Ciao!
We are just back from a very short burst of Italian culture that took us to Rome, Sorrento, and vicinity to meet Carli-Ann’s Grandma Betty and great Auntie Darlene on their tour of the Boot. It was a mostly golden week of scampering madly between the major sites that can’t be missed, such as the Vatican, the Catacombs, the Coliseum, the Mount Vesuvius’ lava covered Roman city of Pompeii, the Greek temples of Paestum… but mostly mad scampering between the crazy Italian drivers and their scooters. And this was sandwiched in between two ridiculously cheap flights that were paid for in general well-being as we spent our first and last nights sleeping in cramped seated positions in the London Stansted airport lobby.
The days in Sorrento were passed sampling as much Italian cuisine as we could possibly stuff into our selves in such a limited time, hiking to the next village between the lemon and olive terraces, escorted from asparagus plant to asparagus plant by little darting lizards, gazing at the gorgeous view over the Bay of Napoli at Mount Vesuvius (Wikipedia says it could erupt again at any time!?!) and the Isle of Capri. All this to the tune of the church bells clanging every 15 minutes day and night, and to Grandma’s 15 travel companions hooting away on their hotel balcony that looked down over the beach and the campground where our tent trembled. I don’t know what they are doing now that we have left, as Mike was their official wine bottle opener, and he uncorked at least ten our first happy hour on their balcony! Actually, a good chunk of our time in Sorrento was spent following a bouncing orange around town from its birth on a tree to its tragic and untimely death before us. Mike has created a memoir to Orange, the results of which can be viewed here. Our new photos from Italy can be viewed here (the first 7 on the page are the latest ones).
Italy is the only European country where we have never gotten away from being just tourists, which is sad, but I hope we will have other opportunities to get to know the country from a different perspective in the future. One of our fondest memories is of the four little Italian kids on the train who kept poking Mike in the belly, asking how to say different words in English, and cracking us up by slapping each other up the back of the head in waves from biggest kid to littlest kid and back up the hierarchy, just like every Italian stereotype cartoon we have ever seen. It was a lovely week with some great grandma-time. Very little relaxation however, so we are happy to have returned to this Scottish isle with seats on the toilets, and streets where the pedestrian right-to-life is enshrined in the British Highway Code. But we are back again to British prices…one of our hospitality club guests found the prices here so high that he was forced to determine his grocery store purchases by calculating the kilojoules of energy in each item and make the most economic pence per kJ choice.
Mike’s Grandma Betty just informed us in a letter that her grandma was from the tiny village of Kirkintiloch, just outside of Glasgow, so that is a cool surprise that we have some Glaswegian roots ourselves. Mike keeps proudly reporting to everyone here that his family’s from Kilt-in-a-Loch. His first day as the Head Porter at the horse track was this week, so he’ll probably have some stories after the first race of the season this weekend!
We’ll blog again when something else interesting happens!
