Post 11: Goodbye Amoeba Bus (Tales of France)

Looking down on one of Monaco's harbors, Saturday

Looking down on Nice, Saturday

Trying to avoid getting run over by the future, Nice, Saturday afternoon

Trying to get a cool picture of me and the view and failing, From our room in Nice, Saturday evening

A Nice Sunrise (pun totally intended), 7 AM, Sunday morning

This time I skip karaoke and get a good night's sleep. I get up at 3:30 AM, shower, make breakfast, and my roommates and I are out the door at 4:30. We've got the routine down considering our jaunt to Switzerland was only last weekend. We get on Maoro and Franco's bus again, sit down, I successfully fall asleep, and my jaw hangs open ever so attractively.

We make a stop at another charming road-side "Autogrill" and then continue on towards France. We reach Monaco, a country squished between the borders of Italy and France with a population somewhere around 30,000 people. We meet with a French, English-speaking tour guide named Pierre that is toting an umbrella and wearing a smoked-salmon-colored dress shirt, and he shows us around for a half-hour, occasionally popping open his giant maroon umbrella so we won't lose him--he was quite short.

Pierre leads us up a coastal path where we look down on the city, which lays in a valley and spills into the Mediterranean like a sack of precious gems. It is a flood of expensive yachts, exotic flora, shimmering blue water, ritzy condos, and higher in the valley, a sprawl of ostentatious homes. Pierre points to the far side of the valley and says that this is the border between Monaco and France: It's seamless. Later, we see the church where Grace Kelly's and Prince Rainier's tombs are, Prince Albert's castle, the changing of the guards, and an "exotic" garden along the coastal path displaying a surprisingly wide variety of cacti. Monaco is only one-half square mile large, is clogged with money and with tourists that wish they had fortunes, and is a little bit stuffy. The history is interesting, the energy is undeniable, but Monaco is not for me. Onward.

We enter France and head towards Nice, following a coastal highway threading itself through tunnels in the hillsides. Maoro pulls over on a hill above the city of Nice, which hugs a u-shaped coastline lined with palm trees, and we are stunned by the size and aesthetic unity of it. If American cities are like a jagged, grey mountain range, then Nice is like a a vast expanse of sand dunes. Nearly all the buildings follow the same two-tone color scheme of peach and orangey-pink and nothing really stands out, except along the coastline. I ask Pierre if he knows where our hotel is. He points to an old, dome-topped building on the shore and then tells me to count three buildings to the right. Lovely, we'll be amongst the ritzies. They'll like that. Then Pierre points to the hilltop above us, "That is where Elton John lives." Oh dear. I spend the next two hours trying to quiet Bennie and the Jets, which plays itself over and over and over again in my head. BENNIE! BENNIE!

We pull up outside of Hotel Le Royal. Kelsey and I head up to room 208 and are surprised to find that we have not been relegated to the back of the hotel, instead, we have a balcony on the second (third) floor facing the Mediterranean. Our other roommates, Jo and Kim, along with many others I'm sure, are not so fortunate. Nevertheless, our eyelids are hanging pretty low and we both take serious power naps before meeting everyone downstairs.

We head down to the beach and spend some time reflecting--the weather is too good to pass up the chance to sit by the sea. The sound of the stones rolling back and forth on the shore reminds me of a rainmaker a friend used to have in her home in Sausalito, and I realize how coincidental it is that she studied French avidly and ended up moving to Paris. Anyway, the sound lulls me to sleep, even though I am laying on a bed of bulbous rocks.

I wake up and hear someone suggest we go in search of coffee. We wander the waterfront, look for a place with cheap coffee, don't find one, and end up at a McDonald's. I haven't bought something from a Micky-Dee's, or any fast-food chain really, since that movie Super-Size Me came out in 2004, but I am tired and want to be awake to enjoy Nice so I get an espresso and don't beat myself up about it. We all perk up and continue our wandering.

We find a long park with a two-story merry-go-round playing techno, a gigantic curving chicken-bone-like sculpture, and a large square with a street running through it lined with translucent white statues of men in different sitting poses perched atop poles that spring up from the ground at least two or three stories high. As we are taking pictures, we are almost run over by the most futuristic train I have ever seen with my own eyes. We are certainly in the future, so what now? Just a thought. Silvery, clean, and worm-shaped, they quietly slide by on tracks sunken into the astonishingly clean ground, right through the aisle of translucent men.

