noise to signal

Rome - Florence, 17 November 2004

Finally, another travelogue entry! At this rate I'll be done sometime in 2006. But I digress...

All right, where were we? In blog time, of course, it's been a couple of weeks since my last travelogue post, but in memoir time we're still enjoying that first afternoon in Italy -- still in Rome, heading back to our hotel, getting ready to head for the train.

Earlier in the day, when we were heading out on our explorations, we had passed a pizzeria getting a load of oak delivered. We decided that was a pretty good sign -- and it was close to our hotel -- and went there for a mighty tasty lunch. It was so warm that we got to sit outside, under their tent. Did I mention how lucky we were about the weather?

Compared to most pizza I've had, the crust was much thinner -- almost cracker-like -- and the toppings were much more sparse. And, as you might imagine, delicioso. Mine came with an egg on it -- obviously cracked in the middle of the pizza just before it went in the oven, and cooked in place. A little weird, but tasty.

We were eating a little after the lunch rush, so our waiter was a bit bored, and spent a lot of time hanging out by the door watching people go by. He also provided the crowning moment to our cliché "first lunch in Italy": A late high school hottie walked by and they spent a few moments chatting each other up. As she walked off giggling, he turned back towards the restaurant and mumbled to himself: "Mamma Mia... Bellisima!"

After lunch, we headed back to the hotel, and they told us how to ride the bus to the train station. As it turned out, they didn't quite explain completely, but fortunately for us we weren't challenged, or we would have gotten a stiff fine.

After swerving through narrow streets and swarms of scooters for about half an hour we eventually made it to the train station, bought our tickets (accidentally getting swept into the "your train is leaving in 15 minutes or less" line), and headed out to the tracks to find our platform. Of course, this being Italy, they don't actually assign a platform until about 15 minutes before the train is scheduled to leave, but once we figured that out it wasn't a problem.

A little more tricky was figuring out that, yes, not only were we assigned to a car, we had assigned seats as well -- again, it wasn't immediately obvious from the tickets. This was representative of a conflict that I would have again and again while we were there: my go with the flow, whatever, Hawai'i personality was perfectly at home in Italy, while my designer side was screaming "Look, people! A tiny amount of information design would let you people be as chaotic as you want while still getting the *^#**! information across!!!"

But I digress. The train ride was pleasant; our seatmate's incredibly effusive cell-phone conversations ("Grazie. Oh, Grazie! Grazieeeeeeeeeee!") only added to the experience. To my surprise, there was no announcement that we were getting close to Florence... or that we needed to be getting ready... or, indeed, that we had stopped in Florence at all. See above for rant.

We got a little lost on our way to the hotel, in what was to become our Florentine Pattern -- we never did figure out the maze of twisty passages, all alike, around our hotel -- but got there eventually (spotting a laundromat on the way, which we knew we were going to need). While Becky napped, I took advantage of the free internet terminal (after figuring out the weirdo European keyboard) and checked e-mail.

Later that evening we headed out to a fantastic (and late) dinner at Il Cantinone on the other side of the Arno river. Aside from the great food, dinner included the entertainment of talking to a Senegalese bootleg CD vendor in a sort of pidgin of our mutual incomplete Italian, and my learned-by-osmosis (and lessons on Chinese television) French: "hai le musique Senegal? Ah, oui, Youssou N'Dour... quanto costa?"

We skated back into our hotel just before the midnight deadline (after which the front door would have been locked) and collapsed into our twin-beds-jammed-together.