A Review of British Beer

During our stay, we've stopped in a lot of pubs, and tried a lot of different beers. Or, should I say, we've tried the same beer made by a lot of different breweries. English Cask Ale is served at cellar temperature, and lightly carbonated, with most of it coming from a hand pump. The basic ale on offer is malty, with grassy hop notes, and around 4% ABV. This is probably why English people looking to get wasted tend to drink something like Stella Artois (in contrast to the US, where they try and sell it as a classy alternative to Budweiser). What I'm going to do instead is review the style, and then list the beers I've had, in order of preference.

Beer #33: Ordinary Cask Bitter

Appearance: Everything from golden to amber.

Aroma: A little grassy from the English hops, a little malty. May or may not be biscuit like depending on how dark it is.

Mouthfeel: The lack of carbonation and low ABV means this stuff is really creamy, and goes down very easily. It's a good thing that this stuff is as low alcohol as it is, because if it were strong, you'd be in a world of hurt very quickly.

Taste: These are generally more malt-forward beers, but the trick is getting a good hop balance. Too much, and it tastes like lawn clippings or something (Greene King 1730, though Alecia enjoyed this one). Too little, and it's too sweet (Fuller's London Pride). To be quite honest, only Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Bitter is better than the English Pale Ale made by Civil Life, but that stuff is fairy juice.

Overall: Definitely enjoyable, but you do need to have a long session if you're looking to tie one on. Or just drink Stella and be a piss head.

Ranking:

1. Samuel Smith's Old Brewery Bitter
2. Sharp's Doom Bar
3. Greene King London Glory
4. Fuller's London Pride
5. Sharp's Atlantic
6. A bucket of dirty dish water
7. Greene King 1730.

Beer #34: English Cask Winter Ale

Appearance: These are all dark amber.

Aroma: Maltier and fruitier than Bitter

Mouthfeel: Almost identical, but a bit warmer from the higher abv

Taste: Marginally higher alcohol means more malt flavor. There's a bit of fruitiness to them, probably from the yeast.

Overall: Pretty solid. I've only had Fuller's Jack Frost for this that I can name, but I did have a different one somewhere.

Beer #35: Samuel Smith's Extra Stout

Appearance: Black (duhhh)

Aroma: Roasty. Very roasty.

Mouthfeel: Creamy and smooth, like all cask ales.

Flavor: Like a Guinness that has been cranked up to 11. It's about as strong as Guinness, but with loads more flavor. Naturally, Samuel Smith's doesn't export it.

Overall: Can Samuel Smith's just open a pub down the street from me?

London, Revisited

Conventional wisdom has always held that London is horrifically expensive. So far this trip, I don't think that holds up anymore. There are two reasons for this.

First, the last time most Americans went to London, their cards didn't work. We used mag stripe, which is for feeble minded idiots who hate change more than they hate credit card theft, and they used chip and pin, which is actually safe. This meant that we needed to use money changer services. These assholes do nothing but rip you off. Today, they would sell me a pound for $1.36. If you can use your normal bank credit card, your rate is $1.27,  and your debit card hits you with a flat fee that may add a cent or two if you get a lot of pounds out at once. That's a substantial savings.

More importantly, the pound has cratered in the past two years. When I was here in 2014, it was $1.66 at LIBOR, and the money changers were selling pounds at closer to $2. That turns a £4 beer into an almost $8 beer. Yikes. But today, I bought all my pounds at $1.27. That £4 beer is now $5.08. That is cheaper than getting a beer in STL once you add the tip. Dinner for two plus two pints was $43. The fiscal hurt just isn't there anymore.

Another way to save your money is to do all your drinking at Samuel Smith's owned pubs. In England, many pubs are "tied houses", where they have a deal with a brewer like Fuller's or Greene King to sell only their beer. Samuel Smith's tied pubs are the cheapest we've seen in London, they have the best beer, and they have some unbelievably historic pubs. Near the British Museum, the Princess Louise is a Victorian era "gin palace" of dark wood and etched glass, prettier than any bar stateside. On Fleet Street, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese dates to 1667, and men like Dickens, Twain, Ben Johnson, and countless literary giants sank pints there. These would be tourist traps anywhere else, but the fact that they will hand you a pint of Old Brewery Bitter for £3.10 ensures that locals come to these bars just as often as the tourists.

