vacanze dolcissime (sweet sweet vacations)

gad, this post has the potential to be huge. i will start with an itinerary:

day 1 (weds march 23rd or something): train to naples, spend the night there
2 - hang around naples
3 - went to herculaneum and pompeii, i think
4 - more naples
5 - more naples
6 - day trip to capri/night train to sicily
7 - cefalu'/beach
8 - palermo, cefalu'
9 - agrigento and the vally of the temples
10 - siracusa
11 - taormina
12 - taormina
13 - day trip home(monday)
14 - back to school(yesterday)

so now, i kept no notes of exactly what i did. i'm trying to get kristin to reveal her diary to me, but who knows if that will happen. anyhow, here's an attempted rundown to get you up to date:

1: took an afternoon train, something like 7 hours long, got into naples at 11pm or so, some cabbie in the station tried to scam us into paying 40 euro for a ride to the hostel, so we went and found another cabbie who charged us 15, like he had said, even though the meter only said about 8. at the hostel that night we met some Canadians, Norwegians, Japanese, and brits playing cards, they all got in trouble for being too noisy. We hung out on the terrace for a while and went to bed.

2: the hostel owner, Giovanni, was nice and for the same price as the hostel took us to a 4-person apartment that he rents out, so we stayed there for the rest of the break. We had our own bathroom, though it was kind of messy and the shower leaked, and we had a kitchen, and jamal and I had single beds, and the girls shared a larger bed on this weird loft thing that was built into the apartment. As for what we actually did in naples, I have no clue, at least not on a day by day basis. We went to lots of churches, walked around the city, checked out the university (the philosophy building had this huge sweet courtyard), and went into some castles and stuff. Jamal and I made lots of stupid (that is, awesome) jokes about ninjas and kings flipping out and killing people and who knows what else. Half of the time we don’t even know what we’re saying. All in all, pretty baller.

3: got up in the morning and went to the train station, where I tried to argue with the lady selling me a special tourist card that we should count as EU citizens since we have a residence permit and all, but she wasn’t buying it. Apparently students from EU countries get half off at just about all sweet places they want to visit, so we were a little miffed that we couldn’t get lo sconto even though we’re students (two of us anyway) at an Italian university. Nonetheless, we got a different sort of discount then went to Pompeii and Herculaneum. Now, I will not describe these cities to you, except to say that they are perfect for running around, finding old rooms and crevasses, and pretending to shoot each other, which is what jamal and I did. To the chagrin of the girls, who so frequently fell victim to our snipering skills. So that was Herculaneum. Then the girls wanted to go to Pompeii, but jamal and I had already been there, so we decided to go climb Vesuvius. The girls left on the train, we tried to find a way up the mountain, but there was no bus and the taxi was costly, so we decided to go to Pompeii. Of course, we didn’t tell the girls. So we got to Pompeii (which is large, mind you), and just about immediately ran into the girls, though they didn’t notice. So we started following them around, planning to scare them or something, but then in our paranoid fear that they might see us, we lost them. So we ran around the ruins for an hour or two, sending them text messages to make them think we were at the mountain, all the while failing to find them. Then we were in this one alley that dead-ended, jamal peaked out, and yelled “oh, crap.” Then he darted into a cell of some sort, but I was placed a little differently and had to charge up the alley. But the girls recognized my backside (I blame the bright orange shirt) and so jamal and I subsequently revealed our ninja selves. The girls were creeped out. We went home and probably played cards and made dinner.

4: I’m not sure what we did this day. Probably some of the stuff that I have mentioned for day 2 or will mention on day 5.

5: we wanted to go to this pretty, versaille-like place called caserta. This was easter Sunday, by the way. So waiting for the train some old, half-toothless man came up to us and tried to give us some little cards with saints on them. This is a pretty typical trick – if you grab the card, then they try to make you pay them. Being silly, the girls took the cards, and when they tried to give them back, the guy got a little angry. He wouldn’t talk though, he just moaned. Anyway he took the cards back, then he started chewing on his index finger in a fashion that was very creepy because of his lack of teeth, and then he punched me in the arm. I’m not sure why. It didn’t hurt. Then we got to the place and the gardens were closed so we walked around the palace, which was decent, nothing special by italy standards though.

