Italy, Siena

It should have a meaning. The fact that so many troubles and misfortunes came together had to have a meaning. All my friends shared the same view when I told them the experiences that I had undergone. Therefore I had to go Siena. Even if I was a woman who didn’t believe in destiny I endured the chain of incidences that had befallen me and left myself to the flow of the beauties that I was exposed to.  I will not spin the misfortune out, what all I can say is that I recommend you not to use the web site Agoda.com at all. 

I wound up the clock to 06:00 for the flight at 09:00 and I woke up before the clock rang as I always did.   I took the distance between Yeşilköy and Akatlar, on which I suffered a lot for exactly 2.5 hours a day ago, in only 15 minutes.  It goes without saying that the bands in front of the entrance doors of the airport were like the doomsday and I stepped on a a new band that was opened as soon as I reached there. So “Okey” I said to myself, “I will absolutely be lucky during this trip and everything will go right. Don’t laugh at my attributing so much meaning to an entrance band. I am the kind of person who believed that we would be champion by just seeing that the clock read 19:05 o’clock. You have probably understood which team I support in this way. Please be informed that I shall continue my activities through this blog for those who don’t understand or understand a little bit want to know more.           

They sometimes put me in the queu of the standby passangers during check-in since I fly with an open ticket. Knowing this I directly went to the standby counter and, yes you understood it, I completed check-in formalities in 5 minutes for which I normally spend at least 30 minutes. You aree wrong if you think that I left myself to the seducing arms of the duty free shop after having passed through the passport queu. Since I had lost my whim for the duty free I just bought my YSL mascara, which is an indispensable thing for me and threw myself into the airplane to Bologna which would take me to Siena. Since there was no direct flight to Siena and even to Florence, which is the nearest airport to Siena, the easiest way was to go to Bologna and then take a bus to Siena from there.   

I landed in Siena airport at just 11:00 Italian time after a 2,5 hours flight that was very comfortable. I already told you that I would be very lucky during this trip. The passport queue which normally continued one hour came to end in only 8 minutes. I know that Bologna airport is a small one but what would you say if I say that the band on which my luggage was placed came just before me wiggly? 

I wanted to catch the bus to Siena which would pass by the airport just at 11:30 and I was actually just about to catch it.

Those who don’t want to fall into the error I had fallen into at the first time must read the following lines of this article more carefully. Never fall in the mistake of asking for any advise at the information desk the officials there would compete with Turkish girls in misguiding you. Let me just say so much and you understand what I mean.

You will see bus stops as soon as you go out through the terminal. There are also buses going to the inner city. Those who miss the bus that I shall propose below may have a tour around Bologna and come back to the airport until the new bus arrives, after they have left their personal belongings in the depository. The bus operated by Sena http://www.sena.it/ which is one of the biggest bus chains of Italia arrives and departs just on time. But be careful, it may not stop just at the bus stop. You must be waiting on the apart section as soon as you see a bus coming. And when the bus stops, you will catch it with packages and bags in your hand and making bodily movements and figures like in Zeki-Metin films, just as I did.    

The ticket must have been bought before. They also sell tickets in the bus but they reprimand you with a sweet tone for not doing the same thing again. If you ask me, I would suggest that you buy your ticket in the bus even if they reprimand you because if you miss the bus you ticket won’t loose its validity. Ticket price is 19 Euro and very cheap taking the distance into consideration. The flight lasts 2,5 hours and the airplane arrives in the place of destination just on time. You see many tunnels along the highways and this leads you think that “Ferhat” of Italy has worked very hard but nonetheless you go through a very beautiful landscape adorned with lush mountains and hillsides. My inability to read books because of rocking of the bus led me to discover the navigation feature of Blackberry. I must say that Blackberry has a navigation system which is quite helpful, if not as much as I-phone.

The bus stops at several places in Siena and detailed information may be found about these places in the web site. You may enter the addresses of the hotel and stations in the google map and choose the one which is closest to where you go. In this article in which you will read time and again how lucky I am, I can’t help saying that the place where the bus dropped me was at a walking distance of 3 minutes from my hotel. 

I was already on the streets of Siena, which I knew by heart, just less than 10 minutes after I had left my luggage in the hotel and while I was just about to faint of hunger. Siena is a very small but very beautiful city and a touristic place in the strictest sense.  For that reason it is almost impossible to find any restaurant, which is not touristic in Il Campio square and the streets that come out to it. They are all the same as one another. I immediately threw myself to a relatively more classical restaurant that I had found last year.

