Cinque Terre

Most people I speak to here in Malaysia have never heard of Cinque Terre. We too only found out about this beautiful cluster of five villages in the north east of Italy when I received advice from my colleague who visited this place a couple of years ago. After a bit of researching and viewing the many beautiful photos of Cinque Terre, we decided to add two nights of Cinque Terre into our itinerary. And we were so glad we did!

We took an early train from Rome, arriving late morning and stayed for two nights.

Cinque Terre marked as "A" above

Cinque Terre ("cinque" means "five" and "terre" means "land" in Italian) consists of five villages, all having the similar features such as colourful buildings hugging cliffs, vineyards and fishing as a main source of income. 

Had I not immediately named this picture, I would have forgotten where I took this! This is Manarola.

However, I think nowadays tourism contributes a large part of their income too since it was difficult to find a place to stay despite trying to book 1.5 months in advance. Each village was also packed with tourists when we got there. 

Streets packed with tourists

Another similarity is the narrow steep paths that coil around each village. Sometimes you never know where you'll end up, which was quite exciting!

Each village has a church that looks almost similar.

Usually at the front of the church, there is a little square for the congregation to gather, I suppose.

Most of the train stations in Cinque Terre are beside the sea so as you step off the trains, you're greeted with a gorgeous view of the sea.

Train station at Manarola

After visiting each village, we discovered each of them had their own charms, one has a beach, another is located on top of a hill so you have to climb many flights of steps to reach the town etc.

We stayed in Manarola, the second village from the main station La Spezia. We splurged on our accommodation but it was worth every Euro!

Our own private balcony with two deck chairs facing the sea

A picnic table where we had our meals overlooking the sea. KS enjoying the sea breeze.

The sea view from where you can see the other town Corniglia from here

The rocks are purposely placed there to calm the waters before it hits the cove where all the fishing boats are launched from. 

View from our window

So where is this place we stayed? It's called Vandiris Room #3. The view was so beautiful that I didn't want to leave to explore the village!

Here's the famous postcard shot Manarola is famous for:

If you stay in Manarola, it is recommended you eat at this place:

Recommended by my colleague, we made reservations on our second night (as they were closed on our first night). The place was packed when we got there at 8pm. However, the owner made sure we got one of the best seats outside, gave us two glasses of white wine while we waited for our table to be ready and the seafood was fresh. KS declared this restaurant made him decide Manarola is the best of all the villages!

The first day we arrived, we hung around Manarola, walking up the hills of vineyards and exploring the tiny paths. I also napped that afternoon, enjoying the cool sea breeze on a hot afternoon. Actually, it was the perfect weather to go visiting the other villages but we didn't know the next day was going to be cloudy and rainy. Oh well. 

So the next day, we took the train to the furthest village, Monterosso al Mare, the only village with a beach (two beaches, actually). This village was the flattest, with the least climbing required.

We made our way down south to the next town, Vernazza. We sat by the fishing boats and had our lunch here. 

Colourful fishing boats at Vernazza

View of Vernazza from the top

The next town was Corniglia. Sorry, because of your many many steps, I didn't quite like you, Corniglia. Still, it was a charming village.

See the zig zagging stairs? :(

Corniglia buildings facing the sea

Manarola was the fourth village from the north and the last village was Riomaggiore.

A dramatic "V" shaped cove with tall buildings on both sides.

If I were to do this again, I would spread my visit to the other villages on both days so that I spend a bit more time in each rather than a quick visit each. Since we visited the other four villages on a single day, my legs were aching by the end of the day!

The morning we left, a storm had hit Cinque Terre. Waves below our balcony pounded on the rocks. It was quite amazingly scary. So do take note of the weather if you are to visit otherwise you'll be limited in your activities such as hiking (the trails were closed when we visited the other villages) or swimming.

Would I recommend anyone to visit Cinque Terre? Definitely! Be prepared for a lot of climbing and hiking but it would all be worth it for the magnificent views. It certainly is a different part of Italy, giving you a short break from ruins, large basilicas, churches or ancient history. 

