Contiki Chronicles, Day 11: Machine Optional

Day 11 was a good day, if I may say so myself. I bought a belt.


Anyway, this was the day we got to explore Florence! We started outside some cathedral and/or church dedicated to some saint or something, and from there we walked down an alleyway (of which there are many in Florence) to this place:

Leonardo Leather Works. If the name doesn't give it away, they make leather and leather products. While inside, we got a brief talk on all things leather, before they sent us into the shop to buy some of their many many leather products.

Leather is pretty cool stuff, by the way. I mean, what is there to NOT like about dead cow skin, treated in chemicals until it's suitable to be worn as a jacket or belt?

...I might sound like I'm bitter or something, but in reality I don't actually care that much. But I did get some good tips on how to tell fake leather for real leather. Or at least, in Florence, anyway. Y'see, Florence is kind of famous for its leather, and where you get really good quality stuff of anything, you can also get really crappy knock-off stuff of the same thing. Hence the streets of Florence are filled with hawkers trying to sell fake leather goods to Tourists by claiming they're real leather. This is actually illegal (or at least I'm pretty sure it is), so it's kind of funny watching them all scatter when a cop shows up.

Anyway, the city of Florence has a number of laws in place to help deal with these people. For example, every leather product in the city has to be labelled (read: burnt into the leather itself) as such, and to label something as leather when it is, in fact, NOT leather is as crime. The hawkers get around this by getting strips of real leather, branding them, and slipping them inside the pockets of fake leather garments. Since the strip is technically a separate object, they can claim that it's real leather without (technically) breaking any laws.

Another thing the hawkers do in their pursuit of forcing fake leather goods upon hapless tourists is that they move around the city every single day, so that they're never in the same spot when your new leather jacket falls apart at the seams and you try to go back for a refund. In the same way, you can tell that if the shop you're buying stuff from has wheels, it's probably selling you fake merchandise. The only way to be sure you're getting real proper leather is if the store is, say, AN ACTUAL BUILDING, and preferably if the brand has some guarantee that they've been making leather for seventeen generations or something, so you can probably assume that they know their shit.

Two more things about fake leather: Suede (the underside of leather) is actually impossible to replicate, so if you can find any of that on your product, then it's most likely real. That's not as easy as it sounds, though, because most products have the Suede on the inside to protect it, and because the outside is the better part anyway. So if you cut open a leather jacket to find it and you find that it actually is real leather... well, you've just made a massive hole in a perfectly good leather jacket.

The other thing that they'll try to do when trying to get you to buy fake leather goods is they'll claim that real leather doesn't burn, pull out a lighter, and then demonstrate by trying to burn their apparently "real" jacket. Just so you know: THIS IS A MYTH. LEATHER IS MADE OUT OF DEAD COWS AND DEAD COWS ARE HIGHLY FLAMMABLE. Furthermore, fake leather burns as well. What they're doing when they pull out the lighter is that they never hold it over one spot on the leather for long enough that it will catch fire. If they ever try to scam you this way, ask if you can give it a try. Chances are they'll say no. Plus, if they say yes, then you can have fun burning fake leather.


Anyway, that's enough about leather. I left that shop with my brand new leather belt in tow, and then we headed over into one of the main-ish squares in Florence: Piazza della Signoria (thank you, Google maps). This is where we started our city walking tour of Florence (or Firenze, as it is called in Italian - although I'm pretty sure that's also the name of a centaur from Harry Potter). Anyway, he was telling us the history of the city, and I've mostly forgotten it by now. I do remember that the entire city, back in the day, was one of the more powerful city-states in Italy, because the people here kind of invented banking and were therefore really rich. That let them bring in a lot of artisans and whatnot from all over the place and the entire city prospered. There were also a bunch of really famous Florentines, and there's a square lined with statues of a whole heap of them, such as this guy:

Yeah, that's right. GALILEO GALILEI. YOU KNOW, THE FAMOUS GUY? YEAH, HIM.

Oh, and the only other one I got a photo of was Machiavelli, because I freakin' love the look of pure evil on his face in that statue:

Other famous Florentines include Dante (of Inferno fame), Da Vinci (you know, the guy with the code) and Michelangelo (Otherwise known as the dude with the really sore back from painting ceilings all day).

