Statues

The Italians seem to be very fond of naked statues of men. There's one in almost every plaza I saw. At least the one one the bottom is more modest- he has a leaf covering his private parts. One building had a whole row of naked male statues lined up on its rooftop.

Buried in ash in Pompeii

This is the face of one of the people we saw in the ruined city of Pompeii. He has an amazingly calm face for someone who was suffocated to death and embalmed by the ashes.

I think ancient people used to be really short. This is an excavated bath and it's quite tiny.

Ciao Roma

Got back from Rome on Tuesday night, absolutely exhausted. We had to cacth the 4 am shuttle bus to the airport, then when we got to Barcelona, we'd just missed the bus back to Logrono by around 10 minutes, so we could either wait till 10pm and get back at 4 am, or catch a bus to Zaragoza and the train from Zaragoza to Logrono which is what we did. Had enough time to fit in a Starbucks chai latte though. Normally I hate Starbucks- coffee stinks, they don't know how to froth and the service is appalling but they're the only place I've found in all of Spain that makes drinks with soy milk.

Italy was fantastic. On the first day, Breda and I just walked around they city, ate pizza, found a place that sold divine soy gelatos near Fontana di Trevi. Breda paid 3 euros for an espresso shot which was apparently the most disgusting thing she'd had in her life but we needed to use a bathroom really badly. I found Rome really overpriced. And overrun with overweight and loud American tourists. The second day we went to Pompeii and climbed Mt Vesuvius. It was steaming slightly from a crack in the crater- I was so excited I took about ten photos of the smoke and two video shots. When we got back down the volcano, it was too late to enter the ruined city but we snuck in through the back and got in for free. We only found 3 dead people, but I think that's enough. Old Pompeii was HUGE. (Well, I guess it used to be a real city.) It was absolutely amazing how much stuff was still intact.

On Sunday we went to the Vatican to get blessed by the Pope. The crowd was massive. I'd never felt so squashed and suffocated in my life, not at the Easter Show, the Sydney Olympics, on the metro... if you fell (which was practically impossible because people were squashing you so tightly you couldn't move) I suspect you'd just get trodden on. Useful Tip #1: If you ever go to the Vatican on Sunday to get blessed by the Pope, find yourself two stout, middle-aged Italian women to follow. They've obviously done this hundreds of times because we found two who pushed through people left right and centre with grim determination and we quickly shuffled through the opening they left in their wake. It was almost as miraculous as Moses parting the Red Sea. Instead of taking us an hour to get through the crowd, we were out in ten minutes. We took a tourist bus which I found very comfortable to sleep on.

Monday was Breda's birthday so we went to the Amalfi Coast, to Maiori and spent the day on the beach there. They fence off parts of the beach, set up deck chairs and umbrellas in rows and you pay to use them. There was only one tiny bit of beach not blocked off, near the rocks, so we lay down there. I had a very freaky incident with the man who worked at one of the beach clubs. I needed to use the bathroom, so asked him if I could, and he said yes and gave me the key. When I went to give it back to him, he said 'Bellissima' to me and pinched my cheek. And then he realised he'd left a wet mark on my face because his hands were wet, so he said 'Oh, pardon,' and wiped my face with the hairs on his arm. Ewwww. And human hairs aren't even absorbent.

I got a tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon on my shoulder.

Day 18 of knees

As you can see, they've healed quite nicely. I think I'm going to get some ugly scars though, especially on my right knee.

Update on leg

This is Day 9. For some reason, the scab came off my right knee and now it refuses to heal. I went to the chemist today and asked the lady for antibacterial stuff and she gave me betadine. I asked her for something else, 'something that won't hurt when I put it on' and she rolled her eyes at me and I could see a thought bubble forming above her head with WIMP in big letters. She didn't have anything else. Or maybe she's sadistic and wouldn't give me anything else. It looks worse than it really is. I have a bandaid tan mark- really unattractive.

We went out for Breda's birthday tonight. Crepes again, delectable as usual. And tomorrow I go to Rome!!! Well, technically I arrive there on Thursday but we leave for Barcelona tomorrow night for the plane. I'll be there with Breda for her real birthday, which I suspect (and I fervently hope I'm wrong) will involve lots of vodka and lemonade.

My Canadian flatmate left on Sunday. As soon as she left I started moving into her room. The stupid moronic bum of a landlady is charging us the same price for two people as for three for the month so I'll be damned if I pay 240 euros and stay in my shitty little dark room with the electric sockets falling out and electrocuting anyone within 2 cm. She is indeed a cow. And that's an insult to the bovine race. We've now officially used up all the clean bowls in the house because my other flatmate refuses to clean, so I've resorted to eating out of tupperware containers and drinking out of my measuring jug. The only time I was more disgusted was when I went to pick up my library books to return and two of her g-strings fell out. But I don't care- I leave tomorrow hahahahahahahahaha. Hahahahaha. Hahahahahahaha. Maybe when I come back, she'll have been eaten by the flesh-eating carnivorous mould spores (the ones that thrive in gross apartments like ours).

Accident

Top left: my poor knees
Top right: closeup of my right knee which suffered the most injury (spot the exposed fat- hint: it's pink)
Middle left: my bandages
Bottom left: beautiful Spanish country
Bottom right: at horse riding place that I had to ride to with blood trickling down my leg

The bicycle thing

I went on a bike trip with the university from Monday to Friday. There's a class called Tiempo Libre and basically the only assessment for this class is you get into a group and plan a group trip that the whole class takes. I was going to take this class but when I went, the people were so juvenile and I was so tired (it cut into my siesta time) that I didn't do it. Emily tagged along with me and enjoyed the class so she took it this semester and signed us up for the bike trip.

On the first day, we were riding along the road to Santiago and it was quite rocky and my bike crashed on a rock on the road and I fell on another rock. It bled quite heavily and my sock and sneakers turned pink from all the blood- you could even see the fat on my knee (unless it was the bone). So they took me to the hospital where the doctor and nurse taught me how to swear in Spanish instead of yelling 'OW!' every time they touched my wounds. They couldn't stitch it though, because all the skin had scraped off and was dangling by slivers. So bloody painful, but kind of attractive in a creepy way. The doctor had to cut them off. He said I had to get it redressed every day till the end of the trip, so on Tuesday, the teacher took me to the hospital. He's such a nice teacher- he brought a wheelchair to the jeep and said 'Sit.' And he would point at random guys in our group and say 'You- carry her bag for her' or 'You over there, lift her out of the car, she can't move'. Which wasn't true; I could move, just very slowly.

Spanish guys are so... chauvinistic though. And absolutely useless. When I was hobbling down the hill from our campsite on the 3rd day when we were leaving, with my big backpack and day bag, only two out of the 30 guys offered to help, and one guy said something along the lines of 'What ho! Heavy bag, good work, keep it up!' Ha!

I had to travel in the jeep instead of riding along for the rest of the trip, but it was all right. I travelled with Lily, one of the people who worked for the outdoor adventure company they hired. She was absolutely hysterical and I got to practise Spanish. On the Monday, when we were driving along, we passed a cherry orchard and we stopped and picked handfuls of absolutely fantastic cherries.

I decided to document the phases of my wounds. The above photos are Day 3, when I'd just taken off the bandages and Day 5, when they'd scabbed decently.