I liked Manarola, Vernazza and Riomaggiore but if you asked me to name them in order, I can't. This is more of by elimination (Corniglia is too steep, Monterosso is not steep enough - I'm hard to please, huh?).

We bade a sad goodbye and left for a day trip to Pisa before heading to Florence. 

For more information, visit KS blogpost on Cinque Terre.

Rome in 2 Days

Incredibly, KS and I squeezed quite a lot in two days in Rome. We did five (yes, 5) tours in those two days and would have gone for more if we had our third day.

So here's what we covered:

Day 1:

We took a Skip the Line Tour covering Museum, Raphael's Rooms, Sistine Chapel, St Peter's Basilica from Viator. It was packed with people and we had to ask twice before we could see where our tour group was gathering. There were hundreds of people lining up to get in so we were very glad we got to skip the line!

Flat ceiling painted to look like it was sculpted

Raphael's famous painting (what is it called?)

Tapestry along the corridor

Our tour ended at noon and we made our way to the Appian Way for the Catacombs.

We took a tour into the catacombs and the tour conducted by a Phillipino brother was very interesting! He kept us very engaged, asking us where each one of us was from (he even asked us if Malaysia had a new President!), urging us to rush from one secret place to another as though we were on a secret mission or going into places he wasn't allowed to show.  

On the way to the catacombs

Catacomb entrance

After that, we walked along the Appian Way to see one of the oldest highways in the world. The large stones were pulled out from the ground where the catacombs were and I think they're volcanic rocks. These roads are straight and usually 8 feet wide to comfortably fit 6 Roman soldiers marching abreast to conquer the lands.

We saw some drivers who ignored the no entry sign and punished their car suspensions by going over this road.

Since we still had daylight, we took the train back and stopped by the Colosseum. My goodness! It's colossal! I never imagined it to be so huge! I made KS hang around until it became a bit dark and took like 80 shots. But I couldn't find a decent one out of that whole stack, there were humans everywhere.

The holes in the pillars used to support an exterior layer that has been pulled out.

We ended up having a very late dinner before calling it a night.

Day 2:

The next day, we headed to the Spanish Steps to join the Free Walking Tour. The walking tour through the city past the Parliament, Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Bridge of Angels and ended in the Vatican. 

The Pantheon was packed! Too bad we couldn't go back when it was quieter.

It was an excellent way to get a feel of the city on foot, just to give you a flavour of where you'd like to visit later. We would have liked to go back to the Pantheon but we had other plans lined up for the day.

After the tour, we took a train to St Paul's Basilica Outside the Walls.

Unfortunately I don't know why Paul is holding a sword since he's not a fighter.

I loved this church mostly because there was hardly anyone in it and it was so peaceful.

After visiting St Paul's, we headed back to the city and planned to go for the Colosseum our. As mentioned before, we wound up asking the wrong person where we should be lining up for the tour and was ushered to one of those unofficial tours.

We did learn a few things in the tour though, like how the Colosseum as built to allow 100,000 people to enter and exit within 15 minutes. Why this is different from our current stadiums is because these people were allowed to view the shows for free. Free because the emperor wanted to make the people happy with his rule and divert their attention away from the other things they weren't happy about.

After this tour, we were told the tour offers a free tour of the Roman Forum just next door. At this point, KS and I were weighing whether to go to the Capuchin Crypt to see how human bones are used as part of the decoration or to go for the Roman Forum tour. We ended up with the Roman Forum tour which turned out to be the most informative tour of our trip!

The guide, Stan, whom they refer to as their George Clooney (but he looked more like a Russell Crowe), gave nuggets of useless information which I totally dig! Hahaha! For example, he informed us that we could drink the water from the flowing taps all over the city. 

The first water fountain we came across had a dustbin next to it. I certainly didn't think the water was drinkable! We bought quite a lot of bottled water before we knew we could drink from the taps.

Plus, most of these taps have holes at the top. Notice how low these taps are? To drink, instead of cupping your hands, you can block the flow of the water and the water will eventually spout through the top hole! Smart eh? I managed to try this later in Burano, Venice and was so excited when it worked!

