back to cinque terre

Monday:
Michael and I went back to hiking the five earths, but this time we decided to try a different trail. Allow me to explain. It turns out there is more than one trail linking the five towns together, there's like 20 of them. We took the "lover's walk" from Riomaggore to Manarola, at this point we said fuck it we're going to get lost in these trails. So from Manarola we took this trail that goes over like two mountains...real intense hiking with thorny plants, etc. After 2 and half hours we finally found some form of life, a small mountain town called Castella. We were not sure where to get back on the trail so we asked a local who kindly pointed us in the right direction. This next trail was nicely shaded and it followed a mountain stream, but we had been walking for a while and were starting to wonder if this had been a good decision. Finally, the trees and shade tapered off and we found ourselves on a rocky path overlooking the mediterranean and pointing us in our final destination, Vernazza. We spent the rest of the day relaxing in the water which felt great after six hours of hiking. If you want to know more about Cinque Terre check out this website, http://www.cinqueterre.it/

Tuesday:
We returned to the five earths yet once again, but this time not for hiking. In Monterosso, Umberto (i talked about him in an earlier, rushed blog post) took Michael and I fishing for mussels. We left in the morning in his rowboat to this secluded spot of rocks. We donned snorkel gear and with knives in hand picked at the rocks to get the covetted mussels. It turns out that the mussel fishing we were doing is illegal, but Umberto has never been caught and he's been doing it for like 50 years. So after a morning of mussel pickin' we rowed back to Monterosso and steamed them up and just went to town on an awesome lunch.

Tomorrow is chill out day, we have decided we are just going to sleep in and then just spend the day on the beach.

Sidenote:
Pictures have been updated. http://picasaweb.google.com/pat.gazzolo

terracina - http://picasaweb.google.com/pat.gazzolo

I was wrong about the World Cup celebrations in Italy. When we arrived in Rome monday evening, the partying was in full effect. There were kids every where downtown, with beer in hand. It was a spectacle.
We stayed the night in downtown Rome before heading south to Terracina. My mom's friend, Giovanna, has an apartment downtown and she is an astrologist...so Michael and I learned a lot about our zodiac signs and psychic numbers, etc.
Tuesday morning we took the train south to Terracina. My mother grew up in this place and it was her first time back in 18 years. She had a lot of catching up to do with old friends. For Michael and I the old friends equated to copious amounts of wine and free meals. We also had to go through the same routine like 30 times, my mom would pull out the photo album and show the pictures of the rest of the family. That always resulted in the same conversation coming up. By the end, her friends thought Michael understood Italian. But he didn't, he just had heard the conversation like 30 times.
One of my favorite afternoons was with Nevio, just imagine this huge typical Italian guy with a grey beard and rosy cheeks (very Pavarotti like). We had been swimming on his beach and had up for lunch. My mom and his wife were not around and he immediately starts telling me, "how its too bad there was only one topless woman on the beach. Yesterday there were two and they were awesome." He also asked me if I saw the two lesbians making out on the rocks in the water. He was pantomiming the whole scene to michael and I. All of this was in italian, so I'm translating it to Michael as he is telling us. We were interrupted by the return of his wife and the start of lunch.
Another old friend of the family, Massimo, put us up for the duration of our stay. Massimo owns a restuarant/wine bar (emphasis on the wine). Every night we would hang out at the bar and he would bring by some cheese or wine or a dessert. He also let us borrow his car to drive around. Its a 97 Volvo 460, available exclusively in Europe. I love old Volvos.

Terracina used to be my summer playground up until I was 5 years old. In 1988 my grandparents sold their houses and ended up moving to the U.S. I hadn't been back since. A lot of the vague memories I had of the old home and the town were refreshed.

Sidenotes:
Pictures are up. http://picasaweb.google.com/pat.gazzolo

I'm using an italian keyboard, some keys are in different places, so I don't know if my apostrophes look fucked up or not.

