The only thing I didn’t enjoy about Corsica was that it was like being in Hawaii by myself. Due to its romantic nature, the island was mostly populated by couples, and since there weren’t any hostels, I was pretty much alone the whole time. I did meet lots of the couples though since I became the designated picture taker at all the romantic overlooks. Knowing that Sardinia was going to be a similar experience, and that I’d probably rather come back to explore with a lover of my own, I decided to look into heading straight from Corsica to Rome.
As I mentioned in an earlier note, everything shuts down as of October 1st on these islands, which goes for the ferry service as well. My original plan was to go from Corsica to Sardinia and from there, catch a ferry to Rome. Well now I found that all the ferries that were still running went only to France, which means I’d not only have to backtrack, but I’d have to pay to get a train from France to Rome when here I was already just off the coast of Italy. I’d been told by fellow travelers that you could get cheap flights within Europe from one of at least four different discount airlines, and upon looking into this, I found that a trip from Alghero airport in Sardinia to Rome could be had for $40!
I bought my ticket, but now I had a new dilemma. I knew I could get the ferry from Corsica to Sardinia and that I could get a flight from Alghero to Rome, but I didn’t know how I was going to get the 80 miles from the ferry terminal to the airport. This was certainly beyond my ability to walk, and from my experience on Corsica, I had a good idea of what a cab ride that distance was going to cost me.
Similar to Corsica, everything on Sardinia shuts down in October as well, and no matter what web site I checked for trains or busses, they all gave me the same message: Service Terminated for Winter. I had given myself two days to get to the airport, and at this point I either figured I would hitch hike or rent a car. My goal was to at least spend less money getting from the ferry to the plane than I would have going all the way back up through Corsica to France and then back down Rome by train.
Not only did my gamble work, but I also found that my fears of Italy being more difficult for me than France were completely unfounded. As I was attempting to read the bus schedules on the side of the tourist information center with a “closed for the winter” sign on the front of it, a taxi driver came up to ask me, in English, where I wanted to go. I told him, “Alghero”, at which point he asked another taxi driver about the bus for Alghero. He replied that it leaves at 3pm from the station on the top of the road. Not only did they speak English in Italy, but to further differentiate themselves from the French, they were completely helpful! I loved Italy already. The bus, by the way, cost me five dollars and was one of the most beautiful bus trips I’ve ever taken passing by empty remote beaches, similar in beauty to those I’d seen in Corsica.
Since Alghero was simply to function as a transfer station for me, I set about getting several practical things done: Mailing some items, getting my haircut, and doing laundry.
I’d picked up a few things in Corsica including postcards. The international rate to send a postcard from France was $1.50 per card, which is just slightly more than the cost of the card itself, so I figured I’d just wait until I got to Italy to send them where it would be a bit cheaper. In fact, it costs $2.50 per card to send them from Italy. Since I had about a dozen postcards, it was beginning to look like I was going to spend, in postage, all I had saved in transportation costs earlier in the day, and that didn’t include my Corsica trinkets.
The Aussie girl I’d met on Corsica told me a story of trying to mail a package in Rome that required three separate trips to the post office, so I figured I was better off trying to mail something from this small island’s post office. While it was easy enough, when I put the package on the scale, the postal worker told me it was going to cost $110 to send the package to the U.S. I don’t see how these countries are going bankrupt! Still, I ended up paying for it because, in an interesting irony, while my plane ticket to Rome only cost $40, any baggage other than my backpack would cost $55. Besides which, I would have had to carry that stuff around with me for the remainder of the trip.
The haircut was a much better experience. My first thought about dealing with haircuts in Europe was that I’d go to barbershops to get the cultural exposure, hanging out and listening to the guys talking about all the political and social issues of the moment, but then I realized most of that would have been lost on me since I didn’t speak the language of any of the countries where I’d be getting my hair cut. Instead, I brought my own electric shears, which I figured would be cheaper anyway. I had acquired the appropriate adapter to make my shears fit into a European outlet, but apparently that didn’t make any accommodation for European current.
