europe

Ever since I was an art student in college, I'd really only wanted to visit four exotic places: Egypt, Athens, Rome and the Playboy Mansion. (In recent years, I managed to cross two of those places off my 'to-do' list; Rome and the Mansion). Naturally, I was psyched when some friends of ours invited us to go along on their trip to visit relatives in Greece. This was an especially rare opportunity since one of them actually spoke Greek. In hindsight, had we gone to Rome with someone who spoke Italian, we might still be welcome there today.

We exchanged 60,000 frequent flyer miles for a midnight red-eye to a random Caribbean island. After inconvenient stops in Dallas, Miami and San Jaun, we arrived 14 hours later in balmy Sint Maarten, Netherlands Antilles (or is it Saint Martin, French West Indies?) for a week of R&R: rum & reclining.

The train left Paris on time with lots of English-speaking passengers. My slowly rage subsided as I slipped into slumber amidst the dulcet tones of the Queen's English being spoken by high-pitched elderly ladies. It was a half-hour or so before we dipped beneath the waves of the English Channel. Twenty minutes later, we resurfaced in the Motherland. The Channel Tunnel (or "Chunnel") was mercifully uneventful; pitch blackness and a weird silence, but otherwise no agonizingly slow drowning for us. Three hours after leaving Frogtown, we pulled into Waterloo Station, a section of London with all the charm of downtown Detroit.

We pulled into Bercy Station, saw the endless line waiting for cabs and dragged our bags to the Metro yet again. The weather in France was nothing like that of Italy. It was overcast and grey, inspiring us to bust out our Moonstone® jackets.

This turned out to be a good call because when we got off at our stop, it was pouring rain. Fortunately, we were only two blocks from Rue de Rivoli and our hotel, Hotel French Louvre. The location of the hotel couldn't have been better (although we were a bit too close to the creepiest building in the world, the Hotel de Ville, for my liking).

We almost missed our train to Venice, but fortunately, it was running 10 minutes late. Watching the destination board update itself was like gambling. "Come on, Venezia! Daddy needs an on-time departure!" Learning from our past experience with EuroStar, we upgraded to first-class for this leg (a mere $20 extra), trying to avoid the unwashed masses and get a bit of legroom.

Our hotel in Florence, the Hotel Centrale, like the Dolomiti in Roma, looks old and crappy on the outside. Unlike the Dolomiti, however, our room looked old and crappy inside as well. For US$85, we got a big room with two twin beds and a shared bath. Fun. But you have to excuse a country where things look old for a reason—they are old, and they HAVE been for hundreds of years. Ian Schrager this isn't.

We boarded the huge Boeing 747 crammed with the entire U.S. population of octogenarians, figuring, "What more harm could another plane full of self-important, Mid-western hicks do to America's already sagging popularity overseas?" The cross-country flight went off without a hitch (assuming you don't consider the scheduled stop in Newark, a hitch). We arrived at Leonardo Di Vinci airport around 8am the next day. The flight lasted a quick 15 hours but we lost a night somewhere. Probably going through security in Newark, I'm guessing.