A Roman Holiday (senza Audrey Hepburn)

Yesterday, I decided to use my day off to go to Rome with a couple friends (for the purposes of this blog, I’ll call them the Canadian and Georgia Boy).  We planned to go to the Vatican Museum in the morning (one of my friends had a brochure that advertised a tour starting at 9:15, before the museum is open to the public), so we got up really early to take a 5:57 AM train into Rome.

Unfortunately, when we arrived at 8:30, at the meeting point advertised in the brochure, there were no tour guides at all (this actually didn’t surprise me, since I had checked out the website on the brochure, which was nonexistent, and I had tried to send an email to the address listed on the brochure and it bounced back to me).  Undaunted, we started walking around the line that had already spanned about two city blocks, even an hour and a half before opening.  We figured there had to be some tour guides hawking the crowd, getting people to skip the line and go in the group entrance.

No such luck.  We arrived at the museum entrance and found another line going in, this one clearly of tour groups, since many of them were dressed alike or had little walkie-talkies around their necks so to better hear their tour guides.  That line wrapped around the city walls from the opposite direction than the general public line, so we decided to try to find the end of that queue and possibly get onto a tour there.

The tour group line was even longer than the public line, spanning about 8 city blocks.  By the time we found the end, we were halfway around Vatican City from where we had started, and there were no tour hawkers to be seen.  Frustrated, we decided to just walk the rest of the way around the wall to St. Peter’s Square (where the Pope comes out and blesses people on Wednesdays).  We realized that since Vatican City is a different country than Italy, we actually walked around an entire country.  What an accomplishment!  But we still weren’t inside the Vatican, which irritated us.

When we reached St. Peter’s Square, we stopped to take lots of pictures.  I remembered all my Western Civ classes in high school, where we learned that Bernini ushered in the Baroque era by building this oval piazza, a far cry from the classical straight lines and perfect circles.  We decided while we were there to enter St. Peter’s Basilica, which houses Michelangelo’s famous Pietà (the first sculpture to actually show emotion on Mary’s face).  After going through the metal detectors (we were entering another country, after all!) and passing the clothing police (those wearing tank tops and skirts or shorts above the knee were not allowed inside and had to wait sheepishly against the wall for their friends), we waited in another line to get into the church itself.

The Canadian saw a sign pointing to the tombs of the popes and noted that there was no line to go there, so we followed him down the stairs.  We passed all sorts of sarcophagi and marble plaques of long-dead popes (and even not-so-long-dead:  we walked by John Paul II’s headstone, decorated with fresh flowers and flanked by two guards who had roped off an area for folks to pray and mourn).  We were kind of wandering from room to room until we found one room that had no sarcophagi at all, but whose walls and ceilings were painted with all sorts of Baroque pictures and designs.  At the end of the room was a tiny, almost hidden, marble staircase, and the Canadian (those Canadians are so resourceful!) said, “Hey, this staircase isn’t roped off.  Let’s see what’s up here.”

We walked up the stairs, and lo and behold, we were in St. Peter’s Basilica.  How’s that for a back entrance?

The basilica took my breath away!  Everything in the church is made either of bronze, gold, or marble.  They allowed us to take pictures in the church, and it was hard to actually find one thing to photograph, since every inch of wall, floor, and ceiling was a work of art.  I did manage to get some nice pictures, though, and I can’t wait to get home to put them all on my computer.

When we got out of St. Peter’s, we took a look at the public line for the Vatican Museum and saw that it had nearly tripled in size since we had seen it at 8:30 (it was close to 11 at this point).  We regrouped and although the Canadian really wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, none of us really wanted to wait in line for hours for it.  We decided to go across town to the ancient part of the city, since I really wanted to see the Colosseum.

Since the Canadian had already seen the Colosseum last week, he decided to hang out in the shade while Georgia Boy and I took the tour.  Our tour guide was terrible!  She spoke English, but her accent was so strong (I still couldn’t place it…it definitely wasn’t Italian) that even with the little walkie-talkies they provided, I couldn’t understand half of what she said.  And whenever she tried to get dramatic, her accent got even stranger, and Georgia Boy and I kept giggling at her speech patterns.

