Where Is Hawkins?

Today on a rare occasion, someone at work asked me something different – it was about my desktop wallpaper. It’s a painting by a guy named Gustave Moreau, a 19th century Frenchman. In 1865, he painted Orpheus, my favorite person from Greek mythology.

Now, I like myths. I think that they’re important for a society to have. There are bad myths, like Jews owning everything – that are perpetuated through the ages. There are “techno-myths,” like the big car companies are sitting on the technology to get 300 miles a gallon with internal combustion engines.

Orpheus was a musician who played the lyre and could play so beautifully the Gods would weep. He was part of Jason (and the Argonauts’) quest for the Golden Fleece. The Sirens (from the Odyssey) would sing and lure ships into the rocks to destroy them, and when the Argonauts heard the Siren’s Song, Orpheus pulled out his lyre and drowned out their inciting songs.

Later in life, Orpheus got married to a woman named Eurydice and was deeply in love with her. While running away from the son of Apollo, Eurydice was bitten by snakes and died. A distraught Orpheus played his lyre in mourning so sad and tragic that the Gods wept. The Gods told Orpheus that he should go to the Underworld and he encountered the King and Queen of the Underworld – Hades and Persephone. Persephone was sympathetic (for the first time ever), and told Orpheus that he could bring his beloved Eurydice back to life under one condition: he walks in front of her and doesn’t look back until they both reach Earth – the “upper world”. His anxiety got the best of him and at the gateway to “the upper world” he crossed through and turned around while she was still in the Underworld. Eurydice disappeared, this time forever.

The more observant readers of my blog (both of you) will realize I’ve mentioned “my Eurydice” before. It’s a good analogy. Sometimes circumstances present you with the most infinitesimal of odds and your anxiety will blow it, this time permanently. The lesson is clear: Don’t look back. Ever.

Orpheus died a rather interesting death. For the rest of his life, he gave up on love and took on lovers – along with forsaking all the Gods except the sun god. The Kikonian women got pissed off, and threw rocks and sticks at him. Orpheus, being the lyre master, played music so beautiful that the sticks and rocks refused to hit him. Naturally, the women got super pissed, and tore him to pieces. His head and lyre still kept singing as they floated down the river into the Mediterranean.

As much as my head knows the myth, the heart doesn’t. And it’s only a matter of time before women get pissed off at me and tear me to pieces despite my lyre skill.

Ah analogies – how I love thee.

I hate every since travel blogger’s “gadget list” because it’s either some fantasy thing from a high end manufacturer or it has some sort of ubercool slant to it. Most if it is just useless. A real geek has a minimal number of devices that can do a multitude of things.

Garmin Foretrex 401. Why settle for those stupid GPS trackloggers when you can have something low-cost that has a digital compass and can be re-purposed for geotagging? It’s what I use since my Garmin Edge 305 went to the gadget graveyard. Plus you can use this for planning skydiving, just in case your first time out involves you HAHOing. And it takes AAA batteries, sweet.

Sandisk Memory Cards. Many a rookie traveler has set off with their new camera that was purchased for their trip and thought that one memory card will be good enough. It never is. As I’ve said before: Take your camera’s number of megapixels, find out how many photos will fit on the card that you have. Divide that by 300 (it’s about how much I shoot on a day abroad) and that’s the number of days’ worth photos you can have. Does your camera do video? Video eats up memory. For example, my Canon 5D Mark II ate up 60 GB of video and photos in 6 days in Italy.

I stick with Sandisk cards because on their Extreme III series, not only do you get high transfer speeds (which is helpful when each shutter click is a 30MB file and HD video is putting down 5MB a second) but you also get RescuePro – recovery software in case a card dies. My Sandisk cards haven’t, but on previous trips I was able to salvage other cards.

Speaking of paranoia…

I’m totally paranoid about my photos. At the end of the day when I sit down for my beer, I backup my photos to my trusty Sanho Hyperdrive Space.

