roma day four: art & tasty food

This day was our last full day in Rome - and we started it like we started every other day, at the cafe around the corner from our apartment! We had only a vague plan for the rest of the day and first set out across the river to try to visit the Pantheon again.



This time, the piazza was completely empty! Lesson learned - don't try to go to touristy places in late afternoon. It's pretty crazy how, from the outside, it's a moderately impressive building but nothing super noteworthy, mostly because you can't really see how big it is because of the other buildings and narrow streets. But inside it's huge! I feel like the only photo I took that almost captured how huge it was was the panorama from my phone:



(click to see it bigger!)



It's too bad that the Catholic church took it over like they did all of the other ancient Roman stuff, but at least it's fairly easy to ignore if you look up at the ceiling!







After our necks got tired of admiring the view, we just wandered around. I didn't get a photo of the best store I saw in Rome - a place for Catholic priests to buy their robes! The window display had all kinds of fancy robes and it was just so strange because we both assumed that they got robes as part of their job...like a uniform?? I also missed the chance to take a photo of the "attractive priests 2017" calendar for sale at a street vendor!









We sat in a nice park for a little while, laughed at the local cats running through the bushes, and stopped in Santa Maria della Vittoria to see the Bernini sculpture. (It was kind of a Bernini day, actually!) I'd really wanted to see this one in person, and it didn't disappoint! We really liked how in Rome, you could see a lot of amazing artwork for free, in situ, instead of feeling like you needed to pay for a bunch of museum tickets.





After walking around, it was pizza time! This was some of the best pizza we had in Rome (and we didn't have any in Florence!). One of them had zucchini and sun dried tomatoes and squash blossoms and the other had some kind of prosciutto-type meat (speck?). And the employees were nice and funny! After lunch, we walked for a little while to Villa Borghese, the big park in the north part of Rome. On the way, we passed by a big section of some ancient walls.









Our one planned thing of the day was our timed entry tickets to the Galleria Borghese to see the Bernini sculptures. It was one of my favorite places when I visited in high school, and it was nice to visit again after having studied him in college! It was pretty crowded at first (I think it sells out basically every day) but luckily that didn't last too long, so we were able to see everything without huge groups of people around us. Which was especially nice, since many of the rooms weren't that big!











We walked through the park to get to Piazza del Popolo - it was a really nice park! It felt a lot like Central Park. Lots of tourists but also lots of local people riding bikes, running, and walking dogs. When we got to Piazza del Popolo, we had a half an hour before the church we wanted to visit opened up after lunch, so we sat on the steps of one of the twin churches at the other end of the piazza. While we were sitting there, we saw one of our favorite players on Roma walk by! It's funny, because we whenever we see famous people in New York, it's not a big deal and most people don't pay any attention to them. It was the same here! Nobody even seemed to notice him.













When the church reopened, we went in to see the Caravaggio paintings and then headed back to the other side of the river. We ate dinner at a place about a block from our apartment and I think it was my favorite pasta in Rome? I had cacio e pepe, which Matt had gotten before, but this one was better! And Matt had pasta all'amatriciana, which I'd gotten before but this one was better. If we'd gone there the first night it might have been hard to try anywhere else!

After dinner, we sat on the steps of a fountain in a piazza a few blocks away and listened to a band play jazz music while people walked around and danced. It was really nice! There was a really cool vibe in Trastevere, even if it might be popular with tourists. And that was our last full day in Rome! The next day, we were off to Florence! Until then - -

Ahoy Italia!

Hello, hello...it's been a while! Summer is over, and my island job is over for the year. Now it's slowly turning into autumn and chilly weather (hopefully coming soon) and all the good stuff that comes along with it. Roasted chestnuts and hot tea and pretty leaves and cosy blankets!

But (drumroll), we spent the first week of October in Italia! We were originally supposed to go for our honeymoon and it was supposed to happen last October, but because we didn't have any money, we waited until 2017 to take our trip. Last year, we tried to substitute a trip to Montreal but our car died en route so we never made it there either! So I guess our "real" honeymoon ended up being the night we spent in Fishkill last August when we hiked Storm King and ate pancakes at a diner and went to the art center (which is maybe the best honeymoon for us?!).



