55.4 Kilometers.
In the morning, Akila and Simone drove me back to the cafe, and we said our goodbyes before I started my run out of town. The night before Simone had showed me a map of a sentiero that ran from Bologna to Firenze (I didn't know about it the day before), and while I had missed the first half of it, I was excited to get off the roads and back onto some mountain trails. I ran around a panoramic road around the lake (the one that I had swam in the day before) before finding a red and white trail sign that had "Bo-Fi" scrawled at the bottom of it. From then on, it was an amazing (and on occasion, amazingly difficult) Tuscan mountain trail. Basically, it felt like I was running through a scene from Gladiator...the whole time I was kind of expecting that a Roman soldier on a horse would storm out of the woods and cut off my arm. Didn't happen, but I did come across a pretty cool old convent in the mountains, where I stopped and had some lunch and something to drink. There were a bunch of nuns standing around with the black and white outfits, and it was cool to see them talking and giggling amongst themselves just like any normal group of girls.
After lunch, I was pretty tired, so I walked for a while to let my food settle. Even when I started running again, I kept having to slow down to a climb on some sections of steep uphill of slippery gravel and scattered branches. After conquering one of the last crazy uphills, I got to a meadow where I saw my first view of Florence. It was incredible. Nearly 20 km from my destination, I could clearly make out Brunelleschi's Duomo through the saddle between two mountains. To me, the city looked like an ancient kingdom, and I forged on towards it with a huge grin on my face. After some more big hills, I finally arrived in the outskirts of the city...I was 5 km away from the center, but I was too tired to run. I stopped and got some Powerades and struggled the rest of the way into the city, feeling like I would never be able to stand again...but somehow pushing forward.
When I got near the Duomo, I gave Pamela a call (Simone had given me here information the day before when I told him I was going to be in Firenze)...her housemate Gloria answered the phone, and I was almost too tired to speak coherent Italian. After some serious struggling, I got the directions to her house (another 5 km from where I was). After that, I sat on the steps of the Duomo for a while, gathering up the courage to make the remaining run/walk to their place on the edge of town. I got there a little after 8 pm (a long and slow day), and we had dinner together with their friend Paolo. After dinner, Gloria, Pamela and Paolo agreed that we should go get some gelato. They are all Buddhist, and before we left I sat in on them doing a pretty interesting vocal chant/prayer...the name of which I forget how to spell, but the importance of which they explained pretty well.
I ended up getting to bed around 2 am. I was woken up the next morning at nine by the sound of my phone ringing. It wasn't a strange Italian number though...it clearly said "Tristan"...and when I picked up, my friend and college roommate was on the other end. He was in Pisa...and he was coming to find me. After some working out of details with Gloria and Pamela, they agreed to let us both stay for another night (I had planned on taking the day off anyways) and Tristan took the first train into Florence from Pisa. We met around 1 pm in front of the Duomo...it was a serious shock for me. The idea of meeting someone that I have known well halfway across the world is a bit crazy...but somehow everything worked out, and there we were.
We spent the day catching up and going through Tristan's stuff, deciding on what he needed to toss and what he needed to get in order to be my running partner for a stretch. We went inside the Duomo and up to the top of the dome (from which we had a great view of the mountains I came from, and the mountains we would have to run over). We went around to a few more of the main sights in the city, and had a late dinner...again, it was pretty crazy having a friend here with me, so a lot of the time was spent just getting over that. At 10:30 we met up with Gloria and Pamela, and I had a shower and washed my stuff. We got to bed around midnight, knowing that each of us would have a big challenge in the coming day...but at least this time it would be a challenge for two.
04 August 2009
Days 73-74
03 August 2009
Day 72
40 Kilometers.
I had intended to leave Monghidoro around 9 am, but I slept like a rock in a comfortable bed...not waking up until after ten, and starting on my way towards Barberino after eleven. My clothes were still wet, my legs were tired and the pain in my shins seems to be lingering...so I walked for the first eight kilometers or so, crossing the border into Tuscany. The run was pretty hilly, and I was pretty wasted towards the end...but I got a good view of a beautiful lake while rounding a hill, so I knew I had a nice swim to look forward to.
