Marina and I also visited UK after the trip to Italy, photos titled Great Times at UK captured our wonderful moments spent with our family and friends, especially the ones where Marina got to know them for the first time. My sincere gratitude to Shell , Nick, and all of Marina's cousins (Lydia ,Hillary, Richard, Ali ,Frances and Almania) for their hospitality.
Rosita Hong Han Chan's Blog
Sunday, May 19, 2024
Wednesday, September 14, 2022
Trip to Italy June 20th -29th 2022
We waited for more than two years before we could embark on a trip that we had planned in 2020 to celebrate Marina's completion of secondary school plus catching up with relatives. The pandemic Covid 19 had caused such an upheaval and disruption throughout the world, particularly in the tourism industry.
My cousin Nora who is living in Jesolo, Italy, had invited us (about an hour from Venice). The photos from the link below provides an overview of the first four happy and memorable days we spent with Nora.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqDA8J0NxSs
During our stay at her home, we took a day trip to Milan during our stay in Jesolo. We left early from Jesolo and took a bus to the Venice train station, our first train ride in Italy. It took 2 hours and 25 minutes to get there. We went straight to our booked Milan Cathedral (Duomo di Milano) tour, and we were both completely blown away by the Gothic architecture.
The weather was hot, after we took the above photo, we ended up having ice cream affogato and berry tart for lunch at an air conditioned cafe. Once we finished our ice cream, we rushed out of the cafe because we had another tour scheduled to see Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper. Marina didn't realise she'd left her phone behind, but thankfully, the staff noticed and chased us down to retrieve it; imagine the stress of the entire trip if it hadn't been found.
The security to get to get into the venue to see the Last Supper was more or less liked the airport security. We were in only there for 15 minutes.
The Crucifixion, painted by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano in the 1490s.It's believed that Leonardo painted the figures of the Duke of Milan and his consort.Putting the two photos together was to demonstrate how they could be different from two different cameras.
The paintings were kept in Santa Maria delle Grazie.
We then walked to the mediaeval Sforza Castle, which had resemblances to the castle we visited in Osaka, Japan.
I didn't like walking in the heat, but I had no choice because the tour guide was so enthusiastic and you simply felt bad to leave the group.
But if not following him, we could have missed the Brera district, which is known for its high-quality leather shops.
Statues were everywhere but this was precious, especially we had just seen Di Vinci's famous painting.
Finally, being taken by the guide to walk through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele was a real surprise to see so many luxury retailers and restaurants all in one place. In memory, a backdrop for many movies.
We took the subway to Metrale train station to return to Venice. We quickly bought some food (arancini, focaccia, and a doughnut) and drinks and had our dinner on the train, which was delicious. We got to Venice at around 9 and took two buses back to Jesolo. It was a long day but very enjoyable.
We said our goodbyes to Nora and set off for Florence on June 24th.
By six o'clock in the evening, we decided to take a stroll through the city to find the famous Florence Duomo, which was a symbol of Florence and inspired countless artists from the Renaissance Era to the present day. We spent at least an hour walking around the Duomo, and by the time we finished, it was nearly 9 p.m. Most places in Europe get dark at around at 10pm in summer.
Marina never missed an opportunity to make friends with horses. We stayed under the shade to wait for the coach to arrive.
After lunch, we went to San Gimignano, a hill town, where the scenery was visually striking.
San Gimignano is also famous for its tower houses.
The country scenery was just so amazingly beautiful while driving along to the famous Pisa Tower.
I had Marina take a photo of me and posted it like most tourists did, whereas Marina preferred to post normally, which could provide a better view of the towner's slant position.
A fun fact about this trip was that the coach was a double decker with two guides, one of whom spoke Italian and the other English. Before we got off the coach for Pisa, the guides warned us about pick pockets so I decided to leave everything in the coach. The weather was so hot and we were so thirty and by then we said we should have taken the water. Finally I borrowed some money from an American family from our tour group to get a cool drink.