London's subway is still more expensive than most anywhere at £2.40 one way, but man do they get what they pay for. There's a stop within a few blocks of everywhere, and almost no waiting. If smaller systems get trapped in the vicious cycle of "doesn't go anywhere so nobody uses it so there's no reason to make it go more places", then "The Tube" is an example of the virtuous cycle. It makes traveling around the city easy.

Trip 3: London Calling

Another year has come to a close, which means it's once again time for me to flee the country in anticipation of the Trump regime travel abroad with Alecia. While the rising international trend towards anti-establishments did bring us an apricot with cotton candy hair as a president-elect, it hasn't been entirely bad. Those same sentiments brought us Brexit, which brought us a 15% drop in the value of the Pound Sterling. London is cheaper than it's been in 30 years! We were strongly considering a trip to some quiet fishing villages in Oaxaca Mexico to eat tacos and lounge around on the beach (an option that seems all the more appealing after a weekend of ice storms and single-digit temperatures), but when a sale like this pops up, you take it. Once again, we will be keeping two blogs. The blog with all of the important pictures and write-ups on what we do is going to be http://adamandalecia.blogspot.com/. This blog is the "R-rated" companion. This is where all of the beer reviews will be (it helps that I've already reviewed several beers in London, and I can now go back and re-review them with two years, and several hundred other beers under my belt), as well as theater reviews, and probably a few think pieces as well (for instance, I'll probably write something about public transit and gentrification that may verge slightly into a screed about how much I've grown to hate West County and the further afield suburbs).


So yeah, hold on to your poofy tall black hats, because we're going to London.

Some More Thoughts About Spain

The following is the closest I will get to politics here.

In the US, we are having a debate about giving the cops military style gear. In fact, our police are lightly armed compared to the Spanish police. Seeing a guy wearing a bulletproof vest with an assault rifle or an SMG is commonplace around here. The difference is entirely in their demeanor. Anybody can ask their officers a question, they never try and look threatening, and they don't actually use those weapons. Our police don't need less weapons, they need to be held accountable for their violent and nonviolent aggressive behavior.

On a lighter note, nobody does tapas right outside of Spain. In St. Louis, the two tapas places I know (Modesto and BARcelona) make these highbrow small plates, and if you get 3, you'll be out about 60 bucks before you start drinking. We hear from a girl from New Zealand that this is much the same there. This is entirely wrong. In Spain, tapas are drinking food. They're things like potatoes in zesty garlic sauce, fried bechamel sauce balls, or baguette slices topped with ham, calamari, or Spanish omelette, and they are frequently free or discounted with your drinks. The place we went in Madrid was €12 for all the tapas we could shove in our faces, and a glass of sangria. Refills were €3.50, and shitty beer was more expensive. Maybe I should open a real tapas bar in STL.

Other Thoughts I Have About Barcelona

Can somebody ask RiFF RAFF where I go to shake dice with Larry Bird, and where I rent a time travelling slab to three wheel through the Olympics?

I've had much less wine in Barcelona, because unlike Madrid, they have some decent craft beer here. I'm going to go enjoy some more cheap wine tonight, because two buck chuck is only going to be tolerable as tinto de verano.

Eixample is one of the few gridded areas in Europe, but it's a bit different than our right angled streets. Each intersection is sort of beveled at the corners to make a square plaza turned 45 degrees from the intersection. This creates a lot of street parking (but still not enough for a city), but is a pain in the ass for pedestrians, who have to zigzag through the neighborhood. It's also really boring compared to the old city or Barceloneta. Stay in there if you can. Just don't use AirBNB. You might catch a paella pan to the dome.

