Trieste, Italy

When we look back, we tend to forget the difficulties of travel and only remember the good parts.  Last week we had a long day as we traveled from Paris to Trieste.  The trip involved a shuttle to the airport, a flight to Venice, a bus ride to the train station, a train ride to Trieste, and finally another packed bus ride to the apartment we were staying.  Part of what made this so difficult was that our bags are very heavy since we didn't know when our household goods would arrive from Taiwan.  Though we had to lift those bags up four flights of stairs, we we're glad when we finally arrived at our destination.

It felt really good to be back in Italy.  On our first full day there we took a bus down to a nearby fishing village for a wonderful seafood lunch.  After walking around town for a while we were able to catch the ferry back to Trieste.  We then took a bus out to Castella Miramare passing by the throngs of Italian sun bathers.

For our next day we took in the surrounding countryside with it's distinctive karst rock formations.  On a hike along a road Napoleon had started we got wonderful views of the city and the sea.  After lunch we made our way to the world's largest tourist cave.  Called the Grotta Gigante it was so large and the temperature stayed so stable that they have place large pendulums to measure the movement of the Earth's crust.  That night we walked around town seeing the outside of the city's Roman castle and ruins, churches, and many twisting little streets.

On our last day in Trieste we went for drinks at the same cafe visited many times by James Joyce.  It was sad that we were going.  Partly because it meant we had to carry our heavy suitcases around again!  We had covered a lot of ground in and around Trieste, but I feel like we just scratched the surface.  Our schedule didn't provide us time to take a sailing course or eat locally-grown food at a family-run osmizza in the countryside.  We'll just have to save those for next time we're there.  We were on our way to Slovenia.