Being the quasi-adventuresome types we are, we pointed on a map of Europe and decided to head to Cinque Terra, Italy. Literally translated as the "Five Lands", the five cities of the Cinque Terra - Riomaggiore, Manarole, Corniglia, Vernazza, and Monterosso - were originally discovered by backpackers in the late 90s and then became the subject of an entire Rick Steve's episode, leading to the onslaught of euro-wielding tourists. We decided to do our part and laced up our hiking boots.
Considering that most summer rooms in the Cinque Terra are booked months in advance, explaining to hotel reservationists that we needed a room for the upcoming weekend was like trying to explain Final Fantasy VII to a cheetah. Looking north and south along the Italian Riviera, we picked Genoa as a base of operations from which to launch our campaigns into the Cinque Terra.
On Saturday, June 24th we arrived in Genoa and found ourselves in the midst of a gigantic party: The Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa holds the alleged ashes of St John the Baptist, stolen during the Crusades, which are taken out and paraded through the city every year on 24 June, St John's feast day. The celebration takes place on the saint's day and involves a solemn mass, followed by a procession where the ark containing the saint's remains is transported through the city. During the procession, burly teams of men carry gigantic crosses - one man bearing the full weight of the cross at any time. Part Cique du Soleil balancing act, part World's Strongest Man Competition, these men were juggernauts: my trousers could probably be snugly buttoned around one of these men's forearms.
When the procession arrives at the city's ancient port, a ritual benediction of the Sea and the City takes place, following which the remains are taken back to the cathedral and the ceremony is solemnly concluded.
Saint John has been the patron saint of Genova since the middle ages, when the ashes arrived in the city courtesy of a band of roving crusaders. The crusaders (or bandits, depending on your point of view) had gone off in search of the bones of Saint Nicholas (or Santa Claus), which were preserved in a church in ancient Demre, or Myra. Miraculously, when they arrived in 1099, the tomb of Nicholas had recently been robbed by sailors from Bari, who abducted the remains and took them back to their hometown.
Peeved, the Genovese started tearing up the floor of the church and discovered another set of remains. Believing these to be the real Saint Nicholas, they packed the bones up and were about to leave, when they learned from the cries and lamentations of the monks at the site that the bones were actually the bones of Saint John the Baptist, a much holier prize than jolly old Saint Nicholas. The Genovese returned to Genova as victors, with their bags full of holy bones.
Whether the remains of the saint are genuine or not remains highly dubious. The saint being one of the most popular saints of the Catholic church, his head was one of the most sought-after relics on the market. At one point at least 13 heads of Saint John were being venerated around Europe. The most prized one was kept in the Vatican, but irreverent raiders apparently sacked the city around the 7th century, finding the time to play three-way football with the revered heads of St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John before taking them off to unknown and remote destinations in Asia.
So the Genovese weren't really raiding, they were "recovering" the stolen relics. Makes you feel better about the whole thing, doesn't it?
Flickr set from the Feast of St. John and Genoa are here and here, respectively.
Thanks to the www.isic.org website for some of this content.
We stood in the quasi line that snaked its way into the front of Notre Dame and basked in the cool, moist air inside. The church met all expectations: airy, light, bigger than life, and jam-packed with people from Kentucky. We sat, reflected on the existence of a higher power and the overarching meaning of life, then walked into the corner of the cathedral, dropped two euro into a vending machine, and retrieved our commemorative Notre Dame medallions. God bless corporate religious branding.
Our feet took us along the adjacent Seine at sunset and traipsed by the Hotel de Ville. Hungry and needing a respite, we found an out of the way cafe and dined on salmon, pate, awesome potatoes, and topped it off with Parisien coffee and a good dose of people-watching.
Dinner that night wasn't a letdown either. At Bistro du 7eme (in the 7th district), we had a decadent 20 euro, 3-course dinner that was divine. In bad need of some cardio following our meal, we walked out of the 7th and walked towards the Louvre pyramids along the Tuilleries and saw why they call it the city of lights.
The next day, we braved the crowds and headed for the Louvre. For 30 seconds, we were face-to-face with the Mona Lisa and no one else. We wandered through French paintings, the sculpture gardens, Egyptian relics, Napoleon the IIIs apartment and saw a handful of impressionists (although we would later find out that a majority of impressionists sit in the Musée d'Orsay). Museumed-out, we bailed out after four hours.
The end of the day found us sitting on the curb on a street off of St. Michele in the 6th district and eating gelato (not the best, that would be in Italy - watch for this post). We picked through the used book stores and headshops that lined the street and caught our breath under the shade of a few trees in the courtyard of a church.
After boarding the train home to Geneva, we reflected on our trip and were amazed that the service was so ridiculously good (and bilingual) - everywhere we went. I already miss it.
Flickr set from Paris is here. Thanks to my forgetfulness, digital camera batteries died on day 1. Remainder of pics are from disposable which are being developed.
This would be a trip of firsts. Venturing out of Geneva at first light, we took the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) to Paris and went a mindnumbingly fast 300 km/h (186 mph), which took us into the heart of the city in three and a half hours. You know you're going fast when the passing phone poles make you think that you're blinking uncontrollably.
We checked into our hotel, Hotel Le Trois Poussins, which turned out to be a little gem of a place in the Opera District (9th). My review of the hotel is here. After making hurried attempts at unpacking, we jumped onto the metro at St. Georges station and took the 12 train towards the river. Emerging from the subterranean underground, we blinked like moles in the blinding sunlight until we found our sunglasses and stumbled our way to the Tuilleries.
Wandering northwest, we walked up the Champs-Elysées, leaping between the patches of shade that lined the street. Powered up with a street vendor-supplied sandwich and too many cans of Coke, we ventured up towards the Arc de Triomphe, stopping only to pick through the meager English section of a Virgin megastore and watch the people who were people watching us.
