This is the lounge in Heathrow we’ve been in the most over the years. It’s huge; this photos represent maybe one-third of it. Food and beverages are free for the taking.

 The coffee bar by the business center. I keep forgetting to take a photo of the main food area.

 Business center, with a wall of computers on the other side. That’s my backpack and laptop on the left.

As I’d stated in the first blog entry for this trip, the impetus for its planning was vouchers Dan had that needed to be used or else they would expire. They got us two round trip business class tickets for not much more than the price of one economy ticket. Hard to pass that up. This is the first trip out of the four we’ve done to Europe that we actually sat together (for the most part) the whole way there and back. We’re usually not even on the same plane much less the same cabin. On this leg, he was across the privacy screen from me, which we kept down. It was a great way to travel. I loved seeing that face every time I looked up :)

 

This trip’s blog was really fun; there seemed to be more interaction with all of you than previous ones. Probably the subject matter – Italy is a prime destination spot and, like previous blogs, the interaction splits along two distinct lines: 1) vicarious traveling for those who haven’t been and 2) memory lane for those who have. Either way, we enjoy it. And it’s definitely a labor of love. At a minimum, the whole process – which in the most general sense is two stages: photo editing and writing – takes two hours a night. And I wouldn’t do it any other way; no way I could remember everything if I waited and did it later. Day 7 of this trip (Vatican and Capitoline) set the record at 3.5 hours. But it also had the most photos ever at over 70. When we started this thing we thought 25 photos a day was a lot. Average now is probably 50 or so.  

 

 1. Tied for first place: perfumes. Again, Oh My God. Men and women, but definitely worse with the women. We’ve never experienced such an over-perfumed society before. Dan has always been very sensitive to it, and my sensitivity to it has increased over the years with him as I wore less and less, and progressed this year after working in a scent-free environment. Just walking down the sidewalk you practically pass out from the fumes. And the worst? Perfume attempting to hide the cigarette smell. Yeah, no. It just makes it that much more disgusting.

3. People are nice to us wherever we go. When we went to Paris in May of 2014, many people told us “Parisians are rude, expect to not be treated well.” We didn’t experience that. We were told that Italians were the worst. We didn’t experience that, either. Everywhere we’ve been we’ve never had any problems. You expect good treatment at hotels and such; but even restaurants and cafes, servers are always very nice. We don’t shop so can’t really comment on retail establishments. So don’t be afraid!

 4. Most everyone we encountered could speak some English. Granted, we’ve never ventured into rural areas (although we will one day) and it’s probably very different out there. But in the now many cities in Europe we’ve visited, English is pretty universal. That said, it definitely helps to have learned a bit of the language before you go. Basic stuff like greetings, please, thank you, can I have the check?, where is the toilet? This also goes a long way, we believe, towards creating a sense of goodwill, which may facilitate the results we get in #3. We’d heard Italians were less likely to know English than their fellow northern Europeans but that wasn’t our experience. This despite putting zero effort to learn the language for this trip because we were so dang busy leading up to it. It’s not like Netherlands or Finland (where the answer to “do you speak English is ‘of course’”), but in the same ball park as Germany and France (“little bit”).

5. You better like pasta. It’s true. Italians eat a lot of it. Dan put himself on a tortilla moratorium after just 4 days in Mexico last year. I sense the same thing coming with pasta.

 

8. Koreans (and other diversity observations). Dan commented on it in every city we were in: He estimates 50% or more of all of the Asian travelers we saw were Korean. China has like 1.4 billion people. Japan, 127 million. South Korea, 50 million. Why is there such a disproportionate number of Korean visitors in Italy compared to other Asian cultures? His hypothesis is they learn English in school so are more comfortable traveling individually or as families, where Chinese may tend to travel in clans because of the language barrier. That said, every city we were in, but especially Milan and Rome, were very diverse. Not only did we hear perhaps the most number of languages spoken on the streets ever, things were  also likely to be written in 4-6 languages, especially at airports and train stations. When we got to the Rome Airport – Leonardo da Vinci – we saw the Arrival/Departure board flash in Italian, English, German, French, Russian and Mandarin.

 

 

2. Scalpers and other visitor scams. We noticed it the first day as we were walking up to the Colosseum. This very loud announcement about where to buy tickets, and what the actual ticket prices were, with a “be aware” message of the folks on the street trying to sell you “skip the line” tickets that wouldn’t have that effect, or other scalping scams. There were people hanging out the subway entrance at the train station doing the same thing; we saw it at the Vatican, too. If this has happened in other cities, we didn’t notice it. Here, it seemed to be everywhere.