The world's disneyland

This one begins on a Wednesday night; James, Lindsay and I head out to the airport for our flight to Brussels. First experience with RyanAir and asides from the mad dash to get on the plane(no assigned seats), everything went quite smoothly. We landed and took a bus to one of the train stations where we had to walk another 20 minutes to get to the central train station, and then another train ride to get to where the Eurolines bus would pick us up. We met this nice man (28 though he looked 21) who was working in Brussels, but was born and raised in Mexico, studied in Canada for two years where he met his girlfriend who he then went to Spain to live with. He was an interesting fellow and pointed us in the right direction, since otherwise we wouldn’t have a clue where to go. We stopped for a bit to eat, Falafel and fries, than made our way to the Central station. After sleeping in the Central train station for a couple hours we headed for the north station where Lindsay and James napped for about an hour more. The bus ride was packed, slept most of the nearly 4 hour ride, and was dropped off about 10 minutes outside of the center of Amsterdam.
Then we were there. And it was love at first sight. Everything about the city was enamoring to me; from the efficiency and appealing look of the tram system, to the picturesque buildings to the beautiful parks that dotted the city. We had a bit of trouble finding our hotel and once we found it and got in it began to hail. We took that time to relax a bit from all the traveling. Once things cleared up we set out for a nice walk through the city. Cold and cloudy, but nothing could ruin my sparkling image of this Disney-esque place. Later in the evening we met up with Zach (from Villa Park) and Megan (Lindsay’s roommate) who had just arrived from there flight and went out for a night on the town.
The next morning began at a decent hour; we got our complementary breakfast and set out to the center of the city. After a bit of exploring we found ourselves at the Van Gogh museum. What an amazing man he was. Crazy no doubt, but an artistic genius, especially considering he didn’t want to be a painter until the latter portion of his life. He only spent about 10 years painting but managed to make 900 paintings, 1100 drawings and write about 500 letters. The museum curator set up the exhibitions in chronological order (I don’t know if that’s the norm, but it was my first visit to a museum dedicated to a specific artist). Ingenious and remarkable. It’s quite a shame VG had such powerful mental troubles, but the same illness that eventually caused him to commit suicide might have been the fuel for his passionate works of art. Later that evening we moseyed on over to the Red Light District. A place unlike any other. Beautiful women in all the windows, drug dealers swarming the streets, sex shows in every building. How is this place legal? I could never imagine such a place flourishing anywhere back home, but day in and day out this place is packed with people and is kept in check, at least on the outside, quite well. The rest of the night was spent walking around Leidsplein and eating the MOST delicious treats from Rene’s Bakery. Strawberry doughnuts, vanilla cream filled croissants, some random Dutch treat that I could never pronounce. Heavenly.
Saturday was spent meandering through the parks of Amsterdam. Vondelpark is a gorgeous, spacious park where locals run and ride their bikes, dogs enjoy rolling around in the wet grass, and tourists like us can just admire the low-laying clouds hovering over the pristine environment. We stumbled upon a film museum which was showing home videos from across the world. A Japanese foreign film was being shown at the time we came in, but certain complications kept us from being able to enter the theater. I also tried to imagine how much of the movie I’d understand as it was in Japanese with Dutch subtitles. Dinner was a struggle, as every meal is due to the enormous variety of food. From Mexican to Argentinean to Indonesian to Chinese and American and Pancakes and Kebabs and oh the choices. We settled on Chinese and feasted on a sampler platter of 5 of the most popular dishes. Some more exploring was done after the meal and the night ended at a somewhat early hour as Zach had to get up at 4 something in the morning.
A sad Sunday as I had to say goodbye to what had become my favorite place thus far. The ride back to the airport was another long yet bearable journey. Then an interesting and confusing event occurred at the airport. I was getting some shut eye waiting for the boarding call with my headphones on when I heard a large group of French people gathering at the gate. Now, we have all heard the jokes about the French being rude and the like but those were just words to me. Until this kind gentleman woke me up from my slumber (headphones on and all) and began repeating the word “Baptist”(now, figuring he was speaking French, as I fond out soon into the conversation he knew no English, I had no clue what this Baptist word meant, imagine the French accent and everything). This turned into a 5 minute discussion of me saying No, I don’t know what you’re saying and him repeating Baptist(maybe 50 times). By this point, all his little cronies where surrounding the 3 of us (James Lindsay and I) and laughing to themselves all the while not explaining what the hell was going on. Finally a nice girl sitting next to us spoke some English and asked us about what we were doing in Brussels and so on. She was warned by her friends not to say anything to us, but she was still thoughtful enough to engage us in conversation to divert attention from the asshole that had been badgering us. Now, does this make the stereotypes true of the French, of course not, its one isolated incident that could have been instigated by anyone, but does it help their cause. No.
Either way, this week has been a pleasant one, I have been feeling a lot better and been going out a little more. I just came back from Perugia today, where they hold the annual EuroChocolate Festival. Absolutely delicious. Fantastic idea though it required 6 hours of train rides for only about 2 or so hours of adventuring there. Well Worth it. Its now about 1:30 in the morning of Friday and I’m waiting for 3 to roll around so I can head out on my journey to Venice and Florence. Train ride up to Venice. All day Friday including the night, Saturday morning we are renting a car again and driving down to Florence for the day and night, then making a longer pit stop at the Ferrari Factory to actually look around, then make it home safely again and hopefully without going through the 30 kilometers an hour speed zones.


