Seamail No. 18 - greece, roma, geneve, nantes, london

Seamail 18

May 28, 2003

Greetings friends and family!

We left you last in Zakynthos, Greece, where we were getting quite bored and my project had come to an unpleasant halt. Things have been much better since then, and we are once again on the road.

In project news, I was finally able to speak with someone from the National Marine Park of Zakynthos, home of the largest nesting population of sea turtles in the Mediterranean. The park was finally created in 1999 after years of unenforced regulations and eventually a lawsuit brought against Greece in the European Court for their negligence. I had tried to contact the park via email and phone with no success when suddenly an email ended up in my inbox saying I was scheduled for an appointment with the executive coordinator three days later. It was a good interview and opened my eyes to some of the more positive things about the park. At first glance on the beaches of Zakynthos, it is hard to understand why anyone, turtles or people, would want to use them for anything. During the non-nesting season the locals use them as main roads and they seem to be severely polluted, but I believe now that things are actually much better today than they were five years ago. Hopefully in five more years things will be significantly better than today - fewer lights, fewer discos right on the beach, more information available to tourists, more turtle-based income (meaning profits from tours, souvenirs, etc.) going to the park instead of tour operators, and year-round staffing of the park offices. These are goals that the park has, and with the proper funding, can accomplish. In some lights it looks as if their work is coming to Laganas Bay ‘too little, too late’ but I now think that they have a fighting chance. I also had just short contact with at least five tour operators in Laganas, just asking them basic questions about their turtle tours (which they offer at an extortionate twenty euro per person). It was sad how little they actually knew about the turtles and the park and how to get more information. Part of the conservation and education burden must fall on the shoulders of the tour operators, but they need to be better educated to do this properly.

So, after eating our last gyros and getting our last laugh out of strange Greek words and commercials, we left our cozy apartment for a short stay in the town of Olympia. It turned out to be a bit of an adventure to get there...we asked around about busses and such, and were told that there were buses that met the ferries arriving from Zakynthos. No such luck. We arrive in the tiny town of Kyllini at around to learn that no one really seems to know when a bus will arrive, but that 4:30 pm is a good guess. At the time it was 11 am. A few hours later our salvation came in the form of a German speaking Greek guy who had a friend that we could get a ride with to a nearby town with more frequent buses. We made it there after a pretty quiet 15 min ride...The Greek-English language barrier is a pretty big one. We can say: where? yes, no, please, thank you, hello, goodbye...and that’s about it. Not exactly conversation material.

In that town, we caught a bus that took us to ANOTHER town, where we could finally get a bus to our intended destination: Olympia! Site of the first Olympics in 776 B.C. Olympia was a nice, and touristy small town, we spent a very quiet two nights there. the archeological site itself was nice, but after seeing things like the mayan ruins in mexico, and the acropolis, it wasn't really too exciting. one cool part was the large, temple of olympian zeus, of which only the foundation remains. but the huge pillars that held up the roof fell into perfectly neat rows so that they lay, in matching sections, perpendicular to the sides of the temple. another cool thing was the stadium, which was just an oblong bowl cut out of a hill with a straight track in the center. the cool part was the marble blocks marking the starting and finishing lines, which were scored for extra traction.

we left olympia at 9am for our longest travel period of the entire year. we spent over 36 hours in route from olympia to Rome. sounds ridiculous, right, but when you factor two bus rides, a 15.5 hour ferry ride and a train ride, plus time waiting for buses, the ferry and the train, that puts us in Rome at 10 pm the next night.

rome is probably the single most amazing place we've ever been. there are more interesting things to do and see in a small area here than we could possibly have imagined, even after reading the guide books, seeing movies, and hearing everyone we've ever known who went to rome rave about it. it's expensive, you walk everywhere and your legs hurt terribly by the end of the day, the tourist crowds range from annoyingly large to inpenetrable, and there seem to be very few italians here, but these are minor distractions from seeing the vatican, the roman forum, the colosseum, the pantheon, the spanish steps, the trevi fountain and who knows how many other incredible monuments.