"La Vecchia Taverna di Bacco - Via di Beccheria, 9 - Tel: 0039 0577 041984" 
http://www.serafinosiena.com/

I tasted Pici and Panzanella which I couldn’t eat last year but you may be sure that you will not have missed anything if you haven’t eaten it. Panzanella is a plate of leftover meal that man gives to the cows in the villages. It is meal in which bread has been chopped up into tomatoes, a little bit green vegetables, dry onion, slices of scallons and some oil has been sprinkled thereon. Look at its picture at the near side and tell me if I am exaggerating. 

It has always been difficult to find a delicious meal with reasonable prices in touristic sites. For that reason one of the most useful tips that this kind of newspaper articles may give are the tips about meals. 

But if you, like dozens of my friends, are too lazy to ask about and seek the places that I have recommended, pay no attention to the vital information that I have given and insist on eating unsavoury dishes in the restaurants in the city center and want to  pay alot of money  for those bad meals, I can’the say anything. It is your own choice.

Coffee and wine is very cheap in Italy.  Especially wine is almost cheaper than water. If you don’t believe me you may have a look at the receipt below.

You can’t find water cheaper than 1 Euro in the cafes in Siena. It is even 2 Euros in touristic premises. I am not surprised: 2 Euros is less than it should be for me as a person who paid 5 TL for water in Çeşme Alaçatı Resort. 

If we come back to the subject, the flavours may be said to be perpetual here. There is no change that might lead one to think “This was good when I came last year but they have dropped its quality this year”. You also understand this from the premises. There are no new enterprises. They are all quite old. In deed, every thing and every place is old but very beautiful.  One might think that somebody has pressed the button of “stop the time” and everything has remained as it has always been. Making modifications on the internal decorations of the building is allowed but it is not allowed to pound even a nail on their external façades. I wish the same to our beautiful country.

Maybe you may drink coffee etc. in Il Campo but I don’t recommend you to have a meal there. Having a meal is both very expensive and unsavoury because of the touristic character of the city. Besides in many restaurants, the price of eating at the table and take-away dishes are very different as in many European cities. Take your sandwich, come to Il Campio, sit on the ground and eat your sandwich. Experince the delight of sitting on the ground as much as you want, which is an experience to which we are not accustomed to at all in Istanbul.

My body which is not accustomed to walk incessantly has naturally lied at full length on the bed at 21:00 in the first two days. Sunday morning I woke up early and was blind enough to go down to the dining room to have breakfast, which seemed quite rich but was in deed quite empty.

I should have understood that there was nothing to eat having seen that they hadn’t serve any foxes. But I am a Turkish citizen and I must first touch the oven in order to understand that it is hot.

Anyhow, after the breakfast I run out of the hotel and threw myself to the savoury hands of the croissant and only then m stomach tasted something savoury. One may find more or less good meal everywhere but I claim that you can not find such a croissant in any place in the world and its price is only 0.80 Euro.

I really don’t understand why the tourists in Siena or the all touristic cities in the world foolishly (excuse me but I can’t find a more suitable word to express what I mean) stroll around the main streets.

The fact that every street of Siena is more beautiful and calmer than other is another aspect of its beauty. It is crazy to miss the surprising sceneries. You see, I promoted them from foolishness to craze. Let me just add a little bit flavor of philosophy to this travel letter as is the custom by saying “Isn’t it always so in life; foolishness sometimes mingles with craze.”

Anyhow, if we return to Siena, I didn’t climb the Torre il Mangia tower (i.e the tower of eating” because I had climbed it last year. Here you see the photographs of the tower from below, top and across.

While I was strolling through the side streets I noticed the building with a wide veranda, which I always liked very much, tracked it down and saw that its not all the short end point comes out to Museo Civico just near Torre il Mangia. 

I must confess that museums seem no more as attractive to me as before since I visited almost all prominent small and big, modern or boring museums in all the cities that I have visited. Museums now seem to me to be places for students of painting, sculpture, history of art etc.  

I feel guilty as if I disgraced the history and works of art which we do not appreciate sufficiently, but what can I do? I am now a little bit bored of them. For that reason 8 Euros which I paid only to see that balcony has been too much for me. 

