Whilst you were sleeping...

 Whoever said "English food is crap" has never eaten here, where we had a fantastic lunch in Hove in the company of some people who were purportedly locally and internationally famous*, but can't really have been, because there was no minder, no bling, no mobile phones, no entourage & no tantrums.  

We wandered up & down the seafront, reminding ourselves about the bygone beauty and tragically lost opportunity of the West Pier, and admired the bathing huts - what a typically ingenious English use of space - kettle, chairs, table, umbrella...

and we admired the English determination to soak up every last ray:

What a hoot - sound asleep in the midday sun - at home he'd be burnt to a crisp in about 3 minutes.


And we went to Beachy Head, where I very gingerly stuck my head over the edge & looked down - ooh, nasty:

That's about 300 metres down, Gentle Readers.

And then we went to the site of the Battle of Hastings, which, interestingly, is in Battle.  We walked round the entire site, and it's really hard to see how the Normans could have won, given that the English had the advantage of home ground, higher ground, and the moral imperative...

The battle was nearly 1000 years ago, and it was hard to imagine such violence in such a beautiful place..

Unimaginably, the Abbey which was raised on the site, and finished in about 1094, was allowed to be partially destroyed during Henry VIII's "Dissolution of the Monasteries" in the 15th Century, but the ruins are very picturesque.

And they sell great teatowels in the shop!

*Edited to add, JUST for AJ - *Norman Cook, AKA Fatboy Slim

The Traveller's Tale

 And our trip went like this:

Rome-Milan (3.5 hours)

An hour wait in Milano for the connecting train to depart (lucky we could wait on the train!), then Milano-Ventimiglia (4 hours)

A 45 minute wait in Ventimiglia for the connecting train, spent entirely in the Ventimiglia ticket office, and I was so rushed I forgot to validate the tickets (Come & get me, Mr Train Police!) which were sold by a lovely man with excellent English... and why do I mention this?  Ah, patience, patience.  

Ventimiglia-Nice Ville (50 mins).  The suburban trains that run between Ventimiglia and Nice are amazing, with glass doors, fabric covered seats and entire sections set aside for travellers with other needs, such as, old people, mums with babies, and other niceties that wouldn't last a day on the Sydney train system.  Clean, shiny and no graffiti, either.

In Nice, we tried to sort out the problem caused by Mr G's wallet being stolen in Rome, which was the fact that the Credit Card used to buy the train tickets from Paris to Dieppe, had been stolen, and so we couldn't get them out of the vending machine (which had been our intention during our nice 3 hour wait in Nice).  Mr G likes to be prepared, doncha know. 


An incredibly rude man in the information window handled our request for information, in my extremely limited French, by pointing to the ticket window, then lowering his head and ignoring every other word that came out of my mouth.  Luckily, the woman at the ticket window was incredibly nice, and she cancelled our original tickets and replaced them with two new ones, at very short notice.  Talk about the sublime to the ridiculous!

The rest of the 3 hour wait in Nice was spent in the bar devouring our meal of the day, two panino with ham, mozarella & tomato, and coffee, and beer for Mr G.  The Nice Ville-Paris (5 hours odd) trip was on a 300kph TGV, and it was amazingly comfortable.  I fell asleep on the train, with my feet up on Mr Golightly's seat, and my raincoat for a blanket.  Smooth as... and quick - we traversed the entire 900km in five hours. 

We didn't see a lot of Paris, but I took some photos from the taxi which took us from Gare De Lyon to Gare Du Nord, and yes, I know you're going to say "why didn't you take the famous Paris Metro?"  Well, gentle reader, I'd had an 18 hour day, about 7 hours sleep (which is definitely not enough, trust me), and the sure and certain knowledge of another long day travelling) was enough to make me forgo the experience of yet another metro, in a language with which I have no absolutely no facility... apart from "please" and "thank you"... so, we took a taxi.

The train to Dieppe was fairly full until Rouen, and then we had the whole carriage to ourselves - nearly as bizarre an experience as the time we went to see the latest Star Trek movie in our local cinema and we were the only people in there...

