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| Sorrento, Italy |
(As we were leaving Corfu for Italy, I snapped a couple photos of the wall of cigarrettes at the duty free shop. The photos are under the Corfu folder and are worth looking at. The warnings on the cigs are...well, blunt, even more so than I remember from my last trip to Europe.)
My first coffee tasting was pretty uneventful. It was mediocre cappocino at our hotel. For those who may not know, this is the first time I have ever tasted coffee. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. I decided spur of the moment it was time. Looking back, I relish the spontaneity of it. There were plenty of significant moments to enter the land of coffee - at the Y2K crossover, on my 30th birthday. Nope, just a random day when I was tired of keeping up the charade. My opinion? It tastes just like coffee smells, and just like coffee ice cream and candy tastes. No sparks yet, but I have yet to have *good* coffee.
Ah, Italia. We arrived by 8 hour ferry in Brindisi, where we hopped another 6 hours of trains to Naples. Naples is nutty. The traffic in Naples makes New York look like a leisurely Sunday drive. Our cab driver came inches from downing a moped that skirted between us and another car. All three vehicles were moving different directions at the time. Naples is very large, dirty, congested, and frenetic. We stayed one night, then pressed on the next morning to Sorrento, where Kelly and I have been for the past 5 days.
Sorrento is more like it. It feels like the kind of cute town where celebrities would vacation. There are tons of outdoor cafes, restaurants, and gelaterias, as well as shops selling clothing, sandals, and unique woodwork. Hotels line the cliffs by the water. There's really only one "beach", and in truth it's more of a boardwalk. There is some sand, but it's all controlled by the beach gestapo, demanding what adds up to around 15 Euro to enter and sit in a lounger with some shade. I don't got that kind of scratch, so Kelly and I laid on the pavement near the sand, which turned out to be more comfortable than I would have expected. I had been swimming a couple times in Greece, but hurt my shoulder when I swam upstream for too long against a strong beach current. Thankfully, it healed up after a week of resting it, and I have swum twice in Sorrento. You can see in the top-view beach photo there's a little inlet between the protective rock wall that makes a calm area separate from the ocean. It was calm as a swimming pool, and sometimes almost as crowded. But it was good to get exercise, I had been getting a bit restless.
Trying our best to skimp on unnecessary purchases like sandy real estate have enabled us to eat like royalty during dinner. Highlights included a caraffe of wine with peaches (how no other restaurant has ever served me this before I'll never understand, it was heaven), local Sorrento gnocci (pronounced guh-nokey by the Californian woman sitting next to us after being corrected two times by the waiter), and a lasagna I had for lunch that was so good it tasted nothing like what I know of lasagna. The food is extremely good here.
Kelly and I visited Pompei on day two or three. Pompei was fricking hot. I mean, no hotter than anywhere else, but it's been around 90 here (and humid), and Pompei is enormous and has virtually no shade from 1pm to 3pm. That's why we made sure to visit it during that time. Seriously, the place is huge. We probably saw a third of it, maybe a half, but that's being generous. Except for the roofs which were almost all destroyed, much of the buildings are intact. It's literally walking around an ancient city. Pretty neat. It was made not at all neater by the electronic portable audio guides we rented. The added information about the ancient site was offset by the cheap sound effects awkwardly worked into the dialog. During the reading of a letter written by a guy who was there just after the volcano hit, they mixed in a volcano noise during most of the whole thing, drowning out the reader's voice. Does a cheap, non-level-adjusted volcano noise increase my knowledge of Pompei? I don't think so.
We just got back today from Capri, an island 30 minutes by hydrofoil from Sorrento. I liked Capri the first time I visited, when it was called Ithaka. At least, that's what I concluded when our ferry pulled into the exact same-looking port town. Capri is even more of a place I would envision celebrities vacationing. Kelly told me Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick just went there. Even so, I still agreed we would go. We hopped off the ferry and began following a sign that said "Capri Centro". Sounds good, since I wanted to visit the centro and also ride the funicular, which was in my guide book without a description of what it was. But I wanted to ride it, dammit. So we're walking to the centro like the sign said, and it starts off as this very narrow walkway uphill. Around the corner it continues uphill...and then uphill...and then, well, you get it. It took until halfway up before Kelly realized the main town is extremely elevated, and the funicular is the cable car thingee that whisks you up there, instead of the 30 minute uphill walk we endured in 90-whatever degree, humid heat. There's a photo of Kelly making a hand-visor that lets you see how high up we hiked from the water. While atop in the main town, we enjoyed a delicious watermelon drink and visited the shops. (Don't worry, I got my funicular ride on the way down.)
I was a little distressed by the shops on Capri. They were nice shops, don't get me wrong. Ferragamo, Gucci, and a bunch of other famous designer shops. It just occurred to me in a sort of shopping epiphany just how much shopping is associated with travel. Boatloads (and I mean serious boatloads) of people had flooded Capri, and pretty much all they were doing was eating and shopping. Sorrento itself is comprised almost entirely of food, drink, and shops. I've got nothing against shopping, it just hit me as kind of sad that many people go on vacation, only to spend the majority of their vacation hunting for crap to bring back home with them. When a Native American tribe would travel for a buffalo kill or to pillage a neighboring tribe...yeah, that makes sense to me. But we're talking about 75 Euro wallets (on sale) and 400 Euro sweaters on Capri. It just seems like so many places are defined by their shopping, and it's so much of what people do when they go so many places. I'm sometimes just as bad as the masses, it just struck me negatively this afternoon. I want to travel the world, not the world's shops.
One thing it is important to realize about Italians is that they are always yelling. It doesn't really matter if they're trying to emphasize a point or not, they just yell. The first few days in Italy I kept turning around after hearing a shouting match, in an attempt to ensure I get to watch and avoid the fight at the same time. Every time I turned around I was disappointed, because I could tell from their facial expressions the people weren't fighting, but just conversing. Now every time an Italian walks by us and shouts something emphatic to their friend, I fill in my own dialogue to try to amuse Kelly: "I'm slightly hot right now." "You are a good friend". Etc.
Kelly and I decided to leave tomorrow for Rome. We've had enough of this calm (we are going to skip Amalfi and Positano) and are ready for the excitement (read: crowds, crime, pollution) of a big city. Also, I need to get me some huge sunglasses which all the Italians are wearing, and possibly some leather sandals. And we heard that Rome has great SHOPPING, being cheaper than the other Italian cities. I'm looking forward to getting to Rome so I can do some SHOPPING.
