, but the respect for them. See a line, go to the end of it. Wait your turn. Does that really seem so hard?
2-to go coffee. I want to take my coffee with me. I want to walk around with it. I want to multi-task.
3-customer service. Just tell me the truth. Give me correct information. Say sorry when you mess things up. Take responsibility. Or at least pretend to.
4-the ability to book things online in advance. Oh, how much we this for granted.
5-schedules and timetables that are somewhat reliable and accurate. If the ferry leaves at 6, tell me 6. Not 2!

The ferry trip was a real treat. First of all, the trip over (about an hour and a half) is a RIDICULOUS $70, US. On top of that, you must pay in USD, but the ATMs don't give out USD. We are pretty sure now that whoever owns the ferry is related to the one bank in the neighboring town that exchanges Egyptian Pounds for USD. Luckily for us, Jenny had enough USD to cover us all. So there are two ferry options, the fast ferry (1.5 hrs) and the slow ferry (2.5 hrs). Well, considering we arrived at 5:30am and had nothing to do but sit outside and drink tea, we were more concerned with getting on a ferry than the amount of time it took to get to Jordan. They told us the slow ferry left at 4pm (and was $10 cheaper) but the fast ferry left at 2pm. So we splurged on the fast ferry. Come to find out, the slow ferry actually left at 12 and the fast ferry finally left at about 6:00pm. Urgh. I would have gladly paid the extra $10 just for the correct information! We met a good group of people waiting for the ferry though, and we all made it over in the end.
The classic picture taken as you walk in and first see the Treasury.


Some of the amazing colors of sandstone.







The following day I pulled myself out of bed early (6:15!), ate breakfast and headed out to Petra with two guys who we had met the day before. Rahima and Jenny were so exhausted that they decided to meet up later in Petra. We got there about 7:45am, and spent all day there...literally. We must have been the last tourists out of the place about 6:30pm, walking out in the dark. I will definitely not do justice to Petra here in this blog. It was one of my top two things I wanted to see on this trip, and it surpassed every (and I mean absolutely EVERY) expectation that I had. I don't think I have ever spent so much time somewhere and just marveled at what was around me. The buildings are carved into the sandstone walls and everything is just massive. The buildings are beautiful and you really feel how it was a true city, not just a little town with one or two spectacular facades carved into the walls. It is sprawling across quite a bit of space and you sometimes just go around a turn and can't believe what you are seeing right in front of you. One of my favorite parts was the Monastery, which is 48m tall and 43m wide. One of the guys we were with, Tim, disappeared for a bit and suddenly called out to us, from the TOP of it! Well, I was certainly envious and so when he said it was quite an easy climb, Ed and I started up ourselves. Jenny and Rahima stayed down to get the good pics of us. It was incredible. I sat on top of one of the 7 wonders of the world. Sigh. :) Does it get much better than that?


The Monastery. If you look closely just to the left of the spire you will see Tim, standing on top, in a dark grey sweatshirt. Wow!


Me and Ed on top of the Monastery. Can you believe it? It was absolutely spectacular. :)


Oh yeah, and on the way to Amman today we stopped at the Dead Sea and floated for a bit. It was really funny. The guide book even warns that if you are coming here to commit suicide, rethink it, because you won't be successful. You literally cannot make yourself sink on your own. Looks like we are lying on the bottom in these pictures but we couldn't touch the bottom. The gnome got to swim too. It was a good day for us all. :)

Happy 31st Birthday!

Well, for starters, this internet cafe hates me. I have been fighting with it for about 45 mintues and I am going to try my best not to let my sheer and utter annoyance at both this computer and the obnoxious men behind me not affect the entirety of this blog. But seriously, if this computer doesn't let me finish this blog AGAIN, or if those guys do one more obnoxious thing, someone is getting hurt. 31 definitely has a shorter fuse than 30. ;)

Aside from my little rant, 31 has been great so far. We spent a day in Cairo and probably did what most people do in a few days, all packed into one. We got a VERY early start and went to the Giza Pyramids. Wow. It was amazing. The sphinx was really my favorite. I just couldn't believe I was actually there, staring at such immense structures that were built so long ago. The pyramids are actually the only one of the original 7 manmade wonders of the world still in existence. We walked around and even climed around inside of one of them. It was great.

Jenny and me going into the Great Pyramid. Check out how large each of the stones that made up the pyramid are behind us. WOW!



Rahima and me at the Great Pyramid.