When I got into Barberino, I walked the length of town trying to find the center...there didn't really seem to be one, so I stopped in the nearest cafe I found to grab something to drink. Dripping with sweat, I went to the bar and bought 2 Gatorades. I drank them both, and then drank one more. Once I had drank that, I asked the bartender to fill one of the bottles up with water. After I drank that, I had him fill up the bottle again. I seem to get pretty thirsty here, and somehow my stomach is able to expand to hold enormous amounts of liquid while my mouth remains dry.
I asked the man at the bar if he knew of the best way to get to the lake (a few km away) and he asked if I was going in a car. I told him my story, which was then subsequently told to another woman who was in the bar. After giving them the details of my website in exchange for directions to the nearest beach, Lisa informed me that it was her birthday that night, and that I should come back to the bar around 7:30 for some food and drinks. I said that I would do that, and headed towards the beach.
On the way to the lake, I stopped in a grocery store to get some cold pasta. Inside, there was a woman who worked for a milk company marketing cold chocolate milk. She started talking to me about the product, not knowing that I was sold on it before she even started talking. One more good thing about Tuscany: a local milk company that sells cold fresh chocolate milk in almost every store. Thanks Mukki.
I went to the beach and hung out by myself at the end of a long man made peninsula, napping under the sun in between rounds of swimming.
Around 7, I headed back into town, where I found an open running shop. I went in and talked to the guy about various running shoe models and about my trip, and left for the bar around 7:30.
Lisa announced me to everyone in the place, and the rest of the night was spent talking to a lot of the guests about the experiences that I've had on my trip. There was huge bowls of fresh fruit, pasta, and alcohol...so it was a pretty good find for me. Two of her friends, Simone and Akila offered me a place to stay at their house and before heading home we walked together to some ambulance volunteer festival that was going on in the town and got some fresh donuts.
At Simone and Akila's place, I took a shower and washed my stuff, and spent some time talking to them both about my past experiences and about the days ahead. Another lucky day, and some more new friends.
02 August 2009
Day 71
42.7 Kilometers.
Italy got beautiful. Not that it always wasn't...but today I escaped the busy chaos of the Via Emila and headed into the mountains towards Monghidoro, one of two stops on the way to Firenze.
I woke up around 8:30 and had some breakfast with Lorenzo. We said goodbye around 9:30 and I started wandering around Bologna to get some things done before leaving town. I needed to find an Internet point before leaving town, and I needed to buy a light pair of flip flops...I was three days behind on my posts, and my feet really needed to start seeing the light of day.
I stumbled upon a huge street market and started circulating the booths of cheap curtains, fake purses and foreign craft products looking for an inexpensive sandal solution. With the heat, my feet really can't be inside of a shoe all day. The cream I bought in Milano isn't really going to make things better unless I can let my feet breath...I've got a bunch of spots on the top of my foot, and two of my toes are starting to look like they belong to a rotting corpse. I'm not really that concerned though...I've had worse...wearing leather cowboy boots all summer while working in hot northern California will really mess up your feet.
I walked through the market, picking up various sandals to see how light they were. I found a pair for two Euros that were a bit heavy, but seemed like the best thing I could find. I went into a nearby sports store and briefly contemplated buying a 20 euro pair of very light women's sandals...but went out and bought the pair for two. I tore off the packaging and threw it away, and two minutes later found a lighter and cheaper pair in a 99 cent store. I hate to add anything else to my backpack, and these seemed like the lightest solution, so I bought them ("Quicksyver" brand) and returned the previous ones (without packaging) to the bin in the market without asking for my money back. From there, I went to an Internet cafe and spent a pretty long time working on a computer. I didn't get out of Bologna until around 3 pm.
