Napoli Calcio (Soccer)

Not sure why I'm squinted.

Yes those are flares! All around the stadium. Near the bottom left of the picture you can see the "retaining wall."

So we all went to a Naples Soccer game last night. Like most sports its even better in person.

Picture college football enthusiasm with a lack of common law we enforce at games. Top it off with the fact that Naples has a good team, and it was a great experience.

The two end zones are the cheap seats that the rowdy fans get and crowd into. On each side of the sections there is a big plexi-glass wall keeping them in. There are no cheerleaders as we know them to be. Instead there are a couple people at the front of the groups leading/ coordinating various chants, cheers, etc.

The visitor section is completely enclosed in a protective screened area.

If the fans see something they don't like or want to have the crowd noise be a factor they ALL whistle. It turns into this thousands strong, high pitched, ear piercing noise...

I didn't look for it, but I don't think they serve beer in the stadium...

Naples won. 1-0.

Istanbul

Blue Mosque at night. It was drizzling so there is a spot or two...

Down in the Underground Cistern.

Continuing with our trips that we don't think we would have otherwise taken from the states... Istanbul, Turkey.

The tickets we found were cheap but they were out of Rome so we had the added adventure of the train and Rome International vice easy Naples. The train was fine and on time. I'm glad we gave ourselves plenty of time though because getting through security at the airport took about 50 minutes itself. I've mentioned before that the Italians don't know the definition of a line. This is true even for airport security. Flights were fine though. That night we stayed at the airport hotel since we got in late.

Tuesday. Carey got us a nice little apartment right in the middle of the old town Istanbul. First stop, Hagia Sophia. It started as a huge church when the city was Constantinople. I didn't read it anywhere but thinking about it and looking at dates, this would have been the largest Christian church in the world for ~1000 years. It was built in 537 AD. The new St Peters wasn't built until the 1500's. In 1453 the Ottoman's captured Constantinople and converted it into a mosque. It is now a museum. A lot of the mosaics were plastered over in the conversion from a church to a mosque, but some have been uncovered and restored. Either way, it is huge inside and the dome is amazing.

Next was the Blue Mosque. Very big, beautiful mosque. The outside is not blue. The tiles inside are... I don't know why I am surprised, but the level of disrespect from some people amazed me. Most women, including Carey and Brianna, covered their heads with a scarf, the same as they would have covered their shoulders when entering a church during the summer. A number of women did not though and the noise level was louder than I would have expected... Turkey seems to be a pretty liberal Islamic country but I was surprised they didn't enforce it. The churches here would have.

Next the underground cistern. The romans built this underground reservoir in the 500's to support the demands of the capital city. Long story short, the Roman Empire/ Byzantine Empire expanded and contracted over the ~1400 years. Constantine renamed Byzantium, Constantinople (now Istanbul with the Ottoman take over), and made it the new capital. You can put a couple football fields down here and it has a 27 million gallon capacity. Like the catacombs in Rome, it was completely forgotten about for hundreds of years and then rediscovered.

Tuesday night we went and saw some Turkish dance. Very entertaining. Folk dances and belly dancing.

Wednesday. In the morning we went to the Grand Bazaar. It is a huge, mostly indoor, mall/ flea-market. You can get pretty much whatever you want here. Shoes, scarves, rugs, suitcases, hookahs, clothes... That afternoon we made our way through the spice market and into the newer town. We went to the top of Galata Tower where we got some really good views and shots of Istanbul. We took a tram up to Taksim square and then strolled back down the hill past all the new stores, coffee shops and even a few churches.

Thursday. Topkapi Palace. The home of Sultans and center of the Ottoman empire for some 300 years. There are a couple main attractions here. One, is the treasury. Golden, jewel covered thrones, giant golden candlestick holders, and a few really big diamonds (one is 86 carrots). The second is the Hall of Holy Relics. The Ottomans brought these holy Muslim (and what should be Jewish and Christian) relics here from Egypt, Medina, and Mecca. I'm not sure how you could prove, or disprove some of these but... The footprint and hair from Muhammad, King Davids's sword, Moses' staff, John (the baptist's?) skull and forearm, Joseph's turban... If this is all true that seems to be an even more impressive collection of historic biblical character relics than Jerusalem had to offer. Hard to say...

That night we stayed at the hotel airport again since we had an early flight out.

Turkey claims to be a 98% Muslim population. I'm pretty sure that is the same as Italy claiming 98% of the Italians are Catholic. I'm not so sure many actually practice. The call to prayer still happens five times a day, which is pretty neat, but I didn't see a lot of people stopping what they were doing to unroll their rugs or go to the mosque. The people were VERY nice and friendly. Yes, they are all trying to sell you something BUT they do take no for an answer and will still chat a little with you even after they know you're not going to buy. I think everyone knew a least some english so getting around was easy. We never felt unsafe, even walking though some more out of the way streets at night.