Why? Well, I can handle my camera gear being stolen because it’s insured. Shit like that happens. What I will cry like a tubby bitch about is if my photos are lost forever. At least with this, I can have a backup of my photos.

With memory cards, you get what you pay for. You’re also better off buying a larger amount of smaller cards (4 4GB’s vs 1 16GB card.) Why? Shit happens and cards fail. Think about it – if you went on a trip and just brought one memory card and it goes titsup, you’re screwed. It’s the reason why wedding photographers shoot with smaller memory cards and swap them out frequently.

If the Hyperdrive is out of your budget, then I’d suggest a 16gb USB flash drive or bigger to back up photos to just in case. If you’re staying at a place that has fast internet, then you can use Microsoft Skydrive for free to back up photos – they give you 25GB of space! A flash drive is always helpful – swapping movies, tv shows and other things with fellow travelers that would get the MPAA/RIAA pissed off at you.

Nokia 5800 phone. Um, Nick – a Nokia? WTF? Hear me out. Recently Nokia offered Ovi Maps free with lifetime updates on certain models of their phones. The maps offer free walk and drive navigation, free Lonely Planet, Events and Michelin guides. What’s not to like?

Oh, and the phone plays mp3s and does other apps from the Ovi store, including Email, Facebook, and other social networking apps. And it’s a phone, so you can find your SIM card of choice while abroad and talk away. As I said – geekery is sometimes best displayed when you have one device that does everything.

Why carry an expensive UV steripen when a simple filtered straw will do? It’ll filter up to 20 gallons of water, and is inexpensive enough to carry in a daypack for emergency situations. The Aquamira filter is around $10, which is a lot less expensive than the UV pens. The SteriPen Adventurer will give you 26 gallons of filtered water per a set of batteries. And it can break. And it’s $80. Why not get the $10 filtration straw?

Pacsafe neck pouches are a good idea to keep your passport and emergency money hidden on yourself. However if you wear it around your neck you are a dork. I wear this around my waist (and for those who have seen pictures of me YES IT DOES FIT AROUND MY WAIST) and under my pants on my thigh. Combine this with the Eagle Creek All Terrain Money Belt and you’re all set to keep money and your passport safe and hidden from pickpockets.

Camelbak Alpine Explorer. I know. I’m one of those assholes while abroad who loves his hydration pack. Sure, I get made fun of, but when it’s hot and humid out and everyone’s dehydrated, I’m sucking down water and everyone else is getting sick. I have an Octane 14+ pack right now, and that holds my travel guides, my cameras and whatever else I need for the day. I just ordered an Alpine Explorer for myself from REI. Awesome.

Fenix LD20 Flashlight. Yes, a flashlight that’s over $50. Why do I love this? Well, it runs on AA batteries and is bright as hell. Seriously. 180 lumens is brighter than the LAPD’s tactical flashlight that, in case of an emergency, you can shine it in someone’s eyes and odds are they’ll say “AAAAHHHH!!! MY EYES!” and start to cry. The flashlight itself adjustable to multiple settings, from bright to supernova bright, and is handy to use in hostels to pack in the middle of the night, flag down cars, or when I was in Mongolia – I used my Fenix to see where the hell I was going in downtown Ulanbataar and to signal to cars that I’m crossing the street (the downside of no streetlights.) It was also handy to use when using the toilet in the dark outside a ger at Terejl National Park. I used my Fenix in Cairo inside of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. And the thing is built to take punishment. Mine’s been dropped and beaten and still works like a charm.

I pick gadgets that work, and aren’t fancy. They may be a bit expensive but they’ll last. And if you’re going to go around the globe, a little investment in gear goes a long way.

I blew off the group because they were doing an early morning guided tour and me, being lazy, decided to walk from the hostel to the Colosseum and do the trio of Palatine Hill, the Roman Forum and the Colosseum. Sadly, I missed what I was told was an 8 hour tour led by Anthony Majanlahti, the author of The Families Who Made Rome, a Canadian who lives in Rome and knows more about Rome in his fingertip than I ever will. Oops. I’ll get back to that later.

