It was my mom’s last day on the Big Island, and we hadn’t gone snorkeling yet. Ray’s not much for getting in the water, so if I was going to do any snorkeling, this was my last day to do it. After a little research, we had settled on the beach at Pu’uhonau o Honaunau (City of Refuge), and we had made plans to meet a friend’s sister (who happened to be working as an archeologist in Kailua-Kona) for the morning.
Since we knew it would take 2-1/2 hours to get there from Volcano (we were starting to understand just how far away everything was), we checked out of the Volcano Guest House at 9:30 and told my friend to meet us at 11:00.
But then I realized that we couldn’t go snorkeling after all, as my body decided to pick that day to start its monthly courses, and with areas in Honaunau Bay up to 100 feet deep, there was a good chance there could be sharks in the water. Best to stay safe and on land. Our friend had also sustained a nasty cut from the lava the day before, so we all decided on the phone to take a tour of the City of Refuge instead.
John Cleese (our GPS voice) couldn’t seem to find Pu’uhonau o Honaunau (the beginning of a trend for our electronic friend for the rest of the vacation), but I was armed with various tourist maps and was able to navigate us there safely. Our friend, on the other hand, got totally lost and ended up getting there much later than we did…it’s a good thing we had decided not to snorkel, because the heat of noon was upon us, and the morning fish were all gone.
We didn’t have a tour guide to show us around like we did in Waipio Valley, but the brochure they gave us at the gate did a very good job of explaining the area.
The City of Refuge, as it turns out, was the place to go if you had broken a cardinal law. If you could make it by sea across the treacherous reef to the shore, you were absolved of whatever law you had broken. Most people who attempted the journey died in the process, so if you managed to make it, that was a sign that the gods favored you.
Most of the huts and heiaus we saw were reproductions, but the wall itself was original (although repaired in some spots), and held together with no mortar at all, which was amazing.
We did see a couple of turtles hanging out in the water and on the beach, which is different from my last run-in with the Hawaiian turtle population. And I was still disappointed with not being able to actually do some snorkeling, but hey, at least the turtles no longer feared me.
After the walk around the City of Refuge, we decided to head into Kailua-Kona (another 45-minute drive) for a bite to eat. Lunch at the Kona Brewing Company was a bit touristy but very tasty, and all too soon it was time to take my mom to the airport and say goodbye.
Lunch at the Volcano House was wonderful. We sat down with our buffet meals and ate in front of a huge window overlooking the Kilauea Caldera. The fog and rain were coming in, obscuring our view for much of the time, but we did get some good shots of the gasses emerging from the ground (see left), so I was pleased.
Even though there were tons of warning signs and blocked roads restricting views of the volcano (even the little steam vents by the main road were blocked off!), I was amazed that I could get as close as I did. I mean, we were on an active volcano! Not one that was dormant and maybe might go off soon, but one that was actively spewing out lava and gasses as we were watching.
So I didn’t see Pele’s tears or Pele’s hair as we were hiking around (I did see them in the Jaggar Museum, though). And we found out that because of safety concerns, the place where you can see the red flowing lava was closed. But I’m okay with that, because I saw this:
And so I feel like I really did see a volcano.
After lunch, we decided to see how far up we could get on Mauna Loa (Kilauea is actually a bit of a pimple on the side of Mauna Loa). One of our maps showed a road going up to Mauna Loa Lookout Point at 6,662 ft., so we decided to try it.
We drove up a one-lane, (mostly) paved road for what seemed to be ages. Even though we only traveled for 11 miles, we were also going 5-10 miles an hour. But there was much more to see here than the Chain of Craters Road. Where along the lava flows there was only desert, here was lush forest, with wild animals at every turn.
