I spent ten days in the Roman suburb of San Lorenzo. From what I gathered prior, San Lorenzo is known for graffiti, university students, and dive bars, which interested me more than the sort of tourist traps I had surrounded myself with while in Palermo. For several years now, Rome has been a destination on my list; my European friends had been telling me how much they love it, which surprised me, as Rome didn’t make a positive impression on me the first time I visited, on a high school trip when I was 16 years old. However, I have traveled enough since then to understand that first impressions are just that. My first impression of Rome was how much the historic center seemed to pull everything toward it. Even a few kilometers away from the Colosseum and Forum, the city still felt centered, with a slight slope towards its core. The train station, the streets I passed through, the tourist services, stores, and restaurants, all of it angled inward, as if the whole city sloped naturally toward the tourist vortex. It’s difficult to describe, but I certainly felt a gravitational pull on the streets to where the mobs of […]
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I met my sister in Olbia, a main city on the island of Sardinia, Italy, for a five-day yoga retreat. She was leaving Paris and returning home to California, and before she did, we made time to see each other and do some yoga too. The retreat’s location was truly beautiful, situated on a private estate along the coast, and the hosts did an amazing job of making everyone feel welcome, including me, the only man in attendance. The airline lost my luggage, so I was without a change of clothes for the first two days, but it didn’t matter much; I made do with some help from my new friends. There was one other American lady in the group; the rest of the women lived in London, though their original nationalities varied. Argentina, France, Colombia, and Tunis were all represented, which made for some great dinner conversations and a lot of fun. I’m a little sad that everyone is based in London, because all these new friends I’ve made will be difficult to keep up with. I’ll try and pass through London on my way in or out of Europe the next time I can make it work; I […]
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I haven’t seen as much of Italy as I had hoped to by now. Recent visits to Tuscany, and Lake Ledro & Lake Garda, motivated me to make more of an effort to explore and learn more about the country. Increasingly, I found myself relishing Italian food, despite being the only person I know who avoids pasta and sweets (something I had always attributed to Italian cuisine). That’s just to say that I’m having a fun time figuring Italy out, bit by bit. What has kept my attention most is the regional differences. Italy feels bifurcated between north and south. In Sicily, a tour guide told me that Sicilians see themselves as Mediterranean, rather than just Italian. The divide isn’t hostile, just deeply ingrained, which might be similar to the divide in the USA between the North and South, or the East Coast and the rest of the country. This dynamic has reminded me a bit of Germany’s regional diversity with different spoken dialects (Sicily has its own regional dialect) I only had a week in Sicily before meeting my sister at a yoga retreat in Sardinia, and Palermo felt like the right place to spend it. Just enough time […]
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After Venice it was a quick few days bouncing around Florence and Tuscany. I had visited Florence once as a child, but this time I found Tuscan food some of my favorite. I also came to understand that Florentine people are very fashionable and interested in fashion! I did see the original statue of David previously (which is impressive of course) — there are other copies of it to which are neat as well. Continuing Tuscany adventures, next in line was Follonica, on the western coast of Tuscany, but just for four days while working. Still managed to do some exploring around the seaside towns and beaches in the area. This would be a great place to spend a summer.
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After finishing the European bike trip through Austria, Italy and Slovenia, we all took a shuttle van to Venice Italy where we spent three days and two nights exploring fun and interesting things around town. I have only been to Venice once before, when I was fifteen years old, on a school trip and this time around I got a better sense of what Venice is really like thanks to Costanza who patiently explained, guided and accommodated me across the various islands. She made an appointment for us to visit the island of Murano, where famous glass art is crafted, to have a business meeting to investigate sourcing materials to her Los Angeles design company. She let me tag along and accompany her as I stood wide eyed with my hands in my pocket making a concerted effort not to break anything. Murano glass is apparently world famous — they produce chandeliers for retail locations of major Italian fashion designers and prices there I saw were over $50,000. One of the head salesmen of the company greeted us when we landed on the island from the free boat he was kind enough to send for us (well really for Costanza). […]
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When someone invites me to do something somewhere in the world, my default is yes. Well I’ve had to re-evaluate that position since meeting Costanza – a woman whose sense of adventure and desire to travel and explore new places vastly outshines my own. She was doing a bike trip through Europe (Austria, Italy and Slovenia) for 7 days that her friend had organized and invited me to join alongside five others. So I reorganized my itinerary (sorry Vancouver, some other time). A cool thing about the bike trip was since I was in the central European time zone (which was about 7 hours behind in the USA timezone I work within) I didn’t have to take any time off work. Each morning we started biking with an early start to avoid midday European summer head and then arrived at the next destination in the afternoon which allotted plenty of time to attend my remote work meetings and grind on client work. The best part though was that the project I was currently working on during the trip got canceled half way through it, so I didn’t end up working at all during the entire six days, which was great. […]
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