The Perils of Being a Cool City

In 1992, Barcelona hosted the Olympic games. Billed as the city opening up to the world again after decades of neglect by Franco, it sparked tens of billions of dollars in renovation, new construction, and public service expansion. So successful has it been that Barcelona I'd often referred to as a model for urban renewal. But this renewal has come at a price. Where once tourists didn't come, today they come to Barcelona more than anywhere else in Spain, and this brings some unwanted changes if you are a local. Aside from the legendary pickpockets and purse snatchers, you get hordes of migrants attempting to sell various knockoff items all over the sidewalks, which just increases congestion, and puts money in the hands of the people who got them to Europe in the first place (read: organized crime). Hotels and international boring chains like McDonald's and Apple and H&M spring up to cater to the hordes, driving out the apartments and mom and pop stores that live there. People realize they can buy an apartment or two in a neighborhood near the old city and make good money renting it out on AirBNB, and the next thing you know, half the people in your building on any given day are strange faces. But this isn't the worst problem.

The big issue is that a lot of people who travel are fuckheads who should never be let out of their own country. This means you, guy carving your name on the towers at Sagrada Familia. You too, drunk -ass Aussie pounding San Miguel tallboys on the street. I know Barcelona has good clubs, but so does Ibiza, and the entire point of that island is clubbing tourism. People in Barceloneta have real jobs, and hate it when you puke or bang in their stairwell at 4AM and then leave. Sex tourist, go fuck yourself. Prostitution isn't legal here, there's just a few places where they don't really bother enforcing the rules. It's not the same thing. If you want to pay for some action, Amsterdam is a Ryanair flight away, and they'll even throw in a wooden shoe full of weed and tulips.

Barcelona has started to fight back, and will continue to fight. For instance, the guidebook I got from 2009 said that tourists could use Barcelona's public bike share, which is the best I've ever seen. This has changed to be only for locals. They've got a ton of bikes, but for high season, they'd need a ton more if tourists could use them. An AirBNB ban is being pushed by some on the city council, and unless the site is willing to work to prevent abuses, it's going to work. But this is the other danger for cities who are working hard to bring more tourism dollars. Some tourism is good. Too much, and it starts to permanently alter your city and embitter your locals. When that happens, you lose the charm that drew people to your city in the first place, and become like Paris.

Appropriately Timed Thoughts On Madrid

I've been here for 3.5 days worth of activities now, so I think I can have some opinions that aren't based on first impressions.

During the walking tour, our guide mentioned that something would happen to her about once a week. She called it "getting drunk by accident". She would go out to meet a friend for a tapa and a drink, and the next thing she knew, she was salsa dancing at a gay bar at 4AM while hammered. This sounded like a personal issue when she said it, but the more time I spend here, the more I see why this isn't abnormal. This city is like that one friend you have who is a total shit show and gets you to act a fool. You know the one. They wake up at 10, deal with a hangover, get going a but before noon, have lunch at 4, eat dinner at 10, and go get wasted and pass out in the wee hours of the morning. That's Madrid's schedule even if you don't drink. And Madrid insists you fucking drink. Lunchtime? Madrid insists it come with a free wine (or shitty beer), and you will linger long enough to have a few. Tapas? Best deal involves more booze. You can easily get a buzz going without trying, and then you're quite open to suggestion. If not for the need to be functional and see things, I'd be drunk a lot too.

Perhaps another thing keeping me soberish is the beer here in Spain. My guidebook said that the Spanish love beer. The guidebook was clearly written by somebody who never actually bothered going into the cervecerias that are everywhere. The Spanish love drinking. They tolerate beer. If they loved it, there would be more than 4 different brands, and they wouldn't all be godawful macro style pilsner. Even in my girlfriend's home town of 3000 people, where the one bar is full of taxidermied varmints shot by the clientele, there are 6 varieties of beer now, and several are craft beer. Madrid bars have one tap, and the standard serving is about 12 oz. "The Spanish love beer" my ass.

The 15000 step a day estimate I gave was way off. It's actually closer to 20000. My feet are a bit sore now.

