Day in Verona - 4.sept

Another early wake up call, quick breakfast and a tram ride to the train station. Have to mention that the tram kinda broke down at half way to the station after making a loud horrible sound. It would not move. So the tram driver made a restart :) All the lights went out, the quiet humming noise stopped for a while, then came a beep, humming noise started again, all the ticket machines ran a log and restarted themselves and our journey continued after a few minutes. Must be running on microsoft :) ?

It took a bit over an hour to get to Verona from Padova. All we knew about the town was that we need to go and visit the Arena and Julias balcony :) Of course we found more things to look at, the city is beautiful, city's flag is almost the same as Swedish flag only the cross made of two yellow stripes is aligned to the center of the flag. When Bologna was very massive and heavy, Verona is much different. There is a river winding through the city with many bridges crossing it every now and then, there are even more churches here than there were in Venice, there are statues on every corner and the heavy stone tombs are lifted up to about 3 meters from the ground and accompanied by lots of decorations.

Anyhow, first we found the Arena - a Roman amphitheater, which is internationally famous for the large-scale opera performances given there. It is one of the best preserved ancient structures of its kind. The building itself was built in AD 30 on a site which was then beyond the city walls. The ludi (shows and games) staged there were so famous that spectators came from many other places, often far away, to witness them. The amphitheater could host more than 30 000 spectators in ancient times, currently it seats 20 000 people. It is used for opera performances nowadays.

Next we found Julia's Tomb, but it seemed so boring and half way under construction that we did not even bother to get a closer look. Found Juliet's balcony. Statue of Dante. Walked by the castel- which was magnificent. As wiki knows to inform about the bridge by the castle: with a span length of 48.70 m, the 1356 completed segmental arch bridge Ponte Scaligero featured at the time the world's largest bridge arch.

History of Verona is colorful, starting from Romans, continuing with Napoleon and also Germans. Won't go any further with covering the history, but I strongly suggest looking it up ;) As you all already figured out Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was based in Verona. Oh and Leonardo Da Vinci was from Verona!

I just have to mention that toilets here in Italy are something different. Some of them are in the tiniest closets, most toilets in public areas (including bus and train stations) cost up to 80 cents. More than once I have found a toilet where there is no seat, there are simply locations for your feet and that is it. Kinda like they used to have in Lauluväljak times ago (this was my friends term). Toilets are all clean and everything but it just seems so ancient and strange to me.

Now comes the story of our wonderful hostel :) It is located right on San Polo square. In the directions that I printed out it was stated that it is best to call ahead of time so they can arrange a pick-up. Well I did call but as it came out this was the only way to get into the hotel, not because of a pick-up, but because they would open the front door via mobile :D Further instructions were given by phone to walk upstairs where we would find the key in a pouch stuck to the door, open the door with a key and keep walking towards a door with my name on it :) How cool is that :) And the house keeper would only come the next morning during breakfast, this would be the time to pay as well. Haven't seen anything that relaxed in a while.

And this place has INTERNET! With a cable and all :) Took me quite a bit more than an hour to make few posts, go through my e-mails and find out what is happening in the world. This was all followed by a quick dinner and off to bed we went - afterall tomorrow we need to wake up very early.