I think I just assumed, because the history around here drops off around the 500-600 AD mark, that the Roman empire fell apart around that time. Really it was a shift of the capital location and the fluctuating of the size that started around that time. Travel really does teach you something after all...

Really glad we went.

This year for New Years we decided to go down to the base in Naples and watch the fireworks from the top of the five story parking garage. WOW!

We got there at about 10:30 and there was already a steady flow of fire works. At midnight, the entire city and all the little surrounding towns lit up. 360 degrees of BIG fireworks being launched from peoples backyards and apartment balconies. You could see as far out as the hillsides of Mt Vesuvius... After 40 minutes they hadn't really slowed down yet but there was so much smoke in the air visibility had been reduced to a couple miles. I have never seen anything like it. Again, these are fireworks our cities buy and shoot off for the 4th or for New Years. I don't know where they get them, or how the Neapolitans can afford them but it was amazing.

Happy New Year.

Bucharest Romania

The Black Sea (black and white photo taken in Constanta)

"Dracula's Castle" If you have ever read Bram Stoker's Dracula you can picture the Count crawling down this wall.

The Orchestra House.

So with just six months left overseas we are starting to look at places you wouldn't normally plan a trip to from the US. Romania came to mind.
With as modern as they have become in the past 20 years they still have a ways to go in some areas.
We ended up going with another family, my boss really. I told him about the great price I found for a direct flight over Thanksgiving and he asked if I cared if he and his family came. The boys played baseball together and went to Poland together so we all knew each other and we all get along so there was no issue. Someone in his family works for Marriott so he hooked us up with a room for $80/ night at the JW in Bucharest. So for less than $800 I've got airfare and lodging for four. Going to Bucharest for Thanksgiving!
We left on Wednesday afternoon. No problem with the flight. The airport is SMALL although I didn't realize how small until we flew out. You go through customs and get your luggage. The dollar rental car was a small stand, really like a podium, next to the Thrifty podium. Who needs computers? All the paperwork was filled out by hand. I think he fished the keys out of a box. We walk out to the curb and he says, "Wait here. I'll bring the car up." It really wasn't that the service was that great, there is no parking garage. He had to run over to the tiny parking lot a couple hundred yards away. He pulls up in a tiny Chevy Spark. It was full of scrapes and chipped paint but I wasn't to worried at that point. It was cheap and temporary. The back tire was a little low. The response was, "Yeah, that's how the last guy brought it back." Fair enough. Welcome to Romania.
The TomTom (ours) has limited mapping of Romania. It kinda knows roads are in place but unless it is a MAJOR road there are no names. We bought a map to get to the hotel...
Thursday. I went out to check to see if the back tire was holding the air we put in the night before. It was holding. Good you may say. Now in the day light though I can see the tires better. The back tires were obviously front tires at one point and the car must have needed an alignment. The outside edges of both back tires were almost, you could see little dents that used to be trend, smooth. No big deal, I remember Carey driving around on bald tires for quite some time went we were teens in Florida. Its when you start to see threads that there is a problem. We were headed out towards to airport anyway.
First sight. An outdoor village museum. They went all around Romania and piece by piece took apart and reassembled traditional old (some hundreds of years old) homes. Actually very interesting. All very simple. Small. Fun to walk around though. We saw a squirrel wit really big ears.
The kids spotted a Hard Rock the night before. It was right around the corner so we all agreed we'd go. The exchange rate is about 3 Leis to one dollar so it really wasn't that bad.
To the airport. The night before the guy gave my boss his cell phone number so that on Sunday we could call ahead and he would meet us out front to return the cars. I didn't think much about it but once we got to the airport it became very clear. He only works when there is an appointment. No one around to care about my bald tires let alone swap out cars (I really don't know if they would have had anything else anyway). Back to the memories of Carey's first car... It’s only a long weekend.
That night Carey, the kids and I went to see an orchestra. Very pretty building. 50+ people in the orchestra. It was a piece used in Fantasia.
Friday. Constanta. A 2600 year old city right on the Black Sea. It is now the forth largest shipping port in Europe. We spent the afternoon just strolling through the small old town. We went down to the water so everyone could say they were IN the Black Sea.
That night we got back kinda late so we had dinner at the Lebanese restaurant in the hotel. Really good.
Saturday. Brasov and Bran. Bram Stoker got the inspiration from and used the castle in Bran as the starting point in Dracula. I got most of the way through the book before we went to it so it was really neat to see the castle as he had described it. The castle itself was great. It was something you could really live in. No over the top rooms or hallways. Normal size rooms, with normal transitions, and normal stairways (and one kinda secret staircase). On the top floor there was a pretty good history of Vlad the Impaler (Dracula) and the myths. Long story short, Vlad really believed in impaling people as punishment for crimes. This lead to comments such as "his taste for blood." That was then carried out further. His father was part of the Order of the Dragon. Dracula is "little Dracul." It was funny to see the light go on in Brianna's head that Twilight wasn't he beginning of Vampire movies... I think she knew that but didn't really know it went back that far and I'm not sure if she had heard of Dracula.
Brasov is another nice old town. Beautiful area on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains. We finally had a traditional Romanian meal there. I had tripe soup. Cow stomach. Delicious.