Back at Le Royal, my roommate and I take another power nap before dinner. When we wake she shows me a video on her digital camera from earlier in the day. She had wandered with another group and they came across a man dancing to Michael Jackson tunes on the sidewalk by the shore. He resembled a cross between Alice Cooper, Chis Angel and Keith Richards and in the video he is wearing an unbuttoned blue, satin dress shirt and silver plastic leg shields that fall apart as he dances. He is flailing around, occasionally doing an impressive move, but mostly just flailing about like a...well, a crazy man on acid that might have been a tai chi or qi gong instructor at some point. Despite whoever he is or whatever he was on, it is hilarious.

The dinner doesn't deserve to be written about. The French have disappointed me in the food department, but then again, I ate in a hotel...not in a bistro. Nevertheless, I am happy to be fed and happy to be traveling: as my Uncle Ted used to tell me, "There are some people in this world that don't have food." It may not sound particularly profound, and I'll admit it's a pretty obvious concept, but not to a 4-year-old and not if one really considers what that means for each of us, who can eat whenever we want (so much to the point that we are statistically the fattest nation in the world).

After dinner we wander around more, admiring the lights (the translucent men were lit from within by colored lights), the sounds of accordions and people speaking French, the smells of fantastic food (it was hard not to blatantly point and stare at plates as we walked past) and enjoying the privilege of being able to travel. As we make our way down the main drag, we come across Michael Jackson guy again. He has been here all day and is still going strong. Naturally, we sit down and take a gander. He effortlessly climbs the street light and hand-balances on top of it (this guy must have tried out for Cirque du Soleil at some point in his life and got turned down). He spends quite a while on the light post, and then his stereo blows out. He takes his time getting down and moving across the sidewalk. We watch until the stereo blows out again, and then we realize that Michael Jackson guy is not Nice and vice-versa--it's time to get going.

We run into our guides, Franco and Stefano, who tell us that we are going the wrong way and that all the fun is the other direction. Well, Franco and Stefano, we didn't find it. In one last attempt to experience Nice's nightlife, we go into a casino. Our group has never looked so sad. I believe that casino might have been one of the most depressing establishments I have ever been in, aside from hospitals, hospices and old-folks' homes. And it gets better: the boys, unsatisfied with the dinner, want McDonald's. We spend at least 45 minutes sitting on a cement ledge outside McDonald's facing the shore and the glowing oval moon before we realize how wrong it all is. I say, "Isn't it great that we're sitting in France, hanging out in front of a McDonald's?" Two trips to McDonald's in Nice in one day--pathetic, I know.

Despite this lack of obvious fun, we have a great time, and the night ends with Ana and Billy--once again--jumping into the Mediterranean. I pass this time out of a sheer lack of preparation in the clothing department. Ana goes in her dress and Billy in his briefs...the French couples sitting along the shore are thoroughly entertained by this. The sound of the stones rolling back and forth on the shore put me in a mood for sleep, and I welcome it. We go back to our rooms at Le Royal, leaving a trail of seawater behind us.

The sunrise is sensational and inspirational in the truest senses of the words. Kelsey and I take way too many photos of it--each minute it changes and keeps us from packing our bags. Breakfast is adequate. The most entertaining part about it though, is Franco's hair. The combination of his crazy eyes, untamable eyebrows, and the gray cowlick--slightly resembling the Mattahorn, ironically--jutting up from his egg-shaped head is enough to make the croissants (or KWAGH-SOHHNTS!) and burnt coffee taste absolutely delicious. And once again, we are off...

We reach Cannes at around noon, and we are given two hours to get back to the bus. No matter: Cannes is my mecca--anything will do. Beggars cannot be choosers. I immediately head for Palais des Festivals, the movie theater where the Cannes Film Festival screenings are held every year in May. I guess my friends can see the excitement in my face, because they keep saying things like, "Don't worry, you'll be back." Although we don't do or see much of Cannes, I can't shake the feeling of excitement from my bones: I want my films to play at this festival. I want to walk into the Palais des Festivals with hundreds of other film enthusiasts and watch my characters and my story move about and unfold on the projector screens. And I will, oh yes.

Cannes ends with my jaw dropping as I watch a busty, older blond woman, who is sitting on the rocks by the parking lot, give her dog a drag of her cigarette. She and her dog get comfortable on their rock, she puts her arm around him--a brown Husky-lookin' thing--and they both gaze out at the Mediterranean, watching the sailboats in the distance.

We head back towards the border of Italy and stop off in a town called St. Paul de Vence, a tiny village still surrounded by medieval fortress walls. Oddly enough, it is filled with modern art galleries, and we spend an hour or so taking calendar shots and tilting our heads to the side and saying, "huh, that's a weird sculpture." 100 or so photos later, we are all ready to move on.