Then we went back to Cairo and went to the Egyptian Museum, where (my favorite part) was seeing everything that they took out of King Tut's tomb. It was so perfectly preserved. The amount of gold and the condition of all of the jewelry is really a marvel. I stood gawking at the famous headpiece for quite some time. We met up with Rahima's aunt Nahid, who lives in Alexandria but came down to Cairo to meet up with us and then to escort us back to Alexandria the next day. She took us to her cousin's house in Cairo for dinner. Their family has 6 kids, ranging from 22 to 3 months. They were amazing. The older kids (22, 20, 17 and 12) speak a lot of English and were thoroughly amused with me attempting to learn words in Arabic. They were so kind and amazing, that they insisted we stay with them for the night instead of returning to our hostel. So Rahima, Jenny, Amar (the oldest boy) and Aunt Nahid went to the hostel to collect our things and I was convinced by the 12 year old, Sara, to stay with her at the house. She and her brother, Mohamed, and little sister, Salma, spent the next few hours teaching me words in Arabic, quizzing me, and laughing hysterically at me. It was great. :)

Everyone together. Amany, Jenny, Aunt Nahid, Rahima, Samina, Mohamed, (front) Amar, Sara, Seif, Me

So my Arabic now consists of the following: good morning, let's go, spider (the essential words first, right?), I love you, I'll miss you, yes, no, man, woman, girl, boy, thank you, you're welcome, okay, hello, and no problem. I also have picked up a few choice hand gestures which I am sure will come in handy. That, and my biggest accomplishment is that I have learned how to read the numbers 1-10, so that I will no longer be ripped off by street vendors when I ask prices. Ha ha to them! They don't know what they've got coming now. :)

So I have come to the conclusion that negotiating really is part of Egyptian culture. It works in reverse inside of a home though. You see, when you are out on the streets as a tourist, everyone tells you a price at least 75% higher than they would tell a local. So you bargain EVERYTHING. It gets a little annoying at points. But inside a home, no matter what you say, they want to feed you more. So when you say you want two pieces of something, they give you six. If you say three, they give you seven. So, if you only want one or two pieces, you must refuse staunchly, and hope that maybe they will stop loading up your plate at two. :)


All of the food...or what is left of what we just couldn't eat! :)



After a huge dinner around 8pm, we ate fruit at about 9pm, cake about 10, and then around midnight Amar, the oldest boy was sent out for bread and things for (what we naievely assumed) breakfast. We came back and talked and laughed until about 2am, when they made cheese sandwiches and forced us to eat again. We couldn't believe it. They tried with fruit (bananas and tangerines) as well, but Jenny took advantage of a moment of distraction to polietly hide them back in the kitchen. :)
They all turned off the lights about 12:30 and sang Happy Birthday to me both in English and Arabic, and being around such a lively group made it feel really great. I am still having a blast and hopefully, with any luck, this blog will post and make my birthday complete. Let's all be thankful for small miracles. :)

Luxor

Sunset on the Nile.

What can I say about Luxor? What is it not? Vegas. No pyramid and no huge beam of light shining from it. What is it? A city filled with history, tombs, ruins, and falafel. I really can't stop eating the falafel. We found a street place that sells a half a pita with falafel and this jalapeno-eggplant mixture for 1 egyptian pound. That is about 16cents. So for two falafels and a soda or bottle of water, you can eat for about 80cents. For some reason though, I can't stop eating them. First of all they are delicious. Secondly, I have been trying so hard to keep some semblance of a food budget while in Europe, where a simple cup of tea averages about 2.5 euros (just over $3). So here I find myself with enough money to eat, and eat, and eat some more. Whoever thought traveling would mean losing weight never came here and ate street food. It couldn't be more delicious. And now the guys at the shop know us and wait for us a few times a day to pass by and stuff our faces...again. Oh how I a poudly living up to the excessively gluttonous American reputation! There is a McDonalds down the street and they sell McDonalds-Egypt beach towels, in three different colors. I guess they had to branch out to keep some business since the food elsewhere is so good!

My falafel...yum.

Luxor itself is a pretty big place, overrun with tourism, but with so much to offer that you can't really help but like it. We are about two blocks from the Nile and can see the Luxor Temple ruins from our hotel as well. Yesterday we went to the Valley of the Kings, the Valley of the Workers, Queen Hatsepshut's Temple, and the Colussi of Memnon. Today we went to Karnak Temple. Everything is very surreal here. Heiroglyphics everywhere and it is amazing to see huge statues and painted tombs that have lasted for over 4000 years.


Luxor Temple at night.


The gnome (yes...he still is with us) and the Colossi of Memnon)


In Karnak Temple.


The spices, especially the dried hibiscus, in the streets of Luxor.

It gets a little old being hassled all the time here, and the concept of walking just to walk seems foreign to all taxi drivers, minibus drivers and horse-drawn carriage drivers. We have tried being polite, ignoring them, speaking spanish, not speaking at all, and even being (what feels to us) rude. Seems like they all keep going, lowering their prices for things you don't want. It can be a little entertaining though. Jenny (who is half Chinese and half Hungarian) has had loads of people here think she is Egyptian. Rahima (who is Egyptian) shocks people by saying she is actually the Egyptian in the group. I (of course) get "tourist" all the time, but when I say nothing and am in my sunglasses get called Shakira. Go figure. Everyone loves Obama and hates Bush, and wants to make sure we are the type of Americans who agree. Amazing how much common ground that gets you once you leave the US.

Rahima, me and Jenny at Hatsepshut's Temple.

Tomorrow we head to Cairo for a few days. After being around all the tombs (we didn't go to King Tut's because everything has been taken out of it to the Cairo Museum so there isn't all that much to see but they charge you extra to do it anyway), I can't wait to get there and see all of the contents of the tombs. And to see the pyramids. :) Maybe I'll even get a few more falafel sandwiches in before we go.