Italy Day 4 (Assisi)

After our rude awakening and after my traveling companion had given the bathroom a good washing, we set off to explore the city that is Assisi. (Incidentally, I have pictures of the entire trip posted with captions online, but some of the photos are personal and I've been trying to decide how to handle this. At some point, I will transfer over the personal ones to a private album and only leave the public ones up and post a link here. However, until that day comes, I have to know you and you have to email me and request the link.)

Assisi is commonly associated with St. Francis, who believed that the church should be more interested in simplicity and not so pretentious in its displays. The city itself, is really rather hilly and you can't get much of anywhere without walking up or down, and it remains basically unchanged from more ancient times. It even still have the wall to the city intact. For me, this was much more like the Italy I had wanted to see, much less touristy and far more authentic feeling.

One thing we learned was that after doing Rome in three days, doing any other city was a piece of cake, more or less. We were able to walk the entire span of the city in very little time and the number of sights to see was far less compared to the ancient Roman city. This afforded me the time to take a long secluded three mile uphill walk (and hike) to St. Francis' private sanctuary. (They even still hold Mass in the woods up there.) Most people take a taxi to the Sanctuary, but my feeling was that if St. Francis could do it, I could do it.

The sanctuary is really an amazing area for nature lovers and they have hiking and biking trails that you could likely explore for many hours. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, I no longer had many hours. However, the journey up was a bit humorous to me, as lots of people making the walk up have hiking shoes and gear. I had basketball sneakers and a pair of cargo shorts, with my trusty iPod. I'd get to a resting point and take a two minute break and see a few hikers (usually from Germany) come up with their big packs and they'd look at me - this strange little fellow with none of the required gear.

Hours later, I returned (going down was so much easier than going up - except for the falling rocks) and we went to dinner, which was good because I had neglected to eat the whole day and had built up a bit of an appetite. The restaurant we chose was really cool. There were no other patrons there when we arrived and it was definitely off the beaten path. I had pasta and Italian sausage and my companion had rabbit, which she wanted me to try, but after having the sausage, there was simply no way I could do it. I simply could not bring myself to blemish the delightful flavor that was still swirling in my mouth. I have never had sausage that good. (Minor caveat - when I go to an Italian restaurant in America, I am always served bread and there is olive oil on the side with herbs in it. I was never served this way the entire time I was in Italy.)

The next morning, we left for Florence - the city that I awaited with great anticipation, after so many people (not the least of which being Jill) told me what an amazing city it is.

Italy (Night 3/Morning 4) Assisi

After exploring Rome for the third day, we boarded a train and headed to Assisi. For those of you that have no idea where I'm talking about, you can read more about it. Basically, it's a small city located in Umbria, but that probably doesn't tell many of you very much more than when I said we headed to Assisi. However, if you take a gander at this map, you can more easily see where I went. One thing I have to say about traveling is it sure will help you learn your geography.

So the train ride was basically uneventful. My traveling companion looked at me with raised eyebrow upon learning that I wrote in my journal everyday. Apparently, this somehow conflicted with the very serious reading she was doing across for me, or somehow didn't comport with what she felt a journal was meant to be. Perhaps a journal, in her mind, is only met to be updated with significant events - like meeting the Pope or witnessing a bank robbery - I'm not sure. All I know is that it clearly did not meet her approval that I was updating my journal again. I mean, it had only been a day.

So the train ride was mostly uneventful. We did meet a young Albanian girl traveling with her family who desperately wanted to make friends with us and talk, but there was quite a language barrier. This did not dissuade her from trying as hard as possible to teach us and I have to say it was immensely entertaining. It also helped keep my traveling companion from absolutely stressing out that we had missed our stop or were going the wrong way or some other ridiculous thing. As soon as we went through a stop that wasn't in her little book, there was no calming her down, and despite her professions that she was calm and it wasn't a "big deal", you could tell from her inability to sit still and her constantly looking everywhere from some sort of direction that she was immediately stressed. Enter the Albanian girl to set things right. (We had just been to the Vatican and St. Peter's Cathedral that day so I was pretty much feeling God was at work.) Now if you don't think that was divine, wait for what comes next.

There we are, waiting at our bus stop, outside the train station in the cold. (OK, it was probably 50, but for me and the other Italians there that's pretty darn cold.) And in walks the nun. Now seeing nuns, priests, and monks in Italy is not rare. I think they are about as prolific as ancient monuments in Rome, but I had never seen one waiting for a bus. She walked up to me and asked me what time it was. Upon figuring out that I didn't speak Italian and she barely spoke English, she stared at my watch with me and figured out whether she had understood what I had tried to tell her. My traveling companion came over a few minutes later and was able to communicate a little better with the nun and explained to her where we were trying to stay for the night. (We had no hotel reservations after Rome, so we were totally winging it.) Upon boarding the bus, the locals and the bus driver burst into a spirited discussion about where we should get let off for our hotel. They ended up letting us off one stop early, which was good because our planned stop would have involved walking down a whole lot stairs, and the nun walked us to our hotel. How cool is that? I decided God was totally on our side at that point, and we got to the hotel and got a room. We had to get a triple, which was a little bit more than the double we had planned on, but it was worth it.

We hadn't eaten dinner so we went to try and find somewhere still open. In Rome or Florence this would not have been much of an issue, as Italians generally eat pretty late anyway and 8 or 9 at night is just about the time they show up for dinner. However, in Assisi, getting food at 10PM was not going to be easily accomplished. We settled for whatever was open, and I think I had some sort of pizza. We had planned to sleep in the next morning. However, we quickly learned that was so not going to happen, as you could hear absolutely all of the outdoor sounds perfectly from our room - the car driving past, the people walking, the churches bells (oh, I said churches) - and all of them conspired against us sleeping anywhere past 7. So I got up to take our shower, which ended up being tricky.

Our shower didn't really have walls. It sort of had doors that were to act as walls, but if you were in the shower too long and the water was too high, you'd quickly overflow into the remainder of the bathroom. I quickly realized this before even getting into the shower and was very strategic in my water usage and showering. I came out and warned my companion. She came out a while later and informed me that she had more or less flooded the bathroom. Convinced that it had to be a problem with the drain, she later complained to the hotel folks, who sent a young Peruvian goddess over to mop up my companion's mess and provide us with new towels. (The next morning pretty much went the same way for my companion. She just couldn't quite seem to get a handle on using less water pressure or something.)

Clean and awake, off we went to explore the splendors of Assisi.