It was bound to happen sometime, anyway. On my second trip to Europe, I got hit with the traveller's terrible trifecta: got sick, got lost, lost my luggage.
But you know what? Small price to pay.
'Cause Sanremo is the cure for what ails 'ya.
Gorgeous weather, beautiful scenery, historic locale.
Totally worth the "recycled" underwear.
Previously....on Lost (in Sanremo)
I head towards Sanremo to take part in a summer course on International Humanitarian Law. It's a looooooooooooong flight from Manila to Amsterdam to Nice, and I arrive close to midnight -- so tired some stranger has to wake me up to get me off the almost emptied plane. I'm still an hour's drive away from Sanremo, but the Institute organizing the course is kind enough to have its car pick me up from the airport (which is great, because the course is set to start in about eight hours).
I get off the plane and wait for one of my checked-in bags, the one with most of my clothes. And I wait. And wait. And wait. I wait so long no one's left in the entire arrival area - not a passenger, not a stewardess, not a janitor. The baggage carousel stops moving. The only open office lights in the whole place are for - you guessed it - the lost baggage tracking desk. It's like they're expecting me.
My crack training kicks in. "Ou est mon Samsonite?" I ask the desk guy nasally.
"We speak English fine", he replies, "and my girlfriend is Filipina."
Oh. Mabuhay, then.
The guy slowly explains to me that my luggage is at least a day behind, and I have to fill out some forms so that it can be delivered to my hotel in Nice. I tell him I'm not staying in Nice, France but in Sanremo, Italy. The guy winces. "Ooooh....Maybe you can have your car pick it up?"
What ca...Car!!! I forgot! There's supposed to be a car waiting for me outside!
I run out and find....nothing. Some idle taxis, an empty parking lot, but no car. Oh, man. It must have already left.
Panic starts to set in. It's past midnight, I'm at a deserted airport, exhausted, with no luggage and no one to call, and a country away from where I need to be.
Oh, crepe.
I walk back to the lost luggage desk. The guy tries to cheer me up by saying my luggage will arrive and be delivered to my hotel in Sanremo the following day. Wonderful. Maybe I can hitch a ride with it.
Then, a ray of light: another guy from out of nowhere starts tapping on the office window. He's looking for...me! The Institute's car! The driver just went to another terminal when I didn't come out right away! But now it's back! Ouuuiiiiiiii-ha!
I get in the car, leave the airport, and immediately conk out. When I wake up, it's just past 3 a.m. and we're pulling up to the Sanremo hotel. My course starts in just a few hours, I have no change of clothes, but at least I'm already in my destination city. Should be la dolce vida from here on in.
Well, no, not quite yet.
After getting maybe three hours of bed-rest, I shower, put my old clothes back on (ew!) and head out. I have a rough guide to the Institute, but have no idea how far a walk it is. All I know is that it's at the far end of some park-land.
(I know what you're thinking: why don't I ask for directions? Well, you try translating "Humanitarian Law Institute" into street Italian!)
The weather is hot, and the walk turns out to be long. The street signs aren't much help because (and this will be a recurring theme) there are so many unmarked sidestreets and alleys that you easily lose track of your progress and location. Worse, the guide doesn't mention that, except for the main drag, everything slopes steeply upward away from you, meaning you can't really see from street level what's at the other end of any property -- unless you're willing to climb 45 degree hillsides for the fun of it.
And so my search goes.
I go past this street-level place because the building on the right is abandoned, and the guide doesn't say anything about no abandoned buildings . . .
...but it does say something about access from a side-passage. Now this picture doesn't do these stairs justice; they're at least three times longer than Georgetown's "Exorcist" stairs. Still, I make my decision. This is where I will make my ascent (but only at ten-step intervals)...
... I (barely) reach the top, and see nothing but tall walls of houses and a sidewalk-less road. Trucks and motorbikes zip by from blind curves, so close I can feel the turbulence...
...then I spot another side-passage. This isn't on the map! I decide to head down the stairs, only because that sidewalk-less road is going to get me killed. Suddenly, I run into fellow Institute-searching stragglers, only they're heading up the stairs! "The place isn't down there", they say. "Well, it ain't back up there either", I want to answer, but realize that they outnumber me, and that they'll make a bigger target than me for those trucks and motorbikes...
...I'm pretty sure we trespass through somebody's garden, but at least we end up in a park. Now if we can just figure out these forks in the roads...
...At last! Surely that must be the Institute at the top! And of course there has to be one last steep climb! Why the hell not?