Turning on my shears, I immediately heard the motor operating at an unusual hum and began to smell burning plastic as smoke emitted from the casing. And just like that, it stopped working. I attempted to find another set of shears, but apparently people don’t trim their own hair in Europe, so I went looking for a barber. All I was able to find in the south of France were hair salons, and they wanted $30 to cut my hair, a price I thought a little steep for 10 minuets of a no-style-required shearing of my scalp. I forgot about my hair for awhile with plenty of other things to occupy my time in Corsica and the French Riviera, but when I got to Sardinia, the right opportunity presented itself.
The door of my hotel opened to the door of a barbershop just across the street, and in this case, I’m talking about a street of about 10 feet in width so I walked out the door of my hotel and practically into the door of the barbershop. While I still can’t say I understood a word being uttered, I was able to pick up quite a bit of meaning through all of the hand gestures that are a natural part of Italian communication.
Just the day before while waiting for the ferry, I laughed to myself as I noticed an Italian on a cell phone fully gesticulating to someone who obviously could not see all of his efforts on the other end of the telephone line. So it was, that my exposure to local culture in a European barbershop was realized. My experience was further enhanced when I got my head shampooed and massaged, scalp sheared, and finally, my neckline neatened up with a straight razor. What a delight to get a good old fashioned haircut, and I began to regret having shaved my face myself that morning. The barber looked at his work admiringly, and asked me what I though. I said “tuto bene” and paid him $15 for his artistry.
Navigating Rome is a challenge. As in France, a street can change names two or three times over the course of its length, but trying to use one of the maps you get from the Rome tourist office presents several more levels of complexity. For instance, to help you find the highlights, they print directly on the map three dimensional models of the places that a tourist would most likely want to find. The problem with that is that it distorts what street the actual building might be on, and you are left to circle all the blocks in the area to find the monument itself.
The map I happened to acquire had the streets nostalgically written in cursive. It’s hard enough for me to read normal type on a map with my detiorating eyesight, but cursive just looks like someone has graffitied my map as well the buildings I’m truing to find. Because it’s a tourist map, a lot of streets are left off, leaving you wondering about those three blocks you just walked when the map indicates one.
But Rome, in particular, is designed like a maze. It reminded me of the Louvre. Good luck ever finding again something interesting you saw and decided to come back to later. At other times, you walk around for 45 minutes and suddenly realize you’re back at an intersection you thought you’d left across town.
Then there’s the street numbering system. As in the U.S., they do odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, but in Rome, there is no natural break in the numbers at the end of the block. They just continue on the next block, so if there are more buildings on one side of the street than the other, the numbers quickly begin to get out of sync. For example, I had walked five blocks from the beginning of a certain street. On one side, the number was 33 and on the other side it was 78. Good luck trying to anticipate a cross street with that numbering system.
More unnerving in Rome than the street system, are the walking street vendors. It’s not so much that they proliferate the areas around all the tourist sites (in some cases it seems they even outnumber the tourists), but that they are all selling the same three items: silk scarves, glass blocks with the Roman Colosseum etched inside, and some children’s toy that reshapes itself into a pig after being flattened by the vendor throwing it onto the ground. So as you’re standing there for putting in your few minutes at each site, you’ll be asked at least three different times about buying each of those items.
What did impress me about the vendors is how quickly they switched from selling useless chotchkeys to selling armloads of umbrellas when an unexpected rainstorm came in. It was like magic. You couldn’t even find a chotchkey a minute after the rain began, and as soon as the rain stopped, the umbrellas disappeared.
There’s a certain comfort that comes in mastering a city: knowing its different subway lines, the most efficient way to get from one place to the next, how to cross certain busy streets using the subway tunnels, where to shop for the cheapest groceries, what theaters show movies in English, which line to stand in (there are three types) at the Italian post office. For me it’s a comfort that usually comes about my fourth day in a new city.
Likewise, I’ve found that there’s a certain amount of time I like to travel before I’m just ready to come home. That’s about three weeks, and since I was a couple weeks past that, I missed my friends and my home, and I had seen quite a bit of Europe (Amsterdam, Paris, Chamonix, the French Riviera, Monaco, Corsica, Sardinia, and Rome), I decided it was time to come home. As of 8PM Tuesday, I was back in the Pacific Time Zone.