f r e s h s t a r t
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Cinque Terre, cinque gelaterias...
Make that sei gelaterias. Quattro Mediterranean beaches. And uno wasp sting, uno painful encounter with barnacles, uno local festival. Due days of hiking. Quattro frighteningly large prawns at dinner. Who knows how many glasses of wine. Half litre? No, make it a full litre.
I went to an area of the Italian Riviera called Cinque Terre this past weekend with three really fun women from my program. It's a series of five small towns basically built into the cliffs, Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manorola, and Riomaggiore. We stayed in Corniglia, the smallest and least touristy of the five. We rented a few rooms at a villa right off the small main square. It was a little family place---as in we picked up our keys at the owners' sister-in-law's restaurant and she escorted us over around midnight to show us which rooms were ours.
While there is a local train line that run through all the towns, they're also connected by hiking paths, and I'm proud to say that I hiked between all of them, even the steep and treacherous path between Vernazza and Montorosso. More importantly I found gelaterias in each town (and two in ours).
We befriended a guy who seemed to be a local waiter (we also saw him chasing a dog through the town), but who turned out to be a Mexican university student. He hung out in a cafe with us one night, and wanted to party the next night. We though sure, when in Rome, do as the Mexicans do. He brought some of his friends along, and we drove down to the biggest town to find a bar. While he spoke English, his native Corniglian friends did not. I rode shotgun in Flavio's car, and our conversation was basically limited to him saying "Robbie Williams good, Madonna good." And hello, okay, nd no problem. Driving on a twisting mountain road with an Italian behind the wheel was exhilarating but a little nauseating. (Not quite as nauseating though as some of the AC-less regional Italian trains. Or Brittany's salami panini in the Milan train station).
The weekend was a welcome alternative to the cathedral-museum-art-culture-monument style trip. As Brittany and I were laying on the Monterosso beach, drying off after floating around in the Mediterranean, and drinking some local wine, she said you know, this really feels like a vacation. Agreed.
01:05 3 comments
Comments:
If the barnacles were in Vernazza, I got attacked by those same ones this time last year. Those little fuckers hurt.
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