If you haven't heard of Capri, it's like the Martha's Vineyard of Italy. It's a small island off the coast of Naples where they make juice boxes and shants. Just kidding, but really it is a gorgeous place. One of the attractions is the Blue Grotto. It's an opening in the cliffs that border the island which opens up into a huge grotto. In ancient times, it was the personal swimming pool of Some Roman Emperor Whose Name Is Escaping Me. It's pitch black swimming in, and the cavernous size and deep water are pretty intimidating when you swim-turn around to look at the tiny opening you just swam through. As in pee your pants intimidating...which I did. When you look, though, your jaw drops. The five o'clock sun cuts through the water making it the purest turquoise I've ever seen. It was beautiful, but our attention was almost immediately taken hold of by the medusa i spotted in the lit up water. A medusa in Italian is a jelly fish. Earlier that day some TAD (Typical American Doucebag) warned us that someone had been stung a few days ago by the jellyfish swept into the grotto by the tide. Nothing happened to us except paralyzing fear, panic and swimming so fast it can only be described as fleeing.
We watched the World Cup games at a bar in town. We ordered an iced coffee* to drink during the first two minutes of the game and then linger over until it ended. Enter creepy Romanian whose had too much to drink and orders Sophie and I a drink without our knowledge. His name is Ben and while he claims to speak Italian, English and French, I am unconvinced he had a firm grasp on any of them, including his own. Even the bartenders are practically in tears laughing at him as he holds a conversation in French with Sophie while I'm sitting in between them. I have no idea how to speak any French. This lasts for around ten minutes when Sophie finally pinches me, hard, taking my attention awy from the game and on to saving her from this mondo dufus.
Sophie: wanna know what I got out of that conversation? He once went to a store and tried to pay for something that was 60 euro with a card. No go. So he grabs something that costs 40 euro and tries to pay for them together with a card. No go. So he goes to the atm, comes back and pays for both things. The end.
Ben is smiling and nodding.
We stayed in Anacapri, another town on the island, with Sophie's family friend, Eunice. She's in her 70s and lives in a beautiful home with a gorgeous and well kept garden. Different flowers line every walkway, with ponds and tortoises and lizards walking freely. It is wonderful except with a great garden come great big bug-monsters who find their way into your room at night and surprise you in your shower just to say hi. She has a guard dog for her tortoises, a ten year old doberman named Dobie. Where she came up with the name we'll never know. She doesn't really guard though, more she just lies in the kitchen, lying on her back waiting to be fondled (as in petted, you perverts) and farting conspicuously at awkward times, like when we're meeting Eunice for the first time.
Anyways, Eunice is a huge nature buff. Her bedroom is made up of the sitting room and the living room. It's all marble, sprawling and fabulous. Almost as fabulous as the woman herself. A large TV sits in one corner with Eunice's comfy chair and a small couch. In the other corner of the large room is her compouter. One night, Sophie and I were on the computers, looking at flights, arranging travel and writing emails. Suddenly, Eunice urgently and firmly shushes us from across the room. She is glued to the TV. I can't even see her behind the comfy chair because the back is taller than her. It startled us pretty bad and we both turned around to see what on the television is so important, so monumental as to repreimand guests for talking softly in the corner.
BBC News: So tell me about this new species of palm frond you've found in Laos borderlands?
Yep...Then began an interview with a dual title holding scholar: Worlds Most Trusted Voice on Obscure Botany and World's Oldest Virgin.
Capri was overall a really great time, though. We snuck into an outdoor hotel pool. It took a couple of tries, but we managed to pull it off. Our plan was to walk in all confident so no one would question that we were staying at the hotel. So we casually strut into the first decent looking place we see. We can see the pool from the entrance and we make our way towards the "terrace opening" in the corner across from reception. We are walking tall like imbuciles and the receptionist is just staring at us. The pool entrance we were walking towards ends up being floor to ceiling windows that look out to the pool and are so well maintained that they appear not to be there at all. So effectively Sophie and I strool into this place and beeline it for a corner of the hotel where we linger for a wihle, pretending we had purposely come back to our hotel to chat in the hotel lobby behind a giant plastic fern. We called it quits on that place. We ended up finding a hotel whose pool was a little less illusive. Only when we got in the swimming pool did the attendant ask for our room number. I would love to say that we pulled our aliby off smoothly, but it was more like us pretending to wrack our brains for our room number, spitting out number/letter combinations, while we gathered our clothes and "walked" "calmly" as far away as we could and then dressed in shame on the main street.