Anyway, I actually can't remember a lot of the history of Florence. Maybe it just wasn't interesting enough for me to remember. Well, whatever. We saw a bunch of really cool stuff, such as this one area which had been bombed in WW1, and was now almost completely rebuilt. And this one bridge which is completely covered with shops and pickpockets and tourists. And finally the Duomo of Florence, which is basically this one ridiculously massive (and I mean MASSIVE) cathedral in the middle of this huge square which as nothing but the Cathedral in it. 

Seriously, this thing is huge. Like, it takes ten minutes to walk from one end to the other. I'm not even sure of the reason why it's so ridiculously massive. It just is. This is the FRONT side:

So, after the very enlightening and exciting walking tour of the city in which I learnt an immeasurable amount about the city and its history, we were given the rest of the day to explore. This one other guy and I made it our mission to hunt down the Leonardo Da Vinci Museum. Which we did, after much searching. It was down an alley at the ass end of the Duomo, and it was marked by a single sign that we missed the first time we saw it. Inside though, was pretty cool. We paid like €5 to get in, and then spent the next hour or two looking at wooden productions of a bunch of Da Vinci's sketches.

Here are some pictures:

...Okay, that's a lot of pictures. But, in order, they are (or at least, I'm pretty sure they are): Horse drawn plow/harvesting mechanism, Some kind of crank-powered boat, A FREAKIN TANK, attempt at a flying machine, some kind of wood-cutting thing, a ball-bearing thing (like the sorts they put in roller blade wheels, except bigger and made of wood), something I'm pretty sure was a crane of some description, A GODDAMN CANNON, Another attempt at a flying machine, wind powered boat (which may have also flown, who the fuck knows?), a frame for another flying machine (with bonus wooden man), and the coolest damn clock I've ever seen. Seriously, pictures don't do that clock justice. I'll see if I can dig out the video I took of it at some point.

So yeah, Da Vinci designed a lot of stuff. Like, a hell of a lot of stuff. And some of it actually worked.

After that productive hour or two, we headed back to the square where we started the walking tour - Piazza della Signoria. Why? Because there were a bunch of statues in that square, and I didn't get any photos of them. I still didn't actually, except for one. One of a very, VERY famous statue:

Michelangelo's David (WARNING: NUDITY BELOW).

So yeah. It's a statue by Michelangelo, and it is called David. Hence, Michelangelo's David.  As one would assume, it is in fact a statue of David, from the Bible.

Although... this isn't actually the real statue. The ACTUAL statue of David is in a museum with a ridiculous line that you have to pay to get in to and you're not allowed to take photos. So that's why I'm not complaining that this is in fact a fake statue.

Oh, and you know when I said I only took one photo?

I lied.

Because I'm secretly 12 years old like that.

(I actually really, REALLY want to just end this post there, like that. But alas, more things happened that day. It's almost over though. I swear.)

So after our day in Florence, there were three things: A photo shoot from a lookout point above the city, dinner, and then a trip to Space Electronic Discothèque, the biggest Nightclub in Florence. Dinner was alright, but the Nightclub was pretty crazy. I drank some unholy number of Long Island Ice Tea's, and also introduced myself to the B-52 shot - equal parts Bailey's, Kahlua and Grand Mariner. Goooood stuff. Also works well as a cocktail.

I got a bunch of photos from the night, but a rather disconcertingly large number of them are of one of my friends hooking up with this one chick (who he actually met the night before, and spent the night at her place). I think the one which sums up the night the most is this one here:

I don't know, but there's something about that photo which perfectly encapsulates everything there is about going to a nightclub.

I think I'll leave it there for tonight. I got home safely and slept fairly well. Day 12 should come along eventually.

Contiki Chronicles, Day 10: ITALY!

At long last, I finally decided to get off my ass and start writing these things again. Although by this point it's been almost 9 months since all the stuff happened, so my recollection may be a little... rusty.

Anyway.

Day 10 started with us leaving Antibes and heading south. After some amount of driving, we exited France, and crossed over into Italy. Our destination? Just a little city in the more northerly part of Italy, by the name of Florence.

But first, a stopover to gaze in amazement and awe at one specific tower.

A little note about Pisa: The place is famous for its Leaning Tower. But something that isn't as well known about the place is that there is LITERALLY NOTHING ELSE TO DO THERE. Seriously. You go in, check out the tower, take the obligatory photos with you in weird poses and then get the hell out because that place is hot as fuck.