Naturally when you go to Rome for the first time, you HAVE to visit the Colosseum. When you return, you start to realize that at one time, it was not just a stadium but part of a massive complex. The Colosseum itself took around 10 years to build, back when Emperor Vespasian took over after Nero killed himself. Let’s compare and contrast the building of that versus the Cowboys Stadium which took a mere 3 years and you realize that the Colosseum was, and still is, an amazing feat of engineering.

I started out in Palatine Hill, still part of the complex but overlooked the Circus Maximus along with the Colosseum. It was weird to hike around the complex simply because this was the birthplace of legend of the name of Rome – the cave where Romulus and Remus were found, so I tried to wrap my head around a place that had a degree of mysticism behind it, and try to imagine what it’s like to actually have been here around 100 AD. Like a good tourist, I tried to take photos of everything.

After a tour around the Colosseum again (mental note: just because you’ve been there before doesn’t mean you know where you’re going) and a few attempts at panoramic photos, I headed back to the hostel, stowed some of my gear, and went to meet up with the gang for dinner. Mr. Majanlahti came with us, and it was interesting to listen to him because he was a rare intellectual – he seemed very excited and passionate about telling us what he knew but without the typical tone of an intellectual who tends to speak down to you. In a way, it was like listening to someone who had all this bottled up information and was ready to explode. Anthony was also a committed atheist, so it was interesting to listen to him talk about the Pope, the Church and everything else. It was pretty awesome.

During the walk back from dinner, Anthony told us about his favorite god – the Goddess of Good Fortune Today. Basically, if you needed something RIGHT NOW and all the other gods had failed you, this was your last ditch attempt. I liked it – I mean, why pray to someone about things that may or may not happen in the future when you can get stuff done immediately. I was curious how that worked – if you had to make a sacrifice, did you stab someone right there? Did you bring a friend? Either way, I liked it.

Another interesting day in Rome, and realizing how little I know about the world and how much I want to change that.

When you have major depression, you tend to look at things differently. For example, the absence of a negative is what is the highpoint of life is for me. For example, if I don’t think about the 65 bus hopping a curb and hitting me on the way into work, then it’s a good day. I don’t know what it is: a combination of lack of sun, inclement weather or just biology conspiring against me, it’s progressively more difficult to get out of bed in the morning. It’s my silent stalker.

It’s now six weeks until the mystery destination. This comes the fun part: the immediacy of the destination. I finally got a book on it, and now it’s a waiting game to see if upgrades are going to clear (when going across an ocean, more room is better, natch), figuring out what to do and assembling packing and postcard lists.

I’ve been thinking about the movie “Into The Wild” – I personally have felt that need to run into the wilderness as a test myself, but it’s hard to feel sympathetic towards a character when they’re a narcissist who came from a very comfortable lifestyle who went out unprepared and got himself killed as a result. Some people’s lives are meant to serve as a warning to others, I guess.

I’ve been behind on a lot of things: My Italy blogging from late January, writing in my Moleskine journal and just a thousand other things that I should take care of, but haven’t. I’ll get to it soon. I promise. When it’s difficult to move, you have to set goals in order to feel like you’re making progress.

When plans for Rome were starting to be put together, some enterprising soul decided that hey, we could go do a visit for the excavations underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, I thought – how badass – I bet that they don’t allow photography. Well, I was right – so sadly, you’ll have to rely on my awesome writing skills.

I got to the Vatican early and decided to bypass the guided tours and instead, just went straight for the Basilica. I mean, since I knew I’d be crippled without my camera, I figured it was time to go back into the Basilica and shoot like hell. It’s a big difference between a full frame SLR at 3200 ISO instead of the point and shoot I had before. I ran around until the meeting time, and got to meet about a dozen new people who were all in for the birthday. Sweet.