I had a stomach ache and my clothes were not yet dry, so I walked for the first 8 k or so until I found a found a good bathroom and a pretty place to start running. The run was completely uphill, along a river in some beautiful mountains...but still on a hard surface two lane highway. After about 20 km, I started feeling pretty thirsty and contemplated how much it would suck to not find any water until Monghidoro...immediately I looked up and found a pipe of clean water flowing out of the mountain...some sort of divine intervention which kept me going to Monghidoro. For the last 9 km I broke away from the river and headed up a serious hill to Monghidoro. After having already done about 30 km of uphill, the grade basically tripled, and I really struggled to maintain a continuous run into town.
I got into town around 7, and was pretty satisfied to see that while the town was small, the streets were bustling with people setting up for a Friday night market. I went to a grocery store and bought a Gatorade and the typical three box pack of warm Nesquick and drank everything pretty quickly. I felt thirsty again soon afterwards, and (feeling like I needed some fruit) bought some sort of large fruit drink. I stumbled out of town and sat down on a hill to let my stomach settle...mixing all of those drinks didn't seem like a good idea any more.
Once my stomach settled, I went back into town in search of a bathroom, and went into the bar on the edge of town. After using the bathroom, I felt much better...and feeling thirsty again and obligated to buy something, I bought a cold bottle of Heineken. Despite how much I had already drank, I was still tired and thirsty from the run, and it was one of the best beers I have ever had.
The television in the bar was playing an awards ceremony for the swimming championships in Rome...the US team had won, and the Star Spangled Banner was playing. After the program was finished, the man behind the bar started whistling the tune, and I started conversation by saying "Sono Americano." Immediately the man dropped what he was doing and came over to talk to me about where I was from and what I was doing in Monghidoro. Tommy loves America. He has travelled there on 7 occasions and has seen about as much of the United States as I have. After talking for a bit, Tommy took a few minutes off of work to drive me to his house, where I took a shower and his wife made me some pasta for dinner. We returned to the bar, where he introduced me to his friend Claudio, who loves New York City and who also offered me a place to stay for the night. I spent the rest of the night drinking and speaking in Italian about how great the United States and NYC are. These guys knew so many places and facts about New York that most New Yorkers don't know, and I was pretty amazed by how much they knew about the country in general.
I went to bed around 1 am in Claudio's unfinished spare apartment (to which he had lent me the key). I had many fond memories of home running through my head, but I was simultaneously incredibly satisfied with where I was.
31 July 2009
Day 70
41 Kilometers.
I finally got to sleep, and slept until almost 10 am. When I woke up, I got ready and we went to grab something to eat near the Piazza Grande (another UNESCO site, by the way). I had a salami sandwich, a croissant, and a few glasses of water before saying goodbye and setting out on my way. I stopped after about an hour to grab some water from a fountain. At two hours I stopped again at a gas station to drink two Powerades and a bottle of water. I was thirsty again after about two minutes, and eventually stopped again to get a drink from another fountain that I found.
When I got into Bologna, I crossed over a river where some people were bathing. It looked awfully appealing, but solving a more important problem first, I went down the street and bought two bottles of gatorade. I drank them both, and still thirsty went for another. Then I went back to the river and went for a swim to cool off. It was also good to rinse off my shorts, because they had a pretty nasty white coating of salt and sweaty sunscreen.
I went to an Internet cafe and found the number of Lorenzo, my couchsurfing host for the night, and spent a little bit of time writing a post for the day three days before (I am just now getting caught up). I met Lorenzo at 6:45 in the Piazza Maggiore, and we walked around town, checking out one of the oldest universities in Europe (I think about 700 years older than Columbia, one of the oldest universities in the US). Lorenzo brought me through many interesting areas (including the leaning tower above), and we ended up getting a drink at the oldest pub in town. During our drink we talked about travels and about more cultural differences between Italy and the states. We spoke (in English) about the problems of dubbed films and television here (as in France and Germany, everything is dubbed here rather than subtitled). Until I got to France, I had never really realized that each American actor has a single person who always does their voice. Here, there is a voice of Stallone that is instantly recognizable as Stallone (and nobody has ever heard his real voice). The problem here though, is when the dub star dies and the real actor keeps making movies--how do you replace the voice of Woody Allen or Sylvester Stallone when it is the same voice you have heard for your entire life? I don't know...but I thought it was an interesting dilemma.