...And here we are (turns out the Institute is by those palm trees at the top of the first picture). By the time we arrive, the other attendees are already on their coffee break. I'm exhausted and so short of breath I can't give my name properly. My shirt is drenched, and I'm dripping beads of face-sweat onto the registration table. When I finally get inside, the air-con is on high...and dries my back instantly giving me a fever/cold.
And all this merely sets the stage for...
La Pigna
At the end of the first day's sessions, we're told there's a welcome dinner at a plaza in La Pigna, in the historic heart of Sanremo. Well and good, except we're not told that La Pigna means "The Pinecone", descriptive of the looping, layered layout of the place; or that it may just as well mean "Good luck with this labyrinth, chump, you are so screwed" because of the dozens of small passageways, endless winding staircases, claustrophobia-inducing walls, and countless dark corners and crevices. I honestly feel I can suddenly collapse dead in one of the alleys without anyone ever finding out.
Heck, the only reason I keep on taking pictures is because I hope someone finds my camera and makes a "Blair Witch" type movie out of it.
(but not "Cloverfield"; that would suck)
Bear in mind as I stumble around "La Pigna", I'm jet-lagged, sick, and wearing days old clothes. The climbs have me cramping, gasping and dizzy. It's also getting dark, the maps don't account for all the slopes and alleyways, and locals - while very friendly - can't quite convey necessary nuances such as "Yeah, you could pass that way, but it would give you a heart attack, fattie."
I give up. I surrender. I sit down for about five minutes before heading back. I go in no particular direction, just downwards. I hit a perpendicular passage. Left leads to the stairs going down. I shouldn't even bother to look to my right (above), but something catches the corner of my eye. It's...it's...batik! That can only mean...Indonesian classmates!!! I'm saved!!!
Well, ciao, y'all! The destination "plaza", it turns out, is dark, completely hidden, and no bigger than half a basketball court. I arrive an hour late, hungry, and with a new found respect for those "Amazing Race" airheads who always bitch and get lost.
Yet for all that, I'm not "the last team to arrive".
Just second to the last.
Only after I got back to the hotel and viewed my pictures did I realize how hauntingly beautiful the La Pigna alleys really were, and how lucky I was to have seen them all. Unfortunately, after talking to my classmates I learned that - despite walking around for an hour and climbing God knows how many steps to get there - our restaurant was actually not even half way up La Pigna (the top being the church above), and there were a LOT more staircases waiting for me.
Dammit.
But then and there, I vowed to conquer the place before the end of my course.
You hear me, Pig? This ain't over.
I haven't been eliminated.
The Town
Once the jet lag, fever/cold and embarassment of La Pigna wear out over the succeeding days, I begin to truly appreciate the beauty and charm of Sanremo. The city was once the summer playground of choice of European aristocracy, and you can certainly still see reminders of its noble and glorious past all over the place. It has more of a tourist / resort town feel to it now, but that certainly doesn't stop me from acting like I was on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous".
I was lucky to be billeted in a small hotel that was right across one of the town beaches. The funny thing was, you had to pay 2 euros just to get on the beach, and another 3 euros if you wanted to use a chair. If you weren't willing to shell out the additional 3 euros, you were consigned to a small corner patch of beach and, well, stand there.
With its low buildings, quaint streets and small shops, Sanremo had a very cozy, neighborly feel to it. It was a place where everybody seemed to know everyone else: people on apartment balconies would regularly wave to pedestrians below, motorbikes would regularly stop mid-ride and greet restaurant owners in side-alleys, and certain foreign students studying international law could regularly get away with shouts of "Ciao, bella!"
Villa Noble, last home of Alfred "Boom! Goes the Dynamite" Nobel. The desk is where he wrote his last will and established the Nobel Prizes. Through the influence of his secretary, he included a prize for peace. One of the first winners of the Nobel Peace Prize? The secretary! Genius!
The Institute graciously treats the class to a boat tour along the Riviera. I get great views of Sanremo and the adjacent towns that stretch all the way to Monaco. The sun is bright, the air is cool, and the sea a shade of deep blue I've never seen before. The trip would have been perfect -- except the tour boat we were on doubled as a party cruise ship at night and, given Sanremo's current demographic, the only music played on the soundsystem were '70s disco standards. Maybe it's just me, but I can't fully enjoy a Riviera cruise with "Boogie Wonderland" in the background.
It's gotta be said: no one rocks the red pants like Sanremo.