The rain and the fog persisted all the way to the top of the road: so much so that when we got to the lookout point, there was nothing to see! It was also 50 degrees outside, which, according to my mother, might as well be freezing. So, back in the car we went, to drive back through the fairyland forests and over the mysterious cattle guards (we really weren’t sure why they were there, since it didn’t really seem like ranching country…just one of those weird Hawaii things, I guess), back to our guest house, where we decided to have dine at the Lava Rock Cafe (okay, it was really a diner, but they wanted to be so much more!).
While I had been planning our trip to the Big Island, the thing I most wanted to see was the volcano. I mean, the thought of being able to see the birth of the world was extremely exciting, and the fact that we happened to know someone who knew someone who had a guest house in Volcano seemed serendipitous.
So Saturday was Volcano Day.
As we entered Volcanoes National Park, we were inundated with warnings about the air quality. The level of sulfur dioxide in the air was high, and we should only enter at our own risk. We closed our windows and put the air on “recirculate,” but the smell was still coming in. The cloud of SO2 billowed across the road like a sinister fog (they call it “vog” in Hawaii – volcanic fog), and because we couldn’t find parking at the visitor’s center, we decided to drive around the crater away from the vog.
First stop: the Thurston Lava Tube. This seems to be the most famous of the volcanic landmarks, although when you come right down to it, it’s little more than a cave with two entrances. Sometimes, when lava flows, the top crusts over, but beneath it remains liquid magma, creating these natural pipes underground. As the source of the lava shuts off, the lava keeps flowing, but there becomes less and less and less, until there is nothing but air. This one is the largest of its kind, I believe, and you can walk right through it, which is what we did.
While we were on this side of the crater, we decided to take a look at Desolation Trail, which is truly a path of devastation left by an eruption in the 1959. The ohia lehua trees seem like the only plants able to survive in this desert. We started up the path, but quickly realized that there wasn’t much to see here (hence, desolation trail), so we turned around and headed back to the car for more sight-seeing.
Unfortunately the Crater Rim Drive was closed due to a new vent that recently opened within Halemaumau Crater, so we opted for the only road open to us: Chain of Craters Road.
The Chain of Craters Road is a 18.3-mile winding drive down the mountain to the sea, with craters and lookout points along the way. We stopped at some of the craters, but after the fourth one, we got bored and decided to stop at the scenic lookouts instead. I was ready to turn around about halfway down the mountain, but Ray was enjoying the lava experience, and he wanted to know what the end of the road looked like, so we kept going.
Lava flows from as recently as 1974 are all that exist here. Oh, there are some hardy ferns growing out of a few crags here and there, but there is nothing but black as far as the eye can see. A blank slate, land yet to find a name.
We finally made it down to the shore, where it was at least 15 degrees warmer. I shed my sweater as we headed down the path towards the plume of steam rising from the sea. That was where the lava was hitting the water, and I was interested in seeing what that looked like.
More warning signs abounded as we set off on the trail. Apparently when the lava hits the salt water, large amounts of toxic hydrochloric gas is produced, so we should proceed at our own risk. A little cartoon man on a warning sign was falling into the ocean because he had been hiking on an unstable lava shelf. All this made me nervous, but we decided to at least hike out for a little while.
As we were walking in the hot midday sun, Ray noticed a little oasis-like area with palm trees. It stuck out because there were no trees of any kind anywhere else. They were all so close together we thought maybe this must have been a village of some sort at one point or another (we found out later that it had indeed been a village before the lava came).
We did have to stray from the path to get to the trees, but it was nice to be in the shade even of coconut palms, and we got some cool pictures while we were there. That plume of steam was so far away! And it was lunchtime, and I was starving.
What to do? I wanted to see the lava flow into the ocean, but I just couldn’t ignore my growling tummy. We decided to turn around and head back up to the mountain (there was certainly no food anywhere here) and have lunch by the Kilauea crater.
Besides, my mom reasoned, the lava is much more spectacular at night when it’s glowing red. We could go to the ocean lava viewing area in the evening around sunset. But for now: lunch!