Before we went in, I stowed my bag and we met up with our tour guide – an American seminary student who was on his iPhone while we waited. It was interesting to go “behind the scenes” – behind the gates that were blocked by the Swiss Guards. I felt super awesome, despite that it’s easy to get the tickets provided you planned ahead.

The history of the excavation was pretty cool: Underneath the Basilica lies mausoleums dating from 100-300 AD and the tomb of St. Peter. To call it a complex is an understatement – it was quite the elaborate cemetery with everyone trying to one up each other and have the best mausoleum. Makes sense in a way – if you want to show how awesome you are. Around 326 AD, Emperor Constantine ordered the construction of the old St. Peter’s Basilica over the mausoleum. And in the 1600s, the new St. Peter’s Basilica was built over the top of the old one. So finding the old mausoleums and the details that still remained was pretty slick. I did like learning about the libation holes, whereby on certain days of mourning that you were offered food and drink, so presumably they’d pour them down the holes and your soul would consume them and be refreshed.

The excavations got really underway during World War II, with most of it done in secret so it wouldn’t attract the attention of the Third Reich because holy relics (much like in Indiana Jones) would have been lusted after by the Nazis. So finding St. Peter’s remains would have been a tempting thing to get. However, it was 20 or so years between the finding of the tomb and then confirmation that they found the remains of St. Peter. I can understand that they took their time, simply because you don’t want to go announce major religious things all willy-nilly and then go “my bad.” We were taken by a room that if you squinted you could see the remains in nice orderly boxes along with the mouse that somehow found its way into St. Peter’s remains.

Eventually we were led into the Clementine Chapel, which was pretty amazing. Again, no photos, but seriously slick-looking walls and stuccos. It was back before anyone really cared about money and budget overruns. Amazing ornateness. I just wish I could have taken photos.

There’s also the Graffiti Wall, where faithful went to the tomb of St. Peter and wrote on the wall. There was a degree of concern that it was actually St. Peter’s tomb, but there was a lot of evidence making the case for it. A lot of circumstantial evidence, but hey, I’m sold on it.

Oh, there’s an amazing Flash-based interactive tour of the Necropolis.

The tour let out in the Vatican’s crypt where all of the Popes are buried. It was interesting to see the number of Popes and the varying degrees of ornateness of their tombs. Pope John Paul II’s tomb was pretty plain, but drew a big crowd of people. Again, no photos allowed. I guess that part makes sense.

After that, I followed everyone around the Basilica (sans camera), which was a nice experience so I could actually absorb the atmosphere instead of worry about taking photos. Robert Hicks regaled us with a story about climbing the stairs to the dome and a small group of us said, sure, why the heck not? Every good trip to Europe involves an insane amount of stair climbing so it would be a good way to see the place. To get to the top, you could either take the elevator or “Pole, Pole” and hike up the stairs. Fuck it, we went up the stairs.

The thing that ol’ Robert told us about was the dome and how when you get to the top of the dome that the stairs lean into the curve of the dome and the last few steps require you to go up a tight spiral staircase using a rope to pull yourself up. One of the guys in the group was claustrophobic, so he was out. The first set of stairs was an easy hike, but the legs and knee felt a bit of burning. Awesome. Once we got to the top, we took a quick breather and decided that the 3 euro Cokes looked awfully tasty, but it was time to press on. The stairs that leaned posed a good challenge. At the point where your body was starting to feel a bit light because of the good ol’ Kreb’s Cycle, the stairs started to lean to adhere to the curve of the dome. It was a little disconcerting. The view from the top was equally fun but since it was raining and I was without a camera (damn you Vatican!), I decided to head back down. On a nice sunny day, the view would have been amazing.

Some of the group that went up the stairs took the elevator down, and I didn’t see them go by so I couldn’t have sworn that them. We went back to walking around the Vatican, and even though it was my second visit, I still felt like I was in a weird magical place that was a movie set.