Language barriers aside, I also feel like she was going through the motions in our tour.  Having given tours myself when I was in Newport, Rhode Island (granted, I was in costume and in character), I know when someone is tuning out and just parroting facts.  And boy, was she doing that.  And most of the facts she gave us was stuff I already knew from taking 3 years of Latin in high school, so I was really bored.  We had the option of getting a tour of the Palatine as well (that’s Caesar’s palace, the original one before Las Vegas), but both Georgia Boy and I had had enough of our tour guide, so we just wandered off to find the Canadian.

The sun was so hot and we found no relief in the shade, so we were all pretty cranky and not interested in walking around very much.  We walked over to the Circus Maximus (where the chariot races were…think Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur).  Unfortunately, the structure of the Circus Maximus is completely gone because in the Renaissance, the Roman citizens dismantled it to use the stones for houses.  All that’s left now is a grassy knoll with a huge track, but if you’ve got a good imagination, you can figure out what things might have looked like.  We took some pictures of the racetrack and Palatine Hill, and then we decided to call it a day.  It was time to take the metro back to the train station and get on the next train back to Spoleto.

I’m back!

Just wanted to let all o’ y’all know out in the blogosphere that I’m back from Hawaii and the wedding went just beautifully. I’ll write more about it, but I thought I’d just let you know to expect lots of pictures!

The Countdown Continues

So I’ve made my lists, I’m checking them twice (and three times, and four times), but I’ve really gotten a whole lot of stuff done in this past year and a half to get me pretty ready for the big day. One thing I’m kind of sad about is that my step-grandmother (who lives on Oahu) just had to go to the hospital with atrial fibrillation, so she’ll (understandably) not be able to attend the wedding. From what I hear, she’s out of critical care and on various blood-thinning medications, but there’s still a possibility of a stroke, and she’s in her 80s, so it’s not like she’s a spring chicken. We’re all pulling for her, though, and Ray and I will make sure to stop by the hospital and visit.

In the meantime, the show must go on, and I’m busily packing and cleaning and making sure I’ve got everything for our trip. We leave on Wednesday, so this will probably be my last post until after the honeymoon. Wish me luck!

Weddings and stuff

The only problem with waiting so long to write posts is that there’s entirely too much to say. In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “Let me ’splain…no, there is too much. Let me sum up. ”

The wedding in California was wonderful. There were so many factors that could have made it a disaster, but it ended up being a super-duper success. Of course, the bride called me while she was on her honeymoon and left a voicemail saying, “We’re in Oahu. Do you want us to do any cake tasting for you while we’re here?” which shows you exactly what kind of silly friends I have. I called her back and told her to go enjoy herself with her husband, for goodness sake, and not call me again while she was in Hawaii unless she wasn’t having a good time.

The following weekend, I attended another wedding, this time in Philadelphia, so no there was no need to board a plane or go through security, which is always nice. (I had forgotten the new “no liquids” policy coming home from SF, and the security guards confiscated a perfectly good unopened bottle of V8. Oh, the humanity!) The Philadelphia wedding was fun, but both the bride and the groom pride themselves on being rednecks, so there was a lot of country music played at the reception.

Since that’s really my only complaint, I’d say that wedding was a success as well. This gives me hope, since Ray and I have passed the 6-month mark, and more things are piling up on the to-do lists I keep getting from The Knot and The Wedding Channel.

Unfortunately, however, I can’t do anything on the list this month. I’m swamped with rehearsals for all kinds of concerts, including Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges with the New York Philharmonic, where I have an itty-bitty solo! Very excited about that, let me tell you. We had our first rehearsal, and I’m so happy the season has started on such a nice note!

Back with tons of stories

You know, before I went off on vacation nobody was really blogging at all, so I didn’t feel left out for not writing too much. But now that I’m back, I have discovered that all my favorite bloggers have been busily writing while I’ve been away. So here I am, trying to play catch-up, and not doing very well, since I’m looking at the clock and realizing that I have to leave to get to work.

