Genoa – Toulouse

Sunday, 29th October 2006

As I came home late the extra hour at night was very helpful. In the morning (7:30 am) my host S. drove me to the motorway junction Genova-Ovest (there’s a little room for hitching at the slip road from the petrol station). I first tried with a sign saying Savona but after 20 min switched to F for France and got a ride in a few minutes with a young Italian couple. They drove me for about 100km and I’m pretty sure they told me their names but unfortunately I totally forgot them. While he was driving, she (also a philosophy student, like A.) talked to me in Italian and tried to illustrate with gestures what she felt I might not understand :-) Very cute :-) We stopped in Imperia to buy petrol, it cost 1.433€ per litre (more than in Genoa), and they weren’t very happy when they saw the price 1.254€ at the next service area, where they dropped me :-|

I changed a couple of Italian cars and a French woman going on a trip to Les Baux-de-Provence and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (her son really wants to become a teacher, the main reason being a lot of holidays…), getting about halfway of my planned route for today. I asked one or two drivers for a ride and then attacked a young van driver with my lousy German (he had German license plates), but he rather replied in English :-) It appeared I was very lucky as J. actually goes all the way to Toulouse! And as we started in English we continued in the same language, although he’s lived in France since childhood, so I could have practiced my French. We talked mostly about our studies (he’s a post-graduate law student), but we were also quiet for long periods and as I woke up early, I also dozed off for a while. He was going to a friend in Toulouse but didn’t know the town very well. Fortunately I had printed out maps of Toulouse from Viamichelin in 6 different scales, focused on the city centre (my HC host lives right in the centre), so I navigated to the Matabiau train station where J. was meeting his friend and a Czech girl. Maybe we could go for a drink but I wanted to have enough time for everything, so I just said goodbye and looked for my place for the night. B. was surprised I didn’t call him that I’m lost but just came directly to his house :-)

Genoa

Saturday, 28th October 2006

Genoa (Genova in Italian) is a maritime town, once upon a time one of the most important powers of Mediterranean (not just in trade) and therefore extremely wealthy; also birthplace of Christopher Columbus. It’s squeezed between the sea and the hills of Ligurian Apennines; there was enough place for the old city, but nowadays with over 600,000 inhabitants it climbed very far up the hills. As said the oldest part is more or less flat, although it’s one of the biggest historical centres in Europe; quite a large part of it was inscribed on Unesco’s list of World Heritage sites this year due to its wonderful palaces. Genoa CFC is the oldest existing football club in Italy.

Genoa is a beautiful city – the older parts of course, the modern apartment blocks can be quite depressing – and among the most underrated cities of Italy. No photos in this article, sorry, but you can see plenty if you follow the links.

Steep city

After I checked e-mails and arranged the accommodation in Spain I went around the city. As mentioned in the previous post, I hadn’t expected so many hills around here, but when I saw them, I had to walk somewhere higher to get a nice view of the town, although there’s also a funicular (or more of them, I’m not sure). It was really exciting (if you don’t mind getting a bit tired), I got some good views of the city, got lost a few times (which is fun of course) and discovered that many apartment blocks in Genoa have one entrance on the ground floor and another – depending on their height – somewhere in the middle, on the top floor or you even have to climb a few steps from the roof to get to the street above the building. Unsurprisingly there aren’t many cyclers around and I doubt there would have been much more if Genoa had been in the Netherlands or Denmark. There are however plenty of scooters, as everywhere in Italy, though here they come even handier.

At the train station

The train station Genova Principe is quite attractive on the outside (like many old railway stations) but I had a look around mostly to get some impression on the prices:

• exchange office holds a quite varied choice of currencies but the exchange rates are a rip off: 1€ = 263.78 / 215.82 SIT (in Slovenia at the same time 240.3144 / 238.8768 SIT; source: BS). Current exchange rates at the biggest bank in Slovenia: NLB

• panoramic postcard (twice the normal size) of Genoa: 1.50€ (in Turkey I got 12 postcards for the same money)

• international trains are still much more expensive than domestic, EU hasn’t yet changed much in this regard

• a little bookshop sells a map called Costa Iugoslava meridionale (Southern Yugoslav Coast) for 1.55€; it’s from 1990, with all the nice names like Titograd :-)

Two girls on the street stopped me and asked where the train station is (nice that I don’t appear local just in the Balkans); fortunately I had just left it so I could actually help them and didn’t need to tell them I don’t speak Italian.

In the old city

I saw many* tourists, mostly individuals (i.e. not groups) – many Italians but also German speaking, I also heard Portuguese.

The Old Harbour (Porto Antico) is a fairly pleasant, spacious place, though generally not very attractive as there’s a motorway on 10-m high pillars running all the way along the coast, and the most interesting buildings are some structures by the famous native architect Renzo Piano.

