Main Page

Venice is beautiful, and incredibly hot. There aren't any cars in the streets (they all have to park out of town) and everyone gets around by boat. The busses are quit fun. Everyone gets on this big boat, and then it crashes into things until it gets where it is going.

One of the main reasons that I wanted to go to Venice was so that we could go to the la Biennale di Venezia, which occurs every other year for 6 months. It is a huge contemporary art show, and 63 countries set up pavilions to showcase one or more of their artists. Today we wandered through about 20 pavalions. Good ones included iceland, who had a giant speaker cone set up, Poland, who had an intricattaly painted floor that changed colors depending on wherre you were standing in the room, and Spain which had probably several thousand light bulb like things hanging from the ceiling. They were tuned so that when the motor shaking it shook it, it would make different sounds. The US one was very.. non political. and .. well.. kinda dull.

The food is, of course, wonderful.
--christi

Oops, I chased Christi away by disagreeing with her verbally over some of the art. I'm sorry. The UK was cool cuz they had this tape running backwards of a guy talking in front of an escalator, but he had learned to talk backwards so the words mostly made sence. The also had a nifty mirrored police box called Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. (If you understand why that's cool, then you are a nerd.). Christi also like the Hungary exhibit. It was all about obsessions, but the art was really repetivive and obsessice too, so it was form and subject. It had wacky music tracks with it. The best and most diverse offerings tho, were mostly in the Italian Pavillion. They had many many artists, some of which might have been American, which is nice that somebody is supporting interesting American artists. They had a series of paitnings where the artist just came up with insane ideas about anything and everything, including topics such as biology, physiscs and chaos theory and then drew a canvas about them, on average one a week. It's a good idea for a series.

Christi and I are nitpicking each other to death, but aside from that, thigns are getting along swimmingly. (Not too swimingly, the water in the canals does not look friendly.

Yesturday was the feast day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist. But where is his head now? hrm.
--Celeste

Sept 1st - Rome
Hotel Aphrodite

Yay! We're in Rome! And we've already had a lot of wine! Well, not that much. We have a nice hotel room, it seems. We just got here actually. We saw most of the Biennale in Venice but we did not enter a museum or a church or ride in a gondola and thats ok with us. Its a very pretty city. We took the bus up and down the canal a lot to look at it. It's a boat, but it's just like a regular bus. Its late, crowded and it runs into things all the time. The city is definitely sinking, that's not a lie. The big square all the tourists go to has water bubble up into it at high tide and the waves wash from the sea up onto the side walk for several feet in. A bunch of front porches now require hip waders. Ok, it's only a few centimeters deep, but the water is kind of groos and you wouldn't want to go wading. It's sad actually, but some sidewalks have had material added to them. Canals can be closed off and worked on and a bunch of them were, so hopefully they're shoring things up. Not everything is sinking at the same rate. People who put in ostentatios front stairs now have happy descendants cuz they're all above water still. Anyway, Peggy Gugenheim spent the last several years of her life inVenice and she was very smart to do that. It would be a great place to live if you were fabulously wealthy, you could have your own boat driver and do the necessary work to keep your living room carpet dry and maintain the marble facade on your house. Otherwise, no way man. Anyway, even if you don't have Peggy Gugenheim's level of funds at your disposal, it's a cool place to visit. (Although I dunno really, i just ate a lot and looked at modern art) You should go NOW before it sinks into the ocean like some sort of modern Atlantis. Get on a plane tomorrow. Your job is boring and they won't miss you. Just say, "I've been ordered to Venice" and dash out the door. They'll understand. and the chuch on San Marco had the actual real remains of Saint Mark the apostle in it. For real. Right there in the church. Not that we saw it or anything, but we got within 200 meters, I think.

Today is a very exciting day for us because not only did we spend 5 hours on train getting to Rome, today is the day our ATM card expires! Yay! We get to spend a lot more time in line waiting to get cash advances against our credit card.
--celeste

i so wish that i'd thought to look at that before we left. there's nothing like the sinking feeling you get when you are in Venice (which is sinking) and you realize that you have no way of getting money out of the wall.
--christi

September 2
Question: Is it true what they say about Roman men making inappropriate comments to single women? Answer: Christi says yes. Fortunately, I have since been protecting her honor.