Also, we met a cat that day. It was black and brown. Sophie named it Black Brownie.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Bonjourno from Itary!
Okay, so a lot has happened since I las published an entry, I realize that. Namely, we are in Italy now, namely on the island of Capri. How did we come to be here? The tale is long, but the sequence of travel goes like this:
January 27th: Taxi --> ferry --> metro --> hostel
January 28th: Bus --> different bus --> ferry --> VW Van
January 29th: VW Van --> train --> different train --> bus --> ferry --> car
The trip here was quite an adventure to say the least. After our stay in Athens, we boarded a ferry that was supposed to bring us to Ancona, in northern Italy, in 16 hours time. It ended up leaving an hour late and arriving about nine hours late, making it more of a 24 hour ride. This was frustrating, and made more so by the fact that Sophie and I must have been the first decent looking humans ever to step foot on that vessel. Honestly, attention is nice, but this friendly and talkative attitude from everyone on the boat bordered on all out social harrassment. While I was on the computers I had a man next to me turn to me out of the blue.
Man: Hullo. (Shakes my hand. I give him the dead fish, of course.) Would you like to be friends on facebook?
I'm already on facebook so I can't pretend I don't have one, so I agree knowing I can just defriend him right after. This man's name was Haras, which was extremely appropriate. On three separate occasions he found us on the boat, asking us to come have a drink. Sophie had a severly intoxicated man named Daniel literally begging her for her number in really broken English. After numerous tries, he was reduced to ''please, please, please, please!''
When we finally came to a stop at Ancona, Sophie and I dismbarked and found ourselves faced with a problem: This very moment was as far as we had planned on our Eurotrip. Ancona, if you haven't been, is an industrail village with more traffic than anything else. It's slogan should be Just Passin' Through! because no vegitation or human activity suggests that anything actually lives there. It's just building after building, traffic intersection after traffic intersection, suspicious dock worker after suspicious dock worker. Sophie and I find some shade and try and decide what to do. After a few minutes, we've still got nothing. Then we spot four guys coming off the ferry, who we'd spoken to a bit on the ferry. We make the call to follow them. They are walking like they know where they're going. We sort of lurk sketchily behind them, acting like we were already headed that way. After they made their way past the crowds and toards town, Sophie finally called out to them.
Sophie: How do you know where you're going already?
We look extremely lost. It turns out that these fellas are Eurotripping with a car they bought in the UK. There were three Aussies and an American who they'd met during their travels. We must have looked so pathetically lost that we didn't even have to ask for a ride to the bus station, they just offered.
We walked in a line through town (well, they walked in a line. I had a luggage crisis that no one seemed to notice because I was last. First my shoe broke, so I had the pimp limp going for me. Then the bag I had resting on top of my rolling suitcase kept falling off the side so it would dangle off and drag on the street. This would happen every 10 or so feet, usually in the middle of a crosswalk when a 18 wheeler had just gotten a green light.) Finally we came upon a Volkswagen Van whose color they designated as ''poop brown.'' I probably would've called it burnt orange, but I wasn't about to get into the finer details of shades of shit with these guys so I kept quiet.
Sophie and I took spots on the floor while the boys tried to navigate through the hustle and bustle of Ancona traffic. This bus station had to have had a secret keeper or something, because it was nowhere to be found. As the boys had no immediate obligations, the question finally arose as to whether they should simply drive us as far as they could to a legitimate bus station. There was silence. The van chugged at the red light and one by one the boys agreed. Danny, the driver, was the last to respond. 'Fuck it,' he said, and turned to get on the highway to Firenze (Florence).
Rarely in my life have I felt so badass. We legitimately hitchhiked to Florence, and got an awesome roadtrip out of it too. We accidentally took the country roads, which snaked through a gorgeous mountain rainge. This added around 5.5 hours to the trip and did some serious damage to their clutch with all the hairpin turns, but it gave us a chance to stop in Bumfuck, Italy, and have probably the most authentic Italian meal I'll ever eat. The only iffy part was the car itself. Every time we stopped, the car would refuse to start up again. Three of the guys would have to push it so the driver could start it in gear and then the pushers would jump in as we pulled away. This unfortunately happend in Florence, beside the river during rush hour. I learned a few new Italian explitives that day.
We found out when we got to Florence that the next train wouldn't come until 6:40 the next morning, and there were no open hostels that we could find. The guys offered us a space on the beds in their van (yes, this van had two double beds) which we pretended to debate for about ten seconds and then accepted. We parked the van in a parking space along a road, pitched the top up to make room for the double bed and set up shop. Essentially, we went camping in the middle of an Italian City.
