Nothing comes close to the Amalfi Coast

I am not really a big fan of dunking myself in huge bodies of water. Despite my love of the ocean, I usually wade in up to my knees, maybe my waist tops and then I'm out. But Saturday, when I found myself basking on a small speed boat in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, no amount of coaxing or encouragement was needed to get me into that water. A glorious weekend spent on the Amalfi Coast hit it's climax on Saturday during a beach day spent in Positano. Possibly the most picturesque place I have ever been in my entire life, Positano is a small town in an enclave in the hills. As lovely as the pastel watercolors done by artists on the paths, the brightly painted buildings stack up the hill like building blocks holding up the kind of sky that can only be by design, a resplendent blue with just a few wispy clouds.

To get to the beach you have to traipse down about a billion weathered stone stairs. Descending stairs seems an easy feat but at the bottom we are all weak at the knees, nursing blistered toes and muscle spasms in our over worked calves. Thin white hotel thrifted towels ride the wind like sheets on a clothesline and then settle onto the smooth dark pebbles of the beach as clothes come off, sunglasses go on, and we sprawl across the rocks like the sun worshipping California residents we are. The only thought on anyones mind is a day napping in the sun and, for all of the lucky people with some pigment to their skin other than freckles, cultivating a tan After a few rotations someone breaks the sleepy spell "Hey you guys, want to rent a boat?" A boat? "It's 10 euro a person, eight people to a boat." People are picked for teams like elementary school children in PE class. Nobody wants to be picked last for dodgeball. We are handed a set of keys, given a quick lesson in how to work the gas and loaded eight by eight along with our handles of rum onto small speed boats with a push off the dock and a Ciao Bella! There are no life jackets, waivers, insurance forms. No pesky questions like Do you have a boating license? Are any of you sober enough to drive a boat? Can you Swim? In fact there are no restrictions at all as to how fast, where we can go, or how many body parts can be hanging out of the boat at one time. We speed off with the wind in our face, our hands in the air and shrieking like banshees everytime we get air striking a large wave.

Out in the open water we pull all three boats close, cut the engines and pray for no jellyfish as we catapult off the boat and into the sea. Like I said, this is usually the point at which I stay on the boat or at the very least require a little push but something about being in a foreign country has been making me brave. Lately I've been eating octopus, walking barefoot outside and taking unknown shots chased with bananas dipped in coffee. Before I even have time to think about it, I plant one foot on the side of the boat and launch myself as high and far as possible. I go under laughing and swallow an excessive amount of the saltiest water I have ever tasted. Seriously, if you filled a cup halfway with salt and added some water that would be less salty than the Mediterranean. The water is the most energizing cold, it shocks all of my senses into a kind of awareness that makes me feel as if all my life before this instant I was sleep walking. I feel like I'm in a Clariton commercial. Like I hadn't even realized I'd been walking around seeing everything through a blurry film until it was gone and now that I'm "Clariton Clear" the resolution is upped and I can't imagine seeing things any other way. Being out in an ocean isn't like diving into your swimming pool. The water is ALIVE. It tosses me in it's waves and caresses me all over like a blind person trying to make out my shape. The color of the water is unbelievable. No other shade of blue has any right to call itself by the same name as this gorgeous water. The water is so blue it transcends the definition of color. Blue is it's very essence. It doesn't just look blue, it FEELS blue. I'm sure that if I had closed my eyes and never seen it before I would still be able to in some way know the exquisite shade of blue just from jumping in and letting it envelop me. In the water I feel tiny and huge all at the same time. The only thing that matters is this perfect moment and I am huge in my importance as the sole experiencer of it. And yet to this great living thing I am just a temporary insignificant speck. Still, even as a speck I am part of it and I too share it's beauty.



But anyway....
Since I've denied multiple requests for a play by play of the weekend with promises to deliver on my blog, let me rewind and start from the beginning.
Thursday Night: After a six hour bus ride to Sorrento that included three hours of restless, Dramene induced sleep, some altogether unimpressive rest stop pasta, an amazing find of peanut M and M's and such cinematic classics as Pineapple Express and Meet the parents, we arrived at our "hotel". A quick debate over the bunk beds is settled by the ever mature and flexible Cally and after taking a moment to appreciate (but unfortunately not photograph) our ridiculously tacky sky blue and mustard yellow floral tile that someone thought coordinated well with the steel blue damask bedspreads and turquoise wood baseboards, we all throw ourselves into bed and pass out immediately.

