(Doesn't Know) It's Not A Real Boat: A rest in Trieste

Sorry for the break - I've now moved into a place with no ADSL connection, and I can't upload anything at work, so updating is going to have to happen when I get myself to somewhere where there's a free wifi connection. Or something.

Anyway, I've been meaning to post about Trieste for a while now, but kept getting side-tracked. Trieste is where I had my first couchsurfing experience. I stayed with D. and his "family" - aka his flatmates and the random people who hung out at their flat.

I arrived on a Friday afternoon with only D.'s address. Well, I had his phone number, too, but that's beside the point... D. hadn't given me any real directions to his place from the station (on the basis that once you found his street, it was remarkably easy to find his place, and he said that everyone would know where his street was), and I hadn't had a problem with this when we'd been exchanging emails, on the basis that I'm usually pretty good at finding my way somewhere using a map.

In my experience, I'd always been able to find free maps at the train stations.

You can guess what's coming, right? Yep, no free maps at Trieste train station.

So I asked a few people if they knew where D.'s street was. In my very bad Italian, which I've described before.

Turned out I had the pronunciation of D.'s street wrong (although that doesn't excuse the guy for whom I wrote it down). This was something that I encountered again and again throughout Europe. If you don't speak the language of the country you're in, it's often easier not to bother trying to say anything in that language at all, because people seem not to be used to hearing non-speakers of their language try. As a result, they're not used to hearing weird pronunciations or oddly substituted words. I think that in English-speaking countries (especially in tourist cities), we're more used to trying to figure out what someone might be looking for. Then again, a street name might be more obscure than a tourist attraction, so maybe that's all it was.

I spent a while looking for the tourist information office. However, every time I followed the signs towards it, I'd lose the signs. I gave up. I finally found it the next day; it would have been closed by the time I arrived anyway.

Eventually I followed some signs to a three-star hotel, on the basis that they would most likely have (1) maps and (2) someone who spoke (at least enough) English. I was right on both counts. Happily, the hotel was closer to where I wanted to go than the station. I had at least chosen the right direction!

D.'s "family" were very warm and welcoming, and I was adopted as a temporary sister. Which meant I spent the weekend being Looked After by a group of Italian men.

(For those of you who know how I would normally react to this: you'll be pleased to know that I accepted it in the spirit it was offered. Besides, it's kind of nice once in a while when you're travelling by yourself. But I couldn't live like that!)

And I was very pleased to find out that Italian men cook (well, the ones I met did - and very well, at that! - and they told me that this is standard behaviour).

We walked around the town that Friday night, bought gelato at the best gelato place in town, and I learnt a lot about the history of the town and the area. The discussions of linguistics that we started that night continued throughout the whole weekend. I don't remember all the details that the guys told me about the town, but I remember enough that I could bore you if I wasn't careful, so I'll just say this: Trieste was part of the last bit of what we now know as Italy to be joined to Italy - after WWI. Before that, it was part of the Empire of Austria-Hungary - and a major sea port for the Empire. Many government buildings were built in the 18th and 19th centuries, and a lot of these survive (indeed, a lot of them are still used for government purposes). They give the town a very Viennese flavour.

An interesting linguistic note: the local dialect is more closely related to Slovenian than to Italian.

So, some photos. I have quite a few from Trieste that I like, but I'll just put a few up now. They were all taken on the Saturday, the day after I arrived. I re-visited the places we had walked the night before.