My mother was only going to be with us for the first weekend we were in Hawaii, so she and I had tried to plan as many fun adventures as possible while she was on the Big Island. Unfortunately, that meant me going back on my promise to Ray that I wouldn’t plan anything during our stay.
Technically, though, my mother planned the tour to Waipio Valley, so I can’t really take responsibility for that. All I had asked was that we have a tour in the afternoon, rather the morning, so that we could recover from our plane ride.
Being awake for 24 hours must have reset me in Hawaii time, though, because I was wide awake at my normal wake-up time, 7:00, even though I had only gotten about 6 hours of sleep the night before. Ray was asleep, though, so I left him in bed while I went to find breakfast.
The guest house was much different in the daytime. My mom (who is also a morning person) was up, and the two of us read through the welcome binder and noted all the signs around the room about preserving water (the entire water supply was through a rain catchment system) and how the solar water heater worked.
Our instructions said that breakfast was “in the greenhouse,” but we couldn’t figure out which building it was from our windows, so we went outside to investigate. Sure enough, directly opposite our building was a greenhouse, and we saw some people inside eating breakfast.
Fresh papaya and bananas were the first things I saw, and I took full advantage of the available fruit. The rest of the breakfast fare was typical: juice, cereal, milk, coffee, as well as assorted bagels, cream cheese, and other spreads.
We chatted with some of the other guests until our hostess, Bonnie, arrived, and my mother introduced us (my aunt went to high school with Bonnie, so we got a good deal on the rooms).
Later in the morning, after Ray was up and dressed, we headed east to Hilo for lunch before continuing up the coast towards Waipio Valley (the Valley of Kings). It was an hour and a half before we got to our destination, but we had left plenty of time, so we stopped at the Waipio Valley Lookout before starting the tour.
Our tour guide was a young Hawaiian by the name of Douglas (but everyone calls him “Toki,” since that’s his middle name), whose family owns some of the taro fields in Waipio Valley. He showed us a lot about local plants and their uses (the stinky Noni fruit with a smell that rivals Camembert apparently cures everything from a stiff shoulder to cancer, but if you’re suffering from nausea, you should chew on some young guava leaves), and he spent a great deal of time explaining that the King Kamehameha Bishop Estate, which owned Waipio Valley, lease land at very reasonable rates, but only to Hawaiians who are willing to farm taro through traditional means (no equipment other than your own two hands).
With electricity only running to the first five houses in the valley and only two roads into and out of the valley (one of which being a footpath only wide enough for one person on the face of a cliff, the other being a poorly-paved winding road built at 25% grade), it’s no wonder there are not people lining up to take advantage of the good rents.
But the valley itself has a very magical quality to it, and it certainly feels like paradise there. It’s just that the price of this particular paradise is manual labor, no electricity, and commuting from work to home via the river road (no really, it’s a road that’s also a river).
After the tour, we headed back down the coast towards Hilo. It was getting to be dinner time, so we stopped at Cafe Pesto, which had been recommended to us by my dad (apparently the owner is a son of one of his Peace Corps buddies).
It was a nice enough meal, but Ray and I were exhausted again, so we drove back to Volcano (at night, again…only this time approaching it from the opposite side of the mountain) to fall instantly asleep as soon as we got back.
The next leg of our trip was a short flight from Honolulu to Kailua-Kona on the Big Island. We met up with my mom at the Honolulu airport (some confusion in communication had us meeting her in baggage claim, only to have us all go through security again, and having to confiscate the overpriced water bottles we had purchased in Phoenix). Even though we were hungry, we decided to wait until we got to Kailua-Kona before eating, since we didn’t have very much time before our flight, and Ray and I were both tired of overpriced airport food.
The three of us continued to the Big Island in a little Boeing 717 commuter plane, where Ray could stretch out in the aisle seat and I could try to catch a few Zs in the window seat.