And the rest is pretty much history, we took two trains, a bus and a ferry and got into Capri at around 4:00 p.m. the next day.
Things I've Noticed:
1. The effects of The Stab are persistent. About once a day, Sophie will hallucinate me saying something and ask me about it. Also, on the ferry, we were browsing through a magazine when I see a snapshopt of Kristin Davis. I ''remember'' that Sophie and I were trying to name the actresses on Sex and the City, so I inform her triumphantly, ''Ohhhhh, it's Kristin Davis, Soph!'' I spend the next five minutes trying to remind her of this conversation until I realize that it took place three days ago at her summer camp and was therefore probably a dream.
2. Cheese toasties (grilled cheese) are suddenly extinct in Greece. These have been our staple diet while in Greece ever since the first time we came when we were in eighth grade and refused to try anything that seemed foreign. When Sophie and I come off the bus and are waiting for our 24 hour ferry, we decide to eat while we wait and to go with the cheap option, cheese toasts. It went a little like this:
a) The place has no menu, but the waitress says they have toast. We order our cheese toasts, making it very clear that we want only cheese in our toasts, and no ham.
b) Waitress deams this possible.
c) Waitress bring us ham and cheese toasts.
d) I don't mind ham. I am starving. I nom away. Sophie doesn't eat ham, and reminds the waitress that she ordered no ham.
e) The waitress tries to convince Sophie that it is turkey, not ham. Pink, ham flavored turkey. She says it is impossible to not include ham in the sandwhich, even when it hasn't been made yet.
f) Sophie politely asks that it be taken off the bill because it's not what the fuck she ordered.
g) This is also impossible because, as the waitress says, then she would have to pay for it. The waitress asks Sophie if she wants to order something else (which Sophie will have to pay for) so that she does not ''starve.''
h) I question this woman's mental capacities. We take all the trash out of our purses, put it on the table with exact change and leave. Passive aggressive revenge is sweet.
SOPHIE AND I ARE SAFE MOM AND DAD AND JANIE AND JOHN. LOVE YOU ALL.
January 27th: Taxi --> ferry --> metro --> hostel
January 28th: Bus --> different bus --> ferry --> VW Van
January 29th: VW Van --> train --> different train --> bus --> ferry --> car
The trip here was quite an adventure to say the least. After our stay in Athens, we boarded a ferry that was supposed to bring us to Ancona, in northern Italy, in 16 hours time. It ended up leaving an hour late and arriving about nine hours late, making it more of a 24 hour ride. This was frustrating, and made more so by the fact that Sophie and I must have been the first decent looking humans ever to step foot on that vessel. Honestly, attention is nice, but this friendly and talkative attitude from everyone on the boat bordered on all out social harrassment. While I was on the computers I had a man next to me turn to me out of the blue.
Man: Hullo. (Shakes my hand. I give him the dead fish, of course.) Would you like to be friends on facebook?
I'm already on facebook so I can't pretend I don't have one, so I agree knowing I can just defriend him right after. This man's name was Haras, which was extremely appropriate. On three separate occasions he found us on the boat, asking us to come have a drink. Sophie had a severly intoxicated man named Daniel literally begging her for her number in really broken English. After numerous tries, he was reduced to ''please, please, please, please!''
When we finally came to a stop at Ancona, Sophie and I dismbarked and found ourselves faced with a problem: This very moment was as far as we had planned on our Eurotrip. Ancona, if you haven't been, is an industrail village with more traffic than anything else. It's slogan should be Just Passin' Through! because no vegitation or human activity suggests that anything actually lives there. It's just building after building, traffic intersection after traffic intersection, suspicious dock worker after suspicious dock worker. Sophie and I find some shade and try and decide what to do. After a few minutes, we've still got nothing. Then we spot four guys coming off the ferry, who we'd spoken to a bit on the ferry. We make the call to follow them. They are walking like they know where they're going. We sort of lurk sketchily behind them, acting like we were already headed that way. After they made their way past the crowds and toards town, Sophie finally called out to them.
Sophie: How do you know where you're going already?
We look extremely lost. It turns out that these fellas are Eurotripping with a car they bought in the UK. There were three Aussies and an American who they'd met during their travels. We must have looked so pathetically lost that we didn't even have to ask for a ride to the bus station, they just offered.
