October 7, 2005
Adventures to and fro Rome Ciampino
"A bottle of your finest champagne!" I bellowed at the serving girl.
"Certainly, sir. Would you like anything to eat with that?"
"Absolutely! I want the most expensive meal you have. I don't care what it is. Just bring me the most overpriced item on your menu."
"Oh, I'm sorry, sir," she said. "Easyjet only have these grilled chicken baguettes."
"Then that is what I want. Bring a chicken baguette hence that I may feast like a king!"
The orange-garbed wench seemed a bit taken aback for a moment. She soon recovered and did a little curtsey and said, "Right away, my liege! That will be £10.50 all together."
I felt a little self indulgence was in order as I had just caught the flight by the skin of my teeth and was feeling somewhat overwrought.
When I'd arrived at Ciampino airport two days ago I had taken a taxi into Rome and have been cheated by an eccentric madman. He charged 85 Euros for a trip which a trip which I discovered later should have cost 40 Euros at the most.
His name was Tony the Taxi Driver and he drove in that irritating style some people have of alternately stomping his foot full on the accelerator and lifting if off completely. He repeated the process the entire time he was driving. Every couple of seconds he stomped his foot on the pedal and the battered white station wagon gave a little lurch.
Another little foible of Tony's was that he only seemed comfortable if one of his signal lights was on and the cab was drifting between at least two lanes on the motorway.
Now this may sound like old-fogey driving technique, and make no mistake - Tony was old. He wore thick coke-bottle glasses and had thinning white hair, most of it coming from out of his ears and nose. But he did not drive slowly. The speedometer lurched regularly between 130 and 135 km per hour depending on the elevation of his foot. Or at least it did until it quit from overwork and lay exhausted on "0" as we flew past Porsches and Ferraris.
And, just in case we were bored, Tony shouted at us the entire time he drove - an improbable tale about how he had once been hired to drive a Jaguar from Rome to London by a rich man who had broken his leg skiing.
I hate Tony the Taxi Driver.
After that experience, I decided there was no way I was taking a taxi back to the airport. Instead I decided to take the shuttle bus from the main train station. This was logistically a little more complicated. My flight was due to leave at 8:55pm. I'd planned to catch the 6:30 bus, but missed it by five minutes. I wasn't too worried, though. The next bus left at 7 and was due to arrive at Ciampino at 7:40.
At first things looked fine. The bus arrived and by 6:50 it was three quarters full. And then, inexplicably, we just sat there. And sat there... And sat there...
We finally left at 7:20 and immediately became stuck in the mire that is Roman traffic. Even running 20 minutes late we should have, in theory, got to the airport by 8pm. Instead we arrived at 8:25.
Coincidentally, this was the time checkin for my flight was due to close.
Sure enough, I got to the desk at 8:27 and the lone attendant at the desk refused to issue me a boarding pass. An anxious queue of others from my bus who were trying to make the same flight grew behind me as I used all my seductive guile and subtle menace to get her to change her mind.
In the end I resorted to mind control. I wiggled my fingers at her and raised my left eyebrow and gazed at her with my psychic mind control gaze and whispered, "the gate... the gate... phone the gate..."
"Just one second," she said. "I'll call the gate."
After a flurry of telephonic Italian, she put the phone down and said, "yes, you can check in now, but you'll have to run. They've almost finished boarding."
Foolishly, I believed this. I ran through the airport, mind-controlled and bludgeoned my way through the security queue, then ran again.
And found myself at the end of the longest queue in the world.
They had announced boarding but hadn't actually let anyone on the plane yet.
Right, well admittedly I didn't have much of a punchline there, but you can see how a fellow might feel both stressed and relieved in such a situation and be prone to making self-indulgent demands.
The champagne was bubbly and wet -- if a little warm. Fortunately, they gave me a full cup of ice which helped cool it down and made it even wetter. The chicken baguette was fresh enough and not too dry. I would rate it higher than the last chicken baguette I'd ordered from Upper Crust.
The big challenge will be how they fare against other budget airlines. Next time I fly Ryanair I'll have to order their finest meal as well. It will be a culinary battle of the air.
Posted by YandaMan at 8:41 AM | Comments (1)
January 9, 2005
Venice
I don't think I've ever visited a place that lived up to its advance billing so well. Venice is absolutely magical. I think part of it has to the do with arriving by boat. Getting on a boat somehow makes you feel you're on a journey that's a little out of the ordinary. It adds a certain spice of adventure. We took the water bus from Marco Polo airport, but you can also take a water taxi which might be even more magical.
The water taxis looked prettier and and they travel much faster. The water bus took slightly more than an hour to get to the San Marco dock on the far side of the island. A water taxi would make the same journey in half the time. If you can get a group of six or eight together, the price is pretty reasonable. A water taxi costs about 80 Euros in total. The water bus is 10 Euros per person. Either way, Venice rises out of the mists as beautiful and mysterious as its quasi-namesake Venus.
We arrived on the 3rd of January which was the first day of low season and had booked a room through hotels.com at the Palazzo Selvadego. Our room was absolutely stunning. It was a mini-suite just west of the Piazza San Marco. There was a little sign in the room that read "The Maximum price for this room is 520 Euros." We got it for £60/night. Deal of the century.