on our first day in rome we had to spend the morning looking for a hotel because the one we stayed in the first night didn't have room for us. that took until around 1:00, but we still saw so much. our first real stop that afternoon was the spanish steps, which lead to the trinita dei monti church. we're not really sure why these are important, but they sure are picturesque, with a beautiful boat shaped fountain at the bottom, and the house where keats spent the last of his life near the top. highlights from later that day included throwing a coin over our shoulder into the trevi fountain to ensure our return to rome, goggling at the papal tombs and their funny dressed guards in the basillica which occupies the pantheon, taking tons of photos of bernini's fountain of the four rivers in piazza navona after eating lunch entertained by the perfectly stationary street performers, one dressed as the statue of liberty and on stilts, and the other as an egyptian goddess, and trying our first taste of italian ice cream (whoa baby!).

late that afternoon we walked to the vatican to stroll around piazza san pietro, and enjoyed watching tour groups of monks, priests and nuns, all making their pilgrimages to the vatican for the pope's birthday and the canonizatoin of ten new saints which was (lo and behold) the next day. we decided to wait on our tour of st. peter's basillica for a few days later when we would visit the vatican museums at the same time, so we walked to the monument of vittorio emmanuelle II, which, we think, is maybe the most impressive of all of rome's monuments.

in the same piazza as the palace mussolini used during his reign, this monstrous building towers over everything else in the city. it is a huge, white marble neoclassical masterpiece, and is obviously newer than the ancient roman monuments since it was built to commemorate italian unification. still, it is incredible, with the tomb of the unknown soldier, and a huge 22 foot tall bronze copy of the original statue of marcus aurelius on horseback (which is now in a museum.). one story we read said that some king's inauguration dinner was held with the head table actually in the belly of the horse (as it was only half done) hundreds of feet above ground level. from the top level of this monument, which is overshadowed by a huge colonade supporting two monstrous statues of horse and chariot with winged figures as drivers, you can see all of rome, from st. peters to the coloseum and beyond, with the tiber river running in between.

that evening, we had a brilliant picnic dinner in the piazza in front of the santa maria maggiore basillica which has an 18th century baroque marble facade to protect it's amazing 13th century mosaic facade. inside (which we didn't get to see) there are supposedly amazing 5th century mosaics. also, bernini is buried there. then we did our almost the entire circuit of earlier in the day (trevi fountain to st. peter's) again, just so we could see everything at night. it was worth it, but we walked more that day than i care to recall. we hit the hay hard that night.

the next morning we ate our picnic breakfast and headed to the roman forum for a day full of archeology. the forum was the political and religious center of rome, and has the highest concentration of excavated ruins. it's actually free, which is always exciting, and pretty amazing, with huge triumphal arches, newer basillicas built on the ruins of say, the place where the roman senate met, temples, and huge freestanding columns. this place was mobbed with tourists, and unfortunately it was hard to get any photos without 2 or 3 hundred of your fellow man in them. after that, we went onto palatine hill, which was where wealthy romans would live, and still contains many ruined homes, gardens, and places of worship/recreation. the highlight here was the smallish museum with incredible roman sculptures unearthed in the excavations. in true roman style, the museum was even built directly onto the ruins of an ancient romans temple, incorporating the ruins into the exhibition rooms. after a picnic lunch in the shade of ancient roman gardens (can you tell we can't afford to eat out?) washed down by some water from one of the many, constantly running water fountains scattered around the city, we headed to the colosseum.

the colosseum is smaller than you might imagine. at least, it's smaller than we imagined. and actually would probably have been better had we been with a tour. it was nice to look at, but you don't really know what anything is, or how it all worked, so we ended up latching on to an english speaking tour guide, just pretending we weren't paying attention, and ended up learning a lot. we learned that there were upwards of 48 trap doors in the floor of the arena, and that there were stage managers, making sure the entire thing went according to plan. sounds like an interesting time and place. we took lots of pictures and commenced a search for a pizza by the slice place to quench a bit of hunger from the thought of all those dead people. Of course, when you really want to find a place like that, it’s never within a 25 block radius of where you want to go. We never did find anything, and decided to go hungry for a while rather than paying for an overpriced sit down restaurant near the Colosseum.