About five hours later we fill up on three rolls and the Fanta juice Italian people like to pretend is orange juice, and head out for the day. Someone at Florence for Fun has apparently been reading up on increased obesity in America and has mapped out all of the activities so that we have to trudge twenty minutes to get everywhere, including the bus we are taking to get to the ferry to Capri for the day. Capri is a scenic Island in the Tyrrhenian Sea which houses multiple lavish celebrity mansions and is a ravishing resort town with the price tags to match. During a boat tour around the island we see the lovers arch, Grotta Azzurra (a Grotto in which the water is a surreal colbat blue color because of a trick of light), and lots of other pretty things I don't remember because I was too busy trying not to get seasick. My favorite part of Capri was a tiny iron statue of a waving man set to welcome visitors to the island, so high up on a cliff it was scarcely visible. After some hiking around the island, a few stolen hours laying on the breathtaking beach, some heavenly pizza, and a lemonchillo tasting we were headed back to Sorrento. This brings us up to Saturday aka the highlight of my weekend and maybe one of the best days of my life. I returned from Positano sunburned and smiling. I am stunned in the kind of way someone is when they have experienced something beautiful and it has ended. I wish that I could capture the memories to preview later like a snowglobe you shake up and watch the moments of a day too good to be true fall like glitter.

A superb weekend ended with a day spent at Pompeii and hiking up Mount Vesuvies. As remarkable and astounding it is to actually see Pompeii and learn about the culture of a city that survived being buried under 30 meters of volcanic ash and was resurfaced centuries later along with molds of it's citizens, it is not all that interesting to hear about if you have not actually seen it so I will spare you the details. I am fairly certain this has already been my longest, least interesting and most poorly written blog post to date so I will end it soon. And as far as Mount Vesuvius. Ummmm ya. I climbed that shit. I looked down into the impressive gargantuan volcano and didn't fall in. And sadly, there was no lava. Obviously I'm an idiot for thinking there would be but still. Disappointing.

I wish that I could tell you all of the breathtaking and beautiful sights on the Amalfi Coast. I furthermore wish that I could do so without rambling and putting you to sleep. But I can't so I'll just end with another thousand words guaranteed to be beautiful than anything I could ever write.
Positano


P.S. Promise my next entry will be better. Expect exciting stories from Oktoberfest this weekend!

Ah home. Let me come home. Home is whenever I'm with you.

With the taste of salt in the air and the wind weaving a tangle of knots into my hair, I drop my shoes just out of reach of the tide and cross the line drawn in the sand by the ocean. That line that says do-not-cross-unless-you-want-to-get-your-feet-wet. Crossing that line to me feels like entering another dimension and brings with it the calming feeling of a complete absence of time. Be it June or December the water always feels cold unless I’ve had a lot to drink and then I’m knee deep in seconds. I wade out a bit, throw out my arms to embrace the wide expanse of waves that fade into stars at an unidentifiable horizon. To say that the ocean is my favorite place to be is so cliché it makes me want to throw up. Saying you love the beach to me feels like listing ice cream among your favorite things: terribly unoriginal and obvious. I am aware that there are people who do not like these things, but they are few and far between and honestly kind of baffling to me. Not loving the ocean would make me a completely different person, one I can’t imagine.

Despite the unfortunate circumstance of being born and raised in Arizona, my parents began bringing me to the beach when I was just six months old. My grandmother had a rule that no grandchild of hers would make it to a year without putting their feet in the ocean. It is a rule strictly abided in my family. For as long as I can remember the beach has been my favorite place. When I was young, it was my playground an infinite source of curiosities and adventures and a treasure trove of seashells which I brought home in fistfuls and cupped tightly to my ear believing in their power to not only play me the sounds of the ocean, but transport me back. As I grew up and began fiercely battling for every inch of independence I could get, it became a haven from my family. A place where I could escape them without disapproval and climb on the rocks of the breakers that stretched out into the ocean far enough my younger sister could not follow. Eventually I went away to college, not surprisingly I chose a university within six minutes of the ocean where many of the students live in beachfront property. But San Diego was not what I expected and after finally leaving a state that had never felt like home I found myself in a place I feared never would. Every time I worried I would never find my place, I was drawn to the beach. I loved it during the day but it was at night alone that I couldn’t stay away. I realized in time that the one constant in my life had always been this. At every age and every stage of my life I had always felt most at peace and the truest version of myself with my feet firmly planted in the sea. Being there gives me a kind of perspective that I lack anywhere else. Every time I stare out at the ocean I realize how small and insignificant my problems are and how just as it was there waiting for me 15 years ago it will be there again tomorrow. I think that kind of safety and security and peace within yourself is what you call home.