As always I hope everyone is doing well and midterms came back satisfactory. I’m a bit sad I wont be able to dress up in another ridiculous costume for Halloween this year.

Until next time

Ciao famiglia

Tarquinia Legend

So its midterm week, meaning the half-way mark of this Italian adventure. I have two midterms tomorrow morning; Italian and Intro to Music. Neither of the two figure to be terribly difficult and things have been going pretty well in both classes so I am not anticipating too much trouble. After the exams I have a few hours to get ready and then I head off to Brussels. I’ll be there overnight with Lindsay and James, and then we take a morning bus to Amsterdam and spend the weekend in Holland Bliss.

It’s been about a week since I returned from Oktoberfest and my body has yet to fully recover, in fact each day brings a new symptom and lessens the effects of the previous one. I’m still managing to get decent night’s sleep so at this point it hasn’t gotten too out of hand.

Last Friday the API group had a day trip planned to Tarquinia. It’s a quiet town about an hour outside of Rome with beautiful rolling hills and some nice vineyards. We started the day off with a tour of one of the bigger vineyards in the area. We got to walk through the grape fields and were giving the luxury of picking the grapes off the vine and eating them fresh. Afterwards, we headed over to an olive tree and the group picked olives for about 10 minutes. These olives were headed to become Olive Oil, which was another specialty of the vineyard. We then got to check out the family’s collection of pigs, which were used for….yes, ham, ham which we ended up enjoying for lunch. When this nice tour concluded, we set off for our bike ride through the town. We got to ride through the cobblestone roads and check out some nice, scenic views. At the end of this hour or so long journey we were taken back to the vineyard and were treated to an amazing 4-course meal, consisting of tomato and ham bruschette, vegetable lasagna, chicken and potatoes, and some sort of butter cream cake. This meal also came with a short lesson in wine tasting. They explained to us the process by which to properly taste wine and how to tell the difference between them. We were giving three kinds of red wine, and although it was a nice experience, I don’t think I am any closer to becoming a connoisseur in that field. After the meal, about 10 of us played a nice soccer game in the field, intense competition in which my team prevailed as victors. We then headed home and I took the rest of the night to relax and recover after a day of much physical stress. I believe this was the night I watched A Clockwork Orange. Crazy ass movie that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully comprehend.