Terrace is a very large old terrace with a closed top but its front side ise all out open. I can’t tell the nostalgic pleasure I experience in such places. I don’t believe in the existence of a previous life at all but, if there is really such a life, I was absolutely taking a rest in such a place and found peace of mind there. In this journey I had to take the photographs with my handy phone because I had forgotten my camera at home. For that reason the photographs that I took here are not very beautiful. If say “that balcony with column that appears from a far” you may find that place, of which location I couldn’t describe very clearly, using a lense. 

We departed with a minibus full of 13 people for participating in a half-day tour around Chianti & San Gimignano in the remaining part of the day. The price of these half-day tours are almost always the same: 38 Euro. Besides there are also full-day tours but its price goes up to 100 Euro. http://www.mytours.it/

Gasolin is also cheap here but the driver ran the air-conditioning at the minimum level until I warned hm and I don’t know why. The rest of our trip was more comfortable (By the way I must emphasize that almost everybody speaks very good English in Siena. For that reason I couldn’t realize my desire to practice Italian. The kind of people who couldn’t dare themselves to make chivalry but glorified those who did, did not leave me here too. We couldn’t know that the wine tasting station named    Tenuto Torciano di Giachi Pierluigi in which we arrived approximately half an hour after leaving Siena would just be a stand-up show. And probably one hour that we spent there would otherwise not pass so easily.  Half-mad presentation of wines by an Italian talking with a very sweet Roberto de Niro accent and his basic knowledge about wine was wonderful.

I have noted down some of  the fundamental rules of drinking a good wine, which attracted my attention. Wine lovers may have a look at those rules below: 

- You must drink the wine not with the hand which you normally use but with the other one. This means that if you are a left-hander you must drink wine with the right hand and with the left hand if you are a right-hander.

- If you want to taste the wine you must take the wine glass in  your hand that you normally use and  hold the glass not  at its stem but from the bottom by grasping it with your fingers.

- Wine glass must be hold one hand span below the face at the stage of smelling. Wine must be smelled by bowing the head forward.

-  Wine glass is taken to the other hand after smelling is completed and put on the table and then you must continue drinking the wine  holding the wine glass with your other hand  

- If the white wine smells banana, it is Chardonnay; red wine is Merlot if it smells plant & vegetable and Chardonnay if it smells pepper and Pinot Noir if it smells Pinot Noir. Sevignon Blanc is the best red wine.

- The best wine of Chianti Region is Chianti Classico.

- The first grapevines for white grapes in Chianti region have been supplied from Mesopotamia, i.e. our own soil.

- Red wine is makbul to the extend to which it is old, while chardonnay is satisfactory  to the extent to which it is new.

- Red wine is in good harmony with meat, white wine is in good harmony with fish and macaroni, and both of them is in good harmony with cheese.

Just guess who wanted the plate,  which contained two slices of salami and one piece of cheese, served together with the wine and was not enough to appease our hunger, to be served again?

What a happiness  for me if I had made the participants of the tour think that a Turk is required for every tour. You would estimate that the real purpose of  the promotion and presentation  of the product free of charge is to sell it. The bill seems to be more reasonable if you think that  even if the products were absolutely expensi,  you had made half of the payment for the performance of the presenter. .

After the wine tour we went to San Gimignano which I had visited last year and liked very much. It is so beautiful. This town  has also been set up on a hill just like  every small town in Toscana region.  If you go there in the evening and find a place with a live music like me together with your lover, then you are the happiest man in the world and make the most of San Gimignano with its view of the Toscana valley…

(An article  on a journey would be incomplete without the spirit of Tayfun Talipoğlu)

You may find wines with reasonable prices here and taste the ice cream named Bottega Dell Alabastro di Magnetti Virgili which was the world ice-cream champion in the years 2007, 2008 and 2009. Of course I am here talking of tasting the ice-cream not the ice-cream maker. By the way I must say that you would be disappointed if  you look for those famous handsome Italian guys around here. Everywhere is full of tourists.  I mean the type of tourists who wears light colored sandalets with white stockings under their short shorts. If they all wear such things thousands of tourists may not be wrong. So let us also try that white stocking.

If we have to say the last words on the subject of ice-cream I may say that the award winning ice-cream in San Gimignano was very delicious but for me, as a person who eats ice cream twice a day,  the most delicious ice cream was the one that I had eaten in Grom http://www.grom.it/ita/home.php in Siena.

We could  stay only for an hour in San Gimignano because the tour organizers wanted to return as soon as possible. I must emphasize that one hour shall not be enough for the first-time visitors. You must absolutely see Toscana and make the most of San Gimignano.

See you in my new article in which  I will tell you about my experiences in the language course in Siena.