I wrote this piece for my travel writing class, this week we had to write about our "favorite destination". Through some unprecedented act of God I have yet to get homesick but writing this piece gave me a little twinge of longing. At least once a day I happen upon something that makes me miss something about home, or more often someone. For a moment I am gripped by a paralyzing fear as i wait for the dreadful (home)sickness to overtake me, for tears to come, for the panic of realizing the unfamiliarity of my own life. But then I remember a favorite quote of mine from Eat Pray when someone is afraid of that bittersweet "I miss you." They say "So miss me. Send light and love my way and then drop it and move on." Whenever I think about how far away the people who know my soul the best are, the people who get me better than I get myself I stop waiting for the sickness to hit and I stop it. I take a moment to miss them but then remind myself that I will see them again. I focus all of my happiness, prayers, well wishes and love across the ocean to the people I love and then I remind myself that I am in Italy and I go get some peanut butter gelato.


*All three of these photos are from an East Coast trip, circa Summer 09.

Wanderlust

Just as I find it baffling and a little absurd to have a favorite or lucky number, I am sure that many do not understand having an affinity or deep love and appreciation of a word. But since words are the only means I have of translating the twisted language of my heart and head to the language of the living, I have a bit of a love affair with language. I tend to develop little crushes on certain words. My crushes are very innocent, nothing serious of course and they usually only last a few days, maybe a week tops. But when I crush, I crush hard. I think about them all day long, remembering the first time I realized their existence. I work them into conversations that have don't really have anything to do with them at all. My heart even beats a little faster when I hear someone else use them both with excitement and also jealousy because after all they are MY words and couldn't possibly mean as much to someone else as they do to me. In time these infatuations end and the other day I barely flinched when someone mentioned Effervescent, a word with whom I shared a few special days last November. However, every once in awhile there is a word that never ceases to delight me. Sometimes I get bored with it, put it up on a shelf and forget about it for awhile. But eventually I always happen upon it again, dust it off and pick up where I left off in our affair. One such word is wanderlust.

Wanderlust is a beautiful word that I've always loved but until now I never really knew what it meant. Or rather, I never knew what it felt like. Wanderlust is defined as a burning desire to travel but it's more than that. It's an insatiable appetite, an unavoidable urge, an unquenchable longing to explore the world. Traveling for me is like scratching at my mosquito bites, it only increases the itch to wander. As I booked my December flight to Paris I felt a rush of adrenaline, of excitement at the fact that I'm actually going but also a greed for more. Why just Paris? I've never been to France before. I want to go to Nice, Bordeaux, Lyon, Marseille! It seems to me that there are not enough years left in my life to see all the things I want to see, to go all the places I NEED to go. (Or more importantly there are not enough zeros at the end of my bank statement) And while each easy jet confirmation email brings with it the dizzying belief that this can not be real, it also feeds the lust for one more day, one more flight, one more trip. After spending the first 19 years and 52 weeks of my life in one country (my family took a very brief trip to Ireland at some point) I stand to see 14 cities in 6 countries over the next two and a half months, including the beautiful city of Firenze that I currently call home. It is enough to make a wanderer out of anyone. So while in the past I appreciated Wanderlust from afar: staring at it from across the room, testing it out in a whisper while others (more worldly then I) kept it's presence, I now bring it proudly with me wherever I go. This is one crush that is meant to last.

