San Marino - Weapons, liquor, and china shops

  San Marino, San Marino
Friday, June 2, 2006

We left Florence at a reasonable hour to get to Bologna to get to Rimini to get to San Marino, but there was still a good portion of speed-walking to the station involved. Not quite to the level of "scampering," though.

The train rides were fine, if starting to feel a little long, plus, the scenery over on this route was not nearly as good as that by the west coast or Tuscany. Not that it was bad, per se, just not quite to the level of picturesque that I have come to expect from Italy.

We get to Rimini (a town known for its huge percentage of prostitutes, particularly transsexual ones - I have no idea where my guide book gets this stuff) to hurry up and wait. We ate at a place across from the train station where every item on the menu ended in "Out," so my burger was a "Cheese Out," a salad was a "Salad Out," etc. After we ate, we went outside to sit and wait for the bus. Since June 2nd is a national holiday in Italy (Republic Day), everything was running on holiday schedule, so there weren't as many buses as usual. If we'd known how cold it was going to be, we would have lingered over our Fries Out and Drink Out a little longer. After a spell, I tire of huddling in the cold, so decide to take a short walk down the street. I had gotten maybe a total of fifteen steps when an elderly gentleman strikes up a conversation. With my very limited Italian, I am getting better at understanding questions, but can't really always answer them accordingly.

We stroll along (this is actually in Italian),
"So, are you a tourist?"
"Yeah."
"Are you Dutch?"
"No, American. From Arizona."
"Where are you going? Would you like to go look at the sea? In my car?"
"Uh, no thanks. We're going to San Marino."
"San Marino? Come, get in my automobile and I will drive you!"
"No, it's okay. I have bus tickets."
"But my car, it is just right there!"
"No, thank you. I have my friend."
"Which hotel are you staying at?"
"Um. San Marino?" (I had resolved to answer no more questions and was resorting to pretending I understood nothing.)

*I walk back over to Sarah and point.*
"There. My friend. Sarah."
"So you both get in my car, we go to San Marino!"
*I sit down.*
"No. Thank you. Ciao!"

Yeah, in a town known for prostitution and tourism, I am going to get in the car of a random man across the street from the train station. He may have been harmless, as he seemed very concerned about the cold and my cough, too, but still. No.

The other thing - Dutch? So far every single person we've run across has guessed German or Dutch. What about us looks so very German? If I were with Sarah, I'd guess the blondeness, but off by myself?

We board the bus to San Marino without further incident and climb the half mile in altitude up the side of a mountain. The whole trip takes maybe forty-five minutes, and as we're let off by the side of a castle that is maybe 1500 years old, I realize the directions I have to find the hotel are useless. Basically, they say "Find the country of San Marino." San Marino is small, but not small enough to not need a little more to go on than that.

It's a country of about 29,000 people from around 300 A.D. that has retained sovereignity and claims to be the world's oldest republic. It covers 61 sq km, most of them, we found, straight up the sides of a mountain. There are three castles, two torture museums, an aquarium, and machinery that sings every time an atomic device around the world is disarmed. I am not making this up. San Marino sells a LOT of weaponry and glass items, usually in the same store. The other fifty percent of the stores are liquor. Swords, maces, handguns, you name it, I could have bought it. Cheap.



Asking directions from numerous strangers, we eventually find Hotel Silvana, slightly down the hotel from the actual suburb of San Marino, San Marino (the bit with the castle), and in Murata, San Marino. This hotel is family run, and I would highly recommend it. The rooms are normalish - not shabby, not posh, but they (the family) go out of their way to help you out. They fetched us coffee when we came in from the cold, sent a tray up to our room in the morning with cappucino when Sarah popped her head down, and wrapped up croissants for us to take with us when we left. Private (clean) bath and view of the valley below. The only thing at which they are hideous is giving their guests directions.



Post dropping off all of our stuff, we grabbed the cameras and went to explore. The view of the land below the mountain is stunning. It looks like a storybook kingdom, and I'm pretty sure none of the pictures came out well enough to do it justice, because the cameras won't focus through fog or clouds. By the time we made it back up the mountain to the castle, most of the tourists were gone and the shops were closing up. We could still get a feel for most of the town and find the pertinent bits, so we rambled from top to bottom and stopped in at a hotel up on level two for supper. This is when we noticed that the menu was not just in Italian and English, but also in Russian, Czech, Slovakian, Polish, French, and Spanish. I may have forgotten a couple. After this, we noticed on signs we passed almost everywhere that the whole town tries to be this thorough. I guess they get a lot of tourists, though I don't know what all those tourists are doing. Buying weapons?

The most notable thing about dinner was the hot chocolate - it was good, kind of, but so thick and rich it was almost undrinkable. Oh, and the rolls were awesome! They must have been four months old, at least. You could hurt yourself on those. Fine dining.

On the way home from dinner, it started to rain, so we did a very undignified scamper down the side of a mountain highway (with no sidewalks). I watched the fabulously bad Italian television, but I noticed when I went to brush my teeth, Sarah turned it off. I don't know why. How can you not appreciate karaoke contests and dubbed Brittany Murphy?

This morning, we left the charming little hotel to trudge back up the mountain to get our passports stamped. We are such geeks. We fought a massive number of tourists, half of them with strollers. But we have a new stamp!

The rest of the day has been spent waiting or riding trains, with a brief pause for us to scamper like fools from the bus at Rimini to the train at Rimini, which we made with less than a minute and a half to spare. We can't run like normal people with our packs, so it's just sort of a ridiculous looking trot, weaving in and out of the other people and trying not to tip over.

The enormous train ride meant we just got to Naples at 11:24, after which we had to find a bus to the hostel. Though we haven't seen much, so far we've seen more homeless people and garbage per square foot than anywhere else. Even Venice. The tour book assures us we will grow to love it, but I am deeply suspicious of this book by now. It has given us almost no helpful information, the maps have no names on the streets, and the guy dissed Lake Como. How can we trust him?

We blundered our way onto the right bus, only to have a crowd of really stoned boys get on almost immediately afterward to surround us in a little clump. They kept trying to talk to us, but we kept looking around and watching the signs and pretending it was perfectly *normal* to be surrounded by a clot of babbling fools in Naples at midnight, carrying everything we owned. They, too, then asked us if we were German. We got off a stop early by mistake, but finding the hostel was pretty hassle-free, for us. We only went the wrong direction for two blocks.

Have no real opinions of Hostel of the Sun so far, other than I think it's nice and there's a good chance I'll like it when it's daylight and I'm more awake.

(Foggy pictures of San Marino forthcoming)
ETA: Pictures up at flickr.