In fair Verona, where we lay our scene...

We leave our hobbit hole

Thursday, 12 July, 2012

Verona's town gates

Today we spent the day in Verona.  Up early, walk to the bus, and then a three hour train ride.   It is past Florence, near Venice.  It is a very cute town, Italian and ancient.  Piazzas and campos everywhere.  They, like most Italian towns, have an amazing number of churches.  Verona, however, charges for most of their churches.  We had to make the pilgrimage to the fabled Romeo and Guillietta balcony.  Annie and I stood in the courtyard and quoted the lines from the balcony scene from the play!  That was fun.  And there is a statue of Juliet, that for some reason, everyone goes and gets a photo of themselves touching her breast--Randy read it was some sort of fertility thing and that mostly women do it (although that wasn't the case when we were there!).  Since I don't need to worry about fertility things at this point in my life (!), I declined.

Guilietta's balcony

Juliet herself (with a very shiny breast)

We did visit two churches.  One  because Joshua said that it was very pointy and narrow and that he had to see inside!  The other was the duomo.  They both had a lot of painting on the walls and in the side alters.  The painting is very elaborate and colorful.  The first church had a lower church in the basement--almost as large as the main church.  The duomo also had a lower church as well as a baptistry and another building with a chapel, and plastic windows to see 6th century foundations and mosaics that were found from a previous paleo-christian church that was once located there.  Those were neat to see.

Ancient mosaics under a church floor

The town puts on a Shakespeare festival, performing two of the plays and puts on an opera in it's own coliseum, so we saw the sets and some of the props for those performances.

After seeing those, we wandered the town, enjoying the traditional Italian feel of it.  We took several breaks in parks to waste time until our night train to Paris.  We left our big bags at the train station and each had our small bags with us.  We stopped at a grocery store for fruit and snacks for the train and at a cafe for dinner on our way back to the train station.

Walking down the streets of Verona

We reserved a couchette for our trip to Paris--it has seats that fold around to create six bunks.  Unfortunately, right after the train left the station and we were making our beds up, a man came in that had reserved the sixth bed.  So we had less privacy, but he got the bed we weren't going to use--one of the smaller bottom bunks (we had already made the other beds up).  I don't know if he spoke much English.  We were getting ready for bed when he arrived.

Friday, 13 July, 2012

Well, during the night we spent many hours at one of the stations  (fixing some mechanical problem or something) and a few more hours at  another station which delayed the train.  Then, when it was ready to go, daytime trains were running so they had to reroute to go around them.  We ended up going through quite a bit of Switzerland and France to get to Paris.  We ended up in Paris almost 7 hours late. They kept offering bottled water and brought around croissants and later candy bars for everyone.  Luckily we also brought food so we weren't starving, but it was a long time to sit and read in a small space.  And the flaps under the toilet bowls didn't close so they smelled horrible!  Our train to Verona had been a more modern train and much nicer.  This had air conditioning, but the air didn't reach the top bunks so we had to open the window flap at the top for awhile (which is very loud--you hear every passing train and station.  Unfortunately, we were supposed to meet the man renting us the apartment at 10:00, but we weren't there until after 4:00.  We called his phone from the realtor's office next door but it went to messages.  Then the realtor came and let us in the building so that we weren't outside waiting in the incoming rain.  Oh--about the weather--sixty degrees and cloudy!  In fact, by the time we went out walking it was in the 50s.  It was nice taking a warm shower and getting out to feel chilly!