Emz-the-geographically-variable

Due to a few delays, we arrived home at 23:00 or so and had to leave to catch a plane to Italy again at 07:00 the next morning. We quickly exchanged the contents of our bags, slept a few winks in our own bed, and were off again, this time for Milan. From there we made a pilgrimage to eat a pizza in the best pizza place ever (incidentally owned an operated by Chinese) caught a train to Loano, a small seaside town on the Italian Riviera where Gio’s family traditionally spends August. After cold rainy Scandinavia, I was quite overwhelmed by 34 degrees Celsius and everywhere sun and brightly coloured houses. I kept having to interrupt the constant stream of Italian with stupid exclamations such as “here there are so many colours!” Besides a bit of work I had to do to, we spent a few lazy days mainly swimming and eating. We tried to go for a jog once, but after exactly 8 minutes I was near death from the unaccustomed heat, and had to call it off.
 

Which is why I was a bit concerned about Gio’s plan to bike to France. We rented bicycles. Mine, the smaller of the two, was a mountain bike with thin racing wheels attached. Our friend Luca arrived (another Milanese who has been living in Leiden the past year), and we three went straight up the nearest mountain. It was painful, especially for me, as I hadn’t been on a bike for more than a month and am not very heat tolerant at the best of times. However, the view from 850m of the town and the valley below was well worth the effort, and I discovered, at the tender age of 25, why people invented skinny bike wheels. My bike was a small mountain bike with racing wheels attached, and even such as it was, was the fastest thing I have ever powered with my own legs. Snaking downhill I allowed the bicycle to get a bit faster at a time until I was comfortable it was sticking to the road in the turns and could be brought to a halt or safely ploughed into a cliff as necessary to avoid oncoming maniacs in larger vehicles. At some point, feeling like I discovered I could fly (I mean without an airplane), I decided to augment the speed a little. We reached eye-watering speeds of almost 60 kph.
 

The following day we packed up the bikes with our tents and other gear and went North, through all the small towns and the long smelly tunnels through the mountains. Somehow, the relative flatness of the first part of the journey along the coast seemed so easy compared to the mountain the day before we really flew. We stopped for lunch and to read and laze a bit, and to have an iced limoncello in a shady crack in an old town, but mostly just wanted to keep going. We passed into France on the first day! The campsite in the town of Menton is high on a mountain. A nice spot, but after more than 100 km of hills on a hot day, it was a bit of a nasty surprise. We made it, pitched the tents and had a shower, and walked back down to the town for a much deserved dinner and ice cream. After, we climbed again to the campsite, lay down, and slept instantly.
 

The next day we had the idea to go Monaco. (I always get confused if Monte Carlo is the city in the country of Monaco or vice versa, because as far as I can tell they occupy the same position and dimensions of the Earth’s surface.)  We biked under the tunnel by the sea used by the Formula 1 race, which excited my male companions a lot more than me. As I understand it, Monaco is a tax haven for filthy rich bastards who do not wish to return any of their money to the various countries in which they have extracted it, many of them poorer countries, as evidenced by the flags hanging from the back of the multi-million dollar yachts the size of small cruise ships. We climbed another mountain to see the palace and the view from there, then headed home, passing back through France to Italy and finally catching a train somewhere around Sanremo as Luca had to be back in Milan by evening. The train station there was noteworthy for having about 4 km of walking underground using walkalators in order to find the platforms. Including the first vertical excursion, and the train station, our trip was 235 km.
 

Another day, we decided to visit a cave. For me, the motivation was to learn how to take nice photographs with my camera in a cave, as I will be living in one in a couple of weeks. It was quite a commercial operation. We were charged 11 euro and herded into the cave with 100 other noisy people, where they told us not to take pictures inside the first of the two caverns as there were some archaeological things inside: some footprints of prehistoric man (how do they date footprints? I still think they were from a kid who was in there exploring in the 1920s…), and some bones of bears that crawled in there, got damp, and died, in cooler times. Past these points of interest, I decided to take a couple of pictures of the walls, and was promptly yelled at. I shortly found myself in an animated discussion in Italian about the ludicrousness of the rule: why no pictures? Because the operation had sold the rights to a TV company! This event marks my first argument in Italian with a stranger – an important milestone (kilometerstone?) in the road to linguistic competence. In any case, the cave, although beautiful, is a bit of a disappointment because it is impossible to appreciate natural beauty under these conditions of stupidity and overcrowding. I hope in the next one I have some minutes to experience it more deeply.
 

It turns out that being able to respond to annoying strangers in their own language is kind of empowering. I left Italy before Gio as I had to leave for Russia and had a Russian guest coming to stay. The train to Milan was full of little compartments with 6 seats in each. I was the last to enter my cabin, and there was no room for my enormous backpack (which contained my stuff, most of Gio’s stuff and our camping gear). Someone suggested I leave it in the narrow corridor outside, as this is apparently common procedure. I did so, but conscious of being in the way,  I got up and held the backpack in our compartment’s doorway at each stop while people passed. At one stop, one of the people who got on, a man in his sixties with a small wheelable suitcase, lingered near the door for several minutes. Even long after the train recommenced its journey, he remained there. Finally, I decided to put the bag down and sit. Shortly after, he came down the corridor muttering and complaining irritably about my bag in the hall. I moved it for him, and as I stood aside, retorted in Italian, “You know I was waiting for you for like ten minutes, eh?” Sudden silence!

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