Saturday began some time around noon. Tracy came over and we headed out on a day of sight-seeing in the southern part of the city. We stopped by a few churches, which were all incredible works of architecture and artwork. San Giovanni was the most magnificent one we saw, as it housed sculptures of the 12 Disciples along with several other rooms full of wonderful frescos and mosaics. Pictures of those should be going up soon. (side note – didn’t have the internet all week so Oktoberfest pictures should be coming up very shortly). We then stumbled over to the National Museum of Musical Instruments which contained various instruments since the 1500’s from all over the world. After that was John Legend.

The concert was held in one of the bigger Piazzas that I’ve seen. I’d have to estimate that nearly 10,000 people flooded this area. We managed to shimmy our way to about the tenth row of the standing room only crowd. When John finished, The Cure came on. Now, I guess I’ve heard some of their music, but apparently all the Italians that were there came to see The Cure, and didn’t take too well to John’s performance. Once John was finished we escape the madness before getting trampled by the drunken, raucous crowd. Oh, it was a free concert, too.

Lindsay’s Birthday today. Happy Birthday to her! Her parents are here and will be cooking dinner for her, along with the roomies and I. Her parents actually also treated me to dinner before my fast for Yom Kippur. A Thank you to them.

Ill be updating on Amsterdam as soon as I return. I’ll try to keep the posts a little more frequent.

Weather has been great here recently; hope the weather back home has been lovely as well.

Ciao Regazzi

Oktoberfest, and all the rest

Wow, what a ridiculous weekend. One of the longest, most unpredictable weekends that I have ever experienced. It was amazing, it was mind blowing, it nearly sucked every bit of life out of me. As usual we will start in the beginning, with day one of this adventurous journey.

Thursday. By 3 o’clock my excitement level had reached its peak for the week, for the last 4 days the only thing on my mind was going to Oktoberfest. We had friends that had gone for the past couple weekends and told us about all their great stories and all we wanted to do was get there and make our own. It was Henry, James, Matt (Henry’s roommate from Massachusetts), and me. Lindsay and her roommate Megan were meeting us there the following morning. So we set off for the flight, a 70 minute flight over the Alps which including some intense turbulence for a short period of time and provided free beer, which Henry took advantage of, eagerly wanted to get this beer drinking weekend started. We landed at Munich International Airport and headed for the train that would take us to the Central Train Station in the heart of Munich, a place that unbeknownst to us, would become our home away from home. After some confusion about how to buy tickets and which train to get on (with the policeman we asked for help laughing at us), we finally arrived and damn what an arrival it was. The station was full of drunk German’s, wearing their infamous lederhosen and parading around as if it were the Fourth of July back home. Our first mission was to get dinner, a Doner Kebab with a beer. Afterwards we headed towards the fair grounds in hopes of catching a glimpse of what our voyage was to entail. Nearly 11 pm an thousands upon thousands of people were still celebrating, drinking and having what looked to be the time of their lives. Singing and dancing on the main strip of road which gave access to all the tents of the different German breweries serving their massive glasses of beer. We found out the tents stopped selling alcohol about half an hour before we got their, so we took the time to enjoy some of the roller coasters while we were still sober, and thankfully we were as one of the coasters had 5 loops and a stomach ache would have been sure to follow had we have been drunk.

