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neadodsI *was* going to have lots and lots of pictures and then I realized how much lots and lots and LOTS of time it would take to upload them (not to mention renaming all 278 from "10010243" to what it actually is). So you're only getting the ones I consider the most important under the cut. You're going to find that I have strange notions of importance.
So. I have spent a week in Italy. I have eaten more tomatoes, marscapone, ricotta, mozzarella, and lemons than I think in the entire rest of my life combined. I have also avoided matricide, even at the end when my mother was shouting across the entire bus to me and my brother (both of us in our 40s and experienced travelers) "Do you know how to work the automatic kiosk to get your boarding pass?"![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
patsyrant, I'm tellin' ya now, I'd put my Mother toe-to-toe with your Poor Sainted Mother any day.
10 pictures under the cut. Click to enlarge.
Getting There Is Not Half The Fun
The cats helped pack. DB's up by the pillow, pretending this isn't happening, and Mickey's down by the foot annoyed that stuff has all the good sprawling places, and Kaylee is doing the classic "cat in suitcase" pose. I know there's a "Stuff On My Cat" website; is there a "Cat On My Stuff" one? There needs to be.
I ask you, is that suitcase eye-searing enough? The bright orange Tauk tag disappears against it.
I had taken six books with me for an eight-day trip, and still ended up buying another in the Borders at the airport. For once, however, I had judged things exactly right... I ended up reading one book in the airport during my eight-frigging-hour layover, and two more were just so awful that I couldn't last more than a few pages. (Once upon a time, I thought "Alisa Craig" was quirky but not overly so. Now my flesh crawled with the mannered, over-the-top writing and characters; Donna Andrews is about my limit for quirk these days and she was pushing it a bit with the claustrophobic character who dressed as Dracula and pounced on people in the Penguins book.) I tossed them all into chairs, where my literary litter was gone next time I came by.
My parents told me they'd meet me at the tour bus. I have this in writing, in my mother's handwriting to be exact, next to the highlighted paragraph on the tour letter on where we would be picked up. This is important.
It's important because the rest of my family held up the tour bus by being inside the terminal because naturally Nea, having only taken herself solo around Germany and France and England (and Canada) in the past could not possibly make it off the plane and find the guy holding up the sign for the tour on her own, so they all had to be there to help me out. That they arrived at the airport 1) after the tour guide with the sign left and 2) an hour after my flight arrived meant that hijinks ensued.
I was told later that I made several people like me automatically by snapping at the tour guide "How should I know where they are, they told me they'd meet me at the bus!" Alrighty then.
My brother came out to the bus on a voyage of discovery, found me, got them, and we all got off on the road. Oy.
Our tour guide turned out to have been a last minute replacement. She didn't have a lot of charisma, and it was hard to follow her talking sometimes... her English was flawless North American, which was, ironically *why* she lost us every time she pronounced an English word with Italian emphasis, or mixed up her dates, which she did a lot. ("Positano was an important port from 1836 all the way up to the 12th century.") I solved this issue by followingshawan_7's excellent advice to take a nap, which I did on the bus trip to Positano.
Positano
Pretty much everywhere on the Amalfi coast was practically vertical, including our hotel, Le Agavi. Where we all had private terraces overlooking the water:
Rooms were marked according to their position vis-a-vis the lobby, meaning our room was on floor "-2." It was pretty surreal pressing that button in the elevator! For people who wanted to go further down, it had a funicular (open elevator or, for people from Pennsylvania, an incline) down to the beach:
They had shuttles that ran down to Positano proper, about 10 minutes away, and would drop us off in the middle of the town to shop and get food, then pick us up and head back. Lombard Street is totally not the narrowest, most twisty road in the world. Not even close! Walking around Positano was like living in an Escher painting; there would be a huge ravine by the shoulder of the road, deep enough that the roof of the building in it was 20 feet below you, but then the next loop of the road was only about 50 yards away, with people blithely walking along it.