And then, we got to Dieppe.  It is apparently a nice town, with some good restaurants, and some interesting buildings.  But, as we couldn't find anywhere to leave our suitcases, we had to sit in the Ferry Terminal for five stinking hours, waiting for the boat to Newhaven. What an absolute waste of a day.  However, it was unavoidable - frustratingly unavoidable - how hard would it be to offer a secure facility at the Ferry Terminal so that people could  dump their bags & go back to town for a few hours?  Too hard, apparently.  


We did have a rather nice Croque-Monsieur each, at Dieppe, and Mr G played a couple of games of pool and learned some Greek swear words from a nice Cypriot boy who was going back to Brighton to study... then we got on the boat, and sailed, and sailed, and sailed:

and then, finally, we were there!

The wheels on the holiday... come off

So, Gentle Readers, there we were in Milano (also known as Furniture World), contemplating our return to Water World, when the volcanic eruption causing havoc throughout places further west of us, hit.  Suddenly, in a flurry of activity (not necessarily volcanic), the airports started closing down one by one, and it looked like it might get a bit ugly.


Back to Venice we trotted, to wait it out.  The email from EasyJet was apologetic, but clear.  "Sorry, your flight is cancelled.  Click here for a refund".


Plans?  Well, I thought we'd be better off in Rome than Venice, trying to get out of the place, and as Mr G was thoroughly fed up with Water World, it seemed like a sensible plan.  Hmmmm... anyway, after seeing the queue to deal with a real person in Venice station, we managed to negotiate the vending machines and get tickets for the trip to Rome on the 19th.  We arrived in Rome in good time, though the train was a lot fuller than the first time we'd done the journey, and with a lively air of speculation - on a lot of topics - eating, sleeping, travelling - drifting up and down the carriage.


Rome Termini was a zoo.  We hadn't needed to brave the ticket office before because we'd ordered our initial journey tickets on the internet, and so were able to go straight to the platform and on to the train.  This time, there was a lone woman standing in front of a barrier, with a sign on a piece of A4 paper (297X210mm), saying in Italian that "all trains to Northern Europe are full until 23 April 2010".  


This poor woman did not speak any English.  I speak enough Italian to buy food, wine, bus and train tickets and fabric, the essentials of life, really.  Not enough to negotiate the 20 other angry, tired, frustrated, foreign, people surrounding this woman bombarding her with questions, and certainly not enough to deal with the incredible Italian talent for getting your face in front of whoever you want attention from.  Whoever said "Italians don't like to queue" was exactly right.  Except for train tickets, apparently.  There must have been 1000 people in that queue.


Anyway, we made a reverse call to the "Don't leave home without us" people, who found us a hotel in Rome.  They couldn't get us any train tickets, though, because, like anybody who buys them 'not in Italy' has to get them from an agency, and they were just as stuck as we were.  Interestingly, the nice chap we spoke to was very keen to help us with a hotel but didn't want us to talk to the local "DLHWU" office.  Not sure why...


So, after the thunder and hailstorm, and after a very nasty previously frozen Panini, we got a taxi to our station, round and round the one-way streets of Rome.  Taxis are amazingly cheap in Italy, and the (woman) driver helped us with our bags and avoided collisions, crazy tourists and other taxis, all for E10.00.  Bargain.  


So, we spent a fabulous, but frustrating additional five days in Rome, explicitly not going to the Vatican Museum, but doing other things, like spending E41.00 on two Gins & Tonic in the hotel's fabulous bar:

And finding this just round the corner:

  
And on our last day in Rome, going for lunch at the fabulous place where we'd had this the first time:

Yum.  And I had one mouthful of this:

before Mr G had his wallet stolen by a very clever young man who slid into the seat behind him, reached round into his jacket's secret pocket, and helped himself.  I can't quite understand why he didn't also take Mr G's passport, but, thank the Absent Gods that he didn't.  

It was quite irritating enough to spend the rest of the afternoon going from the restaurant to the Hotel (room key?  In the wallet!) to the Carabinieri, to the hotel Bar, where even the E41.00 Gin & Tonics were not enough to assuage Mr Golightly's extreme irritation with himself for being so careless, and for that very clever young man, for being so clever.

So, the next day, we got on the train!

And the answer is...

In no particular order, Milano, Beachy Head and Hove.


We took a side trip to Milano because Mr G got a bit bored with Water World after 4 days of 'sameness', as he refers to Venice.  Unbeknown to us, the world's largest Furniture Trade Fair was on at the same time, which explained why our fairly ordinary 3-star hotel in Milano cost at much as a 5-star hotel in Rome.  