6: Capri is pretty. We took a large, shaky boat to the island, and for some reason the boat was entirely filled with middle and high school students. There was lots of drama, running around flirting, etc, oddly mixed with lots of vomiting. The four of us managed to make it through safely, by which I mean we did not vomit nor were we touched by the vomit of others. Once we got onto the island we walked around, marveled at the majesty, sat on rocks, argued about spelunking, and stuff like that. then we had to go back to catch our train.

6.5: night train. The daggone ticket seller man had given us tickets for the wrong day, even though we had specified multiple times that we needed them for the night of the 28^th. Of course we didn’t know that until we tried to board the train and they told us no. but we found a nice train worker guy who let us on, though we still had to pay for the tickets again in part, for the reservation. Then we slept in train-bunk beds. And yes, this is the train to sicily, which means at some point the whole train gets placed on a boat and is shipped across some body of water. But you are in the dark the whole time, so you don’t know what’s going on, except you know that you don’t know.

7: sicily. We arrived at something like 5:30 am, so we went to the little train station café. Jamal and I tried to find the train station bathroom, walked laps for about an hour, and then gave up. The girls then found it pretty quickly – but I’d like to point out that signs and people all told us to go left at the tracks, and the WC was on the right. What a great start to a day. Then we went to get our rental car (we had to wait until 8 for the place to open), and when we got there he told us that the car we were supposed to get had been in an accident, so another was coming. This was a good thing because we didn’t know if we’d have space for all our bags (2 large backpacks, 2 small ones), and we ended up getting an upgrade. The car was pretty much like a civic, but some euro brand. So then we left that town (messina) and drove to cefalu. We had been a little worried about driving but it was only moderately death-scary in the cities and very calm on the highways. So we drove to cefalu, had some trouble finding our apartment, then found it but the staff wasn’t there, so we went to the beach. We picknicked and played Frisbee there, then went back to the apartment, which was extremely sweet. Way nicer than the naples one – kitchen, 2 bedrooms, balcony, bathroom, other balcony, all very clean, well-equipped, etc. we went out to eat for umrao’s birthday, then hung out on the beach at night and went back home.

8: Palermo. We drove to Palermo the next morning, but instead of taking the highway I took some smaller road that went through lots of town. I feared we were lost a few times but we made it – the only incident was that time I hit some other car’s outside mirror with my own. That and the family I ran over, but whatever. So then we went to Palermo, walked around a bit, came back to cefalu, and then the sweetness ensued. The girls went to walk around the town, which is a lame sort of thing to do. Jamal and I decided to climb up into the mountains and besiege a castle. We climbed up this pretty long path, bombed the north wall to enter (hahahaha, you are a dork if you get that), and walked around the walled perimeter pretending to shoot arrows at invaders. Nevermind that 20 minutes beforehand we were pretending to be the invaders. So up in the castle, it smelled like horse, and we kept finding little patches of sand/dirt that had quite obvsiouly been peed on. It all became clear when we stumbled upon a sweet flock of sheep and their old deranged toothless hermit shepherd who tried to give jamal a card, bit his finger, and punched me. No wait, I’m mixing up stories. There was no hermit shepherd. But jamal and I did get sissy-scared and we crept around quietly to this cabin thing, which was actually part of the castle, and there was no evil hermit inside. To finish off the evening, I took some pictures of the sheep, and then they started peeing. I guess the flash scared them. It was weird. Jamal and I descended from the castle (oh yeah – it was way high up and the view of the city was nice) and then my host mom called me. Apparently she was worried that I had died, because she worries and because I hadn’t called. so I apologized for that and told her when we’d be back.