We took pictures of ourselves but dared not venture to the Arc itself because of the mongol hordes of tourists that seemed to flock to it like carrion. We opted instead to stroll down avenue Kleber and found ourselves, still on the right bank, but on the western side of the city, where the Seine makes a sharp southern turn, in the Trocadéro district. Lolly-gagging through the parks, we gazed across the Seine at what looked to be the infield at Pimlico during Preakness: the Eiffel Tower. If you've never been to Preakness, imagine a NASCAR event where all of the people outside of the stadium are now in the middle of the track. We picked our way through the throngs of tourists underneath the shadow of the tower, took some pictures, and stared at the numerous hen parties (bachelorette) that were subjecting the brides-to-be to do some comedic routine. I patted myself on the shoulder for opting not to propose at the Eiffel Tower.
We fueled up on gelato and jumped onto the metro headed for Notre Dame.
We're engaged! I proposed in Talloires, France at L'Abbaye. Perhaps the most beautiful place I've ever stayed at (but I'm biased). The two pictures in this post, by the way, were taken out of the window in our room and can be placed edge to edge (using the mountain in the back) to give you an idea of the Talloires bay. Flickr pictures set from Talloires is here.
So I've noticed a lot of random traffic coming to the site from people looking to find out how to pronounce certain words in French. Although I'm unwilling to record poor versions of my own French pronunciation, there's a great website that everyone should know about.
The BBC website has a section devoted to learning other languages, with online learning material, mp3 downloads, and interactive lessons. Probably not as comprehensive as a Pimsleur, but nice (and free) nonetheless. Available languages are Spanish, Italian, French, German, and a slew of other ones.
The BBC French language site is here. The BBC language site is here. Tutorials also has a website on French pronunciation here.
Flying from the US back to Geneva, I took Air France and I have to give it 4 out of 5 stars to the US and 2 out of 5 stars back to Geneva.
Air France has a terrific entertainment system that panders to the geek in all of us. Movies, music, games, and a real-time map are all available through a personal entertainment system, complete with a game controller in the armrest. When you're on the ground, the pilots can even turn on a landing gear camera where you can see the ground crew work. The flight from Paris to DC had fantastic food: great cheese, coffee, and a choice of quality airline food. Parents with infants less than one year old could order a "skycot" which is a portable crib that latches to the undercarriage of the overhead bins. (Kind of weird seeing it for the first time). Even though there were six babies all screaming in stereo, the crew did their best to keep us entertained and well fed: I saw one stewardess scrounge up a salad for a passenger (from where, I have no idea) and bust into a 3 new dinners to retrieve the cheese for another. No way would that happen on an ATA flight from Detroit to Midway.
The flight back was a little nightmarish. The first thing I noticed was that fewer people were drinking wine in favor of Diet Coke. The crew seemed hurried and the meal distribution was carried out in a frantic manner. Once we crossed some midpoint line in the Atlantic, however, things resumed their normal European rhythm: coffee, cheese, and croissants. It was all okay until I arrived in Geneva to find that the front pockets of my luggage had been torn off by some errant piece of baggage handling equipment.
Getting off the train in the small village of Gruyères, (yes, where the cheese was named), I didn't expect to see a robot picking cheese. I also didn't expect to see sexually explicit cartoons. But I was in for a treat.
In my terrible French I asked the train conductor "Do you have Gruyères?" A brief, quizzical look overcame his face until he was able to affirmatively identify me as a tourist and say "Oui!". Our small train rolled through the quiet Swiss landscape until we came to Gruyères, a small blip of a town near the edge of the eastern shore of Lake Geneva.
Tourist mecca beckoned. A small electric train (Disneyland-esque) advertised rides around town. The menu for the restaurant outside of the station had the word "fondue" and "cheese" splashed on it like an overzealous Jackson Pollack. We walked past the restaurant and gazed at what appeared to be the Matrix on dairy. Robotic arms loaded and unloaded gigantic wheels of cheese onto racks in an enormous warehouse that stretched the length of half a football field.
We jumped on a bus in the attempt at making it to a gondola that we had seen in some tourist literature. Being the only people on a gigantic commuter bus, it must have seemed odd to the driver that my friend and I had chosen to sit knee-knockedly on the same bus bench together, Brokeback Mountain-style. He took us the 2 miles uphill until we came to the cog railway that was out of service for the winter. Defeatedly, we walked back to the bus and took it back to the main village.
If you've never had double cream with coffee in your life, try this experiment: dunk your head in a vat of butter. Remove head, pour coffee in cup and sip. Good, eh? Coffee was served with double cream in tiny thimbles that did not pour, but rather had to be scooped out. We saw people around us having double cream with strawberries. Decadent. We sat and watched the Ricola-esque horns and walked over to the HR Giger museum.
Having not seen the movie Aliens since my 8th grade birthday party, (which ROCKED by the way), I was ill-prepared for the HR Giger museum. The Swiss-born artist was the mastermind behind the scary aliens in the Aliens movies and was apparently a sufferer of night terrors: something that he had initially turned to art therapy to help relieve. His dark, sexual imagery was completely misplaced in this land of dairy, cows, and rolling hills.
We finished up Gruyères by doing a 30-minute breeze through of the chateau of the village. At this point, however, I'm beginning to get all chateau-ed out.
On the way home we stopped in Lausanne, grabbed dinner, walked through a street festival, got caught in a rainstorm we had heard coming across the lake (cool), and eventually found ourselves trapped in an all-too-small traincar with about 400 Spanish schoolgirls who apparently had found a new frequency to communicate on: somewhere between where dog's hearing begins and human eardrums rupture. We were glad to stumble back into Geneva with only minor injuries.
