It seems as though I've been all over the continent of Europe in the past few weeks, but I know that it is far from being over. Don't get me wrong, I love every second of it and I have come to identify myself as being a professional tourist.
To be a professional tourist, one must find the delicate balance between gobbling up the cheesey, famous stuff AND enjoying the not-so-famous hikes, walks, and nooks and crannies of the place being visited. I would say that my career as a professional tourist began three years ago in our trip to Berlin for the first time. We were taking a bus tour and it was very difficult to take pictures of the landmarks we were driving past, but me being the determined person I am, got good enough pictures from the moving bus. I said, "rule #1, a professional tourist will do anything for a good photo". And that's where it all began.
Three years and 10,000 pictures later, I have seen plenty more through the eyes of a professional tourist and am ready to take on the the arguably tourist capital of the world, Italy. One must know the ropes pretty well to take on a country so diverse and daft as Italy, and I get the privilege of taking it on.
We started our trip at four in the morning last Friday to beat the Pfingstferien (pentacost holiday) traffic; being of course the professional tourists we are, we knew that the whole of southern Germany would be making the mass Exodus to Italy and we knew to beat them by getting up early. The drive through die Schweiz (Switzerland) reminded me a lot of driving through Colorado, just overall nicer. Sorry, no offence Colorado. I also got the chance to exchange a few euros for some Schweizer Franken at a gas station that let you pay with euros but gave you change in Francs. It was a little sleazy because the Swiss franc is worth considerably less than the euro and I only got the change back that I would've gotten if I'd payed with francs, but that's the price you pay I guess.
We were able to tell that we were out of Swizerland, not because of the big sign, or even the the border drive-thru, but rather because of the fact the the tunnels through the mountains were considerably less fancy Tha. Switzerland and the buildings were no longer built to survive the next nuclear war. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Milan is a beautiful city, it's just that Switzerland does it better than Italy I guess. Anyways, after the twelve-hour drive, we finally arrived at our Ferienwohnung (holiday apartment) in Firenze (Florence, Florenz in German). It was burning hot, but luckily air conditioning is a must-have in Italy, unlike in Germany, so we won't have to completely die in these next two weeks. We hit up a near by grocery store to stock up on suplies and I got to hear some Italian spoken.
I haven't heard too much of the language, but so far my gist of Italian is that it's a lot like Spanish but way more fun. Joern thinks that it's more like French, so I'm not quite sure who's right, but I guess we both hear what we know.
Yesterday was our first full day of professional tourism and we hit up a village about an hour away from Florence called San Gimignano. San Gimignano is famous for having lots of towers that families built at one time to show their greatness over each other and also for the archery match the happens once every year between the green and the blue sides of the city. One knows this because of the flags displayed along the main promenade through the city. Being in Toscana (Tuscany), the landscape around the village is also gorgeous, so of course we had to make a short two hour hike out of our trip to see more than just where the amatuer tourists hang out.
Today I got to photograph what is probably one of a professional tourist's biggest wet dreams. You guessed it (or not), today we went to Pisa. It was totally awesome to see it for real, but besides the tower, the church, and the dome there isn't much else to see in Pisa, but the nearby city of Lucca; however, is much more interesting and has, in my opinion, much more personality. In lucca, we went up one of the many church towers that make up it's skyline. The one we went up was really cool because it had trees at the top and there was a steel door on one of the landings near the top that you could use to lock people on the top. But sadly, Joerns mom wasn't as excited as we were to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
After walking around the city for awhile, we stumbled upon a sunglass store that was having a decent sale on some name brands. It was funny because we had been talking about buying new glasses tomorrow when we go shopping in Florence, but fate has it's own plan and I ended up buying a pair of super cool 60€ Polaroids that weren't even on sale. Joern didn't instantly fall in love with anything so he will still be looking tomorrow when we go into the city. After the sunglass store, we walked a little bit on the Stadtmauer (City wall) where we may or may not have gotten yelled at by the Polizia for going too close the the edge which, mind you, was a four meter fall. Then we headed back like horses to a stable to the air-conditioned car.
Tomorrow we go to Florence, the next day we go to Siena and then to Rome.
Today is 5 June 2017
Nat
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