Sep 2008

So we've got off our lazy arses and moved on down to Tuscany!

The drive was fairly uneventful, apart from TomTom sat nav, who once again, displayed a total lack of knowledge of Italy. Tried to get us to join a motorway, through a bush.... Seriously, the stupid thing doesn't know certain parts of motorways exist. It's not as if they are newly built either. I reckon the mafia were involved in the mapping...

Kisrtin booked us into a Hostel for the 1st time (shudder). As it turned out - it's a belter! We have our own room - to be fair, by hotel standards, we have a suite. Lounge/kitchen, main bedroom, bathroom - with A BATH!!! - spare room (shoe box) - and a private roof terrace. All for 70 Euros a night! - and the setting is stunning. The place is called the Heart of Tuscany, and for good reason. Oh, and a pool the size of a football picth....

(No pics yet, but you have to wear hair caps in Italy by law, in public pools. Madness! - I mean, what is a cloth cap going to stop?. As I said to K, for God's sake, I'm putting my groin in there too - what the heck is my head hair going to do that could be worse!?!? - besides which, no girls' hair fits in the caps - who on earth thinks these things up?)

(Our lovely terrace)

Suitably amazed at the quality of the joint we popped down to the local shop and grabbed lots of booze and grub and filled the fridge. When I say "popped" - going anywhere takes an age and is a heap of fun. The roads here are all z-bend mountain roads and the Mazda MX5 is the perfect tool for the job. Shame we have to show some restraint so we don't kill the million homocyclists we see (near-miss) all the time.

Today we drove to San Gimignano - a medieval town famed for it's towers. If I read the history right, the town was split into two (feuding families - tsk!) and they built ever higher towers to express their authority (Freud would have had a field day). They did a good job - the towers are breathtakingly tall. I saw something about them on the Discovery channel some time ago - they are supposed to be a feat of engineering, bearing in mind most tall towers relied on a wide base to support the height / mass but these ones are uniform from top to bottom (cheating monkeys made the walls thicker at the bottom :-) ).

A very pretty town it is!

See that tower above? We went up it (well, it may have been that one, or it may have been another, either way it was very tall). We begrudgingly paid our 10 Euros and started on the stairs with a promise of a "good vista" a the top. Bloody ought to be for 5 Euros each, and no lift.

Once we got started on the stairs it took very little time to realise what an undertaking it was. As we got higher and higher Kirstin got the collywobbles. She was gently freaking out, and my legs were going all funny. The stairs are "pinned" to the walls, with gaps all around, and the steps themselves are steel mesh with nothing in between. The walkways at each level don't even join the walls.

I'm not afraid of heights but my brain was clearly chatting to my legs and making them go all weak. Meanwhile I'm coaching Kirstin to just keep looking up ahead, and NOT down.

(It may not look like much, but you are not looking at the floor below, that's a mid-way point - it was stomach churning just to lean over and take that picture)

Mind you, nice views on the way...

When we reached the final level, both quietly terrified at the prospect of having to go back down, we climbed one more ladder to the roof.

To be greeted by a....

Oh yes, and some views... my word, what views!

(Yep, we are higher than a bell tower. Well, another bell tower)

(Ding dong!)

Breathtaking. Simply amazing. And the walk down wasn't half as bad as we thought it would be. Mind you, as we got to the bottom, we saw a woman clinging onto her husband's shoulder, and they were on the 1st flight of stairs. I can't imagine they made it all the way up. The vertigo didn't hit us until the 3rd or 4th level.

Ate lots of icecream, saw some Frescos in the church that I was not allowed to take photos of....

... then moved on.

We headed back to base, and stopped at Vinci (home of Leonardo De ..... ) which is right by our hostel, and checked out the Leonardo museum. Good fun, lots of models of machines that he invented. Kind of mad though. I mean, you have all these intricately made models (in wood) of his inventions - mainly cranes and pulleys etc, that actually work, and you are fascinated by HOW they work, and IF they work, but every model has "DO NOT TOUCH" signs everywhere.

To madden you even more, EVERY model has a large handle that operates it. They even stick "DO NOT TOUCH" labels on the handles. Of course, people touch.