The train was (as usual) clean, fast and on time, and the railway station at Milano is an incredible building, inaugurated in 1931, but begun (officially) in 1906.  It was easy to find the Metro lines, easy to buy a local 48 hour ticket (without the assistance of the helpful girl standing next to the machine who wanted me to give her E2.00 for showing me the button that said 'change language' (in English) and who didn't particularly like being told to "bugger off"), but remarkably hard to find our hotel.  


We got to the proper station (Repubblica), but the map was a bit vague, so we stopped a couple of locals and attempted to find the street.  One very helpful man told we needed to get on the #12 Tram and go about 5 miles in that direction, so we wandered up to a taxi rank and asked the drivers, who were doing the typical Italian thing of chatting over a fag*.  They all turned and looked at us as if we were foreigners (oh yes, so we were!), and one of them jokingly said "Hop on my back".  Turns out it was on the street (round the corner) where we'd asked the other man for directions.  Ah well.  At least it was close.


We wandered the streets, which, despite the Trade Fair, were not that crowded, stopped for coffee, and took lots of photos in some of the richly decorated churches:

Oh yes, and we had Pizza for lunch:

Then, we climbed the Duomo:

The roof of the Milano Duomo is made of slabs of stone, nice and flat and easy to walk on,

 and there are some incredible examples of the stonemasons art:

And we found the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia "Leonardo Da Vinci", where they had working scale models of Leonardo Da Vinci's drawings, as well as about 10,000 other things, all housed here:

And we spent a highly amusing evening at "La Tana del Lupo", but more on that later, the washing calls!

Ciao! 

Where's that then?

There's a blog I regularly read called "Unmitigated England", which I quite like, I might add, as he has the occasional post entitled "Where's That Then, No. xx", and invites his readers to guess where the black & white photo from 60 or 70 years ago actually is.  I got one, once.


Anyway, in case you were getting bored with the travelogue, I thought we'd have a similar quizzy type thing, with a few random shots from our holiday, just so you can stretch your brain a bit.


Here goes:

Answers, later.  Ciao!

Then what?

So, where do all the Gondolas go at night? Well, they go to the Gondola Parking Lot:

There's a small dog-leg in this canal, which allows a number of gondolas to be parked there safely overnight.


We didn't go on a gondola ride this time, but probably my all-time favourite photograph came from our visit in 2006, when we went round the back-streets of Venice with Guido (and he didn't sing, but he did tell us that there is a gondolieri for every bridge in Venice, so that's about 400 guys (but no women, apparently).

What else?  We went to Torcello, an almost empty island with two restaurants and a magnificent church, with 12th Century mosaics, and signs of the original roman flooring clearly visible for those with eyes to see.


No photos allowed inside, however, but you can see them here, a bit. 


On separate days we went to what Mr Golightly caustically refers to "Lace World" and "Glass World", where we had two fabulous lunches, the Burano lunch was in a scruffy looking diner with no outside tables, no tout and no multi-lingual menus.  The only clue that the food might be OK was a hand-written sign saying "Lasagne Al Forno", which literally means "to the furnace", but actually means "cooked in the oven", or, made here.  And it was, because when I asked her "fatto in casa?", she gave me a look and said "Si, certo!!".  It was about the best lasagne I've ever eaten, with a slice of proscuitto between two of the pasta layers - fabulous.  


About half way through, a woman came in with an empty plate, had a quick chat to the restaurant owner and popped back to her shop next door.  Talking to her later when I was stocking up on lace-trimmed hankies for gifts, she told us that all the locals eat there, and that it's the best food on the island, but the tourists don't go there because it looks a bit shabby.  And it was fabulous, as was the artisanal gelato we had near the boat stop - three magnificent flavours, including dark chocolate, which I smeared all over my face and didn't realise until we'd walked all the way home from the Vaporetto.


How old is this?

The Murano lunch was equally fabulous, at a restaurant we'd read about in a book called "Chow Venice" called Busa Alla Torre, where they had a fabulous Menu Turistica, for about E15.00 - I had spaghetti with clams, and a fabulous whole sea bass, which I was quite happy to fillet myself (I was well brung up, y'know...)

