siena, italy
And now for a long overdue 'I am home' entry.
I am home.
Well, Siena home.
The ferry ride was long and stupid. There were about 8 million senior citizens of various nationalities (mostly Spanish and Italian). Normally, I have a pretty good deal of patience for the seniors of the world. I think they're generally pretty funny. But 20 hours on a ferry with a bunch of people who have absolutely no concept of lines, personal space, or volume kind of wore me a little thin. Meal times were such a fiasco at the self-service buffet that I ended up just getting snack bar foodstuffs the entire trip. Oy oy oy.
But the parents came to meet me at the ferry terminal and drove me home. And although cars (or maybe just this Italian one) are making me carsick these days, it was very nice to not be in a bus, train, or floating deathtrap.
So some of our family friends were visiting when I got back and it was nice to see people from home. Dolly and her daughter Monica stopped in Siena for a few days in Siena before heading to Cinque Terre (jealous). On Monday we did the tour de Siena with them and it was ever so enjoyable. We climbed up to the tower on Il Campo (which I had never done) for a view that's more fantastic than the one from the New Wall. Then the building at the base of the tower is a big civic museum that is just room after room after room of gorgeous famous recovered frescoes. Very cool. Also, we saw the IMAX (though my unprofessional opinion was that someone was using the term 'IMAX' in a kind of loose sense) documentary made about the Palio. Basically, it's everything I thought it would be plus 10x the chaos and utter confusion. Aweeeesome. But yes, good company is always wonderful.
Yesterday my mom and I drove to Volterra and San Giminiano in the 95-degree heat. Volterra is nice. I hadn't been there before. But the heat is making everything pretty unbearable right now (including our apartment, even at night. It makes sleeping unbearable). So oh well, still a good day. I even drove the car again. Because I am that stellar. And I only stalled it once when we were trying to get out of the parking lot up a really steep hill that required me to stop and give the machine a ticket. So that almost doesn't even count. Somehow, though, I've still never ground the gears, which I consider to be an achievement. Watch, I'll do it tomorrow.
I'm up early to go with my mom to Siena's ginormous Wednesday market. Yep.
El fin!