So to tide you over until I get to the stories later on this afternoon/evening: the roof is done, and not a minute too soon, since Hurricane Ernesto (although it was a tropical storm by the time it got to us) came barreling through two days after my roof was finished. I went to a friend’s wedding in California last week, and when I came back, Ray whisked me off to Ocean City, Maryland for a couple of days. I went to work yesterday, but I really didn’t want to. And today I still don’t want to go to work, especially since it’s rainy and sort of a bleah day.

Oh well. Gotta pay the bills somehow. I’ll expand on my summaries in a bit.

One last story, I promise

The last Hawaii story that I have for you is that we visited the beach where they film Lost, and it’s a rather desolate and out of the way beach on the North Shore. My mom says there are different spots on the North Shore…she was going to take me to the place where the plane crashed, but she said they removed the plane when they wrapped this past season, so there’s really nothing to see.

She did, however take me to a beach in Haleiwa where you have to walk down this really obscure pathway and past tons of “No Trespassing” signs. She also said that when they are filming, there’s a security guard at the entrance to the path as well as a bunch of people patrolling the walks. Nobody was around when we were there, but there were a whole bunch of tire tracks in the sand.

Anyway, I couldn’t quite place this spot, but it looks awfully familiar. I think Jin fishes near those rocks a lot. So here I am, lost on the set of Lost. I’m also pretty sure this is the spot where Hurley and Libby almost had their picnic, before Libby went to go find some blankets and then got shot. Do any of you recognize the area?

Oh, and before I forget, we had a lot of geckos in our vacation rental, eating up the bad bugs. We thought they were cute, and none of them tried to sell us insurance, so we took a picture of our favorite one before he ran away from me and my camera.

More Belated Photos & Stories

Because I am really falling behind on my stories here, I’m going to try to skip over some of the more boring bits of our vacation. Actually, they aren’t boring at all to me, because we went to different sites to pick out our wedding spot, but they might be boring to you, because you’re not the one planning the wedding. However, I will let you know that although we have decided to get married at Waimea Falls Park, we have nixed getting married at the actual waterfall, because when we got there, it was so loud I had to yell for anyone to hear me. Can you imagine? “I do!” “Whaaat??” “I said, I DO!!!!!!!” “Sorry, I can’t hear you. What did you say?”

We finally decided on a more serene area of the park called the Upper Meadow. It’s got a lovely little stone stage with a backdrop of bright red ginger flowers. There are benches all set up, and our wedding consultant said most of the weddings are done in that area, so it’s obviously tried and true. And hey, we can always get our pictures taken at the falls, even if we don’t get married there.

And for those of you who remember Hawaii’s Noah’s flood of March 2006, yes, we do have a backup plan just in case it rains. There is a cute little enclosure closer to the entrance to the park called the Butterfly House that can be quickly set up as a contingency.

We also went to a luau on the Windward side of the island. Very touristy, but I’m glad we went, because I don’t think my mom would ever have gone otherwise. Ray called it the “Hawaiian Renaissance Faire,” because that’s really what it was. You pay an exorbitant amount of money to wander around, buy folk crafts and souvenirs (in this case, Hawaiian folk crafts), participate in some activities like lei-making or learning the hula or watching a guy climb a coconut tree, and then you sit down to a buffet dinner and watch a hula show. I sort of think of it as a cross between the Renaissance Faire and a theme park, because the slick hula show, with the microphones and the lights, made me think of my time at Busch Gardens Williamsburg.

Mom had a good time, as you can see. I think she was a little sad at the beginning because K. begged off at the last minute, and there were no ticket refunds. But once we decided to say screw it and started acting like tourists, it was a lot more fun.

At Long Last

After having come home from vacation to find that my computer had crashed beyond all recognition (those last two posts I had written at work…shh, don’t tell my boss), and also that Itchy had run away again, I have been in no mood to write any stories of substance about my fun and exciting time in Hawaii.

Since I’ve come home, I have gotten a new computer (yay!), recovered Itchy (I’ll write about that in another post, I think), and started rehearsals for Grendel. So it’s not like I’ve not been having adventures, it’s just that I only have a small window of time with which to post anything. So I guess I’m going to stick with the Hawaii stories for now.

