Feeding my internet addiction

Allora, by some miracle Kevin helped me set up my laptop to get internet off his cell phone. So I’m going to copy-paste the posts I wrote the other night. Prepare yourselves, I have a lot to tell you; but don’t worry, I’ll split it up so it doesn’t look like such a daunting read.

First off, we left Rome Friday morning. That means Thursday night we were all semi-frantically packing up our entire apt. I thought I was in good shape since I had packed one of my two bags the previous night full of all my non essentials. But by around 1am Friday morning my moral was gone, and I was sick of trying to figure out what I should pack and in which bag.

The next morning we made it out of the apt pretty smoothly. We all stopped at the café down our street for the last time and got cappuccinos and cornettos. I love that place, I’m definitely eating their for breakfast as much as possible with my mom and aunt when I go back. We then made our way across the river and down quite a few blocks to meet the group and ultimately the bus. I don’t think it was more than 2 miles, but I will absolutely never, ever do that again. My two bags got pretty damn heavy a few blocks down, and there is nothing harder than pulling suitcases across miles of cobblestone. I truly did not think I was going to make it. But I was the second of us 5 to arrive, so evidently I wasn’t the only one struggling. Seriously, it was a rather traumatizing ordeal. My shoulders and quads are still a little sore. After that, I don’t care how much it costs, I’m sending one of those bags back to the States before I travel around Italy afterward.

Once on the bus, no true issues. We came up with the craziest stuff on that 4 hour ride. First, we started talking about how crowded the Sistine Chapel had been and how much it would suck if there was a fire. We then decided that Fire in the Sistine Chapel would be an awesome band name, and I personally think it’d be a pretty interesting way to die—“yeah, she died in the fire at the Sistine Chapel. What a tragedy…” Also, Christina’s parents sent her a stuffed bunny for Easter, which apparently is a tradition for her, except this bunny is the size of a 6 year old! It had its own seat on the bus in front of me the entire way to Rogliano. We also discovered that paprika flavored Pringles (and I assume all other paprika flavored chips) are actually the Italian version of bbq!! When I saw the can I was really hesitant because it has all these pictures of red bell peppers, but it’s really just a mild bbq. I am so excited I finally found a substitute! I also learned that I don’t like tunnels in Italy. I just now noticed that every tunnel has these green signs that tell you how far away each end is from that point in meters, just in case you need to run out of the tunnel so you know which direction to go. I can only assume one would need to run out of a tunnel because it’s collapsing. I don’t like it. Finally, On the ride to Paestum Giuseppe at one point near Napoli got on the intercom and said we had to make a stop because “Matteo needs to go to the bathroom.” We all started laughing, but I thought he was kidding—nope, when we stopped Matteo was the first one off that bus. A pretty entertaining 4 hours.

In Paestum we got to either go to the beach a block away from the hotel or go explore the ruins of a Greek settlement a little ways away. I went with Sara, Leah and Faith to the ruins (thought I don’t remember why I passed up the beach). Ruggero was waiting for us because we were late, and then he basically gave the three of us a private tour. I actually really enjoyed it. Then on the walk back we walked through a buffalo mozzarella festival and tried various goods. The region is famous for buffalo mozzarella, and the next morning before departing for Calabria we visited a mozzarella factory down the road. Apparently fresh, hot buffalo mozzarella doesn’t taste like anything and is really chewy (thought obviously I wouldn’t know first hand).