We went back to Lorenzo's apartment and had some dinner, and I washed my clothes under the sink and took a shower. Lorenzo had a fan and a comfortable sofa bed, and I got an incredibly good night of sleep.
Day 69
28 Kilometers.
In the morning, Angela drove me by the Calatrava bridge outside of Reggio (on the highway, a ways outside of town) before dropping me off on the Via Emilia where I had arrived before. On my way out of town, I bought a new charger for my phone...a much bigger and heavier version of the same thing (I was told in two shops that you couldn't find the small and practical one in Italy). The run was again a nice distance...not too long and not too short, and I ran continuously and pretty easily.
When I got into Modena, I went into a grocery store and bought my (now standard) 1.75 liter bottle of Gatorade and 1.5 liter bottle of water...I also bought an enormous slice of cold watermelon (a quarter watermelon was the smallest size they sold). I went out to a park bench and spent almost an hour drinking and slowly working my way through the watermelon, carefully dissecting it with my Swiss Army knife. Watermelon is amazing. A (somewhat crazy) woman sat next to me while waiting for the bus and I offered her a piece of my watermelon. She said no, and offered me some sort of candy bar, to which I said no. Then she started talking really quickly about how some people think it is chocolate, but it is gum or taffy and how chocolate is bad or something along those lines, and (somewhat lost) I just smiled and nodded (or shook my head, depending on what I determined to be more appropriate). Eventually she slowed down and I explained that I wasn't Italian, and we spent some time talking about my trip and about her daughter and all sorts of stuff. Eventually she got on the bus, and I headed down the street towards town. I stopped in an Internet cafe to check my email and got in contact with Filippo, my couchsurfing host for the night. We agreed to meet in a few minutes in the main piazza of the city.
I took my time getting there, and once we found each other, we went back to his apartment (nearby) where I met his girlfriend Christina, took a shower and washed the clothes I had on in the sink. I put on the dirty clothes from the day before and waited for the ones I had just washed to air dry so that I could change and wash again. This is life when you only have two t-shirts and two pairs of shorts.
While Filippo went to go play soccer, I went around town and got a beer with his friend who had had a year of high school in Alabama. It was amazing hearing an Italian person speaking English with a thick southern accent. She had even spent some time visiting Columbia, so we had a lot to talk about.
Filippo met us around 9, and we went to a cresceteria and got a typical sandwich of the region (with a kind of strange flatbread that I can only really compare to a somewhat crispy pita). Afterwards, we got a gelato (everyday gelato!) and went to an outdoor bar.
I went to bed around 1 and had a very difficult time getting to sleep. The problem here is that it is incredibly hot, so you have to leave the windows open and sleep with no sheets. However, there are also many mosquitoes, so sleeping without any sheets and the windows open becomes a problem. You are either hot or bitten...and while it would be a very easy solution to this problem, fans and screens seem very rare here. On a couple occasions around 5 in the morning I got up and went onto the balcony, and just stood there for a few minutes in the open air. Tired and frustrated, I wanted all the mosquitoes to come together in one giant human shaped mass so that I could punch it in the face. No dice there, so I just went back and tried to fall asleep to the tune of buzz buzz buzzing in my ear.
Day 68
28 Kilometers.
In the morning I went into town with Saša and he took a few pictures of me running with his fancy camera before I actually started running. Once again, the way was straightforward and easy...just like a regular run in the park (except I wasn't in the park, of course). I had left Parma fairly late, so I ran while it was hot and got into Reggio in the early afternoon. Thirsty and covered in salt grime and sweat, I asked someone on the street where the nearest grocery store was, and a few hundred meters later I was in an air conditioned "Esselunga" with about 3 liters of Gatorade and water and a cold cup of mixed fruit. From there, I went into the center of town and walked around to a few of the old churches. In one, S. Prospero, I was amazed by how beautiful the stone of the columns was...until I walked a little closer and saw that they were just painted to look like marble. There seems to be a real love of ornament here (even if tacky and artificial) in both architecture and fashion. I have to be honest though, it generally looks good from far away.