The Most Important Post Ever

This is important because it's going to save you like 10% the next time you travel outside the US. For years, our magnetic stripe cards haven't worked abroad, as the rest of the world runs chip and pin. This meant that you had to go to a foreign exchange place and get a pre-loaded debit card while being charged like 15 cents more per Euro than the posted rate. Now, your cards work, but there's a $2.50 convenience fee per foreign use, and a 3.25% increase over the posted conversion rate for the transaction. Those of you who mathematically inclined might notice that at some point, this becomes cheaper than foreign exchange places. For those who aren't, here's the math to do to figure out where that point is in the local currency:

Service Fee /(ForEx place's rate - interbank rate*1.0325).

If you do that right now with Euros, this equals about €40. You can use your cars to pull out more than €40 at ATMs or buy big stuff. However, you should still go to the ForEx office for a debit card with some prepaid Euros on it in case you get caught without cash. Just don't change your entire trip's worth of currency stateside like you used to.

Alcohol Review: Madrid

Beer #31: Mahou

Appearance: Pale straw. Macro pilsner.

Aroma: Not much. Macro pilsner.

Mouthfeel: Thin. Macro pilsner.

Taste: A rich, earthy bouquet of floral hops, toasted barley, and estery... lol, jk this is basically just Budweiser that sponsors bullfights. You've had a beer like this in every country, and it all blows. You're drinking this because it's the only fucking beer they have.

Price: If you buy it at the store, a can is like €0.50, and a liter is €1.40 or something. On draft, it's about €1.50 for a caña (small beer), and they might cut you a deal for 2 33cL beers for €2.50 if you buy a tapa. Your discount Bud pitcher night at the local dive is better, but not as tasty.

Overall: 2/10. This is a beer to have while you socialize. It's not for savoring. Chug, and finish your ham.

Amontillado

Appearance: Brownish red, translucent.

Aroma: Boozy

Mouthfeel: Thin. Alcoholic warmness.

Taste: The amontillado I had started out with a ton of alcohol, but not as much as bourbon or vodka. After swallowing, the flavor lingered, and a strong taste of black walnuts came through, probably from the cask.

Overall: I'm not going to rate anything but beer on a scale, as my palate isn't sophisticated enough. Instead, I'll decide whether or not I'd drink it again. For amontillado, that's a yes.

Patxaran

We got this stuff free at Rosi La Loca, and I drank it without any knowledge of what it was. All I've discovered is it's a sloe liqueur from Spain. It sort of tasted like cough syrup. Alecia liked it. I thought it was okay I guess. I don't know if I'd get it again.

Beer #32: Cruzcampo Glacial

See Mahou.

Way Too Early Thoughts On Madrid

I'm going to have to learn to drink something other than beer if I have any intention of getting drunk here. The local beer found everywhere is called Mahou, and it's your basic shitty macrobrew pilsner. Thank god it's cheap.

Fortunately, amontillado sherry was surprisingly good. I thought I was going to hate the stuff, as wine and high ABV beverages and I generally do not get along. The amontillado I had was €2.50 for a good 4oz or so pour, and it had picked up a wonderful almost walnut character from the casks it aged in. I wouldn't follow somebody into a catacomb full of something I'm allergic to only to get bricked into a wall for it, but I guess Fortunato makes a bit more sense now.

In about 6 hours from getting off the plane to now, I walked almost 10,000 steps, and I'll certainly hit that mark by dinner. I'll need it, because there's so much good food.

These will be better posts when I'm not sleep deprived.

The Spain Campaign

Tomorrow, I start more MIZ-adventurES in Europe. This time, I'll be going to Spain. I'll be in Madrid for a week, and Barcelona for a week. There will be a few changes this time around.

1. This phone has a step counter, so I can upload walking distance and steps. I don't know if I mentioned the amount of walking you do in Europe, but this will make it crystal clear. If I had to guess, I would say that we should be around 15,000 steps a day on most days.

2. In the past 17 months, I've had a steady engineering job, so I have a little more disposable income to play with. This won't make me travel 1st class or not stay in hostels, but I may not pick the most economical way to do certain things. For instance, I could get from Madrid to Barcelona for €60 less if I go by plane instead of high speed train. I opted for the train because it's a freakin' bullet train, and we don't have any in the US.