Except I couldn’t, because there was a kid with autism or Down Syndrome or something right behind, and wasn’t it just my luck that he was a seat-kicker? He also was very excited about being on a plane, but was only able to express himself with moans and sighs and occasional hacking noises that disturbed me greatly. The flight only lasted 43 minutes, but it felt like 3 hours.
On the ground in Kailua-Kona, we had the great good fortune to have our baggage arrive first, so we were on our way to the car rental place with almost no delay. Once at the car rental, however, we stood in line for what seemed to be an eternity before we finally got our car.
In the car we went, and out came my TomTom GPS device (which I had uploaded with the voice of John Cleese, so we call the GPS “John Cleese”), much to the amazement of my mother, who I think had not seen one up close before.
Our first priority was to find food, so I used the “points of interest” feature on the TomTom to find the closest fast-food restaurant. John Cleese first led us to a Subway, which was closed (it was 9:00 at night by this time), and the second place, a Wendy’s, was not at the point indicated to us by John Cleese. Fortunately, we stumbled upon a Denny’s and decided to eat there.
Ray and I had breakfast, while my mom had dinner; one of the side effects of our travel was that our bodies thought it was 3 a.m., so I decided to treat it as an all-nighter. A half hour later, we had paid our bill (mom came in handy, as her senior status gave us 20% off the total!), and we were on the road again.
The maps we had looked at before the trip never had a scale on them, so I don’t think we really realized how big the Big Island was until we started driving. Sure, I had checked our road trip out on Google Maps before we left, and the estimated travel time was something like 2.5 hours, but I thought that surely that was a conservative estimate, and that once we got on the highway things would go much faster.
Little did I know that “highway” in Hawaii just means “road that is paved regularly.” It has nothing to do with number of lanes, because we were on a two-lane road for the entire 106 miles. Ray was a trooper, though, and while my mom and I napped, he navigated the windy roads up the mountain to Volcano very well.
We knew we were close when we smelled the sulfur dioxide from Kilauea’s crater. It was foggy, so we couldn’t see very well, but John Cleese led us to our destination with no problem, showing us where the road was when we ourselves could not see it. When we finally arrived at the Volcano Guest House, we rolled into bed and slept soundly.
It’s been two years since I’ve taken a domestic flight, and while many people may have been witnessing the gradual changes that airlines have been making, I (who do not travel nearly as often as I would like due to lack of means and time) have been shocked at the changes that have been made in the airline industry.
Granted, the last time Ray and I took a flight together, we were on our way to get married; I had booked a nonstop trip from Newark to Honolulu simply because I didn’t want to risk our baggage (read: wedding dress) getting lost during a transfer.
This time, though, we were more concerned with cost than with transfers, so when I found a flight that left from Philadelphia for a reasonable price with a reasonable travel time, I booked it.
Our first leg took us from Philadelphia to Phoenix. I had the pleasure of being seated next to Typhoid Mary, Plague-Bringer, who hacked and coughed her way through the 4-hour long flight.
I was also surprised that the “In-Flight Café,” which I had known would be a pay-for-your-food-if-you-want-to-be-fed deal, had absolutely NO vegetarian options. Instead our choices were: 1) a Reuben sandwich with cookie – $7; 2) a Cobb salad with cookie – $7; or 3) a “snack pack” consisting of a tiny can of chicken salad, 4 cubes of cheese, some crackers, and, you guessed it, a cookie – $5.
Ray had discouraged me from making sandwiches for the trip because (and it was a good point) we had no way of keeping them cold until lunchtime. Instead, I packed a bunch of Lara Bars, and he stocked up on cashews, Pepperidge Farm Milan cookies, and almonds, so that became my lunch.
As we were landing, we hit a patch of turbulence, and my poorly-fed stomach began to turn. Thankfully, our plane landed before things got too desperate, although I was trapped near the back of the plane (which is always annoying during disembarkment) and forced to listen to Typhoid Mary explain that she got sick from her grandson, whom she had visited, when the last thing I wanted to talk about was being sick.