Driving around Bucharest was interesting. All the old communist apartments are still in place. You never had to worry about people wanting more than their neighbors. Very dreary. Much more of an overwhelming sense of the communist life style than we saw in Berlin or Warsaw.

Oh yeah. The tires held up just fine. When I turned the car in the response was, "Yeah we were waiting because we're going to have to put on winter tires soon."
The major international airport in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, has 4 gates. All in one small area. Sitting there looking around was like something out of a movie. Flights were on time though and our luggage came with us...

Good trip. Glad we went.

Next stop, Istanbul, Turkey! The week between Christmas and New Years.


As a side note. I just got back from a week long underway on a surface ship. We pulled into Split, Croatia. Extremely beautiful area. More small towns to explore. National parks (I took an excursion to see some incredible water falls). It was enough to put Croatia back on the short list of places to go soon.

Two more to go... Stuttgart Germany

The week of Veterans day I had to go to Stuttgart for work. Brianna has a good friend that moved from here to there and we really like Germany (if that hasn't become obvious) so we decided to take the long weekend up there. It worked out well. Brianna and Danna were glued at the hip and gitty the whole time.
Carey and the kids got on a direct flight from Naples to Stuttgart on Thursday and I met them at the airport with the family we were staying with. We couldn't have asked for more really. We had a place to stay for free and we rented a minivan for the weekend so the families could just stay together and travel around. They were still kinda new to the area so it was a good trip for them too.
Thursday night jumped on a train and bus to a little restaurant. As always, good food and wine. I had pig's cheak. It really was good.
Friday we all loaded up and went to Strasbourg, France. How great is that? "I think I'll go to France for the day..." It is a little less than 2 hours away. We spent the day walking around just enjoying the small town. There was a very pretty church. We climbed the 300 or so stairs to the top of the bell tower. Great views of the surrounding area. We took a nice, glass enclosed, river boat tour. That evening we ate there and then headed back.
Saturday we had a pretty fun and laid back day. We saw Mega-mind at the base theatre in the morning, then went on the hunt for "a great skate park" someone told Austin about. Someone was misinformed... Oh well. Later we went to an indoor water park. They had some waterslides, a wave pool, and a big out door heated pool. That evening we left the kids at home and had an enjoyable dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The Skip was the pilot that flew President Bush onto the aircraft carrier during the Iraq war. The story was awesome. Politics aside, Bush seemed like a very personable person and to this day they still get Christmas cards.
All in all a good weekend.

Berlin (starting to get caught up...)

A shot of the Holocaust Museum

Berlin Cathedral. Some kid doing a handstand in front of it...

We've taken family that comes out to different countries. For my parents we chose Berlin.

