Fregene: October 16, 2006

Part two of the exciting walk on the wild side - a stroll through my mind for two weeks that I spent on a boat in the Mediterranean. Actually, it's part three, but part two was so devastatingly boring that I've done you a favor by skipping it. To give you an idea, it was about waiting at the airport to be picked up. See? We're all better off.

It’s the name of the city I’m in. It’s, maybe, a half hour out of Rome? Not even that.

It’s a little town, by the beach. There’s several bed & breakfasts around, and the advertising on the street for local restaurants suggests that tourism is reasonably significant.

I probably don't need to say this, but the food was good. It's Italy, right? If I could only pick one country's cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it'd be a toss-up between Italy and Japan.

Now, though, it’s pretty quiet. The weather’s pretty decent, though - I was able to get away with just wearing a t-shirt during the day.

I’m in Europe. People are speaking Italian on the street. It still hasn’t sunk in yet, though. Unfortunately, my Italian is nonexistent - I can understand it pretty well, but when I try to form sentences in my head they’re some bastard mixture of Spanish, Portuguese, and even Japanese. I don’t even bother trying to speak it.

The next time I was in Italy, I found Italian to be really easy. Getting languages mixed up is still a problem, though: last year I had an Argentine visitor. I spoke with her in Spanish just fine - up until, as part of the conversation, I pointed to a map and said "Shibuya." The next sentence came out in Japanese. I paused, and tried to start again. Still Japanese. I apologized, shut the hell up, and had to take a few deep breaths before I could get back to Spanish. 

Hopefully I get more comfortable with it over the next week, so I can get around in Venice and maybe Torino after the cruise. Greek is a lost cause. French, well, I should be able to get by with some combination of English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and I won’t be there for long anyway.

Ended up not going to Torino. I had met a super hot girl who was from there. I barely knew her, but hey, a boy can dream right?

I’m writing this from the front patio of this 2-bedroom house that we’re staying in for 2 nights. It’s hideously nice. The garden is small, but it’s full of all kinds of plants and fruit trees. Grapevines are growing above my head. I’ll take pictures in the morning, I suppose.

I'm going to post this for now, and update it with pictures later. I'm doing some major reorganization of my photos now that I've got better hardware, so finding appropriate pictures will be easier. But I want to get a post up. But I've been spending time tagging rather than selecting pictures. Meh.