I spent a while hanging around in the park, doing some very rare core/drills barefoot just to keep myself occupied and to let my feet see the light of day. I spent some time watching some "drama kids" practice some crazy impromptu/mime/ballet, realizing for the first time that those awkward drama games are an international phenomenon.
At some point, I went into a grocery store and was excited to see some cold Nesquick on the shelf. I bought it just out of principle, because it isn't really something you find here. At the register, I spoke with the checker for a good 20 minutes about what it was that I was buying and why I was in town. When I finally cracked open the first little "Nesquick To Go" pouch and took a sip, I found my mouth filled with some chocolaty mess with a consistency somewhere between mousse and yogurt. What a terrible trick...thanks Italian fake chocolate milk marketing team.
Around 8 pm, I walked by a bar that was pretty packed with people about my age, and while I hadn't eaten dinner yet, I figured I should probably take the chance to meet some new people. After asking someone near the door, I found that the place had a deal where if you bought a drink, you could eat the buffet/tapas type food for free. A good way of killing two birds with one stone.
Somewhere down the line I found myself talking to two girls who were both named Julia, one of which was fortunately an architecture student, so I had something to talk about. They ended up leaving fairly soon afterwards, but after eating a couple plates of pasta, I sat myself down at a table with a group of their friends who had stuck around.
I spent the rest of the night explaining what it was that I was doing, answering questions and asking some of my own. One of the questions that I hear a lot here is "aren't you afraid?"...to which I answer "eh." I don't really know what it is, but whenever something is a little bit crazy on this trip, I just think about the reason that I am in that situation and am immediately relieved. This whole thing is my own creation, and it is because of me that I am here. If I ever feel scared, I just kind of smile and take the jump. I would rather take risks and live my life in a way that’s worth protecting than to spend all my time safeguarding something that I can't enjoy.
After we finished our drinks, we headed off to get some gelato and stroll around the city. I was with a great group of people, and after several changes of plan, I ended up with a place to stay.
At Angela's house, I took a shower and was too tired to wash my clothes (meaning that the next day I would have to wash everything). I went through my normal sleeping routine, except for when I got to the plugging in my phone part, the charger exploded in my hand and the power in the house went out. Luckily, Angela was familiar with where the fuse box was, and the power was back on in no time. For a couple weeks my charger had been making a funny sound sometimes when I would plug it in. I bought it in Amsterdam, so it was proper for the EU...I guess it just got tired of working.
I went to sleep around 1:30, tired enough to sleep despite the heat and the mosquitoes buzzing around my ears.
30 July 2009
Day 67
22.5 Kilometers.
A short run put me into Parma in the early afternoon. The distance was easily managed, and I was probably doing six forty miles along the same straight and busy road as the day before. Nothing interesting really happened until I was coming into town and a car t-boned another passing car, causing the front bumper to fly off and land 50 meters or so in front of me...an instant reminder of how wonderfully amazing the drivers are here.
I had set up a place to stay in town through couchsurfing, so I didn't have to worry about much. I gave Saša a call and started checking out the town, waiting until he got off of work. I went into a few churches and meandered around town, eating a gelato before walking through the Giardino Ducale. Eventually I went to an Internet cafe where I spent a few minutes checking over my emails before Saša came there to meet me.
We went back to his apartment, where I took a shower and washed my stuff. He had to meet someone in town for an hour or so, so when I was done with my shower I spent a significant amount of time reading over a photoshop manual that he had in the living room. I learned about a couple things that I hadn't heard of before...and won't believe until I see for myself (the possibility of importing 3d models and maintaining perspective?).
Saša and I went to dinner, and I got to eat some Parma ham and tortellini, both specialties of the region. After dinner, we bought a beer and sat in a nearby park with one of Saša's coworkers. Late in the evening, we went into a gelateria and took some of that back to the park to hang out. You really have to try hard here to keep a diet that consists of less than 10 percent gelato...the stuff is amazing.