That night we went to Da Fiore for dinner. They weren't serving yet so we had a coffee in the bar. I fell immediately in love with the place because they gave us free cake with our cappuccinos. And, once again, I was humbled at the European facility with languages. The woman who served us from behind the bar spoke to us in perfect English and two other couples in perfect French and German respectively. Both the French and German couples spoke passable Italian anyway and the five of them (including the bar-woman) used this as a common language for a discussion that was apparently hilarious. (I was able to tell this because, fortunately, I can understand laughter in all three languages.)
For dinner we had a bit of a mystery meal. All we were certain of from the menu was that it was some kind of risotto. It turned out to be cooked with octopus ink and so was completely black. It was tasty but had we known we would have ordered a different wine. As any serious interior decorator can tell you, you should always have white wine with black food.
The next day we had lunch at a bar on the Fondamenta Minotto near the Piazzale Roma which is where the buses from the mainland terminate. Lots of working men popped in and out of the bar while we were there. They came in groups of four or five and usually stayed for just a few minutes. One group of five stayed for lunch, however. They ate huge amounts of food, especially this one tiny guy. He was probably only about five foot four and skinny, but he had a huge grey moustache the size of an octogenarian ferret. It obscured most of his face. I was amazed he got any food past it, and more amazed with just how much he managed to fit in his wiry little frame. He began with a mountainous plate of spaghetti, followed by a plate of tortellini, followed by a scallopini that hung off the side of the plate, followed by half of his neighbour's calamari. Or course, one explanation is that it wasn't a moustache at all. Maybe he really did have a ferret stapled to his lip. Vicki and I restricted ourselves to a shared starter of diverse denizens of the sea, followed by some delicious gnochetti al salmone.
After lunch we took the water bus to the island of San Michele which serves as Venice's cemetery. Vicki was keen to visit Diaghliev's grave, an impresario who revitalised dance in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. Diaghliev once said,
"I am... ...someone afflicted, it seems, with a complete absence of talent. I think I've found my true vocation: to be a patron of the arts. For that I have everything I need except money."
Despite the lack of coinage, he managed to bring together the Diaghliev Ballets Russes with Njinsky and Anna Pavlova supported by, amongst others, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev.
Stravinsky is also buried on San Michele and we came across his grave first. People had left some rather odd tokens on it: a piece of chocolate, some segments of orange, and the business card of a music teacher from Pittsburgh.
A rather sombre couple stood in front of the grave with whom we had a brief but strangely moving conversation.
"Are you musicians?" one of them asked.
"No," I said. This seemed somehow inadequate so I added, "My wife," indicating Vicki, "is a dancer."
He nodded.
"Are you a musician?" I asked.
"Yes." He gestured towards the grave. "He was the father to us all."
Diaghliev's grave was also decorated with keepsakes, including a pair of point shoes and what looked like a pair of clogs woven from reeds. He died at the age of 57, which made me think that perhaps he should have done less watching and more dancing.
After the cemetery we went back to the main island and wandered into the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni which has a number of paintings of Saint George. They're big on St. George in Venice. Everywhere you go there are depictions of him killing the famous dragon. I have to say, I'm not that impressed. The paintings we saw in the Scuola and later in the Basilica de San Marco are of a beast about the size of a big poodle. Personally, I wouldn't go around calling myself a knight if I couldn't dispatch a wee beastie like that. I certainly wouldn't expect to be sainted for it.
It was Vicki's birthday and so we had a fancy dinner in a wonderful little restaurant we'd spotted the previous night called Ai Gondelieri on the Ponte del Formagen in the Dorsoduro area near the Basilica di San Maria della Salute. Fantastic food, lovely setting, and, having learned it was Vicki's birthday, they wedged a large table candle into Vicki's dessert.
On our last night in Venice we went to the opera, " La Roi de Lahore" at La Fenice (pronounced La Feneechay, by the way). The building is stunning. It reopened in 2003 after being destroyed by a fire set, rumour has it, by the mafia. Unfortunately, we had terrible seats. Except for the stalls, the seats are arranged in boxes in a horseshoe shape. Most boxes have two rows of two seats. We were in the second row in one of the boxes on the side. This meant that while Vicki could see at least part of the stage, I had a lovely view of half the orchestra pit and the boxes directly opposite. Still, it sounded beautiful, and the building itself was gorgeous.
After the show we went a nearby restaurant called La Teatro and I asked for my first autograph. Shortly after we ordered, a large group of effusive Italians came in and we realised it was the cast from the Opera we had just (barely) seen. I had bought a postcard of the opera house to send to my boss. His wife used to be a professional opera singer and the two of them had met while studying music. I asked the two principals to sign it, which they graciously did. Later I added a brief postscript and sent it to my boss. Sadly, this gesture has yet to result in a raise.
We left Venice the next day. It had been sunny with clear skies the entire time we were there. It didn't seem overly thronged with tourists and the Piazza never flooded. All in all, a near perfect trip.
Posted by YandaMan at 10:56 PM