We walked in a line through town (well, they walked in a line. I had a luggage crisis that no one seemed to notice because I was last. First my shoe broke, so I had the pimp limp going for me. Then the bag I had resting on top of my rolling suitcase kept falling off the side so it would dangle off and drag on the street. This would happen every 10 or so feet, usually in the middle of a crosswalk when a 18 wheeler had just gotten a green light.) Finally we came upon a Volkswagen Van whose color they designated as ''poop brown.'' I probably would've called it burnt orange, but I wasn't about to get into the finer details of shades of shit with these guys so I kept quiet.
Sophie and I took spots on the floor while the boys tried to navigate through the hustle and bustle of Ancona traffic. This bus station had to have had a secret keeper or something, because it was nowhere to be found. As the boys had no immediate obligations, the question finally arose as to whether they should simply drive us as far as they could to a legitimate bus station. There was silence. The van chugged at the red light and one by one the boys agreed. Danny, the driver, was the last to respond. 'Fuck it,' he said, and turned to get on the highway to Firenze (Florence).
Rarely in my life have I felt so badass. We legitimately hitchhiked to Florence, and got an awesome roadtrip out of it too. We accidentally took the country roads, which snaked through a gorgeous mountain rainge. This added around 5.5 hours to the trip and did some serious damage to their clutch with all the hairpin turns, but it gave us a chance to stop in Bumfuck, Italy, and have probably the most authentic Italian meal I'll ever eat. The only iffy part was the car itself. Every time we stopped, the car would refuse to start up again. Three of the guys would have to push it so the driver could start it in gear and then the pushers would jump in as we pulled away. This unfortunately happend in Florence, beside the river during rush hour. I learned a few new Italian explitives that day.
We found out when we got to Florence that the next train wouldn't come until 6:40 the next morning, and there were no open hostels that we could find. The guys offered us a space on the beds in their van (yes, this van had two double beds) which we pretended to debate for about ten seconds and then accepted. We parked the van in a parking space along a road, pitched the top up to make room for the double bed and set up shop. Essentially, we went camping in the middle of an Italian City.
And the rest is pretty much history, we took two trains, a bus and a ferry and got into Capri at around 4:00 p.m. the next day.
Things I've Noticed:
1. The effects of The Stab are persistent. About once a day, Sophie will hallucinate me saying something and ask me about it. Also, on the ferry, we were browsing through a magazine when I see a snapshopt of Kristin Davis. I ''remember'' that Sophie and I were trying to name the actresses on Sex and the City, so I inform her triumphantly, ''Ohhhhh, it's Kristin Davis, Soph!'' I spend the next five minutes trying to remind her of this conversation until I realize that it took place three days ago at her summer camp and was therefore probably a dream.
2. Cheese toasties (grilled cheese) are suddenly extinct in Greece. These have been our staple diet while in Greece ever since the first time we came when we were in eighth grade and refused to try anything that seemed foreign. When Sophie and I come off the bus and are waiting for our 24 hour ferry, we decide to eat while we wait and to go with the cheap option, cheese toasts. It went a little like this:
a) The place has no menu, but the waitress says they have toast. We order our cheese toasts, making it very clear that we want only cheese in our toasts, and no ham.
b) Waitress deams this possible.
c) Waitress bring us ham and cheese toasts.
d) I don't mind ham. I am starving. I nom away. Sophie doesn't eat ham, and reminds the waitress that she ordered no ham.
e) The waitress tries to convince Sophie that it is turkey, not ham. Pink, ham flavored turkey. She says it is impossible to not include ham in the sandwhich, even when it hasn't been made yet.
f) Sophie politely asks that it be taken off the bill because it's not what the fuck she ordered.
g) This is also impossible because, as the waitress says, then she would have to pay for it. The waitress asks Sophie if she wants to order something else (which Sophie will have to pay for) so that she does not ''starve.''
h) I question this woman's mental capacities. We take all the trash out of our purses, put it on the table with exact change and leave. Passive aggressive revenge is sweet.
SOPHIE AND I ARE SAFE MOM AND DAD AND JANIE AND JOHN. LOVE YOU ALL.
Bye Ios
Or last day in Ios was extremely fun. We finally got a chance to head down to the other (younger) end of the beach with the boys who worked at the watersport company around the sunbeds I tended to. Two of them got the day off because one showed up extremely intoxicated from the previous night, and the other had no voice from the night before. At the far side of the beach, there is a hostel called Far Out with a pool, basketball court, a bar and alot of sunbeds. We hung there for the day, had some day-quiris, played some basketball* and then had dinner and buckets** at a Mexican eatery up the road. It was muy bueno.
* I am good at basketball. Some might call me the next Lebron James, or Lisa Leslie.