FYI – the Vatican doesn’t offer any sort of passport stamp, so you can’t put anything in your passport to mark that you were there. I thought I was rather ingenious – I bought a postage stamp and put it in the passport next to my San Marino stamp. Hey, why not?

St. Peter’s Basilica was shutting down, and it was time to go back to the apartment, restage and drink beer until we could figure out dinner plans. It was a good way to spend the day and it was just fun to hang out and swap stories.

Bad News: Fiji has been shelved.
Good News For The Bad News: No mile redeposit fee. $150 saved. Now I’m back at 870,000 AA miles available.

The cool part is literally I could decide something like “hey random cute girl, let’s go to Paris this weekend” and actually do it. This is not like last year’s trip to Hawaii in which I upgraded the cute girl and didn’t get any hot sex and got dumped less than 3 weeks later after I was her nurse after surgery for a nasty wrist fracture – on FUCKING VALENTINE’S DAY. Oh, and did I forget to mention that she was anorexic so going to her eating disorder support group was a tiny bit awkward for a fat guy like me? Man that was awesome.

Good News: I’m gone somewhere in April for a week that requires me to get a visa. First correct guess gets not only a postcard but I think, an actual souvenir!

Honest, I was going to write about my day at the Vatican before I went to bed, including describing how I accidentally flung a big wad of snot over a woman’s pants at about 30 feet (on accident!!!) but I decided to go to bed early around 9:30pm, and woke up at midnight after I apparently threw a pillow across the room. Yeah, I know.

This is not a surprise to anyone who reads my blog. In fact, I regularly describe how sleep is my enemy. I honestly think that most of my problems can be solved with good sleep. I’ve been finding myself waking up as of late by dreaming of violent events and then waking up because I kicked or threw a punch. Yes, it’s pretty messed up. I guess that it makes me reluctant to date because of sleeping together because I might injure someone in bed on accident. I honestly think my next marriage will involve 1950’s sitcom style beds, because Ricky Ricardo and Lucy never slept in the same bed. If it worked for them, it’ll work for me.

I know it’s rather cliched, but when you can’t have normal dreams of exploration and trying to find someone to grow old with or even thoughts of people from the past, you have to live them out. You have to take more chances than you would and see things firsthand instead of just holding onto that dream that makes you feel safe.

The tragedy in all of this is that in dreams, I could imagine what it would be like to get a normal night’s sleep.

When it comes to sending out postcards I’m the king. That much is certain. And I don’t mind spending a lot of money to send them out. But at the same time, I’m reaching a bit of burnout from them. I’d like to pair the list down but am not sure the best way to put this because basically, it’ll be pissing off people and I’m already overly paranoid that I am not liked anyway. The postcard list is around 110 names and addresses. Crazy, I know.

So, here are some thoughts, and I’d like your comments…
1) Want on the postcard list? Cough up some cash. I feel bad about taking people’s money, and I’d rather it get sent to charity. $10 a year to charity for postcards? However, a beer for a postcard is potentially doable.
2) Keep the list at 30 postcards but have 5 open spots. That way I could make people grovel and ask women to send me photos of their boobs in order to get postcards. Sleazy, but hey…
3) Start a rotating list of postcards and alternate them between every other trip. This way, everyone gets them a few months apart.
4) Just keep sending postcards, but raffle off an award for the biggest shrine to me. C’mon… you know you want to.
5) Keep going and realizing that I’ll piss off someone by them not getting postcards. It happens every trip. I’ll get a whiny IM/email/text of why I somehow slighted them by not sending them a postcard, but the words “thanks for all the other ones!” never escapes their lips. Fuckers.

Suggestions?

I had come back to Rome to meet people I met once before. Two years ago in Istanbul, I unknowingly crashed the birthday party of NY Times best seller Robert Hicks, who is not just a writer, but a resource for great stories and entertainment. As famous people are suckers for punishment, they invited me back again. Or so I think. I think I just invited myself and they forgot to tell me. Or something.