So anyway - our Italy trip! We planned it for so long that it kind of started feeling abstract, even after we had plane tickets and AirBnbs booked. But then it was suddenly here! After a fairly rushed trip to the airport that ended up being completely fine we were on our way. And eight hours later, after not sleeping much at all but being able to watch a World Cup qualifier on the way, we landed in Milano.

Our original plan was to fly into Rome and out of Florence, but it was way cheaper to fly in and out of Milan...so we added a day onto the beginning and end of our trip - a day in Bologna on the way in and a day in Milano on the way out! So right after we got to Milan, we set out for Bologna. Everything was super fast - we got our luggage in about 5 minutes, customs barely glanced at our passports, and suddenly we were sitting on a train that connected with the main railway station and from there - Bologna!





Our AirBnb in Bologna was a bit of a walk from the train station, but because practically all of the sidewalks in the city are wide stone walkways under those portici, it was easy to roll our tiny suitcases over there! (We definitely appreciated this in hindsight, after Rome and especially Florence.) We rented an extra room in a couple's apartment - it was really nice and had everything we needed, including our own huge bathroom. After getting some tips from our super friendly host, we set out wandering. Neither of us knew much of anything about Bologna before we got there, except that they're known for their food and their university.







So we wandered! And it was great. We got delicious food - tagliere for late lunch (cheese & meat plate) and tagliatelle al ragu for dinner. We sat in a piazza as the sun was setting and might have accidentally dozed off on each others' shoulders because we hadn't slept in about 36 hours. There were lots of people around, lots of young people (huge university, after all). We wandered until it was dark out and decided we'd have to return to Bologna someday, for more than just one night!

day five: muyil and the best dinner of all

So, originally, I had a grand idea of visiting Chichen Itza on our trip. Then we realized that it would probably be a full-day affair and we might not have a full day to give up. So then we decided we'd go to Coba, another fairly large Mayan ruin that's only a 45-minute drive from Tulum. It's set in the jungle and all of the buildings are connected by paths - and you can rent bikes to get around! But then it was the night before our last day and we weren't sure that we wanted to spend half the day going up to Coba - especially because Molly & Ryan weren't interested in doing ruins two days in a row. ...And that's how it was decided that we'd go to Muyil on Friday morning! Muyil is only a 20-minute drive from Tulum, and I'd read good things about it before we came, so it was set. We left early, to avoid the heat and the tourists and make the most of the day! As it turned out, we didn't have to worry much about other tourists or the heat. The drive there was on a nicely paved highway without much traffic and we got there before we realized. We were the first car in the parking lot at about 8:30am. There were a few small vans that local tour companies use, but nobody was there on their own. I actually don't think we passed another group of people without a guide. After we paid our entrance fees (I think about $2.50 a person) we set out!









The Muyil ruins are completely different than the Tulum ruins - first of all, they're still in the process of excavating the site, so only part of it is open to the public! The whole thing still has a kind of buried-in-the-jungle feeling, so we felt more like intrepid explorers instead of tourists shuffling along a pre-set path. Of course there are trails throughout the site, and informative signs by all the buildings, but since we didn't see any other humans for most of our visit, it felt pretty different. Almost the whole site was shaded, which was also a nice change. When we got to one of the buildings farthest from the entrance, we were standing around looking at it, reading the sign, maybe taking a few photos. All of a sudden, we heard a huge crash in the trees - we'd been looking for birds all morning, but it was way too loud to have been a bird. It was a monkey! We saw it gliding through the treetops, using its tail like an extra arm! We looked at each other, then at the monkey, and then the monkey stopped and looked at us. I somehow managed to take a photo of it before it decided we weren't interesting anymore and swung off in the other direction. It was really cool! Our first (and only) monkey sighting - from reading about it afterward, a spider monkey.