(You can't read it, but the small sign says, specifically, "Do Not Touch, AND, Do Not Photograph :-) )

(Reminds me of Panorama)

Oh, one more thing. Every shot you see of Tuscany in the glossies / books - it's true. This place is blinkin' stunning!

Florence tomorrow!

Ciao!

It's been over a week now. All we've done is relax, drink prosecco, and eat pizzas :-)

This place is wonderful!

On the 1st night Pablo and his girlfriend Viviana came over at about 10pm and asked if we'd like to go out for a drink. Assuming we were wandering down to the local village bar I popped 20 Euros in my pocket and off we went. We ended up at another village in the "Rock Cafe" bar - the most popular bar round here. It was heaving and good fun, but we ran out of money instantly - had to scrounge all night! We got back at 3am, after fending off offers to go back to various peoples' houses for more drinks - seems one chap who latched onto us is a bit of a bad boy so it was a good escape.

The next day we wandered down to the local pizzaria and ordered out take away dinner. I got chatting to the manager, who then came outside with a bottle of ... prosecco ... on him, and we drank more and chatted - where else does this happen? You order a take away and the manager buys you a drink! :-) . Soon a couple walked past and their toddler threw their house keys down a drain. Fifteen minutes of messing around with coathangers and the keys were retrieved! Village entertainment. :-)

Another day I went to get my hair cut at the local salon (bear in mind it's a mirace there is a salon here - small town). It was hillarious. I had 6 doting old ladies trying to chat to me whilst I explained in my best Italian that I was travelling etc. When we finally managed to ascertain that I was a friend of the Bazacco family and knew Renzo and Firenza they all showed great relief and excitement and one by one came over and squeezed my shoulder, you know, like your gran does. Priceless - and a good hair cut too.

One of the women mentioned something about wife, french, and "not attractive". I was a little confused but when I left all became clear - Kirstin was sitting at the bar across the road chatting in broken french to an old Italian chap. He was not very attractive.

We got chatting, and my french is pretty good now, but as good as it may be, talking another language to someone with no teeth is challenging to say the least. And he was Italian, not French. In the end I found it easier to agree and smile to most things he said :-)

We went round for dinner at Pablo's house across the road (Matt's cousin) and had a fantastic chicken curry and Tiramasou (sp?) and plenty of Grappa.

Another great night and we got to meet some of his friends, one of which lives near some hot springs near the coast so we plan to drop in in the coming month.

We went out again a couple of nights ago with Pablo and Viviana - this time to a near by village that was hosting a festival / faire kind of thing. We all ate food off plastic plates with a bottle of... yep, prosecco. The food was delicious! - I had pork ribs with Polenta and chips and we all shared a plate of Sopressa which was delicious beyond words. (Sopressa is a local thing - like a cold meat sausage - very grainy and moist - totally scrummy). After that we came back to Pederobba and went to the "main" bar where a local band were playing. Bloody good music, lots more drinking, and made a few more new friends.

I just can't describe how welcome everyone we have met has made us feel. This is village life as it used to be many years ago in England. We frequently bump into "toothless man" , Renzo, the man from the pizzaria.. etc etc. Great place and looking forward to coming back again after our South Italy excursion... which starts tomorrow.

We are heading off to Florence where we have booked a hostel outside the city in the country. Not my idea of a hostel (thank God) - it has an infinity pool and "wet bar". We plan to go all the way to Sicily then get a ferry to Sardinia, then another ferry back to the Rome area.

Loving Italy so much. I'm learning the lingo as fast as I can but what can you do? Be intersting to see how the South is. Several people we have spoken too seem very "suspicious" of the South, and the Mafia gets mentioned a lot. lol. Sounds fun!

Oh - nerd update - uploaded "custom" software onto my small Canon DS 870 IS camera so I can now do HDR photos again. Below is a quick rough example - it's very overprocessed but it was just a test (for the uninitiated - a HDR photo is when you take several pitures of the same subject with varying exposures, then let computer software merge them all so you get the best of all exposures - i.e. when you take a photo of a building in bright sunshine, you either have a properly exposed building with a white, featureless sky, or you get the sky properly exposed, but the building will be very dark. HDR lets you "cheat")

(That is what it really looks like (light etc) - a normal photo can't capture that - I'll do some much better ones shortly as we travel, now I have the facility again)