Now on a quest to find San Clemente church, we ended up taking a big detour and arriving there hours later, even though it’s only about 2 blocks from the colosseum. As they say, though, getting lost in Rome is rarely a bad thing because you end up discovering other, lesser known ruins, churches, and architecture. Nevertheless, we paid the small entrance fee and were shown the stairs down into an 6th century ruined basillica, which was amazing enough, then down some more stairs to some 1st century bc roman and pagan religious ruins, on top all of that is built the small 15th century catholic church of san clemente. The ruins were really cool (literally and figuratively) - signs pointed out ancient frescoes, small pieces of sculpture were displayed in groups on the walls, and eventually we made our way down to the oldest of the ruins which included a sacrificial altar of the mystras religion that was ornately carved in stone.

Day three in rome was vatican day. When we got on the metro that morning a free italian newspaper was sitting on my seat and I glanced at the front cover which was graced by a large photo of the pope. Evidently, the day before had been his 83rd birthday, and he had celebrated this in St. Peter’s Square by canonizing 10 saints. So, there were a LOT of folks in town to be present for this ceremony, and I think that nearly all of them went to the vatican that day. When we exited the metro and found the line to get in, we saw that it was stretching around for blocks. Luckily, it moved very quickly, and it took less than 15 minutes to get inside, but it was a little daunting to think of thousands of people wandering through.

The sheer quantity of artwork in the vatican museums is enough to make anyone’s head spin, but when you consider that among those are many of the most famous and most important pieces in the world, it makes is almost impossible to describe how awed and overloaded you are when you exit. The incredible list of highlights include an amazing egyptian section with a partially unwrapped mummy, the Rapheal rooms which include his famous school of athens, and of course, the sistene chapel with michelangelo’s preeminent works of creation and judgement day. And then they shuffle you into St. Peter’s Basilica, which contains the 29 meter (90 foot) tall baldaccino designed by bernini, michaelangelo’s pieta (his only signed work), and much more. After a while you just can’t take in any more, but there’s still the crypt of the popes to walk through below the altar. You can see st. peter, founder of christianity (behind bulletproof glass of course), as well as lots of other popes and saints. I could say a lot more about this day, but it’s really something that defies explanation and elaboration. Just go, if and when you can, because it is worth the effort to see. To enjoy it fully we think you have to look past the extravagance of the catholic church and see it as art and design instead of a gross misappropriation of funds away from the soup kitchen the vatican would undoubtedly be were jesus still in charge.

Our last day in rome we reserved for some extra special miscellaneous things we hadn’t seen yet. We went to a small church were the agony of sta. Teresa (bernini) is housed, and saw another church where caravaggio’s masterpieces of the conversion of saul and the crucifixion of st. peter are housed. Then, we came to the ‘piece de resistance’, the crypt of the capuchin monks, where, for about 400 years, they transported the skeletons of poor Romans and buried their own dead. The place is eerie, with every wall, and the ceilings, covered in decorations made completely from various human bones. The monks themselves are either buried in the dirt floor, or dressed in the brown monk robes and placed in prominent places amongst the rest of the skeletons. The decorations included archways made completely of skulls, ceiling rosettes made from rib bones or jaw bones, lantern chandeliers made from tibias, and several hour-glasses created with 2 tail bones complete with shoulder blades as wings. There were four rooms completely filled with these impeccably arranged bones. This was definitely one of the more memorable parts of Rome.

That night, after a day full of walking, we got on an overnight train to geneva switzerland, where we would spend the next day. We woke up on the train for a nice breakfast while skirting the edge of lake geneva with the alps rising seemingly directly out of the lake, shrouded in fog and capped with snow. This is why we’ve always wanted to visit switzerland. We had a beautiful day in this cosmopolitan city on the shore of the largest lake in central europe after storing our luggage at the train station. We marvelled at the jet de eau, which shoots water up 120 meters into the air (at any one time there are more than 7 tons of water in the air), climbed the tower in the church where john calvin preached (and saw the chair he sat in!), and saw the famous flower clock, which was being planted when we were there. We also walked through part of the fine arts museum, which had an impressive collection, some monets, rubens, picasso, rodin, etc. Geneva was a very very nice city to spend the day, but we headed out on an afternoon train to nantes, france to visit jeanne and brian, our friends who visited us in greece a few weeks ago. Our train was supposed to arrive at 11:15 that evening, which would have made that day a long enough travel day, having left at 8:00 the night before, but we were delayed about 2 hours because of a suicide on the train track. Since we got in so late, brian and jeanne had been waiting forever, the trams weren’t running, and consequently there was a huge line for the taxis, so we walked the 30 minutes back to their house with all our stuff in the middle of the night. We were very excited to see them again, though, and having friends to converse with (and who will help us carry the backpacks) is such a joy we hardly even noticed that we must have walked about 2 or 3 miles.