Now, since Lindsay wasn’t arriving until tomorrow, we did not have any sleeping arrangements, but had been assured the train station provided housing for hundreds of people on a daily basis. We heeded the advice and roamed around looking for a place to sleep. The prime spots were all taken, so we ended up finding a spot near the lockers we had initially put our bags. The floor was a little dirty, so to combat this obstacle, James found 3 pieces of cardboard and one big sheet of bubble wrap. And yes, those were our beds for the night. And what a terrible night sleep it turned out to be. Constantly waking up from the raucous of the opening and slamming of lockers, and sketchy people walking around giving us suspicious looks. Not to mention the guy who peed about 5 feet from where James was sleeping. Yes, our dignity had taken a massive blow, but it didn’t stop their. At 5:30, I guess it is a ritual for the local police to wake everyone at the station up. How? By hitting or kicking you while you sleep to ensure you understand the importance of getting the hell out of “bed.” Since we were no longer welcomed at our place of rest, we wandered the train station until we found the closest thing to home, the one saving light which probably surpasses the success rate of the North Star – McDonalds. We got ourselves a tiny breakfast and tried to continue sleeping at our table when we finished. We managed to get a bit of shut eye, but of course, an employee found it necessary to ruin our naps by waking us up and kicking us out. Next was Burger King (German’s LOVE American fast food). We tried our luck their, but once again sleep wasn’t happening, by this time it was 8 in the morning. 8 in the morning. Maybe a good time to eat breakfast for most people, maybe a good time to get some extra sleep for the night, maybe you have to get up and go to work. But if you’re in Munich during Oktoberfest, it means one thing. Pre-party time. Hundreds and hundreds of school aged kids flocked the station carrying cases of beer and wine, an hour before the festival opened they were already preparing for the long day ahead. We decided to join in on the fun and grabbed a couple beers ourselves while we waited for Lindsay and Megan to arrive. Once they did (mind you we had no form of communication and had to rely merely on pre-Germany strategy and luck) we said our hellos and the boys headed off for the fair grounds while the girls waited for more of their friends to arrive.

Friday – 10am. The lines to get into the tents were long, crowded, and worst of all, not moving. Not to mention we chose to go to HaufBrau house, which is the biggest and most popular tent there. After 2 and a half hours waiting in line, in the rain, on our feet, and after they ha already told us the tent was closed for the day, the security guards finally let in a stampede of wet, eager standby-ers into the madness. And madness it was. By noon, everyone in the tent was already hammered, standing on the benches, stein in the hands belting away the songs played by the band (located in the center of most tents). You would think a festival taking place in Germany would have the band playing various German tunes, and although there were about 3 chants that were repeated numerous times during our stay in German, the vast majority of songs played were old school American tunes. The one we heard first. Sweet Home Alabama. Wtf, right? EVERYONE knew the words, and all of them. Five thousand people, from all across the world, in unison singing songs about the Southland. Stunning. One of the recurring problems that the four of us had was that you must have a seat at a table to be served food or beer, because of the massive crowds, and the European Man’s infatuation for American girls, guys like us don’t have much luck in this scenarios. We haggled our way to our first round, before we found some friends from our API program at one of the tables who assisted us in gathering the rest of our drinks. Each stein consists of roughly three 12 ounce beers. By 3:30 the four of us were pretty drunk, having gone through 3 steins of Haufbrau’s best. We now needed to get some food. Henry worked some magic and got us each an absolutely scrumptious, mouth watering chicken. We spent the rest of our time their walking around meeting and greeting with random people, nothing too serious, and around 5 o clock, Henry and I felt like our time was done at this brewery. We left, and Matt and James stayed behind with the people we ran in to. Henry and I tried to get into a few other places; side doors, bribes, following people with ticket in, nothing worked. All the tents had closed their doors for the time being. So instead we went on Freefall, a ride similar to Supreme Scream, just not near as high. From the top of the ride, we could see the Alps, snow capped and majestic as had always been described. We thought to ourselves, damn we just got a pretty close up glimpse of one of the most infamous mountain ranges in the world. Lucky us. Boy, if we only knew ;). Exhausted from the long day and short night’s sleep, we headed to the train station where we parked it at our old stomping grounds an took a much needed nap for about 2 hours, only to be awaken by a Brazilian girl who told us how embarrassing it was to be sleeping in a train station. Now, she might have had a point, but as described earlier, there was dignity little left anyways and sleep was imperative.

After waking up and finding the rest of the gang, including Lindsay, Megan and her friend Allison who is studying in London, we finally headed back to our hotel room for what we hoped was a good nights sleep. But with nine of us in this tiny hotel room and a broken window allowing the near freezing temperatures to join us in our slumber along with rock solid carpet, we managed to yet again sleep poorly and painfully. Next morning was early to rise as we wanted to make the grounds by 9 am when the tents opened up. Today had Lowenbrau on the agenda, while the girls were heading to Haufbrau. By the time we got to the tent doors, a few thousand people were stampeding in through the entrance. We managed to slide on in before they closed the doors, but to our dismay there were no tables left for us to sit at. So yet again we had to work our magic to grab a beer.