In Phoenix, we had 1 hour and 15 minutes to get to the next gate (one terminal over) as well as eat lunch/dinner. I was still feeling queasy, as was Ray, but we forced ourselves to buy individual pizzas to bring with us on the plane.
Before we knew it, the flight had boarded, and we were back in the air again. Departing Phoenix was almost as bumpy as our arrival, so we were both thankful when we reached cruising altitude.
Even though I had specifically requested a window seat for Ray, something must have happened with the booking process, because he was given an aisle seat. And we were right next to the lavatories, which might have been useful if either one of us had continued to be sick. Instead, we got a whiff of other people’s bowel movements every single time the bathroom door opened.
I was stuck in the middle seat, as always, since I have shorter legs. The guy in front of me pushed his seat as far back as he could, and then he bounced back against the seat a couple more times, for good measure, I assumed, in case my knees hadn’t gotten quite bruised enough.
Meanwhile, the guy behind me (who had made a big stink upon boarding because his seating assignment had been messed up too, and the flight attendants gave him the option of dealing with a middle seat or getting off the plane) had some sort of nervous tic that involved kicking my seat for about 2 hours until he finally went to sleep. He awoke about an hour before the plane landed and resumed, much to my chagrin.
The only good thing about the seating mix-up is that Ray now realizes he likes aisle seating better because there is more room to stretch out.
After 7 hours in the air, we arrived in Honolulu tired and hungry and cranky, but we did stop to take in the fact that we were finally in Hawaii. That put smiles on our faces.
So I’ve been back in the U.S. for 4 days now, and I haven’t written anything since the blackout last week because A) there is so much to write and B) I don’t want to admit that I’m not in Italy anymore. I really fell in love with that country, and I definitely want to go back someday (preferably when I’ve gotten a little more fluent with the language).
The last few days of the festival flew by, mostly because there was so much drama in and around the whole town. The Unicorn concert that had been rescheduled because of the blackout went very well, although our clarinetist was ill from food poisoning and did not play the first movement of the piece. Apparently (and this is rumor, so take it with a grain of salt), because the orchestra hadn’t been getting paid, they couldn’t even afford the cafeteria food they had been getting, and so some of the orchestra members, including our clarinetist, ate some tainted food that they had brought with them.
I don’t believe I mentioned this before, but the festival hired a Ukranian orchestra to do the job because they were super cheap and would work with no breaks (man, that irks me!). They drove for 4 days, 24 hours/day, from the Ukraine to Italy. They stayed in the police barracks and ate cafeteria food, and even though they were getting paid less than us (and that’s saying something), they still were getting paid a good half year’s salary by just playing in this little 3-week festival. They endured countless hours of abuse from conductors that only spoke English to them (their only translator was the concertmaster, who sort of paraphrased in two or three words what the conductor would rage in four or five sentences).
(Actually, a side note on that: it really amused me how the conductors would speak slower and louder English as if that would make any difference. At least our conductor, when he had to work with the orchestra, got an Italian-Russian translator, and spoke only Italian to the orchestra during rehearsal and only in small phrases, asking the interpreter to translate phrase by phrase. See, that’s actually communicating, not yelling in a foreign language and hoping that the orchestra will respond)
As if that didn’t make the situation dire enough, the technical staff decided to strike (they hadn’t been paid in 45 days), so our second rehearsal with orchestra for the finale concert was without light for about 20 minutes until someone figured out how to turn the lights on. Our conductor for the finale concert was less than empathetic with the situation, saying at one point to the orchestra during the dress rehearsal, “Are we going to make music, or are we going to strike?” This is after the food poisoning situation, and keeping in mind that the orchestra has been working nonstop since they arrived, with no days off and very few breaks. He made all of us in the chorus very angry, and not just for that one comment.