I grabbed the first shuttle out, because I was a woman on a mission (I would, in fact, rapidly become pegged as The Shopper of the group.) I have a horrible time getting shoes that fit, and I had, thanks to the Internet, discovered a custom sandal shop. (I would find out later that Amalfi and Capri are lousy with such shops.) I never found the one I linked to, but I did find one just a block and two loops up the road from the shuttle dropoff, where I promptly bought sandals. It's sort of like a Chinese Menu of shoe stores - they've got all their styles hanging in the window and you pick one from column A (soles that fit), one from column B (heels - either flat, stacked, or kitten) and one from column C (assorted straps). Then a guy takes the sole, makes holes for the assorted straps, and nails them into place. The actual selling was done by a woman who spoke all the English (it seemed to be a family concern; either her father or son were doing the hammering). Not a hard sell, which I really appreciated. She let us browse and try on and never pushed.maureen_the_mad is completely unimpressed at the idea of custom flip-flops, no matter how fancy, but two of the women from the tour followed me in the first night and, since I wore my sandals at the introductory dinner that night, two more followed me in the next day when I went back. (I got about 10 euros off on my second pair, I think because of all the business I brought in!)
Amalfi
The first day we got settled, mooched around town, and had a cocktail party followed by dinner. The second day, we went into Amalfi in order to look at the Cathedral of St. Andrew and shop.
St. Andrew, that bright building in the middle, doesn't have the sort of architecture I commonly associate with cathedrals. It has religious and historical significance, though: it claims to have (most of) the bones of said saint in the basement tomb, and its doors are the first bronze ones imported into the region from Constantinople. One of the faces on the door is very shiny because people touch it for blessing/luck.
Inside is a little museum of old church stuff, the elaborate tomb in the basement, and the working church has one of those amazing historical melanges that you can only get in Europe: the eagle to the left is from the 12th century; the altar and crucifix are about 14th, and the rest is baroque... and then there are the Italian mamas wandering around making things nice with little regard to the centuries. They were bringing in flowers, which I think might be for a wedding. (Lots of weddings; I saw my first bride of several getting her picture taken in a back alley in Positano, and got a shot of her and the groom setting up.)
Out in the town square, I got my first present, my first lemoncello, and my first shortchanging.
Then it was off to look at ceramics factories. All those handpainted Italian ceramics come from factories along this coast, and you can go straight to the source. And the source will come straight to you, given half the chance: they're all online, take credit cards, and will ship. We passed one tiny little store clinging to a corner of one of the hairpin turns (and how reassured was I to see the road jutting out from the rock and barely buttressed from below? Not very. The guide kept insisting that nobody drove drunk out here. Of course they didn't. That would be an excellent way to darwinize yourself.) Anyway, I digress. Tiny little store - we could hardly stop for it, but it had its website (www.giona.com) written in large letters so you could note it as you whipped by.
I ended up working with Ceramiche d'Arte, who were so on the ball that my shipped things were waiting for me when I got home, having arrived in only about 3 days, although I was told to expect up to three weeks. Even though I disappointed the man at the desk terribly when I picked out something from a dining room set for a present and he was all hopefully asking "Will that be 10 sets or 12?" and my reply "No, just this one, thanks."
(I am, by the way, seriously considering getting one of those tile tables for my side porch someday. And my vague intention of utterly redoing the bathroom has gotten quite the jolt of inspiration.)
I tried the lemoncello out on the terrace when I got back to the hotel. It was a pretty yellow liquid in a pretty painted bottle. I worked out the pretty tight stopper and to complete the bella, bella, decided that it tasted pretty much like Listerine. The rest of my family, more used to liqueur than I, rather liked it. So I made them drink it.
While I enjoyed the cathedral, what I mostly enjoyed was wandering around on my own, shopping and taking candid photos. When I got hungry, I'd grab something from a deli and take it back to the terrace, where I'd have sandwiches and cheese and fresh fruit and granita - I'm not normally a fan of lemons, but those granitas (basically lemonade slushies) were divine!
The first time I saw this cat, it was crawling into the wrapping for ceramics, it was so desperate to get its owner to pet it right that minute!
The owner saw me taking the picture and moved the bowl for a better shot.
The poll comes in here, from my candids.
[Poll #1068063]
Capri
After two days in Positano, we were off to Capri. Y'know those bad paintings of blocky houses right on top of each other in front of a bright blue bay with lots of little sailboats? Turns out those suckers are drawn from life.