Anyway, back to Roman Forum, the guide made us imagine being right there at the start of the 1st century, how this place would be the downtown, the happening place. The sophistication of the Roman engineering of the Aquaducts, the huge and high ceilings of the buildings they created and how they've endured over the centuries really made me so amazed.

Another one of those structures that you HAVE to be there to appreciate how huge it is. This was a warehouse back then.

Over the centuries, a lot of these structures and material were recycled to build new buildings. Like the bronze sheets plastering the Colosseum were removed to be melted down to make other things, pillars too were ripped down and used elsewhere. See this structure below?

Have a closer look at the pillars. The stripes near the top were created when ropes ate through the pillar surface when they were yanked by horses, in an attempt to tear them down. The pillars held fast and remain there as it is now. Imagine the force! Imagine the workers urging the horses on as they strained against the might of the pillars!

Thereafter, I walked those roads, imagining the hordes of Romans back then hurrying along their daily business on these roads I now tread. 

See the parallel grooves? These roads were used for horse carriages, I think. How many wheels had carved these grooves? 

Yes, I was mesmerized at the Roman Forum and brought back to the past. Something which I totally did not expect.

From there, we walked all the way to Trevi Fountain. How can we visit Rome without visiting this fountain, right?

As expected, the Trevi Fountain was teeming with tourists. Many of whom were just sitting and enjoying the view, others were throwing coins, some with their right hand over their left shoulder.

We stayed for a short while and then headed back to Roma Termini for dinner before we went back to sleep. Our early morning train would take us to our next adventure, Cinque Terre.

Italy In General

We’ve been planning for our Italy trip for months now and yes, while it was a tough one to plan for, it was a very rewarding trip! We flew by Emirates which was such a change from budget airlines we've been travelling on for some time.

In our short 10 full days in Italy, we covered Rome, Cinque Terre, Pisa, Florence and Venice. And as mentioned before, we had to cut one day from Rome and extended one day in Venice due to the General Elections. Otherwise, three days in Rome would have been better and 2 days in Venice sufficient. Still, we managed to pack in quite a fair bit into Rome and took a relaxing time in Venice to wander around. 

Let me start off with the general things in Italy.

Food
Food was generally good as we enjoyed the Nutella croissants, pasta, pizza, focaccia breads and antipasti with melon. And the gelato every day of course! We budgeted about €15 per person per meal so while breakfast could be as cheap as €3, we could then splurge a little for dinner that day.

All sorts of pasta: spaghetti, ravioli, lasagne, gnocchi (I didn't take a photo of our risotto)

Melon with parma ham (our favourite!), anchovies (a little weird but still okay), focaccia  with some ham and rocket and osso bucco. I absolutely love their tomatoes!

Sweet stuff : chocolate/Nutella croissant, tiramisu and gelato. I had the choc croissant and gelato almost every day.

Weather in May
The days took turns from sunny hot to nagging rain the next day. This also means I wasn’t very happy with my photos from this trip with the grey skies. Thankfully I brought my umbrella, a rain-proof coat and sun block. Temperatures were beautiful between 17 – 20s. As we moved north, the nights were slightly chillier. Dawn was at about 6am and sun set was around 8pm so we had good long days to move about.

People
There were tourists EVERYWHERE! They were mainly Americans and groups of Japanese. I could hardly take photos without having people in it. Aside from the tourists, the Italians are generally warm and friendly. We encountered two unfriendly people in Venice on our first day there though. And I used to hear friends saying Italian men were very good looking, I can now say I have seen them with my own eyes! A lot of them looked like George Michael with a stubble and sunglasses. Swoon!

We were also told to watch out for gypsies but we found many Bangladeshis who were peddling their wares at every point of interest. They didn't really come up to us though (maybe they knew we were cheapo tourists who won't buy their goods!).

