Perugia

DISCLAIMER: sorry for this being so long and detailed, but that’s way muh daddy wants it =). Feel free to skip boring parts. Also, its kind of hard to explain this place because its magic is mostly in the feeling of it… but details help, so, yeah. Grazie!!

Perugia (Pair-oo-juh??)

            People definitely get lured into little rooms and tortured to death here. Just kidding, but if meg were here she would totally be thinking the same thing =). Everyone is more kind than they need to be and everything is quiet except for the church bells. (this is just the part of the town that we’re staying in; there is a lot more activity near the university)

            When we first got here, we came off of the train and were politely faced with a nice set of stairs, up which we needed to lug our gigantic bags. I took off with mine (I was gonna go back for mom’s, I swear =/ ) and when I looked back, a little woman was holding one side of mom’s bag as they carried it together up the stairs.

Within about thirty seconds of leaving the train station, we became lost. As we turned around after walking a few seconds in a direction which I declared was “certainly not the right one”, a man in a suit stopped us and asked where we needed to go. We told him that we needed to get to the Mini-Metro and he walked us in the direction where we had turned from (oops). As we walked, he told me that he had only met two people here who spoke English. He told me that he was from Armenia and asked me where I was from. Well, he asked “Is your land?”, which I, of course, thought was adorable. Once he got us a few feet up the little path thing to the metro, he turned around and walked where he had been going.  

The mini-metro is this amazing little automated rail-system. It goes from the top to the bottom of the hill on which the town is built and has about ten stops. About every minute or two, a small, one-car “train” comes. It is similar to an airport shuttle but tiny, like maybe ten feet long and five feet wide. We bought our tickets (1.5 euro), went up the lift and, obviously, caught one going the wrong direction. Before we realized this, we went a few stops down the hill. We passed a little park with a shiny turquoise ping-pong table and a school which had graffiti on the side saying “Welcome to Hell. Fuck”. The grass and trees were a beautiful green and looked way more hydrated than I was.

We finally realized our mistake and got off and back on one in the other direction. We had yet to see another person since getting on the mini-metro, until we got to the next stop, where a little lady, who was probably in her 70’s or 80’s, hustled her way up the stairs and joined us in our car. Since basically all that we knew was what direction to go toward, mom asked the lady if she knew where our hotel was. Of course, our version of asking a question like this is “Dove (where)…?” and pointing at a piece of paper. She thought for a couple seconds then gave a detailed explanation of where to go… in Italian. I’m pretty sure that at one point she looked at mom and said something about me not understanding anything that she was saying. But when she said “Ultima fermata (last stop)” I was like “oh! Ultima fermata” and then we said ultima fermata back and forth a few times, nodding to confirm/affirm that I had understood. A little later, she seemed to understand some of our conversation about how the car-rails must go in a circle because they had conflicting instructions in them (too difficult to explain without hand gestures) and when mom said “it must be a loop” and made a circle with her finger, the lady said “si, si” and nodded, making the same gesture with her hand.

We were in a tunnel for a while, and when then we came out at the last stop and were faced with a magnificent view of mountains and nature, and some houses. Thank goodness, we passed what I believe was a British family here visiting the wife’s mother. The father had seen what he thought was our hotel (and ended up being very close to it) and so explained to us how to get there. We followed the directions which led us through a series of narrow, curving streets. We found the thing that he was talking about, realized that it wasn’t our hotel, and continued walking until we came to a piazza (plaza). Here, we called the guy from the hotel, who told us that we needed to ask someone. So, we did. We asked this woman who was selling bracelets and earrings and she tried to point us in the right direction but looked doubtful that it was going to work out for us. We bought some bracelets from her, and she laughed at our trying to scramble together 18 euro from our coins (I forgot that I had 30 euro in my pocket). After this, she asked the man vending next to her if he could watch her table and she walked with us for about four blocks, until we could see the steps that we had asked her to lead us to.

From here, we wound around roads, up and down stairs. We passed churches and people—most walking arm-in-arm and talking in quiet voices, as the sound of the plastic wheels of our luggage turning along the diagonally-ribbed roads reverberated off of the tall walls of the narrow corridors, disrupting the calm of the town. After a couple more phone calls, the lady who worked at the hotel walked out to the large church (the closest certain land-mark) and led us from there to the tiny road where our hotel was waiting for us.  

Mom let me rest for about twenty minutes (I got little sleep during our last night in Rome) and then we went out to find the restaurant that had been recommended to us.

We got lost… again.

But this time, we were grateful for it. Our wrong turn led us to a road which curved up a hill. We hit the curve of this road and were presented with a view of the town, descending down from us with churches, houses, roads, and cars, all seemingly still. Mountains rose up from the town all around, some of them capped with snow, some of them green, some almost blue under the most magnificent sun-set that I have ever seen. It encompassed every aspect of every beautiful sunset that I have ever seen. There were parts where the clouds appeared to be on fire; there were rays coming down and up from the sun as it barely peeked out. There were puffy clouds and wispy clouds; there were blues, purples, pinks, and oranges. Between mom and I, we probably took about thirty pictures. I haven’t looked at them yet, but I can guarantee that none of them really captured it.

We followed this up with amazing pizza and pasta, little potato dumplings, and wonderful bread and wine.

Welcome to Perugia =)