The day of the finale, Francis Menotti held a press conference in the middle of the day and said that he still didn’t have the money to pay anyone. He then begged those people who hadn’t been paid to do the concert for free, for the memory of his father. There was a little town meeting in which the orchestra members aired their grievances against the festival and some tourists showed support for the festival, and in which Francis blamed the festival for holding the money ransom because they want him to step down. It was a whole political to-do, and although I understood less than half of what was being said, we had a couple people sitting with us translating the gist of the conversations. The press conference came to a close with no firm answer of whether or not we were going to have a concert that night.
In fact, we did not know if the concert was going up until about 20 minutes before the concert started. I was so sure it wasn’t going to happen that I actually bet 5 cents (that’s Euro cents, so it’s about 8 American cents!) that we would have no concert. Alas, the show went on, and I am now 5 cents poorer.
Before the concert could start, though, the stagehands marched on stage and made an announcement in front of the TV cameras that were there to broadcast the concert. They reiterated that they had not been paid for 45 days, but that they were going to work the concert for the memory of Giancarlo Menotti. They wanted to show that they were the bigger people than the politicos that were holding their money to force Francis out.
Of course, the next day, which was Monday, they had clearly still not gotten paid because the stage and all the chairs in the piazza had not been broken down. I had dinner near the Duomo and saw all the stagehands have a meeting on the stage…I sure hope they are able to get paid! The bus company that had picked us up from Rome was now on strike because they hadn’t gotten paid, and so our manager found a private company to take us back to Rome. We were lucky…I believe it’s that same bus company that was scheduled to take the orchestra members back to the Ukraine, and who knows if they made it back?
On Tuesday morning, all the choristers got on the privately hired bus and started the 24-hour trip home. First the bus back to Rome, and then a flight from Rome to Paris (which half of us almost didn’t get on because of a travel agent mix-up and some surly ticketing agents), running to catch our connecting flight from Paris to JFK (we got an escort to make sure we got through the shorter lines at security), and then a bus from JFK to Philadelphia (we got another idiotic bus driver who got lost on the turnpike and decided to take a detour through Newark Airport. How do you get lost on the NJ Turnpike? It only goes two ways!).
Piazza del MercatoBut besides the actual travel part of the trip, I really enjoyed myself in Italy. Now that I am back, I’ve been busy organizing and storing all my photos onto my computer, so you finally get to see some of the places I’ve been talking about.
This first picture shown is the Piazza del Mercato, where I stayed. The building on the far right side of the picture was my apartment building, and the open window above the awning was my window. Every afternoon, a group called Concerto Strauss (or as one of my roommates called it, “The Lawrence fricking Welk Orchestra”) would start playing cheesy opera tunes and fun waltzes, making me feel like I was living on an opera set. I thought that maybe if I looked out of my window, perhaps I could see Musetta in the cafe across the street, or perhaps the commedia troupe would be coming around the bend, with Canio and Nedda at the fore.
Caffé CollicollaThis next picture is of the Caffé Collicolla, where everyone always gathered before rehearsal. The people who ran the cafe were so sweet, and I’m sure they were happy to have us spend all our money on coffee at their shop. Too bad they didn’t have gelato, because we would have bought it there!
There were some high school exchange students who also spent some time at Collicolla early in the morning, and one of them painted a picture very similar to this photo. I was inspired so much by her painting that I decided to take a picture of the porch of the cafe, empty because it was riposa (nap time) and at the heat of the day. The cafe stayed open through riposa, which was great, but they did close their doors and turn the AC on.
So that concludes my adventures in Italy. Actually, there are many more stories, but I think I must keep my eye on what adventures are to come. And I definitely know I want to go back to Italy, only next time I’ll bring Ray along with me.
A couple of nights ago, one of our concerts was postponed because the entire town of Spoleto lost electricity. The concert (which is now rescheduled for tonight) was actually one of my favorite pieces we’ve been working on here, and all of us were extremely sad to have it canceled, so we are very excited to be able to perform tonight.