Italian trains
Since I bought my tickets online earlier, getting around Italy was a breeze. I must say one of our initial achievements of our trip was to get to the train station at the Rome Airport, use the machines to print our ticket, time stamp it and get into the train within a few minutes. Only when the train shut its doors and started moving did I ask the person beside me if the train was headed to Roma Termini! LOL

Another achievement for us was our train trip to Manarola from Rome. We had to switch trains in La Spezia with a 10 minute gap. We needed to print our ticket, time stamp it and find the correct train all within that 10 minutes. Worse, our train from Rome was slightly delayed by 3-5 minutes. Thankfully, I pre-printed our tickets at Roma Termini, rushed down from the train at La Spezia to time stamp it, followed the general crowd into the train and hoped it was right train before it moved (as there were two trains on the same platform).

One thing to note though, when we got to Roma Termini to take this trip to Manarola, this guy came up to me (rather forcefully) and brought me to the correct platform and then demanded for money for his help and scolded us for giving him too little. It was rather frightening and KS was worried he would grab my bag. On hindsight, this guy did help me understand how to read the Italian train schedule, as it would have taken me some time as I was looking for the train to La Spezia on the screen when the displayed name would be the last station the train would stop.

For example:

Train Schedule: Our train name on the screen follows the name of the last station it would stop at. So ours was called Pisa Centrale even though we were getting out at Pisa S.Rossore. This schedule shows the stops this train makes.

So on the screens, you would need to refer to the train for Pisa Centrale for the correct platform. I learnt this from the guy at Roma Termini. My train from Roma Termini to La Spezia was Genova P.P. and I would have taken some time to figure that out if it weren't for him.

Validation Machine. Insert your ticket in the middle slot to have it time stamped before boarding. 

Touristy Stuff
I used to think people normally backpack in Europe but KS and I were the rare ones carrying backpacks. Still, it was quite helpful when we had to climb stairs, steep slopes in Manarola or bridges in Venice. We bought a Skip the Line Tour of Vatican from Viator and were glad we did as there were hordes of people lining up to go in! Plus there were so many touts trying to get you to sign up for a Skip the Line Vatican Tour right outside the gates.

Unfortunately, we weren’t careful when we got to Colosseum and was made to pay for a tour at €13 per pax (the official tour inside was only €5) after we asked someone outside who looked like he was wearing an official tag where to queue for the tour.

Still, there was a silver lining to this because it led us to the most interesting tour thereafter which made Rome my favourite place of all! I'll explain this in a location by location blogpost later.

Planning for Italy

After many months of putting off visiting Italy, we finally bought our flight tickets in mid March to travel in early May. I didn't think it would be a problem getting rooms since we have 1.5 months before we travelled. But boy was I wrong!

We spent many weekends and weekday nights trying to secure rooms all over Rome, Cinque Terre, Florence and Venice with a budget and some pre-requisites such as an attached bathroom but was quite challenging. Many places have about 3-4 rooms and they're all pretty snapped up especially if we wanted to stay somewhere for like 4 nights.

My usual favourite sites like hotels.com or bookings.com don't quite have the choices I was looking for. I found TripAdvisor to be quite a help and there are quite a lot of B&B that have their own sites so it's quite hard to find them in a collective site.

Here are, so far, the most useful sites other than TripAdvisor for finding the perfect rooms:
airbnb.com
cross-pollinate.com

We've spoilt ourselves with renting a whole loft in Rome, a room overlooking the gorgeous sea in Cinque Terre which left my budget of RM400 per night in tatters. So it had to be cheaper accommodation for Florence and Venice.

One thing I've discovered is that some rooms may have just a shower tucked in the corner of the room, no toilet, just the shower. Very strange! And the toilets mainly would have bidets! This is going to be interesting as I've never tried using one before. Also, most places accept only cash so I need to start looking for my body pouches to avoid pick pockets.

So that was just the room bookings. I then spent another two weekends figuring out the trains and buying them online. Thanks to this site called italylogue, I found italiarail.com where I could buy my tickets with ease.

There are two types of tickets which I bought, one is a ticket with reservation (time and seats allocated) and the other is an open ticket whereby it is valid 2 months from the date of purchase.

