This was a short but event filled trip.

The first stage was meeting with my fiance, Zarina, in Almaty a few days before spending over a week touring the Italian highlights.

The trip started with disaster and could have ended quickly because of the crappy Kazakh visa rules and their general bad behaviour. A 200€ bribe and six hours waiting in the customs lounge for everyone not on the take to leave gave me a three day 'transit visa'. From there I tiredly checked in Hotel Kazakhstan, a soviet edifice and luckily Zarina had left a message and she hadn't gone back to her neighbouring country and was staying at an airport hotel. So things turned out alright in the end.

It was cold, not snowy, in Almaty, the trees being white with frost. The hotel had a good view as Almaty is near the mountains. Otherwise Hotel Kazakhstan is as good as communism and avoided. We walked around the town, visited Panfilov Park where there is a colourful pastel Orthodox Church and WWII rememberance shrine for two days before Zarina had to leave. I spent another day and organised an earlier flight back to Dubai where I had a wait a full day (of boredom having used up all the time I needed in the city in 2005) before my connecting flight to Roma and the second stage: Italia.

The plane did not go direct to Rome. It flew to Milan for a stop over first, giving me an impression of the Swiss Alps and the Lombardy plain for a little while. I had to wait a few hours for refueling and picking up the passengers that would return to Dubai and beyond.

Eventually it was Rome, well after a slow train from Fiumicono. A train that hard to get to that another recent arrival fainted on the way and I had to help. The trained pullled into Termini, the big train station. My hotel for the night was not far away, on the fringe of the seedy area that is always near a big station. The hotel served breakfast, a nice civilised brioche with coffee. How breakfast should be, everywhere.

In the evening I explored the immediate surroundings which involved a few Churches, one of which was being set up for some event as there were plenty of uniforms, including period stuff, milling around. Quite big these places and nice too. There was also a round-a-bout fountain nearby with fancy hotel and the beginning of a long road of shops heading into the heart of Rome. But I would come back to Rome, first Venezia, and then Florentia beckoned.

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