The venue for this concert is at the Rocca, a castle at the top of Spoleto where Lucrezia Borgia lived, and also where one of the popes in the Renaissance was also rumored to have lived for a time. The Rocca is gorgeous! Not only do you have a fantastic view of Umbria, but the walls are full of frescoes (mostly intact) and several lovely courtyards, one of which we are using for the concert. Keep your fingers crossed that it doesn’t rain! I don’t want the concert to be canceled again!!
When it became clear that night that the electricity problem in Spoleto wouldn’t be solved any time soon, we gathered in the Piazza del Duomo and sang an impromptu concert on the porch of the Duomo. TV cameras were already there because of the blackout, and they ate up the fact that we just spontaneously started singing. I have to admit, it was pretty cool. We could only get a couple songs out before the sun finally set, and then we just couldn’t see anything, so we had to stop.
After that, we all dispersed to go find something to do in the dark. A couple friends and I went to a restaurant, where they had torches and candles brightly burning on the deck. The kitchen obviously wasn’t fully working, so they gave us large portions of everything that was going to go bad due to lack of refrigeration: huge hunks of cheese, mixed vegetables (raw as an antipasto, and then grilled veggies for me as a first course). My friends had the same, only they had grilled meat for their dinner.
The electricity came back sometime around midnight, and there was much rejoicing outside my window at the Piazza del Mercato.
Yesterday, I decided to use my day off to go to Rome with a couple friends (for the purposes of this blog, I’ll call them the Canadian and Georgia Boy). We planned to go to the Vatican Museum in the morning (one of my friends had a brochure that advertised a tour starting at 9:15, before the museum is open to the public), so we got up really early to take a 5:57 AM train into Rome.
Unfortunately, when we arrived at 8:30, at the meeting point advertised in the brochure, there were no tour guides at all (this actually didn’t surprise me, since I had checked out the website on the brochure, which was nonexistent, and I had tried to send an email to the address listed on the brochure and it bounced back to me). Undaunted, we started walking around the line that had already spanned about two city blocks, even an hour and a half before opening. We figured there had to be some tour guides hawking the crowd, getting people to skip the line and go in the group entrance.
No such luck. We arrived at the museum entrance and found another line going in, this one clearly of tour groups, since many of them were dressed alike or had little walkie-talkies around their necks so to better hear their tour guides. That line wrapped around the city walls from the opposite direction than the general public line, so we decided to try to find the end of that queue and possibly get onto a tour there.
The tour group line was even longer than the public line, spanning about 8 city blocks. By the time we found the end, we were halfway around Vatican City from where we had started, and there were no tour hawkers to be seen. Frustrated, we decided to just walk the rest of the way around the wall to St. Peter’s Square (where the Pope comes out and blesses people on Wednesdays). We realized that since Vatican City is a different country than Italy, we actually walked around an entire country. What an accomplishment! But we still weren’t inside the Vatican, which irritated us.
When we reached St. Peter’s Square, we stopped to take lots of pictures. I remembered all my Western Civ classes in high school, where we learned that Bernini ushered in the Baroque era by building this oval piazza, a far cry from the classical straight lines and perfect circles. We decided while we were there to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, which houses Michelangelo’s famous Pietà (the first sculpture to actually show emotion on Mary’s face). After going through the metal detectors (we were entering another country, after all!) and passing the clothing police (those wearing tank tops and skirts or shorts above the knee were not allowed inside and had to wait sheepishly against the wall for their friends), we waited in another line to get into the church itself.
The Canadian saw a sign pointing to the tombs of the popes and noted that there was no line to go there, so we followed him down the stairs. We passed all sorts of sarcophagi and marble plaques of long-dead popes (and even not-so-long-dead: we walked by John Paul II’s headstone, decorated with fresh flowers and flanked by two guards who had roped off an area for folks to pray and mourn). We were kind of wandering from room to room until we found one room that had no sarcophagi at all, but whose walls and ceilings were painted with all sorts of Baroque pictures and designs. At the end of the room was a tiny, almost hidden, marble staircase, and the Canadian (those Canadians are so resourceful!) said, “Hey, this staircase isn’t roped off. Let’s see what’s up here.”