3. The big one is that I'm taking my girlfriend this time. This means a few more candlelight dinners, and a few less 1AM kebabs while drunk in the street. Oh well.

This also means that we are doing a joint blog together. If you want pictures, they will be there. This is my R-rated blog where I can swear and complain about stuff and not have her family see it (some of my previous comments about the Catholic Church probably shouldn't be seen by nuns... or regular church goers).

Next post will be from the Way Hostel in Madrid.

Vatican Museum

Ancient Rome Pics

Beer Review: The Last Two

Beer #29: Perroni Rosso

Served: Pint, with aperitivo buffet

Appearance: Reddish brown, translucent.

Scent: Faint beer scent. Same as most Italian beers.

Taste: This tastes almost like Killian's Irish Red. This is not really a compliment.

Cost: €6. However, this came with the plate of food in the picture. Not a bad deal.

Overall: 3.5/10. The aperitivo buffet was good though.

Beer #30: La Chouffe

Served: Tulip glass.

Appearance: Cloudy, orange/reddish.

Scent: Bready, Belgian, and delicious.

Taste: Bread, coriander, strong flavor. Classic Belgian beer.

Cost: €5. However, Belgian beers at 8.4% ABV also usually cost around that much in America.

Overall: 8/10. It was a good beer overall, but remember, I really like big Belgian beers. If you're impartial, perhaps take off a point or two.

Day 31 & 32: The Last Days

I started off my Sunday with a trip to the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij. This is a museum that consists of the home and art collection of the Doria Pamphilij family, and a few of them still live in parts of it. They came to prominence in the 1600s, when a Pamphilij was named Pope Innocent X. Since in those days the pope was also the king of Rome, the Pamphilij acquired a bunch of wealth and influence that they've managed to hold on to, because Europe doesn't have the philanthropic tradition that America does (we have Carnegie Hall and Carnegie Mellon and the Carnegie Foundation, and they have aristocratic families with priceless art collections). The villa is sumptuously decorated, like a miniature Versailles, and the art collection includes pieces by Titian, Caravaggio, Raphael, Velazquez, Bernini, Brueghel, and a bunch of other old Italian masters. However, the best part of the museum is the free audio guide. It's narrated by a member of the Pamphilij family, and includes interesting notes, like the time he and his sister got in trouble for scratching the terra cotta floor by roller skating on it.

After that, I went to get my fried artichoke in the Jewish Ghetto. This was the first time this trip I was ripped off. The artichoke was €5, but the restaurant charged €2 for water (acceptable), €2 for bread (this is what the place in Venice charged for cover, and the Jewish ghetto in Rome doesn't have a view of San Giorgio Maggiore to justify such an expense), and €2 for service (in Venice, I was charged a maximum of 10% of the total for what I ordered, and I never ordered €20 worth of food). For those keeping track at home, that's €11 for a €5 artichoke. A quick check of other restaurants in the Jewish ghetto showed a similar result would have happened had I picked another place to go. If stereotypes are based on a grain of truth, then the Jews got theirs from that whole area. I would suggest skipping it.

Afterwards, I went to Trastevere and wandered around a bit. Trastevere is across the Tiber (Tevere) from where I was staying, and was a slightly odd mix of interesting bars and restaurants with souvenir shops, street vendors, and slightly sketchy stuff like sex shops or casinos with 10 slot machines only. One of the stores was selling marble fruit bowls for what seemed a reasonable price, so I got one. I'm sure there's a drinking game that can be played with it, and it seems pretty sturdy. I ate dinner at one of the restaurants, watched the end of Mexico/Netherlands, and went back to the hostel to sleep. A month of touring is finally starting to catch up to me.