Back in Rimini, I had slept poorly as usual, and packed up my gear in order to make my 6:30ish train back to Rome. Since the plans were everyone was rolling in during the afternoon, I had time to go be a tourist since I pretty much assumed that together time didn’t mean tourism time. The plan for me was to go check out the National Museum of Rome and then meet up with the gang and see where it takes us.

The train itself was pretty fun. There was something cool about whipping past the Adriatic as the sun came up and the overcast skies made for a cool contrast. It made the scenery that much more pleasant because I was beat going to Rimini. It was also nice to relax my feet and knees for a few hours, since the terrain, new shoes and weather through off my gait, and my roboknee didn’t love me. I managed to somehow offend a businessman, who was sitting across from me and gave up and moved elsewhere. His loss. I would have totally offended him even more if he sat down across from me.

Back again at Termini Station, I dropped my bag off at the hostel, threw a doner down my piehole and went to the National Museum of Rome a bit north of Termini Station. During my walk there, I got to see a homeless man, pantsless, bent over at a 90 degree angle taking a piss best resembling a horse’s piss and then a massive dump. Welcome to Rome.

The National Museum of Rome itself is split up across multiple campuses and I hit the closest one. I admire the hell out of Roman statues and wish I could go back and watch the artisans at work. Seriously – I can’t draw a stick figure and would probably injure myself with the carving tools, so I admire the effort and beauty of things. After the museum, I ate some lackluster pasta, went by the hotel I stayed at 5 years ago and had fun at because it was hilarious, and then decide to hump it towards the Trevi Fountain. Since everyone was staying near the Pantheon, I figured it would be best if I walked that away and planned on catching up with them.

Since it’s tradition that you throw a coin over your shoulder into the fountain to get a return to Rome, I threw another coin in for good luck, since the first one worked well. I took some photos with a far superior camera than last time (how on earth did I ever survive in the land of point and shoot cameras?) and poked my head into the St. Mary Above Minerva Basilica before I went back into the Pantheon. I didn’t realize that the church was built over a temple dedicated to Isis. But the real treat was going back to the Pantheon. It’s a damn sexy building that would be a modern architectural marvel if it were created today, not nearly 1900 years ago. The best part was getting to read the inscription on the tomb of Raphael. “Here lies Raphael, who Nature feared to be outdone while he lived, and when he died, feared that she herself would die.” That’s a ballsy thing to put on your tomb, and I figured that my tomb needs to top it.

I got to meet up with Robert Hicks and cohort Justin Stelter and his wife along with Dave, which was nice because after all the emails through the years in keeping in touch, it was like we didn’t miss a beat. We ended up going back to the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain and eventually decided to walk to the Colosseum after dark, making me wish I had a monopod along with me to better steady shots and not rely on high ISO and noise that creeps in as a result of my photos. I had never been to the Colosseum at dark, and I gained even more respect for it. You’d figure that after seeing it before and the dozens of National Geographic specials on TV over the years, it would somehow lessen the impact but I was still amazed. It’s not beautiful – it’s fucking beautiful.

Eventually we hit the wall, and cabbed it back to their apartment (mental note: Monte Isom is the man when it comes to finding apartments) and commenced with drinking beer until I decided to head back to the hotel round midnight.

I rolled back into the hostel around 12:30am, half expecting that I’d be the only person in the dorm room that was there at that hour, but I was THAT GUY who came in and made noise and jumped into bed. Classy, that I am. First day in Rome with my old friends and meeting new ones. Tomorrow was the Scavi tour of the Vatican, and I was excited to meet up with everyone. It just goes to show that life is truly amazing and beautiful when you can meet amazing people and still be in contact with them.

Part of why I decided to take my impulsive trip up to Rimini is that I could go to San Marino, the 5th smallest country in the world. Why? Why not I ask.