The tobacco store is the best place to get postcards in Europe.

World Cup!!

Well holy shit, i did not sleep last night. For those no longer following the world cup, Italy won. Chiavari (the town i am in) went nuts, as did the rest of Italy. There was an amazing fireworks display, for such a small town I was surprised they were so well prepared. Every kid with a scooter or car was driving to the boardwalk with blaring music, italian flags flying, and car horns blaring..all night long. Michael and I went and joined in the festivities. Italians really know how to celebrate. There was cheering and yelling and fireworks and parading all night. Despite their skills in celebration, they really don't how to party. A world cup victory comes only once in a while, ice cream is no way of saying, "fuck yeah we won a world cup". The local restuarants ran out of beer in like the first 30 minutes because they didn't have any in stock. Regardless it was a great time, I took some pictures.

Earlier in the day I also went to Cinque Terre, which means the five earths. Its five picturesque towns nestled in the mountains overlooking the meditarranean. A five megapixel camera does no justice to the majesty that is cinque terre. The best part is that they are all connected by a hiking trail.
We have family at one of the towns, Monterosso. Umberto and Margherita fed us mussels that Umberto had just harvested that morning along with other standard italian fare. Cinque terre is only a 10minute train ride so there will be many more posts related to this area.

Sorry if this seems rather scattered but we are leaving for Rome in like 2 hours.
Side notes: I found a cafe that will let me get my pictures off the camera. So those will be coming later next week when we get back from Rome and Terracina.

Also, the women tan topless here. Its breathtaking.

2 inches...

The flight to Italy...sucked. The travel agent with whom we bought tickets dropped the ball, it was a real mess. We had to fly with Delta which isn't so bad; except for the fact we were scheduled to fly with Lufthansa from Charlotte to Munich. Now to most this isn't a big deal, but my brother was pissed because allegedly Lufthansa serves great sandwiches on the flights and they have nicer creature comforts.
Now back to the title of this post, 2 inches. What separates a shorts wearing man from a bitch? Two inches, because thats the amount of material it takes to turn shorts into capris. Capris are rampant down here with the male metrosexual crowd.

Chapel Hill

It's a pretty long drive from Charleston, SC to the eastern shore. So, I decided to stop by Chapel Hill, NC to hang out with Chris (and his dog, Max, the coolest dog....ever). Chapel Hill is probably my third favorite college town. (the first is blacksburg, duh and second is athens, ga) The people in Chapel Hill are a little pretentious. I take this as an open invitation to get drunk and tell inappropriate stories.

Jason, a friend of chris's, had a cookout in the afternoon. We roll up there with a cooler packed full of Miller Lite and abita beer (for the beer snobs). Now from the standpoint of a 23 year old, the point of a cookout is to drink heavily, eat large quantities of meat, and maybe throw pool furniture into the pool. Well someone should have warned me, because the majority of people at this cookout were 30 years old, married, and had kids. Chris and I were drunk and illiciting dirty stares due to the language content of our conversation. We awkwardly left after a while.

We eventually went downtown to Franklin St. Not many people drink in Chapel Hill....on a sunday. The fun part of the night was that the two bars we went to served 34oz. beers. That's half a pitcher. I drank over two pitchers worth of miller lite. We ended up at this bar called He's not here. It was karoke night and some douchebag decides he wants to sing Oasis. I hate Oasis. I wanted everyone in the bar to know how much I hate Oasis. So I immediatley stand up and proceed to yell at them about how much Oasis sucks and then I started making up my own lyrics to the song. Everyone in the bar is looking at me like, "who the hell is this moron?". I thought for sure that we would be asked to leave at this point. I'm not sure where this is going, nothing interesting happened the rest of the night. Chris tried to sign me up to sing Foreigner - Double Vision, but after I made fun of the Oasis singers I decided to not go up because they would probably try and embarass me to make themselves feel better. I chickened out, but it was last call so there was no real point anyway...