An hour later, we stop in a town called Eze (pronounced 'ezz'), where we take a tour of Parfumerie Fagonard. Strange as it is, we have a surprisingly good time. This is the last stop and we know it. This is it for my Lorenzo de Medici field trips...and I know it. Although I wish I could travel with Franco and Maoro on the crazy amoeba bus every weekend for the rest of 2008, I am also excited about becoming my own guide. I am excited about traveling according to my own schedule and not being counted by Franco every couple hours. Thank you Franco, thank you Maoro, but it's time to move on.

We leave Fragonard a little before 5 pm and hit traffic outside Genoa around 6. Everyone decides that they want to watch a movie, so Franco puts Crash into the DVD player. This is only the second feature-length movie that I have seen in the past six weeks. Heaven for a film-lover. The movie ends and we are in..actually, I have no idea where we were, but we were at another Autogrill off the superstrada. Everyone feasts on paninis and we get back on the bus for the last leg of the journey. Franco puts The Interpreter with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman in the DVD player and again, I am in heaven. Sometimes we all just need to forget about time, place and space and just engage ourselves in a plot totally foreign to our own realities. At least I know I do. The movie ends exactly as Maoro pulls up next to Piazza Indipendenza--the timing is eery. It is 11-something pm.

I spend the walk home thinking about how wonderful these past two trips have been, and how much greater my future trips will be because of them. Learning to travel so I can travel to learn. I now know two things: 1) if given the chance, every spot on Earth is interesting, and 2) with effort, one can spend their entire lives being interested. I may have thought these things before, but now I know these things to be true. It's time for many of us to move past being guided by "Francos" and "Stefanos" and to move towards becoming "Francos" and "Stefanos," people that have--like many others--ventured out with wide eyes and open minds and continue to do so.

Below is a video of the sunrise in Nice. I know it's not great, but I thought I would experiment with posting a video because I want do it more in the future. Sometimes still shots just aren't enough.

#10: The World Is Our Happy Meal (Tales of Switzerland & Como)

20 Minutes Out of Tirano, Leaving Italy

Crossing The Bernina Pass...On the left, a lake of death

The high altitude starts to affect Charlie and I

A Photo of An Alp and I. (Requested by Mother)

The Ferry to Bellagio, Lake Como, Sunday

Ughh. 3:50 am. Piazza Indipendenza, Florence. One of the few places where residents of this God-forsaken, stone city can find trees. The bus leaves at 4. Passport? Yes. Sleep? No. Karaoke the night before? Yes. Pillow? No. Woops. We crowd onto the bus and half of us pass out. The other half--minus myself--pass out a few minutes later. I am AWAKE. I spend the next three hours rotating between holding my eyes shut and listening to music, and watching the bus barrel down a "superstrada," thinking about how it looks like we are in the US barreling down the 5 through Southern California.

At some point, holding my eyes shut works, because at some other point I wake up. The sun is rising on my right, and everyone else is still getting their beauty rest. I begin perusing my iPod for one of the new albums my roommate Kim gave me that hasn't received much attention: I have a lot of attention to give right now. I settle on U2's Joshua Tree. (NO. I hadn't listened to it before now, other than on the radio, because Bono used to really freak me out. But don't worry, I've converted)

"Where The Streets Have No Name" begins to play. All of a sudden I feel lucky to be awake. I take a look back at 50-something sleeping American beauties, glance at the peacock sun rising over vast silhouettes of Italian hills and wonder, Where the hell are we? Indeed, Bono, indeed: the streets have no name. "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" comes on next. No, Bono--you're 92% wrong about that.

"ALLOOOOORA! Wake UP! ...We are in Milan." The sun is up and Franco, our crazy-eyed Italian tour leader is belting over the microphone from the front seat. Everyone makes breathy I'm-waking-up noises. Me--I am ready to go thanks to Joshua Tree. Third off the bus. We're at a roadside gas station/food mart and it's so cold that we actually find ourselves skipping towards the quick stop. A half-hour later, our bladders are empty, our stomachs somewhat less grumbly, and we're sick of the bus. We all get back on and once again, everyone passes out and I am left to fiddle with my iPod.

