Random Thoughts

Part 8:  Can you just imagine how long
the entire Travelogue is going to be?

So it won’t be long now until we get

halfway

to St. Marks.

You guys aren’t in a hurry, are you?  Okay, good, then Sherrill, go over there and pose in front of, oh, I don’t know…how about a cracked up exposed-brick wall?  To mix it up, we’ll make sure there’s one of those cool intercom thingies nearby. Read more »

So we got home the other night and sat down on the couch.  Just as I was about to turn on the TV I noticed that S had suddenly gone all still.  I looked at her, but she didn’t look back.  She seemed to be listening for something.

Finally she said, “Did you hear that?”  I hadn’t heard anything.  After a few seconds she said, “There it is again.”  I still hadn’t heard anything.  So I’m completely still, trying hard to hear whatever it is that S can hear and I can’t, because frankly she looks a little scared.  And yet fascinated at the same time.

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Part 7:  The Brick Edition

Well it just wouldn’t've been Italy without an accordion playing somewhere, would it? 

Or is that France? 

No, I think they both use accordions.  I dunno.  If Sherrill were awake I’d ask her.  All I know about the world I learned from Disney movies, apparently.  He wasn’t playing Bella Notte, though.  No spaghetti and meatballs either. 

The guy’s sign says something like ‘An offering, God bless you’. Read more »

Part 6:  That place with all the canals, anyway

Venezia
(Venice)

So after wandering around the train station a bit, we decided it might be fun to leave the train station and see this town outside it, which was called Venice.

This is looking from just outside the glass doors of the train station down some steps towards a canal, with Venice just behind.  The green-domed building is um…a big dome.  In Venice.  It’s probably very famous or something.  Maybe not, I’m not sure.  It’s certainly a familiar sight if you ride trains in Venice a lot. Read more »

Part 5:  The Most Boring Travelogue Yet

Fascinating description:  Here we are on a train to Venice.

We either got on the train late, or there was some nonsense about having to have a reservation…oh wait, no, it was a non-reserved train…anyway.  You don’t even know what I’m talking about.  Let me splain.  No, it’s too much.  Let me sum up.  There were no seats together.  So we either had to split up and sit in separate seats, or we had to improvise.

So we improvised.  Here we are in our private compartment.  When I say private compartment, I mean, here we are sitting on the floor of the train at a set of exit doors. 

Well, except for not having seats, this wasn’t too bad.  She had her door and I had mine, and we had the empty corridor to ourselves.  Each door had a window, so that’s like window seats.   The only thing was, once in a while one or the other of us had to get up to let people through the doors, but it’s good to stretch your legs sometimes on a long trip to Venice.

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Part 4 - GALLO’S:  Sherrill’s Favorite Restaurant
in All the World

I’ll meet you any time you want
in our Italian restaurant.

And now we come to the real reason we went to Italy in the first place…Gallo’s.

I have known Sherrill for around five years, and during each of those five years, I would occasionally, at least once a month, hear this:

“I am really craving some Gallo’s pizza right now.”

When she first said this, I was like, “I don’t think we have a Gallo’s…we have Pizza Hut?  Domino’s?” 

But the icy stare that followed that told me that somehow I had said the wrong thing.

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Part 3 - Scandicci

Sherrill and I stayed in Scandicci, just outside Florence, at a Bible School she used to work at when she lived in Italy.  This was completely fine for her, after all she worked and lived there for a couplea years, but, as you would expect, very very weird for antisocial me.  It was awfully communal…we had a tiny room on the third floor up a steep stairway, and we shared a bathroom with people in the room next door.  Three or four rooms were connected by a common area with couch and table.  In our room there was simply a bed and a wardrobe and some unidentifiable desk-ish thing.  We did have a couple of double doors which led to a small balcony overlooking the back courtyard, but that too, was shared.  In the basement was a kitchen all the residents had access to, along with a largish den with a few couches and a TV and DVD player.

Let’s all start sharing!  This is a bit too hey-let’s-all-be-friends to me.  Especially when you consider the fact that despite all the limitations and foreignness, and the lack of air conditioning, we still had to pay $60 a night.  After seeing what the place was all about, I probably would have preferred a regular old hotel for maybe a little more money, but Sherrill assured me that in Italy we wouldn’t've had a decent hotel without paying a lot more money, so I should basically shut up and be happy for the deal, and that even if we had gotten a hotel we probably still wouldn’t've had air conditioning.  Apparently Italy is not all that into air conditioning. 

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Part 2 - Actually in Florence

Firenze
(Florence)

Once we got off the plane, things improved a lot.  Going through Italian customs is a lot different from customs in America.  A lot different.  We walked inside the airport and up to someone who  immediately looked at our passports, then a few feet over to wait for our bags, and then we walked out of the room and found ourselves in amongst all the stores and food places.  “I guess that was customs,” Sherrill said.

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Part 1 - US Air:  The Lovely Airline

Welcome to our Travelogue of our September trip to Italy!  Well I think that’s a more than sufficent introduction, don’t you?  So anyway.  Our trip begins with our flight from North Carolina to the Florence airport, and we had an absolutely lovely flight on US Air.  Now when I say absolutely lovely, you know I probably mean horribly sucky.  And you’d be right. 

For starters, every inch of available space which is normally reserved for passengers had been stolen.  For some reason, the space under the seats in front of us, which usually is just barely spacious enough to actually put your feet under, had been reduced by some big, obviously unnecessary, maliciously-placed hunk of metal that had been bolted underneath so that you might be able to fit a TV dinner under there, if it wasn’t a Hungry Man. 

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(Don’t let the title discourage you; you don’t need to know anything about Photoshop or graphics or anything to understand this.)

Here is a shot of the newest version of Photoshop.

Does this annoy you?  It does, doesn’t it.

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