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.