The Course / Institute
As I said at the beginning, I was in town to take part in a summer program on International Humanitarian Law (IHL): wartime rules, Geneva Conventions, refugee law, those sort of things. The lecturers were at the top of their respective fields, while my fellow participants came from around the world and an assortment of backgrounds: lawyers, diplomats, students, academe, aid workers, military. The subjects were serious and substantive, but the interaction open and friendly. In fact, I would consider the time with my classmates the best part of the whole course. Their personal insights and experiences were things you just couldn't find in any Powerpoint. And, of course, it's one thing to know there are, say, African officials or Scandinavian Red Cross workers in this world, it's another thing entirely to go out to a bar with them.
If you asked a comic book artist to draw a heroic, military-type action figure, he'd definitely come up with the Colonel on the right, a former peacekeeper. Six-foot five, commanding presence, chiseled features, super-straight posture, zero body fat. Needless to say, all the girl participants swooned over him (as one said, "he's every mother-in-law's dream!"). Anyway, he effortlessly kept everyone's attention with his presentation on IHL principles vis-a-vis true stories from the war front. For instance, to explain the principle of "proportionality", the Colonel told of a tank commander who used 27 rounds to take out one sniper hiding in a small cottage. When the tank commander was asked by her superiors "Why did you use 27 rounds to take out one sniper?", she replied "I'm sorry, sir, that's all I had."
I served as co-presenter in several of the case studies (thank you, fake twang!). One case dealt with a jet that accidentally bombed a civilian train crossing a bridge. To set-up the presentation, my co-presenter recited the case background to the class while I drew the train, jet and bridge on the whiteboard. As my co-presenter wound-up his introduction, he turned to the whiteboard, stopped, stared, then said out loud "Is that supposed to be a train?"
(everyone laughed, but under my breath I mumbled "Itsura nyo! Kaya nga ako nag-law kasi hindi ako marunong mag-drawing!")
When the lecturer pulled out this prop, everyone hummed - need I say it - "ella, ella, ey, ey"
We had a funny role-playing excercise where the class was divided into three groups: those with balloons, (representing refugees); those with toothpicks (representing armed groups) who had to pop the balloons; and those with nothing (representing peacekeepers) who had to somehow protect the ones with balloons. The balloons, of course, were wiped out quickly. Above, the last remaining refugee makes a final desperate dash towards the Swiss border.
Yes, you read that right. We actually discussed the effect of "24" on the Geneva Conventions. During the presentations, I got respectfully rebuked by the lecturer for taking into account a possible imminent nuclear attack during non-coercive questioning of a prisoner of war. You're not supposed to link one with the other. Sorry, Jack.
Lunch breaks at the Institute (Before anything else, I have to say this: Europe, you're really great, but you're killing me with those 1pm lunch start times, man! And no dinner 'til 9pm?! C'mon! I thought y'all were enlightened!). Anyway, it was a very diversi-nationalTM setting, I made a lot of new friends, everyone got along, and there was no cool-kids table for me to be excluded from. Still, there were very spirited geo-political arguments every mealtime on the propriety of chili sauce on pasta, the merits of agua naturelle versus agua frizzante, and whether mixing a cup of yogurt with milk in a glass is acceptable under any circumstance (Brazilians say yes, Europeans say no).
Or, as they call them here, "Food / Restaurants".
How do I put this delicately? Umm, maybe it was because we ate mostly at touristy restaurants, or maybe the chefs in the Philippines are just that adept at Italian dishes. All I know is, the food in Sanremo was very good, but just short of knock-your-socks-off-you-don't-have-none-of-this-in-your-homeland good (like in Barcelona). And the food served was often not what we expected when we ordered. Take my Tongan classmate. He orders a pizza, and gets ....
Tasty, to be sure, but shelling a pizza wasn't exactly on the menu.
Wherever we ate, it was always easy to spot the Asians' table.
The breakfast spreads were surprisingly very "carby". All breads, sweetbreads and pastries, with hardly any protein in sight. Italians haven't discovered Atkins, I guess.
Omg! Forget everything I said about Sanremo food! The gelatto! O-M-F-G!!!!!
I'm not proud of this. Go away.
BTW, in case you're wondering whatever happened to Britney, she's waitressing in Sanremo.
Unfinished Pig-ness
As the Sanremo leg of my summer course came to a close, I turned to face an old foe. La Pigna did not go without a fight - throwing in steep stairs and slopes until the very end - but I did finally conquer it. Of course, it took me two hours, three rest breaks and five gelatto cones, but I got to the top church and was able to take in the spectacular views.
Totally worth it.
(gasp gasp)
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