Speaking of photos:

I don't know what you're talking about. Clearly that tower isn't leaning at all. It's just everything else is.

Okay seriously though, there's the tower. Now you don't need to go all the way over to Pisa to see it. When they built it, the city was basically doing it to show off their wealth. But what I gather happened is that they just so happened to build it on the worst possible place, and with improper foundations. Meaning that when they were three quarters of the way through building it, it started to lean. They kept building it though, and you can see that the upper floors are sort of angled in regards to the floors below them.

There's also this big ass lawn out the front that you're not allowed to step on, meaning that the road becomes clogged with tourists, and every twenty minutes a Police Officer and/or Security Guard has to come and yell at people for being on the lawn and doing stupid shit like this:

Yeah, that's a human pyramid in front of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, because why the fuck not? I think making stupid poses in front of the tower is sort of like the unofficial pastime of the entire City, and all tourists are required by law to pick it up whilst in the city. Which is why I discovered a hobby of taking photos of people in stupid stances from a totally different angle, without the tower in the background. Kind of like this:

Because it cracks me up the amount of stupid shit people will do if they can get a photo of it.

Oh, and here's another photo of the tower, because why not.

It's seriously not leaning at all. I don't get this country.

After lunch, we cleared that hell hole of a city, and got back on the bus and after much more driving, arrived at our destination.

Now, Florence is a pretty cool city. But we'll get to that tomorrow, because that's when all the stuff we actually did in Florence happened. That night, we went to a karaoke bar, I drank a 2 litre jug of Long Island Ice Tea almost entirely by myself, and ended up not being as drunk as I'd expect, but still pretty drunk. That was a good night.

I'll try to update some time between now and three months from now with day 11. 

Contiki Chronicles, Day 9: Nice is... Nice.

Right, so this was the first full day on the French Riviera. Also, coincidentally, the last full day on the French Riviera.

We started off with a trip to a perfume factory - the brand produced here is called Fragonard (or something similar), and they claim to be as good as most of the top-name designer perfume brands around, but cheaper because you're not paying for a famous brand. Or shipping. Or other similar stuff. Not being an expert on perfume I wouldn't know, but after the very brief tour of the factory I bought an extra large bottle for like €56 as a Christmas present for Mum. Don't tell her though, because I shipped it home and it hasn't arrived yet. How about that.

So after all that was dealt with, we went on to Nice for the day. Um... That's Nice as in the city. Pronounced neece but spelt differently. Like the female child of your sibling.

So yeah, with that hopefully unnecessary pronunciation guide out of the way, what is there in Nice? Well, the entire French Riviera area is practically a massive vacation/retirement spot for fairly wealthy types. Thus, it's an incredibly prosperous area and it also has a pretty nice beach. Which is where I spent most of the day.

Anyway, I didn't get any photos of Nice itself, but here's some of the general area, so maybe you can see why it's so popular. (Apologies, I took these from the bus, so there's a lot of window glare/reflections in some of them.)


Um... I'm unfamiliar with Blogger for iOS, so I'm not sure if those photos are in the right place. Also, there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to display a photo from a URL, so I had to do a bit of a workaround. So sorry if there's a drop in quality, as well.

Oh, okay, so the photos are down the bottom now. Stupid google can't make things user-friendly...

Anyway, in Nice I realised that I'd lost my towel in Pamplona somehow, so I had to buy a new one. I found the biggest mall in the city, looked in every store for towels, and then finally found some for like €10 in a shop five minutes walk down the road. I then promptly went down to the beach, where I was freshly accosted with the horror that is European stony beaches.

See, because much of the European coast is in some sort of bay or something, there's a significantly less amount of tide action. The result? Less erosion on the shores, meaning you get rocks instead of nice fine sand. And this is a problem for a couple of reasons. Firstly, IT IS NEXT TO IMPOSSIBLE TO SIT COMFORTABLY ON A BEACH MADE OF ROCKS THE SIZE OF YOUR FIST. Secondly, when you decide to get up for a swim, WALKING ON THOSE ROCKS IN BARE FEET IS INHUMANE TORTURE. Thirdly, because of the way the tide works with rocks instead of sand, the actual ground drops of ridiculously quickly. So you can be eyeball-deep I'm salt water about five metres from the shore. And that doesn't sit well with me because I prefer to be able to know where the ground is when I swim. And also when you get out you literally have to climb over a pile of rocks to get out of the waves. AND THEN YOU HAVE TO WALK ACROSS THOSE ROCKS WITH BARE FEET AGAIN. AND THEN TRY TO GET COMFORTABLE AGAIN ON THOSE SAME ROCKS.