The next day, jeanne and brian were our tour guides through the city of nantes. It’s a nice, medium-sized city with a beautiful little castle (with a moat!) where the edict of nantes was signed (this guaranteed protestants religious freedom in france). There is also an amazing cathedral which is undergoing extensive restoration, so you can see how the one side is deteriorated and dirty, and the other is clean, white and perfect. It’s a pretty cool process. The inside of the cathedral is impressive too, with the tallest ceiling of any cathedral in france, and the largest stained glass window too. Unfortunately, many of the stained glass windows were destroyed in WWII, and replaced by ugly modern ones. The ones that do survive, though, are very nice. That afternoon, we met their friend kathi, from austria at a sidewalk café, and felt like true europeans, basking in the spring sunshine chatting about nothing in particular, and munching on fresh paninis.

The next day, the five of us (including kathi) rented a car to drive around the french countryside a bit. We drove north, into bretagne (brittany in english), beginning our day in the mythical broceliand forest, the mythical home of king arthur, merlin, etc. This was a day trip which came highly recommended by a friend of jeanne and brian’s, but turned out being a series of wild goose hunts, as we searched for merlin’s tomb, the fountain of youth, and the golden tree, among other things. We eventually did find these things, but we’ll only say that the tourist authorities in the broceliand area need some help with signposting. Later that afternoon, we drove to the costal town of vannes, which is the home of a huge number of megalithic stone gatherings. These were much easier to find, and quite impressive; huge granite stones weighing several tons each arranged into huge lines stretching along a path through pastureland and forest. Some small caves were created by the stacking of stones, and inside were ancient carvings, dating back to the 6th century B.C. They were pretty cool too. That night, jeanne and brian through a crepe party for us with their french friends at their apartment, so we learned to make crepes, drank french wine and pastis, and since we don’t speak french, helped the frenchies practice their english.

The next morning, after a delicious breakfast, we headed out for the train ride to paris, then to london through the channel tunnel. We moved our arrival date to london up in order to be there for a few days with my mom, who had flown in to visit my brother jesse (who goes to school here) last week. We’ve spent the last 3 days here, seeing the sites with her, visiting museums, going to the theatre, stopping at a few starbucks (there’s one on every corner!), and marvelling at the fact that she really will strike up a conversation with anyone and everyone (she seems to have a magnet for polish people...). Highlights from these days are the tate modern museum, the national gallery, the british museum, tower bridge, westminster abbey, and a small play called stones in his pockets, which was excellent and pretty cheap. London is, so far, a great city; easy to get around, fun, and lots of stuff to see and do for free. We had a really good time exploring with my mom, and she went home this morning, so right now we’re just sleeping and cooking at jesse’s flat in cricklewood, taking the underground to the center every day, and seeing every possible free thing there is to do. We also plan to see richard III at the globe theatre sometime this week, and we meet up with one of my friends from high school, heather, on Saturday, who will be here on a tour with her university choir.

as you can see, the europe leg of our around the world journey has kicked into full swing, and we have great plans ahead, for paris, germany, austria, switzerland, maybe a day in venice, and possibly some time in barcelona. We’ll be visiting friends at several points along the way, and are looking forward to seeing them again. Look for just a couple more seamails before we head home around the middle of July. We love you all, and do take care.

Liza and jerad!!

Music pick of the week is the amelie soundtrack (thanks kalle!), which is great for sleeping on long train rides, or just listening in general.