Capri!

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.