Today, I had my ticket to go see the Vatican Museum. This enabled me to skip the massive line to buy tickets. On my way into the Vatican, I was also informed that there would be lines for the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter's Basilica at least that long, and that I could skip them if I was on a tour group. So I paid my €20 to get a tour, and this marked the second time I was ripped off. There are no lines for either the Sistine Chapel or St. Peter's (I probably should have figured that one out given that St. Peter's could swallow any other church whole and stil have room for another one after that). I wound up leaving the tour halfway through, because the guide wanted to go straight to the Sistine Chapel and skip the Raphael Rooms, which are almost as good as the Sistine Chapel, and contain his famous School of Athens fresco. You would have to be a bigger idiot than I was today to miss these, and I wasted €20. The Sistine Chapel itself was breathtaking though, but I don't have any pictures of it. Unlike anywhere else in the Vatican, snapping pictures is forbidden, and if they catch you, you will be forced to delete them. Why they care about that and not St. Peter's, or Raphael, or their massive statue collection is a mystery. Why the poverty part of the priestly vows goes out the window once you are a cardinal or pope is a mystery too (the Vatican Museums were once the Papal Palace, and they do top Versailles as the most opulent royal residence in Europe, because even the Sun King couldn't afford to hire masters like Raphael, Michelangelo, and Bernini to come decorate his house, or take the choicest ancient statues back to his kilometers-long house without paying). But regardless of the massive hypocrisy behind the creation of such a place, it's still a must-see. Just don't expect it to strengthen your faith. Heck, even Michelangelo himself located the devil in his fresco of the Last Judgment on the wall in such a position that it would be right over the Pope's throne (this is more an indictment on the Pope at the time, but that's far from the only detail Michelangelo threw in to piss off the Vatican. Everybody has seen the central panel of the ceiling fresco, with God inside of a shape that is exactly the shape of a brain. No comment on how he knew what a brain cut in half looked like with the church's ban on autopsies at the time, or the philosophical implications of putting God inside a human brain). The size and scope of the museums took me half a day, and I didn't enter until 12:30 (my tickets were timed for 1:30, so I guess I paid €20 for early access, less of a ripoff than the artichoke fiasco).

And with that, my tour of Europe is at an end. I'll post all the Rome pictures at home with good wi-fi, I have one more beer review, and I'll probably write a best-of post on my ridiculous travel day tomorrow.

Day 29 & 30: Roamin' Through Rome

The Blogger app on my phone has been a recalcitrant piece of shit the past two days, so now I have to rewrite my post for yesterday again and combine it with today.

After a slightly late start yesterday (fuck you, wine), I went to the Palatine Hill to see the Forums, Domitian's palace, and the Colosseum. As soon as I arrived, I saw a huge line of people waiting to get inside the Colosseum. It looked like I would be waiting for two hours if I wanted to get a ticket from there. Fortunately, I have a guidebook and fellow hostel travelers who told me that I could skip that nonsense, wait 10 minutes for the same ticket at the Roman Forum, see that, and waltz past all those idiots. So I did.

The Forums (Augustus, Trajan, Nerva, and Caesar have forums outside the paid museum, the main one is inside) are mostly smashed to bits, the victim of 2000 years of history, several sackings, and the Catholic Church's insatiable hunger for marble to use in their churches. Nonetheless, what remains really conveys the majesty and wealth that Rome amassed in its prime. The columns of the temples and public buildings stand over 33 feet high, and the peaks of the roofs must have been 45 or 50 feet. Equally massive are the dimensions of the buildings evidenced by the broken bases of the columns. To see them as they must have been in antiquity, with polychrome marble, and adorned with statues and paint and gold leaf would have been to gaze at the power of the Roman Empire at its peak. What's left today is merely an echo, but an interesting one. The story is much the same atop the Palatine Hill, where one comes across the ruined Palace of Domitian. So grand was it in its time that the word palace comes from the Palatine Hill on which it stood. Now, it's just a massive set of crumbling walls that outline what would have been a sprawling building that would have rivalled Versailles in size, and probably majesty as well (when you control the whole Mediterranean, you aren't ever going to run out of palace money).