Mr G had a fabulous smelling bucatini with smokey pancetta, and then something that escapes me, but he assures me it too was fabulous, then I made a complete pig of myself with a piece of their homemade strawberry tart, which was fantastic, all custardy and crumbly... yum.  We walked it all off, later, by trying to find souvenirs that didn't appear in every single shop we looked at.  That was hard work, let me tell you.


Then we got the boat back to Venice and had a long nap.  

The wheels on the train go round and round

Italian trains are fabulous, y'know?  They're clean, they leave on time (Thanks, Benito) and the seat numbers you have so carefully reserved when you bought your tickets online only 3 months before are clearly indicated overhead.  The window seats have their numbers next to a little window symbol, and the aisle seats are next to them.  Simple, really.


Well, Mr G & I thought so, but the rather large couple from a country where a form of English is spoken, which isn't Australia*, didn't get it.  Even after the extremely nice, fluently-English speaking conductor-guy pointed to their tickets, our tickets, the window, the aisle, god, and ghod-knows what else, they still didn't get it.


Anyway, eventually they moved so we could claim our prize (the window seats, natch), then sat for the entire journey glaring daggers at us.  Well, she certainly did.  He put his earphones in & played some game on a little white boxy thing for the entire trip to Firenze.  Then they got off.  I had nearly turned purple with the effort of holding my breath for that entire time, but I breathed again once they'd gone.  In with the calm, out with the stress.


In Firenze, two delightful American Gentlemen got on the train, and engaged with us in charming, well-read and well-bred conversation all the way to Venezia, where we bid them a fond farewell, and proceeded to drag our suitcases all the way from Fondamenta Santa Lucia to Strada Nova.  I noted with some small degree of pleasure the new steps on some of the bridges that allow people with wheelchairs and idiots with suitcases to negotiate the bridges without dragging their wheels off, but there weren't enough of them to make it easy... and the idiots in tour groups didn't help either.  


Needless to say, a small tiff ensued because I didn't have my handy-dandy Venice map on me, right there, right then, and "we might have missed the turn", but Mr G solved that by going into a bookshop to buy yet another one.  That's about 19 we own now, but, to quote Ms Lois McMaster Bujold, "No artificial shortages".  Once we had the map, Mr G was satisfied that we hadn't missed the turn (see, he has absolutely no short term memory, and so could not remember from our visit in 2006 that the street we needed to turn into was almost directly opposite the street for the Ca' Doro vaporetto, unlike me), and we walked the 20 feet to our turning.  I felt almost vindicated, however, smug does not make for a happy marriage, so I held my tongue.  Kind of.


Our apartment was small but perfectly formed, with two bedrooms, PayTV and a laptop, and the most difficult-to-use washing machine I've ever encountered.  However, once I'd mastered it, it was extremely handy, so no more whining, lucky for you Mr ForeignWashingMachineMaker**.


It was also directly on a canal at the front, so we were able to leave windows and shutters open during the day, which meant we got some lovely fresh air, and it was relatively quiet, which meant we got some nice sleep, once I persuaded Mr Golightly to turn off the TV, that is - did I mention it was in the bedroom?  Same in Rome, too.  I think it's a bit weird, I have to say, to have the house's only TV in the bedroom, but Mr G liked it.  


It also had the worst shower I've encountered in a building***, where the temperature varied from 'boil your arse off' to 'freeze your arse off', and the pressured varied from trickle to slightly faster trickle.  It was one of those showers you have to run around in to get wet, which made washing my hair interesting.  


Some views, then:

View from outside the living room window.

This is a very famous building just near Ponte Rialto, which also features in this photo I took in 2003, but from a different angle:

We came out of this calle onto the canal which connects to the Grand Canal whilst we were looking for this:

The amazing Scala Contarini del Bovolo, which sadly was closed to the public when we were there, and it's probably just as well, because about 30 seconds after we got there, and an extremely nice French lady took our photo, a horde of tourists arrived, making lots of noise, disrupting every body else's views and generally being irritating.  I'm sure they would have overrun it.  We left them to it and went off in search of the Gondola parking lot!


Ciao for now!






*See?  I don't like to generalise.
**Whose name I can't actually remember.  Nothing wrong with my short-term memory.
***As opposed to 'whilst camping'