so you want to be american

Brie and I are in Rome now, ready to begin the more internal part of the trip. This means more blogging, as I've been reunited with my favorite friendly neighborhood internet joint and I don't feel like I should be seeing the sights all day. I do have an arbitration that I need to start working on, and I will be taking gelato breaks, but I'll still catch you up on all our events, so don't you worry your pretty little heads.

Where was I... oh, yes, I was two weeks ago. Our second day in the South, we decided to take a bus ride down the coast to Amalfi. We scattered through the bus so we could each have a window seat without graffiti (because of the good book we were sure to sit on the ocean side). It was a beautiful, windy hour-and-a-half drive. That's windy as in hairpin turns, not breezy, for those of you reading aloud. Even through my increasingly incapacitating nausea, I could tell it was lovely. Here is proof. When we got off in Amalfi Brie didn't feel so hot either so I felt at least justified in my illness. (Mom, you would have LOVED it.)

We got off in Amalfi, and decided to take a walk into the next town of Atrani. The good book described this as a "stroll", something that Yvette would bring up as evidence against the accuracy of the GB for the rest of her time in Italy. Here are some pics from the walk to Atrani, which was basically 100% stairs in a narrow alleyway between buildings. Tiring but still really quaint. This is the step where Brie fell and nearly broke her elbow. She doesn't read my blog now that she's here so she won't know that I'm posting this.

When we got to Atrani, we ate at a little pizzeria on the water. Waves kept coming up and crashing over the patio edge near the lamppost, which was beautiful, but I couldn't catch it. Brie did discover one of her top five skills ("predicting waves"... full list to be disclosed in a later post), but unfortunately "listening to Brie" is in my bottom five, which is why I don't have a lovely water crashing over a lamppost picture. I had a local pasta, called... sciocolialiagica, or something. It was seafood pasta, it was great. Yvette actually took a picture of it, which I was going to include, but this post is kind of picture-heavy. Probably because this was two weeks ago, so my ridiculously abysmal memory is starting to chip away at the day.

Then we "strolled" back to Amalfi and kind of meandered around the city. Or, Yvette kind of meandered around and Brie and I sat in front of a church. Unfortunately, I think that about set the tone for my energy level for the rest of our traveling. I did get one of several "Brie being introspective" pictures, and this next one, which, in case you can't tell, is a reflection of a "limoncello" sign in a puddle.

After that we tried to figure out the bus system to get back to Sorrento. (Struggling to figure out how to get around has been somewhat of a recurring theme.) We were standing in the parking lot talking and we started walking back towards the town when Brie said, "I think we're about to get silly strung." We turned around (Yvette was already turned around glaring, she has an uncanny sense of danger, as well as an ability to ward it off with just a look) and a small gang of teenagers was right behind us holding up cans of what turned out to be shaving cream. I don't know what Brie's face looked like, but I was doing my best I COULD DESTROY YOU expression, and they suddenly peeled back, laughing. This is an out of focus picture of their backs, just to capture the moment.

While we were waiting in the parking lot, an older Italian man came up to us and started talking. Yvette was flashing us "danger will robinson" eyes mixed with "I'm bored" eyes, and eventually wandered off, leaving Brie and I to listen to a story that started out ok, about a girl from Los Angeles that he met when he was a front desk clerk at a hotel decades ago, but whom was stolen by his friend Giovanni the bartender who always gave the pretty girls free champagne, and then morphed into something that neither one of us could follow. After the story, he invited us for coffee, which we decided to do, because we're crazy like that.

At the coffeeshop, Angelo, as he was called by about twenty people who said "ciao" to him on the way, bought us cappucini and had himself an extra strong coffee. This is what coffee looks like in Italy. Try to use his fingers as a size reference. The espresso must have perked him up, because he started singing to us. Our favorite was called "So You Want to Be American" about an Italian boy during the war trying to get girls by dressing up as an American soldier, but I'm not sure that we got that one on video. I actually don't have sound here so I don't know which one this was. Maybe someone can watch it and tell me.



After that we headed back to the square, and Angelo said he was going to go wait on the bus. He walked towards the buses, and we found Yvette, who was watching a couple of gigantic, gorgeous half-naked Brazilian women dance in a crowd. (Still Carnevale.) After a little while, we went to get on the bus ourselves, and found all of them empty. We were afraid to ask anyone if they had seen Angelo, because we thought they would say, "Oh, a man named Angelo? With a green coat? But... Angelo died in a bus accident here 45 years ago."