I think we're spoiled for beaches in Australia.

So after a somewhat mixed day on the beach, we dried ourselves off, went back to the campsite, got changed, ate food, and then got back on the bus again. Our destination this time? Monaco. Yes, that's right, the world's second smallest country, the city of which is practically its own Formula One race track, the country with only two industries: Gambling and Real Estate. The home of our source of entertainment for tonight: the Monte Carlo Casino.

Now let me just say, if the French Riviera is the home of rich people, then Monaco is where the richest of them all end up. Apparently, the country has the lowest poverty rate in the world, and also the highest number of millionaires and billionaires per capita. And if I had any photos you might be able to see why it's so popular. But unfortunately my camera ran out of batteries, so I couldn't take a photo from the amazing viewpoint we went up to just before we went to the casino.

Actually, interesting thing about the Monte Carlo casino: we were told to dress nicely, and act calm, and even then we wouldn't have much of a chance of getting in - apparently Aussies and Kiwis are a bit too rowdy for their liking, and they'd be checking passports at the door. Well, not only did they not even bat an eyelid at any of us as we walked through, but they didn't even stop us to look at out ID's! Still, I felt pretty cool all suited up walking in there. I bought a ridiculously expensive cocktail (€16!!) and then proceeded to lose €30 between the roulette and the video poker machine. Fun times.

So after an hour or two in there, we went back to the campsite, some drinking probably occurred, and I went to bed. Tomorrow we leave for Florence. Yay!


Oh, and here are those photos now:

Contiki Chronicles, Day 8: France again

So on day eight, we headed once again out for another travel day. Today we were off to Antibes, in the French Riviera, and we stopped for lunch and a look around in a small(-ish) town by the name of Arles.

Arles is a small town down the far south of France with not enough shade and some nice views. In fact,  this was where Vincent Van Gogh made his home and painted a fairly large number of his paintings. On top of that, the region is apparently famous for its lavender, and also has a large amphitheatre, left over from when the entire area was occupied by Romans. It's also on a river of some kind, which constitutes my entire lot of pictures of our stop there:

There's also a picture of the amphitheatre on the shot glass I bought there, but I wouldn't put a lot of faith in it's accuracy.

So we stayed there for a while, had lunch in the form of baguettes bought just off the main square, sold to us by a girl who was cute enough that I regret accidentally not giving her enough money... I think. The math made sense at the time, but after we sat down in the shade I began to think it through a bit more.

Anyway, soon we were off again for the town of Antibes. We arrived at the campground, and were promptly greeted with what I'm fairly certain were mimosas, for what amounted to no apparent reason. Maybe to celebrate our first week of tour, or something. So anyway, we didn't do much for the rest of the day, although the guys went down to the beach (which was a lot farther than we thought) in the evening to play some touch. Of course, since the entire beach is all pebbles, we made the executive decision to instead play in the car park where, despite it being about 7pm and quite dark, we had to make way for cars on at least ten separate occasions. On the way back, we stopped by the town's resident theme park - the aptly named Antibes Land. And then I think some drinking happened and then bed.

And that's it for today. These travel days are always so easy to write. I'll get day 9 up... at some point.

Contiki Chronicles, Day 7: BarceloNA? How about BarceloYEAH!

I promise I'll stop making puns on city names soon.

So today was the day in Barcelona. Which, by the way, is a really nice city.

We were dropped off in the middle of the city at the top of La Rambla, which is kind of a big long street with lots of shops and whatnot. Having seen the outside of Gaudi's church - La Segrada Familia (or The Sacred Family), we then decided to head off to see the inside.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

We took the metro to the church (and here's a good time to point out that Barcelona's metro system is surprisingly easy to use. Although that's to be expected. if it were hard to use, nobody would use it), and when we arrived, well... Take a look:

This is the outside of the church from the walking tour around it the previous day:

Actually wait, first. A bit of an explanation. As the name implies, La Segrada Familia is a church dedicated to the family of Jesus Christ. However, that's kinda irrelevant to the point I'm getting at which  is the fact that the outside of the church is divided into three facades, each representing a different part of Jesus' life: The nativity, the passion, and the glory - birth, death and resurrection, in that order.