We reach Tirano, a tiny town at the base of the alps (still in Italy),  at 10-something AM and wait for "The Little Red Train." Also called the Bernina Express, the train takes the highest pass through the alps...very slowly. We spend two, three, maybe four hours climbing the alps and running from one side of the train to the other, yelling OOH! AHH! OHHHH! NOO!! as everyone stumbles over each other trying to get shots of the landscapes around us that look like they are torn out of an issue of National Geographic. This is just too good. We are too lucky. Many of us don't know it. At this moment I can't help but feel like an underachiever compared to Mother Nature.

At the highest point, I lean out the window to get a shot of the train and the icy death-lake next to the track. Four seconds later my face is an ice-cube tray. This is true wilderness. Like the oceans, the Alps are unforgiving. We're just a bunch of kids crowded into a little red train, and we expect that we'll live through this, when truly, the cold and rock could claim us at any second. I try not to think about that. We're crowded into a little red train climbing the Alps. Awesome. Happy thoughts. I start thinking Mother Nature should have thought about getting a prescription to Zanex. We're crowded into a little red train climbing the Alps. Awesome. Happy thoughts...

The train drops us in St. Moritz and we hop on our buses and head to "Bad." Yes, we stayed in "Bad." In St. Moritz, a fancy-shmancy resort town, there are two sections: Bad and Dorf. Bad means spa and Dorf means village. I hear several people mention the Shining as we drive into the deserted section of "Bad." Sadly, we only have a couple of hours until dinner and the next morning we ship out at 8, so we try our best to experience St. Moritz by doing what ignorant, inexperienced college-aged travelers do: wander around. We find a lake, ducks, horses, runners in shorts and t-shirts (it was probably 25 degrees fahrenheit), tons of people walking with ski poles, and signs telling us that we are going the wrong direction.

That evening, after thawing ourselves out a bit, we had an amazing three-course dinner in the restaurant of our hotel, Hotel Sonne (Hotel Sun). I've never been so excited to see a plate of meat and vegetables in my entire life. I'll leave it at that. After each of us had induced a severe food-coma, we watched "Double Jeopardy" on TV...in German, we think...and then we passed out.

The next morning at 8 AM, our bus is skooching down a wiry, ratty road towards the Swiss border. Everyone is awake this time--waiting for our giant Alterini Bus to tuck and roll down one of the lovely, green hillsides. Maoro, our bus driver, pulls out his cell phone at one point. Despite Maoro's crazy fast conversation, we lived.

We arrive at the ferry terminal on Lake Como a couple hours later, and we ferry over to Bellagio, a small resort-y town with tons of expensive crap to buy. We wander, take pictures, hop back on the ferry and head to the town of Como. We are all starving, so the second we hit the ground we go in search of food. As we are eating, a multi-cultural parade marches by one street over. Unfortunately, this does not make our food better.

We are all dragging our feet. Tiredness sets in and we lay down in a park. This town is just too touristy and we are just too tired and there's not enough time and so we rest. I think about the day when I won't have to travel on someone else's schedule or skip from place to place without learning squat. I'll be back Como, believe you me.

The bus ride home is even harder than the others. I can't sleep. I can't get comfortable, so I turn to my iPod for some imaginary rose-colored shades. It works, as usual. While at another rest stop in Milan, we all mill around the bus, waiting for Maoro, the driver, to return so we can just get on and get it over with. I ask my friend Billy, "What do you think that is?" I point to the giant, web-blob of colors splattered down the side of the bus. A moment of silence. Billy, a random girl to our right, and I, all say in unison: "Amoeba." Our brains are mush. We have seen too much and too little. The world is too big. But then again, maybe not.

I spend the ride home thinking about worldly things and developing scenes for a feature-length script I've been working on for nearly a year. Of course I loved going to Switzerland and Lake Como--that's exactly why I wish the trip had been longer; better. But alas, I am young and the world is our Happy Meal...soon it will be our oyster.

I found one of my favorite quotes in a book called Blue Highways. The main narrator, the traveler, meets a monk who says to him, "First I learned to travel, now I travel to learn." I am in the first phase and it is difficult, yes, but it is so fulfilling and exciting to know that I still have the rest of my life to work on the second phase. I'm getting mushy again...I'll end here.

Considering that I quoted Bono, I have to provide some profound, intellecutal, Emersonian-food-for-thought to protect my ego:

"The world belongs to the energetic."

"None of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone."

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." (even Florence, Italy)

"Don't be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better." (Doesn't it seem like Americans tend to either deny this or just plum forget? They say, 'I know what I'm doing' or ask, 'But what if something goes wrong?')

"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." Ooh, that's confusing, Emerson.

Stay tuned for tales of France...I leave in 8 hours.