Thankfully (somewhat), most of my tickets are open tickets so when we had to change our flights to enable us to vote in the next Malaysian General Elections, I only forfeit one day of Rome from my schedule and not my train tickets too.

Anyway, this holiday was one of the most researched of all our trips. So much information on the net! So many decisions to make! Yes it has been stressful but I'm enjoying the process (I can't say the same for KS who has to plan what to do, which tour to take, if we need to get a phone card etc).

Blog posts coming up on our trip.

Malaysia's 13th General Election

Malaysians have been heaving speculating when the next General Election (GE) would be held since November last year. The 5 year mark from the last GE (8 March) came and went, the only other time this has happened was in 1969.

KS and I had planned to go for our Italy holiday in either April or May. We waited for the news but there were no forthcoming announcements. We couldn't wait so we booked our air tickets on 5th May, avoiding as many Saturdays as we could since previous GEs were held on Saturdays.

Finally, when the Prime Minister announced the dissolution of Parliament on 3 April, I eagerly waited for the announcement of the GE date. People speculated it would be at the end of April so I felt somewhat assured I wouldn't miss it. Then the Election Commission took their own sweet time and only announced it a week later. And the date they selected? 5th of May. Our flight is at 1030am, we have to be at the airport by 0830 latest. Polling stations open at 0800. KS votes in Melaka.

Different permutations came into mind:
1. We check in the day before. KS goes back to Melaka to vote as soon as the doors open while I vote in PJ. We both then speed our way separately to the airport to make it for our flight.
2. I vote and grab the ERL which takes 28 minutes to reach the airport while KS checks in earlier.
3. KS votes while I check in earlier.
4. We just don't vote.
5. We shift our flight one day and pay the forfeit of RM860. Thankfully this is Emirates so we only need to pay the fine for changing our details and fare increase.

I checked with the travel agent and neither one of the first three options were viable. Then I thought, what's our votes worth anyway? But I've been advocating and encouraging everyone else to vote and here I am, not even voting. I cannot imagine not voting when I've been so passionate for the last many years.

Then I remembered that there are potential phantom voters waiting to vote on your behalf. That's when I called my travel agent and made the change. So what if I have only 2 days instead of 3 in Rome if I am going to regret for the rest of my life of not being a part of a historical event in my own country?

There are stories out there of many Malaysians coming back to vote. I heard someone flying back all the way from Finland. Jan says most of her Malaysian colleagues in Singapore are coming back to vote. Those who can't are few due to fully booked tickets. Maybe they should ask around to hop on with those who are driving back.

Ini kalilah.

Bra Strap Solution

For some time now, I've been irritated with my bra straps falling off my droopy shoulders, especially when I wear a sleeveless top. I was constantly adjusting, my hands diving into my shirts to shift it back onto my shoulder until I considered tying some string across my back between the straps.

So one day while browsing through a group buying site called stardeal.my, I came across the perfect solution to my problem. It was called the Ultimate Bra Strap Solution and it had a video on how one uses it. It seemed perfect! Price was a little bit steep for some plastic thing but hey, the description said: "1 set is 6 pieces. You will get 2 sets". There was also another description which said "The Bra Clip Set Perfect includes 12 pieces" which I simply couldn't understand.

Anyway, I ordered it and after a couple of weeks, KS told me something had arrived for me in the mail. I came home and opened my pack:

This is the bra clip

This was the box it came in. Now each box had 9 pieces (where are my 12 pieces??)

And they sent me 12 boxes, each with 9 clips in it.

So there you go. I now have 108 bra clips. I tried giving a box to my mum who simply said, "Put it on all your bras". I don't have 108 bras and neither does this require me to attach to the bra except when I'm wearing one. So far I've been using one for over 3 weeks now and it hasn't snapped in two or hasn't been destroyed. Looks like I have enough to cover several lifetime of uses.

I've successfully given away six boxes now to various friends and colleagues. So let me know if you need one (or three, or a dozen).