**A bucket is an alcoholic beveraged mixed to the brim in a child's beach sand pale. The drink consists of gin, Red Bull and Coca-Cola. The serving size is one bucket per person.
Things we learned about New Zealand/Australian culture over dinner:
1. Heaps (part of speach unknown) - favorite vocab word of theirs. (Ex. This bucket is heaps good., I am heaps keen to nom this enchilada.) Comparable to wicked. Pronounced heaps.
2. The kiwi bird is, in fact, not the size of a kiwi fruit. It is at least five times larger.
3. In Australia, our friend Mel's actual occupation was ''prodder'' for the Sydney Harbor Bridge. A prodder is always paired up with a ''catcher.'' The catcher is the Robin to the prodder's Batman. They are paid to propel along the bridge removing koala bears that hang on to it. Mel prods them and his partner catches them before they plummet to a watery death. This is astonishing and if you don't think so, you are sad and boring.
On our way down to Far Out, we walked on the street in a line that stretched five people across. The whole walk down, lasting about five to ten minutes, there is a young boy walking literally at my heels. If you know me at all, you know that I have a huge issue with being chased, and being followed is just like being chased but in slow motion. It turns out that the boy is the son of a customer at the watersports hut, and the guys had been charged with entertaining him for the day. I was unaware of this however, so I started getting really freaked out. I ask myself all the logical questions: Does this child want to hurt me? Where am I most vulnerable? What do I have that could double as a weapon? I start sweating profusely (well, more profusely) and moving over every once in a while, giving him plenty of room to overtake us, but no dice. When we finally arrive at Far Out and I deduce that he's actually with us, I am angry and embarassed.
A little later on, Sophie and I go to the bar to get the Far Out special. The Far Out special is some daquiri that has blue in it. When we get back to our sunbeds, Tom and Mack are smoking a cig. This does not phase me, until I spot the eleven year old with a half smoked cigarrette in his hand.
Me: Guys! You can't give cigarettes to an twelve year old! (At this point I actually have no idea how old he is)
Them: He's the one that gave us them!
I'm sorry, but if you're young enough to be wearing Paul Frank swim shorts, you should not be holding a Marlboro Gold. This kid and I are not going to be friends. I plan on never seeing him again...which is probable.
* I am good at basketball. Some might call me the next Lebron James, or Lisa Leslie.
**A bucket is an alcoholic beveraged mixed to the brim in a child's beach sand pale. The drink consists of gin, Red Bull and Coca-Cola. The serving size is one bucket per person.
Things we learned about New Zealand/Australian culture over dinner:
1. Heaps (part of speach unknown) - favorite vocab word of theirs. (Ex. This bucket is heaps good., I am heaps keen to nom this enchilada.) Comparable to wicked. Pronounced heaps.
2. The kiwi bird is, in fact, not the size of a kiwi fruit. It is at least five times larger.
3. In Australia, our friend Mel's actual occupation was ''prodder'' for the Sydney Harbor Bridge. A prodder is always paired up with a ''catcher.'' The catcher is the Robin to the prodder's Batman. They are paid to propel along the bridge removing koala bears that hang on to it. Mel prods them and his partner catches them before they plummet to a watery death. This is astonishing and if you don't think so, you are sad and boring.
On our way down to Far Out, we walked on the street in a line that stretched five people across. The whole walk down, lasting about five to ten minutes, there is a young boy walking literally at my heels. If you know me at all, you know that I have a huge issue with being chased, and being followed is just like being chased but in slow motion. It turns out that the boy is the son of a customer at the watersports hut, and the guys had been charged with entertaining him for the day. I was unaware of this however, so I started getting really freaked out. I ask myself all the logical questions: Does this child want to hurt me? Where am I most vulnerable? What do I have that could double as a weapon? I start sweating profusely (well, more profusely) and moving over every once in a while, giving him plenty of room to overtake us, but no dice. When we finally arrive at Far Out and I deduce that he's actually with us, I am angry and embarassed.
A little later on, Sophie and I go to the bar to get the Far Out special. The Far Out special is some daquiri that has blue in it. When we get back to our sunbeds, Tom and Mack are smoking a cig. This does not phase me, until I spot the eleven year old with a half smoked cigarrette in his hand.
Me: Guys! You can't give cigarettes to an twelve year old! (At this point I actually have no idea how old he is)
Them: He's the one that gave us them!
I'm sorry, but if you're young enough to be wearing Paul Frank swim shorts, you should not be holding a Marlboro Gold. This kid and I are not going to be friends. I plan on never seeing him again...which is probable.
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