Question: Statues are often missing heads, arms and other apendages. The heads and arms are often on display next to the statues, but some other pieces are not. Is there a secret museum that holds them all someplace, maybe a sort of members only kind of deal? Answer: please never answer this question.
--celeste

I went out to do the laundry this morning, by myself, and the laundrymat was supposed to open at 8. at 8:05 some guy with keys showed up, started to open the door, and then looked at me, my laundry, and said "i'll be back in a minute." 35 minutes later I gave up waiting. (hey, i had a book). about 15 guys walked by and made ohsoinnappropriate remarks. inclduing the fruit stand vendor acros the street, who would send everyone by to talk to me, and had some wistle or something. i tried to trip one of them. anyway, I gave up, and now we are at an internet cafe/laundrymat.

we and 8745433476 people saw the colloseum today. very nice. very big, very old. exactly like you'd imagine that it looked based on pictures. tomorrow we are going to see Vatican City.
--christi

September 3rd
we saw a pretty nifty church today, saint sylvesters. it has the head of st john the baptist in it, sort of in a side chapel that people don't pay much attention to. there's a copy of a micheal angelo statue that people come thru and light a candle in front of, but everybody ignores the head. all the pews are pointed away from it, even tho it's on an altar. hello people. you can see michealangelo knockoffs anywhere! this is the head of st john the baptist! but it's only part of the head (including most of the brain) so maybe that's why they don't pay it much mind. also it looks like a sort of a gray rock that you really wouldn't want to touch. looking at a statue copy is a lot more asthetic. christi took a flash photo of the head. We considered stealing it (thus facilitating a fourth finding), but there were too many people around.

Yes, we saw the head. Part of the head. Where is the rest of it? Good question. Apparently there's a piece in Venice (dern it!). Some of a competing head is scattered around France. There are at least two heads that are suppossed to be JtB's and now a third one in Turkey that might be the real deal. You may be wondering how we found the head. Was it a sign from God? Actually, we asked the tourist information at the train staion. They looked at us funny and told us to call the vatican. So we did a net search and came back with the name of the church. There are two St. Sylvesters in Rome, so we went for the one with it's own square named after it, becuase it was closest.

We also went to Vatican City today. I asked at the pilgrimage deak where I could find a list of all the JtB relics on display. The guy told us to go to the post office. (I think it was a language barrier.) But somebody else gave us the phone number for the office of relics, so we're calling them tomorrow.
We saw all the usual stuff in Vatican City. Silly looking Swiss Gaurds, small chapels, etc. The small chapels are not very small. We also saw the less-visited museum of contemporary religious art. There is a reason it's less visited. Somebody should set it on fire. I know there is good modern-type devoltional art. Why don't they just have it be a wing of Dali and Brother Joe Aspell?
We went to the Vatican Treasury. I've heard a lot of people say that instead of having that treasury, they should use the value in it to feed the poor. (Strangely, these people have not personally sold off all their valuable posesitions.) They charge enough to see it that I think the poor are being fed. Besides, how can you just sell of St. Paul's index finger? Who would buy it? We saw a lot of relics today. At least two heads, a bunch of bone fragments, somebody's leg. We also saw, in the treasury, a relic of the Madonna. Assuming they don't mean the pop signer, this presents a serious problem. Mary, Jesus' Mother (the BVM) was suppossed to have been just sucked into heaven directly, via the assumption. So where did the relic come from? They had it covered with felt, so I didn't actually see the relic, so it could have been anything. Lost tooth, maybe she had something amputated during her life, I dunno. It sort of seems fishy, doesn't it?

Definition of relic: a piece of a dead saint. They take bits of them and display them in churches or sometimes offer them for sale. Remember that Xtianity is a death cult.

Oh yeah, and we also saw the head of St. John the Baptist today.
--Celeste

Celeste says that i should add something here, but she has pretty much already said everything. I don't know what I'm supposed to say. We say a fountain. It uh. well, I forget what it looked like. but i got a picture. it was ostentaious. we went to the vatican musuem. It was a lot like hearst castle- full of stuff, jammed to the corners. also, you aren't allowed to have uncovered knees or shoulders, and it's like 9263482735 degrees here, so people spend most of their time trying to trick the guards. having a good time, bet you wish you were here.

We also saw the pantheon. It looks like a large round old building. of course, it is now a catholic church. it has a very large hole in the ceiling, but it's on purpose. lots of statues.
--christi

August 5 - Naples (Napoli)
Imperia Pension
Tel: 081 059 347

We just got here, so there's not much to say yet. The mopeders are insane, but not as insane as Russian drivers. Our train was massively delayed for about 4 times the normal trip length because it had to be re routed because an earlier train hit and killed somebody, but we don't know if the person was on a moped. This wasnėt all bad. We thought we had missed our 8:30 train, so we went for breakfast, but it was still there when we showed up at 9:15. We were happy not to have to get new tickets. Anyway, we saw 4 thousand dead monk's bones yesturday, and two catacombs. Today we just saw the inside of an aqueduct. The tour was only in English, but the other two people going only spoke German, so I was very badly translating what the guide said. He would say, "we are now under saint somebody's church where every spring the miricle of saint somebody can be observed, but in the war civil engineers used this as a bomb shelter, and the greeks and the romans did other diffferent things with this etc." And I would tell the Germans, "There's a church up there." Only the german words for "church" and "cherry" sound very alike to me and I always get them confused. Luckily, I knew the words for water-well because of Brunnenfest in Frankfurt. Right now we're ina secret internet cafe, the regular one was too full so they took all the foreingers to a bar with computers. The staff did a quick clean up. It's a secret gay club! The Italian gay clubs are very cloak and dagger. Look for the buzzer marked "private" and buzz three times, etc.