We stayed at the Grand Hotel Quisisana, easily the nicest hotel I have ever stayed at... even though the tour guide told us that it was originally a sanitarium. It was at the apex of the main street, vertical and winding as they all were (and getting there was like taking a funhouse ride, as we were all going up around these whippy little roads in identical convertible taxies.) However, this was a shopping street for people who like to shop at Ferragamo, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, etc.
Regardless, I found a little "bibette" place that sold - huzzah! - little airline-sized painted bottles of lemoncello. Hey, I know a good gift when I see one. (I tend to fill my suitcases with the nicer sort of tourist tat... at least I think the nicer sort. And these days, it's a relative miracle to find bottles of liquids under 3 ounces!)
We had a lot of free time there - somewhat more than I wanted, unable to shop at most of the stores and unable to log on during my free time. I got a lot of wandering in, took many photos, did some reading and knitting. Turns out some other women on the tour were mystery buffs, so I gave them my books as I finished them.
We also went to Anacapri to see the Villa San Michele (of The Story of San Michele fame). Dr. Munthe had imported a sphinx as part of his decorations and plopped it up in the garden facing Sorrento. Legend says that if you place your left hand on its butt and make a wish, it will come true, so let me present the only Italian to get an assgrab during my trip:
The narrow path up to the villa is lined with booths and shops, and by the time we got out it was choked with tours heading up and down and, in the words of our guide, "improving the local economy." I bought some lemon soap - I was by now a big fan of the lemon and I've been using that orange/ginger shampoo I discovered one Shore Leave to complete the citrus theme - and saw a vendor pouring taster shots of creme lemoncello.
Now let me explain something here. There are things I have done, and will continue to do, in my life in the full understanding that I will not, in fact, enjoy them one bit. The momentary bleh is far better than wondering for the rest of my life what Experience X was going to be like.
For the record, it tasted like creamed Listerine.
I shopped right up to the nth second, met the tour guide heading down as I was heading up to join the group, pivoted, and was one of the first to the buses. Where I was told to go back up because my father had plunged back into the crowds looking for me. (When he resurfaced, I told him I loved him, I understood why he did it - but that I was grown up and owned a watch.)
Time to see if this post is too big for LJ or not. Next up - probably tomorrow at this point - Pompeii and the Archeological museum of Naples.
So. I have spent a week in Italy. I have eaten more tomatoes, marscapone, ricotta, mozzarella, and lemons than I think in the entire rest of my life combined. I have also avoided matricide, even at the end when my mother was shouting across the entire bus to me and my brother (both of us in our 40s and experienced travelers) "Do you know how to work the automatic kiosk to get your boarding pass?"
patsyrant, I'm tellin' ya now, I'd put my Mother toe-to-toe with your Poor Sainted Mother any day.10 pictures under the cut. Click to enlarge.
Getting There Is Not Half The Fun
The cats helped pack. DB's up by the pillow, pretending this isn't happening, and Mickey's down by the foot annoyed that stuff has all the good sprawling places, and Kaylee is doing the classic "cat in suitcase" pose. I know there's a "Stuff On My Cat" website; is there a "Cat On My Stuff" one? There needs to be.
I ask you, is that suitcase eye-searing enough? The bright orange Tauk tag disappears against it.
I had taken six books with me for an eight-day trip, and still ended up buying another in the Borders at the airport. For once, however, I had judged things exactly right... I ended up reading one book in the airport during my eight-frigging-hour layover, and two more were just so awful that I couldn't last more than a few pages. (Once upon a time, I thought "Alisa Craig" was quirky but not overly so. Now my flesh crawled with the mannered, over-the-top writing and characters; Donna Andrews is about my limit for quirk these days and she was pushing it a bit with the claustrophobic character who dressed as Dracula and pounced on people in the Penguins book.) I tossed them all into chairs, where my literary litter was gone next time I came by.
My parents told me they'd meet me at the tour bus. I have this in writing, in my mother's handwriting to be exact, next to the highlighted paragraph on the tour letter on where we would be picked up. This is important.
It's important because the rest of my family held up the tour bus by being inside the terminal because naturally Nea, having only taken herself solo around Germany and France and England (and Canada) in the past could not possibly make it off the plane and find the guy holding up the sign for the tour on her own, so they all had to be there to help me out. That they arrived at the airport 1) after the tour guide with the sign left and 2) an hour after my flight arrived meant that hijinks ensued.