9: agrigento. This was a long day. We left cefalu, drove to enna, the highest city in sicily, and scoped out the castle there. Then we doubled back to go to the valley of the temples, a place filled with old greek ruins, which were cool to see, especially after so many churches. Jamal and I, by the way, were trying to go into a church only if we went into a castle as well. We failed, but only because we had already been to so many churches when we started the game. Anyway, after seeing the greek ruins from 6 bc, we were planning to drive along the coast to siracusa, but I thought it’d take to long, so we doubled back again, passed enna, and drove to our hostel. Just to give you a time schedule, we probably spent about 6 hours in the car that day and 4 seeing stuff. We pretty much did half a lap around sicily, or at least half of the circle of the big highway that connects the 4 largest cities.

10: siracusa. The city was really nice. We just walked around it a lot. I don’t remember anything. Oh, except we went to a castle. And the duomo (main church), which was actually a greek-temple converted into a catholic church. Very cool.

11: taormina: we drove to taormina the next morning. On the way, we stopped at mount etna, hoping to figure out if we could climb it the next day. We found our way to some tourist info center, but it was only open on Wednesdays. So, out there in the middle of nowhere we taught Kristin how to drive stick. She didn’t even stall out her first time getting into gear – that’s how awesome of teachers jamal and I are. So then we went back down the mountains (oh yes, I was the one driving up, and I had to do the whole emergency break so as not to roll back and crush the guy behind you on the hill gig) and I made jamal drive instead. He got us to toarmina, this tiny city on the coast with lots of switchbacks on the roads, etc. we checked into our hostel, which was nice, then went to eat and went to see an old amphitheater. There was a castle jamal and I wanted to go to, but it was being renovated and prepared for visitors. Jamal and I decided that in that weakened state the castle was not worth attacking, so we let it be.

12: taormina again. It was pretty ugly outside, so I think I stayed inside almost the whole day, at least until dinner time or something. I mostly rested up for the 12 hour train ride the following day and started translating some poetry by Leopardi, which I really enjoyed and I have a new favorite poem called night song of a wandering shepherd in asia, but let’s not discuss that now. So that’s the end of that day. Also, that was the day the pope died. I think.

13: last day of the trip. We left taormina at 830, thinking that we could make our 1045 train since it was supposedly a half hour drive. That is plenty of leeway, right? WRONG – jamal and I arrived at the train station about 4 minutes before the train left. Let me tell you why. First off, getting back to messina was longer than we had been told. Then, once we were there, we had no clue how to get back to the car rental place. Or rather we thought we did, but we really didn’t. so we drove around the city for a while, got some directions, (all of this very frantically), then jamal and I dropped the girls off at the train station with all 1000000000 pounds/kilograms of luggage and immediately got stuck in a traffic jam on the way to the rental place. By now we knew where we were. So finally we get to the place, and the one guy who (usually) works there was not there. I called him and told him to hurry up (in Italian) and in the meantime jamal drove in circles trying to get to the parking lot. He tried to take a left into it, but the cops whistled at him, so then he had to go make a u-turn and try again. While he was doing that some guy parked in our spot, so I had to try to convince him to leave and stuff, which he did, how nice. Then we made the car rental man drive us to the station, frantically thanked him, frantically bought some croissants, and boarded the train.

14 hours later we got home, and I went to bed, woke up, went to school, came home, went to bed, woke up, went to school, and wrote this.

It seems that I remembered more than I thought. Cool. I hope you had the patience to read this, especially all you punks who annoyed me into posting. 2600+ words. That’s for sure longer than the total number of words in the total number of my papers this semester. And I don’t mean so far – I mean in total. Man is that cool. The number of castles seiged is greater than the number of papers written. How many of you can say that? jamal, you don’t count.

So I think that’s just about all.

Oh, except Justin horn is swinging by this weekend. So those of you who know him…well now you know he is coming here. I guess I will have to go show yet another person that Venice place.