San Marino is interesting from a historical standpoint. The country’s been around since 304 – 1700 years old – and is the world’s oldest Republic and sovereign state. For a country to be around for that long and to be engulfed by wars and time and remain unscathed and independent is amazing.

I got up ass early from the hotel to catch the bus to Rimini station and then chilled until the bus to San Marino came. The bus seemed like it was a commuter bus, picking people up from all over Rimini to head into San Marino. The weather decided to take a slight turn for the worse and started snowing – nice big fluffy snow. As a long time Midwesterner, you know that when it’s the big fluffy stuff, things generally don’t end well.

On the road up I kept looking for a “Welcome to San Marino” sign or something equivalent. Sadly I didn’t find anything, but I did notice a string of air rifle shops en route to downtown San Marino. One or two didn’t bother me, but the sheer number made me a bit confused. Hey – who am I to comment?

The snow kept coming, and I figured, hey, San Marino is picturesque enough for me to just parade around like a silly Yank. The final stop for the bus was Porta San Francesco, which looked like an old medieval gate into the city.

The first stop was the Natural Museum. For the oldest country in the world, this was the first step in understanding this place. Perhaps there were lessons here in survival and how politics didn’t devolve into violence. You would have expected that after some time, that something bloody would have happened internally but nope – everything seemed cool. The museum itself featured a lot of amazing paintings and early middle age artifacts, but didn’t help me understand how or why.

One of the more interesting things I had read en route to San Marino is that there’s no single person in charge of the country. In fact, there are two co-leaders referred to as the Captains Regent, one from each major political party who are elected to terms of six months. I kind of like that – it seems very fair for a country that has around 32,000 people, and people have to work together to ensure that things get done versus one party in power, or people who hold political positions for so long that they’re an impediment rather than an asset. Even when you don’t compare it to the orgy of insanity known as Illinois politics, their way seems downright cordial.

Since I came in the middle of freakin’ winter, most things were closed. For example, the three major forts: the things you think of when you see San Marino (or for most of us, when you Google it.) Also, the cool cable car to the valley below was closed. All of this told me that I need to make it a point to come back in summer to check this place out. The tourism website made it sound like there was amazing hiking to be had. I had wandered past the Piazza Della Liberta, got my passport stamp for 5 euro, and then walked into the very impressive Basilica Del Santo, which from the outside seemed like your normal European church but internally, seemed like it dwarfed St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. I mean, huge.

I grabbed a snack of pizza and a beer and decided to check out the towers firsthand not knowing that they were closed. Oops again. The paths towards the top were not shoveled, so I gingerly step, slid and managed to avoid falling to the first tower, La Rocca o Guaita. The fortress itself was around since the 11th century and has been renovated a number of times, so I was hoping to get inside so I can duck out of the cold but was foiled by it being closed. No matter – I pressed on and slipped and fell on my ass more than a few times (at all times, protecting my beloved camera) and. The next fort, Cesta o Fratta, was also closed. Again, I slip and slid to the third fort, Montale: closed. At this point I was pretty disheartened, and went to grab some lunch before I figured out what else I should do. I wrote out the handful of San Marino postcards I had sent out, and then decided to be brave and locate where the bus back to Rimini was and figure that out.

I decided to take the 3:30pm bus back to Rimini, so I went through the Torture Museum (yeah, I was confused too) and waited for the bus. The bus didn’t show up for some reason, so I went with an old lady who wisely grabbed a third person to translate for us to go to another parking lot so we could catch another bus that left for Rimini at 5pm. There were a bunch of us, so I went to a cafe and had some coffee and a snack, and then went back to take the bus back to Rimini.

Would I go back to San Marino? Of course. It was cool. I still have to read on how a small place like this can escape 1700 years of European chaos and thrive. But whatever you do, don’t call them Italians or they will kick your ass.

Pictures are up at Fotki, as usual.