We also saw a skittish animal called an "agouti" that kind of looks like a giant guinea pig that dashed off the second it saw us. And lots of cool birds! After walking around the main site, we went on the boardwalk behind the main building (the last image above). It's not part of the ruins site and is actually part of the biosphere reserve where we had thought about doing a tour. So there was an extra entrance fee - something like $2.50 again. When we set out on the boardwalk, it suddenly felt like we were really in the jungle. (Actually, we learned that the Yucatan doesn't have any "jungle" at all, in the sense of rainforest, because it doesn't rain all year round, but as you get closer to Belize it becomes wetter.) It was noticeably more humid, the plants were really dense and big, and everything was green in every direction. The boardwalk goes from the back of the main building in the ruins all the way to a lagoon. The lagoon was used by the Mayan people who lived at Muyil hundreds of years ago - the tour that we were originally going to do included a boat ride from the end of the boardwalk through a canal built by them that went out to the ocean!











We didn't end up walking the whole boardwalk - we figured since we'd just been snorkeling, and since we weren't planning on doing a boat tour, there wouldn't be too much to see at the lagoon. But! There was a lookout tower (mirador) about halfway through that was supposed to have good views of the area. It wasn't like the fire towers I climbed when I was a kid - the stairs to the top were hardly different than ladders. It required a bit of planning, especially when descending. When we got to the top, though, it was worth it! We could see the lagoons in the area and all the way out to the ocean and lots and lots of forest. Unfortunately, we didn't see any exciting birds from up above the trees, so after a few minutes taking everything in, we headed down and back the way we came. We were so glad that we went to Muyil, since it gave us a totally different experience of the area - we even heard the employees speaking what we could only assume was a Mayan language! I'd love to go back and do one of the tours offered by the communities in the area, where you get to visit the village centers and learn about their history (for example - chewing gum originally came from trees in the area, and was only made that way until recently!).









After our jungle adventure and hanging out on the patio for a while, we decided to go to the restaurant our snorkeling guide had told us about for dinner. He described it as being "not fancy, right on the beach, plastic chairs, not fancy bathrooms" and I was sold. We turned off the highway onto an exit that had no mention of the restaurant (we took this as a good sign), drove through a newly-developed area of fancy condos, and parked when the road stopped at the beach. It was more perfect than we'd imagined! It's the kind of place where you can show up in the early afternoon with your swimsuit, order some drinks and seafood, go for a swim, order more drinks, and just hang out all day. We'd eaten at the beach before (Pelican Pub!) but never on the beach. It was pretty much just a (well-appointed) shack and plastic tables. But the food! It was perfect. Maybe the best ceviche of our trip? Me & Matt both got fish and it was so fresh. I had a michelada (kind of like if you mix a bloody mary + beer) and it was tastier than the ones I've had around here. The food was great, but the atmosphere made it the best! We really, really didn't want to leave.























Eventually, we figured we might have to go back, so we left our friendly server and beautiful beach and came back to Tulum. Actually, it wasn't our last meal of the day - because we ate kind of early, and because wanted more delicious mojitos, we went out at night and got more mojitos and ended the night (and the trip) with the amazing al pastor tacos we had earlier in the week, sitting at the table in the alley next to the taco place. Kind of the perfect end to our trip?

It was such a fun vacation! And it was even better than I expected, actually. I think some of that was because it wasn't as planned as other trips we've been on. When all you do is worry about making it to see X, Y, and Z, it becomes more stressful and less enjoyable. It was kind of like our first trip to New York - we just kind of wandered around without any real plans and it was great! A nice mix of sightseeing and just walking through town or eating delicious food. So I didn't get to see everything I wanted to - a perfect excuse to return! And I do really want to return. It was just such a nice place with so many things to see and do, it's the kind of place you could go back to all the time and enjoy it more and more. Plus, plane tickets are just so cheap! So who knows - maybe we can even squeeze in a trip next winter if we carefully plan vacation days? New Years Day does fall on a Monday next year, and that's when vacation time resets...haha. This photo I took at the Tulum ruins sums it up:



I do believe it!!