While the Forums and palace have lost their grandeur to time and greedy cardinals, the Colosseum has not. Despite being stripped of its marble cladding by the church, and half the outer facade having collapsed, it is still a massive edifice. In its day, 50,000 spectators could have watched two guys hack each other to death on an oval space somewhere between a hockey rink and a football field in size. While this is only a mid-sized stadium by today's standards, it was built without the steel, powered construction equipment, polymers, and computers that shape places like JerryWorld, and is 2000 years old to boot. It is a far greater engineering marvel for its time than JerryWorld is by today's standards, and it doesn't have a giant fucking scoreboard that interferes with punting or stabbing somebody because it's too low.

After the Roman stuff, I went to the Trevi Fountain. I found it under renovation, drained of water and half obscured by scaffolding. Shit. Then I went to the Pantheon. The building is a greater triumph than the Colosseum. It's still the largest dome of its kind in the world, and is the best preserved Roman building we have. It does have two downsides though. First, the exterior is kind of ugly. The architrave on the porch doesn't line up with the one on the round part of the building. It seems as though the Romans got the columns for the porch, installed them, realized they were too short, and then just said fuck it and finished the temple as is. If you ask me, they should have stopped after the first one was found to be short, removed it, thrown a few quarry workers to the lions, and done it right. However, this is pretty minor compared to the other issue. A few hundred years later, the Catholics got hold of it, ripped out all the old gods, and made it a church. Rome has a gazillion churches already, and many are far more ornate than the Pantheon. There are no Old Masters in it either. So, for the sake of a meh church, we lost the only intact Roman temple we could have had, because Pope Shitforbrains XXVII or some such wasn't okay with any religious history that wasn't about Jee-zus. You're a douchebag, Pope Shitforbrains XXVII...

About those other churches I mentioned. Rome's got a bunch of them, and with the exception of the Vatican complex, they are free to enter. Many of them have a couple paintings by Caravaggio, or Raphael, or some other Italian master. One or two even have sculptures by Michelangelo. Even the ones that don't have some really amazing frescoes and chapels. As a result, if you go into five or six, it's like seeing a world class art museum for the price of feeling guilty about all of the sex, drugs, and rock & roll in your life. If you don't have sex, do drugs, or rock & roll, admission is guiltless, but you're missing out. Raphael certainly thought sex was better than painting, and they didn't have drugs and rock & roll back then.

After all the art and guilt tripping, it was time to meet a friend for dinner. Anna Springer has been living in Rome for about a year now as a student life coordinator, so she was an excellent person to go get some good pasta & gelato with. The restaurant she and her coworkers took me to made the best spaghetti alla carbonara I've ever had, and the gelateria had a bunch of really interesting flavors that were super light and refreshing after a big plate of pasta with cheese, egg, and pancetta. I was near a food coma by the time I left, and went back to the hostel to sleep it off.

After sleeping it off, I went out for more arts. I began my day with the Capitoline Museum. This is near the Roman Forums, and was designed by Michelangelo around a massive 1800 year old bronze of Marcus Aurelius on horseback. The one outside now is a copy, but the original is inside, along.with the foundations of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, a picture gallery with more Old Masters, and the Roman statue collections of several popes that were given to the public in the 1700s. These include the famous statue of the dying Gaul (maybe if he hadn't gone into battle nude he wouldn't have gotten that blade in the ribs, but then again, the French army has never been known for thinking this stuff through), and a beautiful statue of Venus, known as the Capitoline Venus. How a bunch of dudes sworn to poverty managed to acquire such a rich collection of priceless marbles from a pagan religion while destroying the buildings they found them in is beyond my comprehension, but I'm an engineer, so this isn't really my department.

After that, I thought I would go see the Borghese Gallery. This is the collection of art and statues acquired by the Borghese family. It is housed in their family villa in the Villa Borghese, which was once their estate, but is now a park. I arrived at the door to discover that you needed advance tickets, and they were sold out until the day I went home. Instead, I went through the Villa Borghese to the Piazza Del Popolo. It's a nice park for a stroll, but I liked the Tiergarten and Englischer Garten in Germany better (no hard feelings Rome, you have much nicer buildings and art and history).

