TEST

So the last two days were supposed to be nice relaxing, easy days, after the terror that was the run across Europe I felt I deserved it. Unfortunatly they were two of the most full on days we've seen since the Tour De Fear.

The closest major town to the Italian border was Venice, so that's were I headed too first. I camped just out side of town and then caught a bus into the town and get this people the streets were made of water!

At first I shook my head at the poor town planning and went looking for the flood markers to see if it compared to Bris Vegas 79, but no, this turned out to be how they wanted it. People looked stunned at me as I stiched half a hundred inflatible boats to the undercarraige of the Messy Dayz (Yes with a Z these days) but I had the last laugh when I was cruising for hookers on the Grand Canal!

Anyways, Venice was good, they did well with the whole, no cars thing. Although the entire town could do with a coat of paint. I took a ride on a ferry, which was slow and poorly run, I mean really, if the Venice town council can't organise a Ferry what hope is there for the world? I got off my Ferry at the Rialto bridge, which was clearly ripped off from that College in Oxford and then walked to St Marco Place, which was quite a good square, although the whole encouraging people to feed the pigions I felt was a bit much, thousands of the things, I decided to nix the actual church, the line was very long, and hey I've been to St Peter's, why would I go to St Marks? After this I just walked around town a little and visited the Academia, which is where I was expecting to see Da Vinci's Versuvian (No Idea) Man - you know the scetch of a bloke, anatomically perfect... Well it wasn't there, not sure if it was in one of the rooms they had closed off for renovation, or if Wikipedia was just lying, but I didn't see the thing either way, so that was a big bust.

After I was finsihed in Venice I got in the bus intending to drive half way to Verona, the next days target, but it was only 100 clicks down the road so I was in Verona before I knew it. The reason for Verona was to attend the Verona Opera Festival so I was there in heaps of time to see the nights show, Nubucco. The show was excellent, as was the scene:

The theatre was increbile, a roman ruin/non ruin. 50 rows of seats up, the top 20 or so are the cheap seats- the orignal stone action. Guys walking around selling brews, you can picture them doing it 2000 years ago. (Need to read my libretto before dark). Right before the performance they handed out small candles. Reading the blurb it turns out that 85 years ago when they started using the amputheatre for Opera there was no electricity available, so the punters would bring along candles along in order to read their programmes. So nowdays they do it to keep the tradition going, and to help their marketing, the image as they turned the house lights off to be replaced by 2000 candles was very (sic) unique!.

No poxy warning alarms at this theatre, a girl comes on stage with a gong and gives it a solid bash. We all clap, I'm not sure why but she does generate a fair tone.

The Maestro is one of these eccentric types, wild arm and head movements, jumping up and down to set a rhythm.

Simple sets but lots of really good lighting- which I like. Large chorus so some quite powerful sections. A real no fooling horse. Interval- the folks next to me are having a lend of their daughter "There was no horse on stage!", "Did you see a horse? Where?"- Priceless.

Looks like 3 intervals/4 acts- a long night.

The fashions aren't as well to do as in Puccini fest, this is more your every mans opera fest.. God, that girl in the white dress at Tosca, Torre Del Lago... I will sleep well tonight.

Act III- Chorus was epic- crowd went nuts, demanded a do over - and got it! Power to the people baby.

Anyways, overall it was an excellent day. I slept in Verona and then headed off towards Milan the next morning.

Milan was a single target town, Da Vinci's Last Supper, considering the trouble I have had with other pieces of ancient art (didn't see the real David or Virtivean man, also missed a couple of things at the Vatican), I wasn't overly optimistic about my chances of seeing it. Anyways, I caught a train into the centre of town, and then proceded to get horribly lost, no map, and lots of rain.

Eventually the rain ended and I walked around and around, eventually seeing an interesting looking church, on a whim I wandered over to check it out- which was lucky as this turned out to be where the Last Supper was, I went into the ticket office and was concerned to see a sign saying that the only way to get in was to pre book, the loathing began to descend, thankfully the girl on the ticket desk was susceptible to a full blown dose of the A smile and she releneted and gave me a cancellation ticket if I came back in an hour.

So I did, and I got to see the Painting, which was very impressive. Now, I don't want piss of the more religous minded of our readers, but the person next to Jeebers really looks like a girl, and their is a disembodied hand...

After the big ticket item for the day way done I kept going with the whole walking around town thing, and saw a nice park, an areana, an Arc de Triumph, and a cool old Castle. It was good, I then jumped aboard the bus to head for France, and finally be done with Italy. As I headed towards the autostrada a thought occured to me that place names like Cologno and Bolognia sounded a lot like the kind of area that Monza is in...

Which is when I then saw a sign for Monza- I then started to get really excited, I took the bait and and took the turn, the racing car track was not well signed, so I started to get a little lost, but it all worked out as I finally found the track. And the afternoon got really exciting when I all of a sudden heard the sweet note of a racing car engine producing 19 000 rpm of energy.

The Monza GP is in a weeks time, and traditionally the F1 teams Test their cars in the week before the race at the track, which is what they were doing yesterday- it was very exciting, two instances of F! racing cars inside of a week- A result. It was golden, Ferrari, Mclaren, BMW, Toyota, Red Bull, Torro Rosso and Spyker where all on hand, as was a surprisingly big crowd. good times.

After the surprising bonus of seeing the F1 test I finally got on the road towards France, I decided to stop for the night when I got to France, which turned out to harder then I thought, as just west of the Border a toll booth stoll my Amex card...

You can imagine the scene, I drove into the toll booth and went to put my card in the reader, the person in front of me was acting funny, and all of sudden my card would not come back to me. I thought I was going to get the Sonny Corleone treatment for a minute, but thankfully all I lost was my card.

Still thougth, as my bookkeeper will attest my financial situation is a little on the dire side (lousy no where in Greece accepting AMEX) so the loss of the AMEX credit hurt hard, I battled against the urge to begin throwing Molatov cocktails all over the place, dealt with the AMEX people and then fucked the hell out of Italy so I could finally relax again in the more civilised France.

The last part of the story involves a very, very long tunnel, 12.8 KM's in fact (and 35 Euro's worth of paege) Anyways, I finally re-entered my third favorite country and this trip got back on track.