I was told later that I made several people like me automatically by snapping at the tour guide "How should I know where they are, they told me they'd meet me at the bus!" Alrighty then.
My brother came out to the bus on a voyage of discovery, found me, got them, and we all got off on the road. Oy.
Our tour guide turned out to have been a last minute replacement. She didn't have a lot of charisma, and it was hard to follow her talking sometimes... her English was flawless North American, which was, ironically *why* she lost us every time she pronounced an English word with Italian emphasis, or mixed up her dates, which she did a lot. ("Positano was an important port from 1836 all the way up to the 12th century.") I solved this issue by following
shawan_7's excellent advice to take a nap, which I did on the bus trip to Positano.Positano
Pretty much everywhere on the Amalfi coast was practically vertical, including our hotel, Le Agavi. Where we all had private terraces overlooking the water:
Rooms were marked according to their position vis-a-vis the lobby, meaning our room was on floor "-2." It was pretty surreal pressing that button in the elevator! For people who wanted to go further down, it had a funicular (open elevator or, for people from Pennsylvania, an incline) down to the beach:
They had shuttles that ran down to Positano proper, about 10 minutes away, and would drop us off in the middle of the town to shop and get food, then pick us up and head back. Lombard Street is totally not the narrowest, most twisty road in the world. Not even close! Walking around Positano was like living in an Escher painting; there would be a huge ravine by the shoulder of the road, deep enough that the roof of the building in it was 20 feet below you, but then the next loop of the road was only about 50 yards away, with people blithely walking along it.
I grabbed the first shuttle out, because I was a woman on a mission (I would, in fact, rapidly become pegged as The Shopper of the group.) I have a horrible time getting shoes that fit, and I had, thanks to the Internet, discovered a custom sandal shop. (I would find out later that Amalfi and Capri are lousy with such shops.) I never found the one I linked to, but I did find one just a block and two loops up the road from the shuttle dropoff, where I promptly bought sandals. It's sort of like a Chinese Menu of shoe stores - they've got all their styles hanging in the window and you pick one from column A (soles that fit), one from column B (heels - either flat, stacked, or kitten) and one from column C (assorted straps). Then a guy takes the sole, makes holes for the assorted straps, and nails them into place. The actual selling was done by a woman who spoke all the English (it seemed to be a family concern; either her father or son were doing the hammering). Not a hard sell, which I really appreciated. She let us browse and try on and never pushed.
maureen_the_mad is completely unimpressed at the idea of custom flip-flops, no matter how fancy, but two of the women from the tour followed me in the first night and, since I wore my sandals at the introductory dinner that night, two more followed me in the next day when I went back. (I got about 10 euros off on my second pair, I think because of all the business I brought in!)Amalfi
The first day we got settled, mooched around town, and had a cocktail party followed by dinner. The second day, we went into Amalfi in order to look at the Cathedral of St. Andrew and shop.
St. Andrew, that bright building in the middle, doesn't have the sort of architecture I commonly associate with cathedrals. It has religious and historical significance, though: it claims to have (most of) the bones of said saint in the basement tomb, and its doors are the first bronze ones imported into the region from Constantinople. One of the faces on the door is very shiny because people touch it for blessing/luck.
Inside is a little museum of old church stuff, the elaborate tomb in the basement, and the working church has one of those amazing historical melanges that you can only get in Europe: the eagle to the left is from the 12th century; the altar and crucifix are about 14th, and the rest is baroque... and then there are the Italian mamas wandering around making things nice with little regard to the centuries. They were bringing in flowers, which I think might be for a wedding. (Lots of weddings; I saw my first bride of several getting her picture taken in a back alley in Positano, and got a shot of her and the groom setting up.)
Out in the town square, I got my first present, my first lemoncello, and my first shortchanging.