After a failed attempt at yesterday's blog post, it was dinnertime. Instead of a sit down dinner, I decided to do an aperitivo buffet. In Italy, at around 6PM, most bars have a thing where you get a drink, and then they have a variety of finger foods and stuff laying out that you can munch on while you drink. I had a €7.50 Aperol Spritz and a €6 beer, but it's a good deal when it comes with like €5 worth of appetizers each time. I'll do a beer review for Perroni where you can see the amount of noms you get. Then I came back to the hostel to rest.

Tomorrow may be a bit interesting. Apparently, it's a Vatican holiday, and while I don't speak Italian, I have a sneaking suspicion that the Pope is going on a field trip to a bunch of churches to take selfies, preach his socialist agenda, and fire a few more hardliners. This may turn Rome into a crowded snarl of roving pilgrims. Either way, it sounds like a good day to hunt down some fried artichokes in the Jewish ghetto. I wonder how fast they run...

Day 28: Naples to Rome

I decided to catch an afternoon train to Rome so that I could visit the Archaeology Museum in Naples. This was a very good decision. The bottom floor houses the Farnese Collection of monumental sculptures from Rome. Unlike the Greco-Roman statues in other museums, these are by and large not smashed to bits (though this is due to restoration in most cases). The sculptures themselves are immense. One sculpture, called the Farnese Bull, is a larger than life depiction of two people tying a woman to a bull (it's from a myth). This was carved from one block of marble that must have been the size of a Hummer before the sculptor worked it, and the detail is striking. Other sculptures include a resting Hercules, and a bunch of gods and emperors between 10-20 feet tall.

The second floor explained why the Pompeii site had so few mosaics and frescoes. Most of the best ones were hacked out of the site and put in this museum. This is actually for the best, as they are fragile, and being in a climate controlled museum where nobody can touch them or step on them is better than leaving them in situ, but what a wondrous sight it must have been when they were digging up Pompeii and came across frescoes, mosaics, statues, and household objects in bronze and silver that they now display here.

However, neither the statues nor the Pompeii stuff is the most interesting thing in the museum. That honor goes to the contents of the so-called Secret Room. Secret Room is actually a misnomer, but you can't name this room after what's actually in it, because "The Gallery of Penises and Naughty Statues" is not really a good thing to name something in your museum. Nonetheless, this gallery brings to light something that isn't taught in schools when the Romans are discussed: the fact that they were very, very open about sexuality, nudity, and eroticism. The penis was used as a symbol of fertility and prosperity, and so when they found Pompeii, there were dick statues and paintings everywhere. They were placed at crossroads, stores would paint Mercury with a penis in his hand instead of a cadeuceus to ward off evil, and most people had some statues in their garden that are waaaay not appropriate by today's standards. In particular, there was a statue found of the satyr Pan having sex with a goat (which I guess is only half bestiality), along with a Superbad level case of bronze penises with wings or other adornments. My friend Dan Hoff once got in trouble in Latin class for "demonstrating sexual prowess with Corinthian columns" (he held two paper columns up to his crotch and pretended to have two organs). Turns out that instead of giving him a disciplinary mark, our Latin teacher should have given us a history lesson, because that was about the most Roman thing anybody did in that class...

After that, I got on a train to Rome, watched the US advance, and then celebrated by drinking a Budweiser in Italy.

Beer Review: Carlsberg Special Brew

Beer #28: Carlsberg Special Brew

Served: Draft, into a 0.4 liter glass (American pint).

Appearance: Amber, but transparent

Smell: Not much different from Budweiser

Taste: Yeah, this is essentially Europe's version of Old English or anything else that is normally associated with being a 40 in America.

Price: This was €5 for 0.4 liters. This is also 9% alcohol, and the cheapest thing at this bar in Rome. When will I ever learn?

Overall: 2/10. The only reason this gets a 2 is because it's strong. Anything that tasted like this at 5% ABV would probably score a 0. Good thing soccer is a good sport to watch when you're drunk and your team is already through to the next round...

Day 27: Pompeii Picture Dump, Part Uno