We arrived at the Honolulu airport after a grueling 11 hour nonstop flight from Newark. The good thing about the nonstop is that it really does cut down on the travel time. The bad thing is that the flight just keeps going on and on and on and on…

My mom met us at the airport with her partner, K., and after we got the rental car, we caravanned to the North Shore of Oahu, where we would be staying for the next week. My mom had rented a beautiful vacation apartment for us, but when we got there, we could care less how big or spacious or close to the ocean it was; all we wanted to do was sleep.

In the morning, however, we went outside and beheld the beauty of this vacation rental called Waimea Wonder. I cannot stress enough what a great time we had there. We were in a two bedroom apartment, complete with kitchen, living/dining room, and wrap-around porch. The apartment itself was its own house and stood with the landlord’s house (also the same size) on the property.

When we walked to the yard behind the landlord’s house, we realized that we were right on the ocean. The backyard opened out onto a rocky shore, and there were two coconut trees with a hammock strung between them (Ray’s favorite part of the whole place). There were benches facing the ocean as well as a gazebo to take one’s morning coffee, I would assume.

It was like we had our own private ocean. It was so peaceful, and while we were out there that first morning, a monarch butterfly kept flitting around the garden, reminding me of my plans to have a butterfly release for the wedding.

We spent the first day recuperating from jet lag. Actually, we spent the whole week recuperating from jet lag, which made it all the harder to get back on East Coast time when we returned, but it was worth it. Ray discovered (of course) that we had cable with our TV, so he loafed around watching the Discovery Channel while I puttered around making breakfast.

My mom had stocked the kitchen with everything one might need, including fresh papayas and mangoes and locally grown coffee. Ray, who eschews all vegetables and most fruits (especially the exotic ones), had bacon and eggs for breakfast, but that just meant more papaya for me.

My mom and K. came over around lunch time, and we went “into town” to Haleiwa, which is the most popular tourist destination on the North Shore. Most tourists (and hotels) are in Waikiki, which is on the southern part of Oahu, in Honolulu, so the North Shore is a little more country, and the locals like it that way. They get their share of tourists, especially surfers, but the bulk of the tourists stay in Waikiki, where the hotel deals are.

We ate at the famous Haleiwa Joe’s and then walked around the rustic shopping area, where my mom pointed out an off-the-wall shop where the eccentric owner paints and carves old surfboard and other pieces of wood and displays them. There were large wooden painted birds hanging from the trees, angry-looking turtles painted as if they were coming out of the surfboard at us (perhaps some foreshadowing?): indeed, a whole garden of surfly delights. While we were touring the outside of the shop, we were approached by a very tall, friendly, black woman who either had purposely styled her hair into an Afro that stuck out almost ten inches around her head or, more likely, hadn’t combed her hair in a week. I can’t remember her name, but Ray called her Rastafarian Rita for the rest of the trip. She was very nice, although she clearly wanted to sell us some of the surfboard art, and she was the one who recommended that I buy a disposable underwater camera for snorkeling. If it weren’t for her, I wouldn’t have had those pictures of the fishies.

Well, now my time has run out, and my post has gotten way too long. So I shall say adieu until I have a little more time to show you more pictures and tell more stories.

More Teasers

For those of you who have been anxiously awaiting pictures and stories from Hawaii, I’ve been a bit busy because my computer died a slow and painful death. I do have a new one, thank goodness, but I’ve been loading all my extra software and stuff on it, and haven’t had time to blog.

That being said, here’s something to tide you over. I like to call this one “Ray’s view of Hawaii.”

Turtlebane

Just as a follow-up to my previous post, I did want to mention that I went back twice to the turtle beach to see if I could find another turtle and NOT freak out this time, but I didn’t see any. There was even a local guy standing on the beach telling tourists that they were definitely out there; all one had to do was swim out there, and they would come. But try as I might, I didn’t see any.

Ray says that the one turtle I had the encounter with told all the turtles in the area to keep away from the crazy flailing girl. I’m thinking I scared away all the turtles on the North Shore for two days. When we were driving to the airport, we passed the turtle beach, and I actually did see one out in the water, but we didn’t really have time to stop, and I didn’t want to get on the plane dripping with seawater.

More tales to come, attached to pictures, which I have yet to download from Ray’s camera.