Success was found after about 45 minutes or so of pondering with a German man who let us sit at his reserved table for a few minutes while we ordered our beverages. Then we decided to wander around the walkways on the outside of the tables and look for any friendly faces that would let us join their party. Took only a few moments until we saw the Phillies Jersey, along with the Sean John T-shirt, and we knew we had found a piece of home. We kindly asked to join them and the three of them, along with about 10 military guys who are stationed in the North of Italy. We conversed with them for quite a while, grabbed a few more beers, sang along with the music of the band and walked around mingling with whomever. Sometime into the day, I met Flo Simon, a Swiss of twenty something years of age, and a connoisseur of everything Amsterdam. We talked with him for quite a while and a couple of his buddies he had brought along. Soon after, the drunk munchies began to sink in, sot he four of us began to look for a location to order food from. We roamed around upstairs, in the private reserved section and attempted to make friends with anyone who seemed chill enough to not kick us out. Probably went about 0 for 7 as people seem to truly cherish their reservations and do not want anyone intruding on the multitude of empty tables. Oh well. Once again, around 4 I began to feel myself losing speed. James had roughly the same feeling as he had been falling in and out of consciousness for the past half an hour. So we both decided to head out and find our way back to that wonderful train station. After getting lost and ending up who knows where, we hopped on a bus that miraculously took us right in front of the station we had become so comfortable with. We grabbed a falafel pita and went to look for a place to rest our heads. Once again, sitting upright, we managed to fall asleep for what I think turned out to be about 2 hours or so of interrupted sleep, Interruption had been a focal point of sleep the past two nights, with my nap in the train station with Henry being the only other solid couple hours of sleep I had gotten. We then woke up and wandered the streets of Munich, and tried to sneak into the Haufbrau Brewery, where the beer is actually made. That was wildly unsuccessful as a big German security guard caught us about halfway between the rope and the door and kindly “escorted” us back out.

By the time we had gotten back to the hotel, we had no clue where anyone was and couldn’t get a hold of anyone either as we didn’t have phones. We figured we’d be the only ones back but to our surprise Lindsay and Megan had made their way home as well, and Henry, who had disappeared to hang out with some buddies that asked him to their table a while back in the tent, was also in the room, but only physically as he appeared to be in a world of his own for the remainder of the night. By the end of the night everyone had made it back safely and rest for day 3 was next on the to-do list.

5:30 Sunday morning. Matt James and I wake up and head to the festival for the last day of festivities. We figured it was our only chance of getting their early enough to capture some seats and enjoy the half day that lay ahead. On the train ride over there we met an Australian who told us about how the past 3 months he had been traveling from country to country in Europe, where he knew a relative or a friend that provided a place to stay and found him a job, and worked for a couple weeks at a time and then moved on to another country. He brought little money with him, so everything he spent was earned from his random odd jobs such as working in a vineyard in Italy and at some summer camp in France. He had no timeline for his return or any real itinerary for his next move. The most impressive part of the whole story was his age, 18. Didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life and he didn’t want to waste time or money at a university, so he packed up and left. Crazy.