Yesturday I called the nuns of the Reliquary Office. To get a list of the locations of St John the Baptist relics, I need a letter of reccomendation from my bishop. not being confirmed has come back to haunt me... but it took a lot more time to get me than not paying attention in statistics class (when am i going to need this?) did... So we'll just wait for inspiration from god. That's apparently how the monks found the head lurking in France in the first place. Seems like an unlikely location, doesn't it. There's a miracle performed here in Naples every week. The blood of one of the saints is held up in front of the congregation and turns to liquid. The really strange thing is that a whole bunch of local saints do this same miracle. Like all of them. This is the only place in the world where you can regularly see old saint blood liquify. Too bad the weekly miracle was yesturday. Anyway, we'll report back on Pompeii (and Pompei, the current city where the city council was just all arrested on mafia charges) later. We're thinking of not going to Nice, but going to another town in the South of France. If you have suggestions, or know of someplace there where the head can be seen in a church or Vinnie's Car Wash or whatever, send us email.

Our loyal readers should know that you can get cash advances on credit cards AND we have a whole mess of Travellers Checks just in case, so there is no cause for alarm that our ATM card isn't working. It's inconvient, not disasterous. Calm down Mom, we're ok. Besides, we've said a prayer to St. Sebastian, whose grave we visitted. He mostly deals with the plague, but since that's been under control for a while I thought he might be able to help with any possible plastic problems.
--Celeste

September 10
We're not in Italy anymore, but we saw some cool things there that bear mention. For instance, we saw a little town called Pompei. It's not much inhabitted since a volcano wiped it out 2000 years ago and covered it with ash. But you can still see frescoes on the walls and mosaics and a few buildings still have stucco ceilings in tact and furniture in the house. It's amazing. You could spend all day there for sure, but make sure you bring food and water cuz it's expesive there and the food is not good. There was a winery outside of town that was especially well preserved. The frescoes were bright and covered three or four walls of a few rooms still, floor to ceiling and the tiles pattern was still on the floor. The wine press was intact. It was amazing. The Necropolis (city of the dead, pagan final resting places have different names than Christian ones (christi would like me to point out that there are many religions in the world that have names for where dead people go but most stuff in Italy is dived into grecco-roman pagan and then Christian as far as archelogical tour leaders are concerned) still has statues in it. With heads on them. And facial expressions. Also, the rumored ash people, volcano victims frozen in stone and ash rained down upon them, they exist. You can see their horrified facial expressions, smoothed over time and erosion. They look like modern art sculptures but they're real people. It's very creepy.

Earlier I asked about the possibility of a secret museum. In the Naples archeology museum, it's just a secret room. Free english language tours daily. Some of the mosiacs we saw in Pompie, in one place along a hallyway with a lot of small rooms, in another in a room adjoining a kitchen were NC-17 rated. It turns out that the hallway we saw belonged to a brothel. And the kitchen-adjoined room was servants quarters and the servant there was expected to more than make dinner. The museum room had additonal examples of these sorts of frescoes and a whole bunch of fertility symbols. They were also protections symbols. Ancient Pompeii had one of these things sticking off of every building doorway, like a welcome matt that was really happy to see you. These are now in this museum and not still on the buildings, probably because of school groups going through.
The museum also had a tremendous selection of statues. They just stuck them all in their limmitted space and they're 25 feet tall. You feel short walking among them. And they have more mosiacs and frescoes and statuary they carted back from Pompeii. It's a great museum even without the secret room (or maybe especially without it).

We heard a great many firetrucks in Napoli. They all moves slowly throught the town, mostly because the streets are narrow and the moped seem to have the right of way always no matter what. Finally, our last day, we walked past an apartment fire. All previously we had been walking past piles of burned belongings next to damaged buildings. I think there must be an apartment gutted by fire at least once a day. And, you know, the volcano still poses a threat. One day all Napels will be ash.
I bought an Italian suit. It's gray. Apparently I should have gotten a black one, but it's still pretty cool and you know, in Italy, Italian suits are a dime a dozen. Money saving tip: buy Italian suits in Italy! If you buy more than maybe two of them, it will cover the air fare for sure.

We went to Nice anyway. (That link will break when we get to Spain and I'm not going to remeber to fix it...)
--Celeste