Honestly, I kinda screwed up the planning on this one but it still worked out pretty good. We had about 48 hours on the ground in Berlin. In my defense part of the "problem" was that Carey and I went to see U2 in Rome the night before. Woa is us... The concert was AWESOME.
The first day (afternoon) we got on the metro and went to a giant outdoor flea market. The walk there was pretty. There is a giant park (Tiergarten Park), nice walkways, statues, etc. The market was neat. Anything from antiques to spare parts, to paintings and furniture. That night we went to a Brauhaus for good German food and beer. I think with enough time here I could convince my dad that Busch beer really is nasty. Probably not.
Normally we don't put to much stock in hop-on hop-off busses but with some proper planning they can be very effective. This will be a little out of order as I go through the Rick Steves book and look at the bus stops on line but I think I'll cover it all...
Reichstag Building. It is the parliament building. Massive with pretty, huge glass dome on top. There is a nice open grassy area in front of it that you can take in the size and get some really good pictures. Of course there is people watching and pretzel vendors too. I think we ate our way across the city!
Brandenburg Gate. The last surviving gate of Berlin's old city walls. When the Berlin wall was up it blocked off right in front of it. Street performers, people posing and taking pictures in US and German uniforms, a make shift passport stamping stand (we have very few stamps believe it or not now that the EU countries have open borders).
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. 2,711 gravestone/ coffin looking pillars all at different heights. It is the first government sponsored holocaust museum. Below it is a fairly large museum that outlines the events of the holocaust. Eerie personnel stories, letters, tell of individual sufferings. As with all things holocaust, moving.
Berlin Cathedral. Huge! I think I read somewhere this was the protestants answer to St. Peters. Unfortunately services, or something, were going on inside so we had to admire from outside. Interesting, yet unrelated, the terror threat through Europe has been a little higher in the past few months so the police were enforcing a no parking, standoff, zone in front of the cathedral. We saw two or three cars towed in 15-20 minutes.
Check point Charlie and the Berlin Wall. All through Berlin there is a brick path following where the wall used to be. At Check Point Charlie there is a long detailed exhibit that tells a really good history of the wall. If you listen to some of the tourists, I got tired of reading, you could here people reliving times that they had spent here (one guy in particular was in the service or something and was telling a story about the procedures and some problems getting back and forth). Detailed in the exhibit were the stories of people trying to get over the wall (was no easy feat since there was a huge cleared area where you were likely to get shot) or smuggled out in the trunk or with fake id's etc. We walked up the street a found one of the few remaining portions of the wall. Amazing to think of what it must have been like to live on either side of the wall and the different lives associated with each.
The final morning we went to KaDeWe's. A huge, high end department store second in size only to Harrods in London. I don't think I will ever understand the logic of spending so much on even common clothing (hats, shirts, jeans) but ,wow, there was some pricey stuff in there. The most amusing part was the food section. "Gourmet" foods from all over. What does America have to offer for the Europeans? Betty Crocker. I don't make this stuff up. You see it here though too. There was an international bizarre at the NATO base here in Naples and that's what the American stand had there too.
So we really did pack a lot into our 48 hours.
Some trips are more "fun" than others, but all of them have something to offer as far as history and culture are concerned.

Still catching up

A couple pictures from Ravello.

I really should have stayed on top of this... Now its kinda painful and I have to remember...

My parents came out in September/ October.
We saw a lot of the same stuff I have already written about but we also took a trip back to Cusana Mutri (the hill town we have family from). My Uncle hired a genealogist to meet us up there and go back further in the family tree. The town records people where extremely supportive. We were, mostly by ourselves, able to go back a few more generations and then go FORWARD. The woman working that day looked at the genealogist and said, "Let me take you all up the street to talk to some people." Condensing the story a little, we ended up having coffee in the living room of some very distant cousins (to be exact, my mom's great-great-grandfather and Antonio's great-great-grandfather were brothers). Not the overwhelming family reunion I think I wrote about with the Retrosi's (they had a get together with 80 of their closest relatives they had never met) but still pretty neat.
We also took the time to walk around the town a bit more and it really is pretty.

Another little trip worth mentioning while they were here was Ravello. Every now and then you go some place around here that you think "This is Italy. This is the beauty that I always thought of." Ravello is one of those places. It is along the Amalfi coast but set up in the hills just a little. Absolutely beautiful ocean views and lookouts. If you ever find yourself planning a trip that involves sothern Italy center your time around the Amalfi coast. Its nice to say you've been to Pompeii but if my time was limited I wouldn't spend much of it looking for things to do around Naples. If you do have time to kill there are definitely things worth seeing, and our guests so far have all had weeks here so we have taken them, but Amalfi really is what people picture.

Berlin to follow...

Need to catch up a bit...

This will probably come in a few posts. Out of laziness I stopped posting trips around Italy but there have been a couple lately (the last few months) that are worth posting.



Labor Day weekend: Carey posted pictures on facebook right after we got back from this one so it may seem a little familiar to some of you.

We went to Pescasseroli which is a small town in the mountains a couple hours north of here. We stayed at a nice hotel that had an excellent resteraunt downstairs. The town itself is nice but the area is really about outdoors activities.

The first day, Friday, after walking through the town, we went to the ski lift area. They had these four wheel cars, no engine, that got towed up the bunny slope and then gravity takes you down. In addition to the four wheelers they had jumbo wheeled skooters. Pretty fun... After that, we went down the street to where they had tubing and trampolines. For the tubing, they built wood ramps on the side of the hill and then covered them with what is essentially inch and a half tall, in-door/ out-door carpet. Then you slide down on a tube. One of the ramps ended by launching you up and out onto a huge airbag. They also had outdoor trampolines. Nice ones. Competition type.

Saturday, we went horseback riding. This time Austin got to do it all by himself. It was funny riding the horses, they were definetly raised in Italy. They were all trying to either pass eachother or get in a better position. Kinda like Italian driving... After that we went back to the ski area. We took the main lift to the top and then hiked back down. About an hour and a half later we got back to the bottom. Pretty area. Pretty views.

Fianlly, on Sunday we stopped at a really pretty lake on our way back to Naples. Lago di Barrea. We rented paddle boats and spent an hour or so just cruising around the lake.

Nice weekend. Relaxing, fun.