We went to Haufbrau, arriving around 730 in the morning with a short line of a hundred or so people already waiting. The doors opened at 9 and the mad scramble ensued. This time we finally managed to come up on a bench to sit at, success never felt so good. We happened to be sitting with a massive group of Kiwi’s from New Zealand and Australia we provided us with the entertainment for the few hours we were there. 3 steins and a soup later, with Henry joining us around 11 or so, we decided it was time to leave to make it to our flight, which we thought was at 330 (“thought” is used to provoke foreshadowing). We didn’t go straight to the train station though, making some pit stops at the lost and found (Henry’s jacket) and of course we got lost. After finally making it there, getting on the train and heading to the airport, we go to check in counter on to find out our flight was actually at 305, and it was 250. Fuck. We tried to get them to let us through, but rules are rules, 40 minutes early or no go. If only the flight was really at 330. So we went to the ticket counter to ask about rebooking. The next free flight was Tuesday afternoon, but if we paid an extra 250 euro, they would put us on the 4 o clock flight. Since that was too expensive we said forget it and headed to the train booth to ask about times and tickets for a train ride. Monday evening and 150 euro a piece, so a little less expensive, but either way we’d be back on Tuesday. Forgoing that option we headed back up to the airline and asked them to rebook us for Tuesday. We would just stay in Munich for another two night and enjoy the nightlife sans Oktoberfest. On the way to the train which would take us back to the city center we walked by the row of Rental Car places, with the usual; Avis, Hertz, Budget and so on. We said, why not try and ask. But once again we were shut down, as no company had an Italian car (if we drove a German car one way it would be an extra 600 euro for transfer fees) along with the fact you had to be 25 to rent. But wait. Europcar. Rules are always different when dealing with Europe. The age limit was 19 and yes, they had an Italian car. How much? 25 euro a piece not including gas and highway fees. We found it, our way home. A stick shift, but Henry was more than comfortable handling that. And we knew the trip was less than 11 hours, as 11 hours is how long it takes the bus to make it home. We’d be home by 5 in the morning no problem! We bought a map and were on our way. The parking lot was full of beautiful rental cars from BMW to Mercedes to Alfa Romeo. We thought this won’t be too bad after. Then we saw her. The Fiat. Squeezed car with a max speed we would learn to be around 85 mph, but at least we had our way home. Along the way we drove on The Autobahn, through the Alps, Austria and into Italy. Nothing but beauty for the first few hours. We had been making great time, never really getting lost and driving at a comfortable speed. Then we reached Tuscany, and one wrong turn after another, one windy narrow street after another, one 40 kilometer sign after another, we realized this journey was far from over. We did happen to drive by the Ferrari manufacturing building, which we had planned on another trip later this month, but it was late and dark and we just drove around the outside streets. Henry, our driver for the past 7 hours or so had been fantasizing about this moment so it was nice to give him something to keep his eyes from closing. Around 4 in the morning Henry could go no longer and we stopped on the side of the road to take an hour nap. I had been sitting shotgun the whole time, and had yet to sleep either, while Matt and James enjoyed the back, occasionally getting some shut eye along the way. Once we made it out of Tuscany it was only a few hours to home. I finally decided I have to try and take the wheel as Henry was at the end of his energy tank. Although I stalled a couple times at one of the toll booths, I put in a solid hour of driving while Henry slept and he took over the driving as we made our approach to Rome. 10 in the morning. 3 pit stops, one nap break and 16 hours later we arrived at the airport to drop off the car. What a fucking trip. Now, as gruesome as I made it sound, Tuscany was actually beautiful, tons of sites for prime camping and a lot of beautiful little cities and homes scattered throughout the region. All that was left was a short train ride back.

I don’t know if I summed it up the best way I could, the weekend was a bit hazy for much of it, and sleep-deprivation definitely hindered the memory. All-in-all in was a wild, glorious adventure of a lifetime and I would recommend it to anyone who has any chance to try it.

Im feeling a bit sick today, Tuesday, and I’ll be taking this week pretty easy. Tarquinia group trip on Friday which includes a nice bike ride through the country side. And I was just informed that John Legend will be performing for free somewhere in Rome on Saturday. So Ill definitely be trying to make it there. Our internet at the apartment isn’t working and probably won’t be for a little while, so early apologies for any late responses to people.

Midterms next week. Not that Ill be stressing too hard with painting and management not having mid terms. Then Amsterdam next Wednesday to Sunday with Lindsay and some others. Need to be well rested for that one ; ).

Hope all is well for everyone at school. Absence does really make the heart grow fonder, I am missing you all.

Upset the Angels lost, Go Tampa Bay??

Ciao regazzi