Apart from two or three most important churches, they are almost always closed. Many look very inviting and I’m sure it’s worth peeking inside, but usually there’s not even a timetable saying it’s open (for example) 2 hours a day. University building at Via Balbi 5 is gorgeous, especially the courtyard is interesting with arcades and staircases around it, reaching 2 or 3 floors. I discovered Castello d’Albertis, a castle built at the end of the 19^th century by a sea captain who travelled the whole world and brought plenty of archaeological and ethnographic objects back home, so the castle now hosts the Museum of World Cultures. It’s surrounded by a very pleasant park with a nice view on Genoa. A sign says the dogs mustn’t enter it but nobody seems to care about it. Then I passed Albergo dei Poveri, an enormous building, maybe the biggest in Genoa, once providing housing for the poor. I wandered around the heart of old centre, passed a whore street close to the municipality building, saw the former St Augustine’s monastery, what’s left of the city walls, and the house of Christopher Columbus, which is now situated on the edge of a busy square but at the same time in a cute little park that also includes romantically lit remnants of St Andrew’s cloister.

* many as there are many tourists in Ljubljana, i.e. not that many compared to Paris, London, Prague etc, which means they don’t spoil your experience by their presence

Mmmm, ice-cream

I hurried back “home” to change my clothes and refresh a bit and immediately back to the centre to meet some other HC members – A., a Polish girl on Erasmus exchange; three locals; and S., a Belgian girl who also stopped in Genoa on the way to Spain. First we went to a cheap pizzeria (OK but nothing extraordinary) and then to the best ice-cream in town at La Cremeria delle Erbe (really good!). We walked around a bit, first to Porto Antico, where we climbed over the fence onto the ship attached to the Aquarium (one of the biggest in the world) and had a look at the lighthouse (Lanterna) across the bay, the symbol of Genoa. We crossed the heart of the old town and used one of many public elevators (I guess it’s obvious by now why they are needed in this city) to get to Belvedere Montaldo and see Genoa by night. Then the 2 guys and S. left and A. & E. escorted me to the old port, where I caught a bus home (metro wasn’t running anymore).

Thanks especially to A., E., C. and M., nobody believes me anymore I don’t speak Italian. But I really don’t. I just make up something from other Romance languages and somehow it often comes out understandable. I don’t usually say much in Italian though. And as me and A. concluded, it’s really easy with Italians – they don’t expect perfect Italian from you, or any specific level of Italian for that matter, so you just say whatever you know and they accept it and communicate somehow with you. (The French were given as a different example.)

Slovenia – Genoa

Milk truck

On the other side of the border post to Italy I tried to get a ride with VE for Venice but eventually I asked a Slovene driver who stopped to check the tyres and I joined him on his milk truck, all the way to Brescia or over 300km. There was nothing special (new) to see on the way, it’s just all very flat, so we just talked mostly about truck-related themes, which doesn’t mean it was boring.

The driver was just a few years older than me, he is actually 4 (most difficult) exams – short of his university degree, but he took a kind of break. He drives Slovene milk to a town in the surroundings of Milan every other day, without any exceptions on Sundays or holidays – simply because cows give milk every day and we want fresh milk on the shelves every day. He actually prefers this to being on the way for 10 days and then having a longer break, as he can sleep at home every other day and have a decent shower etc. He’s also not really a lonely truck driver as there are 7 milk trucks going at roughly the same time and usually there’s someone driving close enough that they can chat with each other.

Some other stuff:

• his colleague was recently fined over 3600€ in Poland because the tachographs weren’t in order

• since a few days later transiting trucks in Slovenia aren’t allowed to use state roads parallel to motorways; in general it’s good but the problem is that the (Slovene) truck owners are paying over 1000€ a year for “road use” but many of them are using just motorways, which is paid separately anyway

• there was a traffic jam on the motorway when we were passing Venice, so we were driving only 60 kph but I was told we actually saved one hour compared to normal circumstances (even though it was Friday afternoon), as normally they aren’t even driving all the time but just moving and stopping, as if they were in the middle of a busy city

He was very nice and took a bit different route to bring me to a more convenient service area for me, and it was very comfortable to just ask once and get a long ride but the trucks are so slow and they also have to stop every few hours, so that later I tried to avoid trucks and rather asked car drivers.

Brescia – Genoa

It went very smoothly, I never waited longer than 15 minutes – and even then it was because the first car I sat in just couldn’t start and I had to find another one :-) I was a bit surprised by all the tunnels before Genoa as in the picture in my head the Apennine Mountains were only in the middle of the peninsula but actually they reach all the way along Ligurian coast and to the Alps. The first signs I arrived to southern Europe appeared when we arrived to Genoa at 10pm: the roads were blocked and we were crawling through the city for the next hour and a half. In Ljubljana there’s hardly anyone on the streets at this hour, maybe some crowds on special occasions, but we certainly don’t make traffic jams at midnight!

I slept for two nights at a priest in the suburbs of Genoa. He has a big dorm so it was very comfortable, and I got the impression that he’s a bit lonely, so maybe that’s why he joined the Hospitality Club. Not that I could get a good impression after just a few short conversations. His parish is quite far from the centre BUT the metro terminus is a mere 5 min away from his house, so it was actually a very convenient location.

Just a few Italian drivers so far were enough that I learnt some very useful words for Italian roads: traffico intenso, incidente, and then words like cazzo, putana troia, porca putana etc, which are best avoided if you’re not sure when to use them :-)