So here we go, starting from the Nativity facade, and working our way anti-clockwise through the facades:

The Nativity Facade:

The Back. Nothing much to see here:

The Passion Facade. This is the side that has the ticket booth for entrance to the church:

Aaand the Glory Facade:

Did I mention the Glory Facade is still under construction? It's going to be the biggest and well, glorious of the three facades, and it still isn't complete despite the fact that construction started on the church in 1882.

So there you have it. you have four sides, each with a wildly different architectural style, with the Nativity opposite to the Passion, and the Glory at the front.

So here's the sight we saw when we came out of the metro station:

That's one the side of the Nativity Facade. Remember when I said the ticket booth was on the Passion Facade side? Yeah. that's the same line. 

So we then decided to head on back to La Rambla. Not wanting to waste a perfectly good €2 worth of metro ticket, we decided to take the opportunity to walk back. Noting to ourselves that this particular Barcelonian (Barcelonan? Spanish.) monument was actually off the map we were given. So we promptly got ourselves slightly lost (but not too lost!) and ended up back where we started with little gained but some exercise. Which we promptly remedied by eating lunch at McDonalds.

So with our bellies full and balance restored to the universe, we - 

Wait, I've forgotten something.

BEFORE we decided to waste our time at a church we didn't get to enter, we were taken on a nice little tour of Barcelona's Gothic Quarter. it's a nice place - lots of winding streets with narrow passages, easy to get lost in. We walked past the place where Christopher Columbus first unveiled American Indians to Europe, and sooner or later ended up in a very nice little square somewhere.

It was a very nice square:

Peaceful, even:

Well, that is, until you saw the bullet holes:

Turns out this particular tiny little square was the site of a brutal scene from the Spanish civil war. Unarmed civilians were lined up against the walls of the church, and shot in cold blood. The height of some of the bullet marks suggest that even some children were present that day. Although the height of the others suggest that they just weren't very good shots. Or perhaps some soldiers intentionally aimed high to avoid having blood on their hands. I'll probably never know.

So back to the present, and we are now walking down La Rambla. It's an incredibly busy street (and you'd better keep a close eye on your possessions) but for some reason today there weren't quite as many street side stalls as there are. I mean, there were still a lot, but I wasn't accosted to buy something or other every ten steps.

We ducked out of the street for a bit to look through a bunch of covered markets, and for a while we just wandered around in there, looking at everything there was:

It was while we were here that we were stuck in the middle of a very Spanish peculiarity: Siesta.

Now don't get me wrong. The idea of Siesta is pure genius. Have lunch, close the shop, go the fuck to sleep for two hours, wake the fuck up, and get the fuck back to work. What more could you want?

Well, at least, that;s the point of view from the people actually taking the Siesta. As a tourist, all you get from this experience is two hours where you can't buy anything, and the slightly odd felling of standing in a crowded market, and suddenly realising that not only are three quarters of the shops around you now closed, but there is suddenly a lot less people around. Like so:

No wonder their economy is so messed up.

So we walked out from under the covered markets (without buying anything on my part) and casually strolled down to the beach, where we spent the rest of the afternoon. The beach in Barcelona is one of the rarest sights in Europe: An actual, proper, SANDY BEACH.

Well, scratch the "actual" part, because the beach is entirely fucking FAKE. 

Yes, that's right, it's an entire fake beach. They opened most of the beaches in Barcelona when they hosted the Olympics in 1992. They also ship stupid amounts of sand from somewhere each year to replenish the sand lost due to storm erosion. Of course, it's all worth it because of the ridiculous amount of people that go to the beach every day.

Take a look:

If you look closely (or at all) you'll see that there are more people on that beach than there is actual beach. It's insane.

So we chilled out there for a while, went swimming for a bit, and pretty much everything else that happens on the beach. I should point out that it is a REALLY nice beach, with amazingly clear water - warm too, and the only problem is that the biggest wave is about twelve centimetres high. But you learn to deal with it.

...Aaaand then we went home, after several hours of the beach in which I got more sunburnt than I can ever remember being. Which was kinda stupid on my part. I was peeling for weeks.

Oh yeah, and on they way back, I saw this sign, which kinda cracked me up:

(I'll make it big so you can actually see it)

With that note, I'm off. Tomorrow is another travel day, to the French Riviera!