Tuesday, August 10

Hey all, sorry we haven’t been keeping up on the blog. The Internet here has been flakier than Sticky. Finding a good connection has been more challenging for us than it is for Gator to tie his shoes. The service is worse than his comedic timing. The wireless is splotchier than his senior year prom pictures. (We’ll get all the jokes out of the way early this post. On an unrelated note, miss ya Justin! Got you a sick tie in Florence) That being said, the postings won’t cover every day now, but we’ll try to fill you in for the most part and if things are slow, maybe we’ll fill ya’ll in on whatever we missed. Anyways, here it goes:

Florence: The Cinque Terre

We spent the day in the Cinque Terre, a set of five cliff-side villages on the coast with a hiking trail between them. The weather was premium, if not a bit hot, but the scene was unreal. We started at the Southern-most town, Riomaggiore, and worked our way north to Monterosso. The second town was basically a set of colorful streets and narrow alleyways. One alley in particular had a bunch of balconies looking over it. As we and other hikers walked through, we were bombarded with water balloons and kids dumping buckets of water out onto us. It was a nice cool-down for me as well as Max. I know this because until that point I had been practically wading through Max’s trail of BO (which was, in all honesty, most likely compounding with mine). Anyways…
When we finally made it to the last town, the sun was setting but we went for a quick dip before finding a place for dinner along the boardwalk. What I experienced next was one of the greatest seafood meals of my life.
I ordered mussels in a green garlic soup as an appetizer and fried calamari for my entrée. When the waiter brought out my appetizer, I was surprised to see linguine in my dish but you never know when Italians might throw pasta in something just for kicks and the linguine looked delicious so I just went with it.


Fig 1: My linguine. Looks pretty delicious, huh?

Well, let me tell you, the linguine was delicious. About three minutes in I was halfway done with my meal, as Shelman and I had worked up quite the appetite (the hike was just about 5 miles long.) But, here’s the best part—they gave me the wrong dish! Munching harder than ever, I received a tap on the shoulder from our waiter, followed by an explanation about how he mixed my dish up with someone else’s, an apology, and a huge, fresh bowl of mussels. Never has anybody apologized to me for doing something so nice. “Apology pending” I told him, and shot him a million-dollar smile (thanks, Jack). Anyways, I absolutely MURKED those mussels, then it was on to the calamari, which I also DESTROYED. Sidenote: The calamari came with no marinara sauce and when Max asked the waiter for some, he seemed confused (didn’t speak much English) and brought us salt (sounds like “sauce” I guess) and bread (who knows what he thought we were asking for). Eventually, a different waitress came over, again couldn’t understand what “marinara sauce” was, but after a while brought back cold meat sauce. Close enough, for Max, and not worth any more trouble. But is calamari and marinara an American thing? Lift-up on the sidenote: Isn’t marinara Italian? Why didn’t the waiter understand what “marinara” was? PS on the lift-up: Did you know that root beer is strictly an American thing. Not only is it not served in Europe, people here don’t even know what it is. When Max asked a waiter (separate restaurant in Rome) for some RB, the dude had no idea what he was talking about. How do you explain to someone what root beer is? It’s tough, believe you me.

Pictures: Max and me on the boardwalk, A view of one of the towns from the hiking trail (I believe this is Riomaggiore), Me climbing the rocks, Shelman taking in the view.