Then it was off to look at ceramics factories. All those handpainted Italian ceramics come from factories along this coast, and you can go straight to the source. And the source will come straight to you, given half the chance: they're all online, take credit cards, and will ship. We passed one tiny little store clinging to a corner of one of the hairpin turns (and how reassured was I to see the road jutting out from the rock and barely buttressed from below? Not very. The guide kept insisting that nobody drove drunk out here. Of course they didn't. That would be an excellent way to darwinize yourself.) Anyway, I digress. Tiny little store - we could hardly stop for it, but it had its website (www.giona.com) written in large letters so you could note it as you whipped by.
I ended up working with Ceramiche d'Arte, who were so on the ball that my shipped things were waiting for me when I got home, having arrived in only about 3 days, although I was told to expect up to three weeks. Even though I disappointed the man at the desk terribly when I picked out something from a dining room set for a present and he was all hopefully asking "Will that be 10 sets or 12?" and my reply "No, just this one, thanks."
(I am, by the way, seriously considering getting one of those tile tables for my side porch someday. And my vague intention of utterly redoing the bathroom has gotten quite the jolt of inspiration.)
I tried the lemoncello out on the terrace when I got back to the hotel. It was a pretty yellow liquid in a pretty painted bottle. I worked out the pretty tight stopper and to complete the bella, bella, decided that it tasted pretty much like Listerine. The rest of my family, more used to liqueur than I, rather liked it. So I made them drink it.
While I enjoyed the cathedral, what I mostly enjoyed was wandering around on my own, shopping and taking candid photos. When I got hungry, I'd grab something from a deli and take it back to the terrace, where I'd have sandwiches and cheese and fresh fruit and granita - I'm not normally a fan of lemons, but those granitas (basically lemonade slushies) were divine!
The first time I saw this cat, it was crawling into the wrapping for ceramics, it was so desperate to get its owner to pet it right that minute!
The owner saw me taking the picture and moved the bowl for a better shot.
The poll comes in here, from my candids.
[Poll #1068063]
Capri
After two days in Positano, we were off to Capri. Y'know those bad paintings of blocky houses right on top of each other in front of a bright blue bay with lots of little sailboats? Turns out those suckers are drawn from life.
We stayed at the Grand Hotel Quisisana, easily the nicest hotel I have ever stayed at... even though the tour guide told us that it was originally a sanitarium. It was at the apex of the main street, vertical and winding as they all were (and getting there was like taking a funhouse ride, as we were all going up around these whippy little roads in identical convertible taxies.) However, this was a shopping street for people who like to shop at Ferragamo, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, etc.
Regardless, I found a little "bibette" place that sold - huzzah! - little airline-sized painted bottles of lemoncello. Hey, I know a good gift when I see one. (I tend to fill my suitcases with the nicer sort of tourist tat... at least I think the nicer sort. And these days, it's a relative miracle to find bottles of liquids under 3 ounces!)
We had a lot of free time there - somewhat more than I wanted, unable to shop at most of the stores and unable to log on during my free time. I got a lot of wandering in, took many photos, did some reading and knitting. Turns out some other women on the tour were mystery buffs, so I gave them my books as I finished them.
We also went to Anacapri to see the Villa San Michele (of The Story of San Michele fame). Dr. Munthe had imported a sphinx as part of his decorations and plopped it up in the garden facing Sorrento. Legend says that if you place your left hand on its butt and make a wish, it will come true, so let me present the only Italian to get an assgrab during my trip:
The narrow path up to the villa is lined with booths and shops, and by the time we got out it was choked with tours heading up and down and, in the words of our guide, "improving the local economy." I bought some lemon soap - I was by now a big fan of the lemon and I've been using that orange/ginger shampoo I discovered one Shore Leave to complete the citrus theme - and saw a vendor pouring taster shots of creme lemoncello.
Now let me explain something here. There are things I have done, and will continue to do, in my life in the full understanding that I will not, in fact, enjoy them one bit. The momentary bleh is far better than wondering for the rest of my life what Experience X was going to be like.
For the record, it tasted like creamed Listerine.
I shopped right up to the nth second, met the tour guide heading down as I was heading up to join the group, pivoted, and was one of the first to the buses. Where I was told to go back up because my father had plunged back into the crowds looking for me. (When he resurfaced, I told him I loved him, I understood why he did it - but that I was grown up and owned a watch.)
Time to see if this post is too big for LJ or not. Next up - probably tomorrow at this point - Pompeii and the Archeological museum of Naples.
