LG Vacation Summer 2015 - Italy & Greece

LG, The Wife and six friends went to Italy and Greece on vacation a few weeks ago.  As a self-declared internationally-acclaimed travel writer (no need to Google it, trust somebody for once you skeptical, trust-issue-having S.O.B), LG felt obligated to post some photos of his vacation.  

It started in Rome and continued during a seven-day cruise (Royal Caribbean; LG gets $1,000 every time he mentions the company) to four stops in Greece.  It concluded, after the cruise, with LG and The Wife (LG loses $1,000 every time he refers to his spouse as "The Wife") enjoying two days in Venezia (that's Venice for you unwashed masses down at the roller rink and laundromat).   

So here we go.....

This is the Roman Coliseum.  A funny thing happened to LG on the way to it, but that's a long story. You can rent a headset and listen to a bunch of seemingly-interesting facts about the Coliseum for three hours or you can take one photo and make up your own facts. That red port-a-potty in the lower left of this photo is from 435 B.C.  It was invented by Julius Hava Shatticus.   

   

   This was our open-air tour bus in Rome.  Pro Tip: Don't take an open-air tour bus in Rome.  Not in August anyway.  The sun is hotter in Rome in August than it is on the actual surface of the sun, and there is no shade in an open-air tour bus.  Also, very few of the people speak English so they don't understand when you say "Hotter than a witch's tit" and sweat a gallon of fluid onto the bus floor.  And, believe it or not, that phrase is not in most Italian language phrase books.  Little did these people realize that the backs of their foreign heads would be on an internationally-acclaimed blog.  

You think your town has some run-down areas, there are a lot of very old buildings in Rome.  This one is older than Betty White.  And there are buildings like this everywhere. Rather than stop to discover what it actually is/was, LG just rides by and marvels and makes shit up.  Although reliable sources say that this was once a Home Depot.  

For you foodies, this was a typical Italian meal in Rome.  Whoops, guess the photographer was a bit slow on the shutter.  What was there was pretty dang good.  All of the food in Rome is at least very good if not excellent.  Better, even, than your average Olive Garden.  

The Romans haven't fully embraced modern technology yet. Apparently, when one receives a fax in Rome the customary practice is to spray paint the word "Fax" on the side of the recipient's office building so that they know to check their fax machine. 

This is the ceiling of a room in the Vatican Museum, the second largest museum in the world (behind the Museum of Donald Trump's Hairpieces).  This museum contains eight miles of corridors according to the tour guide (he did seem a little shifty however; his name as P. Francis or something like that, wore a red hat.)  While people are busy looking up at the ornate ceilings pickpockets are busy lifting wallets.  Pro Tip: Don't look at anything in Rome, just cling tightly to your wallet. 

This is one of the pools on the cruise ship on which LG and The Wife and six friends sailed.  Because it departed from Italy, only about 15% of the passengers spoke English.  The other 85% of the passengers found what LG had to say to be very interesting!

This is not LG (sorry ladies) but this is the model of bathing suit that LG wore on the cruise.  However, LG's agent prevents the posting of those photos.  GQ gets the first rights.  

This is LG posing right before the cruise ship's "World's Sexiest Man" competition.  No need to say who won, it's pretty obvious.  

This is Sophie.  She wasn't on the vacation but her contract calls for her to be on every LG Report post.  

This is a view of Santorini, Greece from the harbor.  The guy who owns the white paint franchise on Santorini is doing pretty well for himself.  

Here's another view of Santorini.  LG dove off that church dome into the Aegean 500 feet below.  

Here's LG with Mike Milbury.  This photo wasn't from the vacation, it was from a wedding in Boston earlier this summer.  LG just wanted to post it.  If you don't know who Mike Milbury is, you can YouTube him along with "shoe beating."  He was a Boston Bruin great who once went into the stands at Madison Square Garden and wielded a shoe as a weapon even more effectively than LG's Greek grandmother. 

Mykonos island's capital city has a maze of narrow white streets designed to confuse invading pirates and tourists.  

This is a typically overcrowded bus in Greece.  LG tried to ask the driver if the large number of passengers complied with U.S. highway safety laws but he was inexplicably ignored. The ticket taker, after having apparently told a passenger "one thousand times" (by his own declaration) that she couldn't eat on the bus, grabbed her bag of peanuts and threw it out the open window, narrowly missing people waiting at the next bus stop.  If that had occurred in the U.S., a federal lawsuit would've been filed before the next stop and TMZ would've been on site. 

  This is a statue in a museum in Olympia, Greece, site of the first Olympics (in about 700 B.C. maybe? LG forgets the exact date, it was long ago...) LG almost got thrown out of the museum (true story) for innocently posing behind a headless statue with his head in place of the missing noggin.  The security guard dropped her Greek Edition People Magazine and raced over to admonish LG before making sure that he deleted said photo. Another treasure lost for the ages. 

  Meanwhile, back on the cruise ship, Royal Caribbean (cha ching, another $1,000) awarded LG a medal for being "The Most Outstanding Cruise Passenger Ever," or something like that.  

After the cruise, LG and The Wife went to Venice.  This is one of the canals. The people on the left are wanted to art theft in France (LG had to say something to spice up this photo). 

LG took The Wife on a gondola ride (about $140 for 40 minutes if you really must know).  That is the "Bridge of Sighs" in the background (or is that considered the foreground?)  So named because prisoners would supposedly cross it on their way to prison and would sigh at their last sight of the beauty of Venice before their incarceration.  Probably a B.S. story but that's what they tell tourists.  Don't be a killjoy by Googling it.

Here a man is practicing the age-old art of glass blowing on the island of Murano, just off Venice (all glass blowing was segregated on a separate island after a large fire in Venice long ago; again, possibly total tourist B.S. but that's what they told us....) There is also a Domino's extra pepperoni pizza being cooked in there if you look closely.  After the brief "tour" (consisting of standing in one spot and watching this guy for ten minutes while faced with a discretely placed "Tips" jar), a personal guide will bring you through eight showrooms of glass products, featuring such low-cost items as $50,000 chandeliers and $100,000 glass sculptures of clowns and horses. Key chains were $80.  And the kicker is that they supposedly won't sell to anyone on-line unless you've personally been to the factory.  

This shirt was displayed in a storefront in Venice.  LG is always amazed by the nonsensical t-shirts sold in Europe as U.S. originals.  Of course, everyone in the U.S. wears athletic t-shirts identifying themselves as a "player."  Among other shirts that LG saw were those touting (absolutely true): "Downtown Los Angeles, U.S. Cup Champions," and "National University, East Coast Division, Champions."  

The sun setting as seen from Santorini will bring this post to a close.  LG hopes you've enjoyed some snaps from his vacation.  Feel free to leave laudatory comments at your leisure....and don't forget to root for Downtown Los Angeles in this year's U.S. Cup! 

Yasou!