It took the coach close to two hours to send us back to where we started from in the morning. We dived back to the airbnb. I was so tired and could not be bothered to do anymore walking, luckily Marina was happy to go out and she found a market and bought some food back for dinner. She wanted to bring me back to the market the next day but we simply ran out of time.
That night. we went online to purchase the train ticket to Rome as by then we knew how much time to take us to get to the train station (Firenze Santa Maria Novella) from where we stayed.
We checked out the next morning, leaving our luggage at the airbnb, and went to the Uffizi Galleries, the only place in Italy that we did not pre-book. We didn't have to wait long to get tickets to see the outstanding collection of ancient sculptures and paintings displayed on two floors of a large building. We started out taking photos, but after a while realised there were far too many sculptures and paintings, we gave up.
We stayed for about two hours before realising we needed to get to the next tour, which was to climb the Duomo that we was only able to see the outside the night before.
When we got there we could not find the group we booked into. Fortunately, the WhatsApp phone was answered, we felt like we were in the Amazing Race, Marina was holding the phone and talking to the office, and I simply ran behind her, puffing and huffing, worried that we would miss the tour, we finally found them and of course we were the last two.
After climbing 463 flights of very narrow stairs in extreme heat, I was completely exhausted halfway through and on the verge of quitting, but I decided not to disappoint Marina and gathered my energy and struggled on. We eventually made it to the top of Brunelleschi's Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral, and once there, I understood what we meant by "breath-taking view."
Look at the half death Rosita
When we returned to the ground, we sat at a cafe directly opposite the Duomo and ordered two juices for $7 euro each, which was much more expensive than most of the other drinks we had.
In Italy, no restaurant served water; instead, customers had to purchase either sparkling or non-sparkling water. Also, because we didn't see many public restrooms, most restaurants will let you use their restrooms as long as you buy something from them.
We returned to our airbnb to retrieve our luggage before taking the tram back to the Florence train station and boarding the train to Rome. The train ride was one and a half hours long, but because the train was so small, sitting was exhausting because you didn't know where to put your legs. Because we only booked the day before, our seats were diagonally opposite each other. We booked the ticket to get off at a station before Rome Termini, thinking it would be closer to the hotel Nora had reserved for us (Best Western Spring Hotel), but when I saw only a few people getting ready to get off at that train station we had booked, I panicked and asked the guy sitting next to me, and he was so nice and told us to get off at Termini instead; he also told us to take the subway to get to the hotel. It was close to 6:30 pm when we got out of the train station so I decided to take a taxi to the hotel. The hotel was modern and included full breakfast in the morning. We showered, then Marina used Google Maps to find a nearby restaurant where we had the best beef truffle tortellini and veggi pizza. The restaurant was run by a very nice old couple; it was ten o'clock and they were still serving customers tirelessly. The meal only costed us $23.5 Euro with also a bottle of coke zero.
In the morning, after a delicious breakfast, we walked to St Peter's Square, the public heart of Vatican City, which features the famous obelisk in the centre. The large open space was designed so that as many people as possible can see the Pope when he gives his blessing. We saw a long line forming to enter St. Peter's Basilica, so we gave up because we had booked a tour of the Vatican Museum and Sistine Chapel. We took some photos and I sent a couple of postcards from the Vatican Post Office, which was operated from a mobile truck. Apparently this post office is famous for sending more letters per year per inhabitant (825 in 2019), of which 99.9 percent were sent by tourists like myself.
We joined a tour to visit the Vatican museum as it has the most extensive collection of ancient Roman sculptures, many of which were allegedly stolen from other locations. We didn't take many photos because there were so many tourists around, and Marina and I decided we could walk back after the tour was over.
After this, we were so tired and we decided not going back to take photos. At this stage, all we wanted was to get ourselves some cool drinks. Marina got a watermelon slushy which according to her was the best and I had a Aperol spritz. We shared a plate of lasagne as afternoon tea.
England Trip 29th June to 14th July 2022
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