We walked up the stairs, and lo and behold, we were in St. Peter’s Basilica. How’s that for a back entrance?
The basilica took my breath away! Everything in the church is made either of bronze, gold, or marble. They allowed us to take pictures in the church, and it was hard to actually find one thing to photograph, since every inch of wall, floor, and ceiling was a work of art. I did manage to get some nice pictures, though, and I can’t wait to get home to put them all on my computer.
When we got out of St. Peter’s, we took a look at the public line for the Vatican Museum and saw that it had nearly tripled in size since we had seen it at 8:30 (it was close to 11 at this point). We regrouped and although the Canadian really wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, none of us really wanted to wait in line for hours for it. We decided to go across town to the ancient part of the city, since I really wanted to see the Colosseum.
Since the Canadian had already seen the Colosseum last week, he decided to hang out in the shade while Georgia Boy and I took the tour. Our tour guide was terrible! She spoke English, but her accent was so strong (I still couldn’t place it…it definitely wasn’t Italian) that even with the little walkie-talkies they provided, I couldn’t understand half of what she said. And whenever she tried to get dramatic, her accent got even stranger, and Georgia Boy and I kept giggling at her speech patterns.
Language barriers aside, I also feel like she was going through the motions in our tour. Having given tours myself when I was in Newport, Rhode Island (granted, I was in costume and in character), I know when someone is tuning out and just parroting facts. And boy, was she doing that. And most of the facts she gave us was stuff I already knew from taking 3 years of Latin in high school, so I was really bored. We had the option of getting a tour of the Palatine as well (that’s Caesar’s palace, the original one before Las Vegas), but both Georgia Boy and I had had enough of our tour guide, so we just wandered off to find the Canadian.
The sun was so hot and we found no relief in the shade, so we were all pretty cranky and not interested in walking around very much. We walked over to the Circus Maximus (where the chariot races were…think Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur). Unfortunately, the structure of the Circus Maximus is completely gone because in the Renaissance, the Roman citizens dismantled it to use the stones for houses. All that’s left now is a grassy knoll with a huge track, but if you’ve got a good imagination, you can figure out what things might have looked like. We took some pictures of the racetrack and Palatine Hill, and then we decided to call it a day. It was time to take the metro back to the train station and get on the next train back to Spoleto.
They have been keeping us busy here in Spoleto. I am definitely working very hard for my money, and although this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, sometimes I wish our schedule could be a little less stressful. The last three days have been full of rehearsals and concerts, all with only one or two hours of rest in between. The worst of it was when we sang a concert at midnight and had to get up the next morning for an early morning mass.
Now that we have gotten several concerts under our belt, one would think the rehearsals would let up, but that is simply not the case, because we still have two more concerts to prepare for, each with different repertoire. Today, though, we have only rehearsals, and I intend to relax a bit. Tomorrow is our second day off, and I am going to go to Rome and take a tour of the Vatican…and hopefully I will get a chance to see the Coliseum as well.
In the meantime, though, I must away to another rehearsal and hope I still have some brain cells left to learn more music.
John Cleese (our GPS voice) couldn’t seem to find Pu’uhonau o Honaunau (the beginning of a trend for our electronic friend for the rest of the vacation), but I was armed with various tourist maps and was able to navigate us there safely. Our friend, on the other hand, got totally lost and ended up getting there much later than we did…it’s a good thing we had decided not to snorkel, because the heat of noon was upon us, and the morning fish were all gone.
We did see a couple of turtles hanging out in the water and on the beach, which is different from my last run-in with the Hawaiian turtle population. And I was still disappointed with not being able to actually do some snorkeling, but hey, at least the turtles no longer feared me.