Dandelion Wishes

I take my aviators off and stick them on top of my head, combing my fingers through my bangs in an attempt to correct the tangled mess the wind has created. I am sitting on a metal bench in Lucca, a city know mainly for it's fully intact Renaissance-era city walls upon which my bench is posted. After rave reviews and a train ticket priced at only 2,40, we decided to stop in Lucca on our way home from Pisa. My roommates are off exploring but I have a blister, my legs hurt from walking, and my stomach is not happy with the carbonation in the water I didn't realize was frizzante (sparkling water) when I pulled it out of the fridge at the gelato shop. So although I am technically sitting on this bench until the wave of nausea passes, I am also sitting on this bench pouting just a little bit.

Lucca wasn't on my list. Until this morning I had never even heard of Lucca and were I not here right now, I would probably have lived out the rest of my life without ever knowing it existed. City walls. BIG DEAL. From where I'm sitting the only thing remotely exciting about Lucca is the fact that there are dandelions everywhere. Although I am aware that the general population considers the dandelion to be a weed in need of removal, I have a certain soft spot for them. I'd even go so far as to say that I love dandelions. Maybe it's partially because I love making wishes and watching them fly into the wind, believing in their power to come true. Or maybe it's because they belong to a category of things that are by definition ugly (weeds) and yet there is a kind of beauty to them. Maybe it's something else entirely. Whatever the reason I am a devotee of dandelions, and am clutching one in my hand considering what to wish. That the pizza and gelato from earlier remains in my stomach? That I remember how to ask for the bathroom in Italian since as usual I have to pee? That the Italian guy sitting on the wall five feet away creeping me out quits staring soon?

I don't know this then but in about 15 minutes when my stomach settles, I will finally make my way down into the old town and wander around for a bit. I will find the Duomo di San Martino, a kind English speaking kebab place owner with a free bathroom, and my roommates haggling in the open air markets. I will find that while yes, there is no leaning tower in Lucca and really nothing in general that people back home will be particularly interested in hearing about, there is a certain feeling. It's calmer and cleaner then Florence. The city has retained it's history, like it's walls, while still managing to expand and modernize around it.

While I am good about marveling as I take in the sites that I have always dreamed to see, I find I need to remember to appreciate the Lucca's of Europe. Just because the Duomo di San Martino is a church that I have never heard of (and so had no specific desire to see) and is less impressive then the Duomo I see daily in Florence, does not diminish it's beauty. I smile just as much at the site of a dandelion here as I do back at my best friends parents house in Arizona. It does not lose anything because I have seen it before and can see it again every day for the rest of my life.

I consider as I sit on my bench that although the beautiful scene in front of me is not so different from one that I will see again in Italy and is not something to cross off my bucket list, I am no less lucky for having it in front of me. I am lucky to get to experience and appreciate the city of Lucca even if no picture or description afterward will seem that interesting. I hold the dandelion up to my mouth. I wish to be present and enjoy every moment ahead of me in Europe and not to take it for granted again. I close my eyes and blow.


*Image found on stumble

Bucket List (The Abroad Version)

1. Walk the Ponte Vicio at Sunset and photograph from afar at night
2. See the David
3 Museo Di Storia Naturale (Florence Botanical Gardens)
4. Climb the Duomo (Check)
5. Eat Gelato on the Steps of the Duomo (Check)
6. Take pictures holding up the leaning tower of Pisa. (Check)
7. Buy Something Italian Leather. (Check)
8. See the Sistine Chapel
9. See the Vatican City
10. Make a wish in the fontana de amore
11. Drink champagne at the Eiffel Tower
12. Go to Champs-Élysées
13. Go to arc de Triumph
14. Go to Moulin Rouge
15. Go to Notre-Dame
16. See the Mona Lisa at the Louve
17. See Big Ben (Check)
18. Go to Madrid
19. Go to Santarini and stay in an amazing villa
20. Beach it up in Greece
21. Buy Evil Eye Jewelry in Greece
22. Take a Gondola Ride in Venice
23. Go to the Cannibus Cup
24. Take pictures with the Amsterdam Sign
25. Oktoberfest (Check)
26. Buy shot glasses in every country
27. Push the cart through platform 9 and 3/4 (Check)
28. See Buckingham Palace (Check)
29. Walk accross Abbey Road (Check)
30. See Westminister Abbey (Check)
31. Ride on the back of someones Vespa
32. Be asked for directions/mistaken for a local
31. Eat Best Gelato in the world (Check)

Sepia Toned Memories.

Although words have always come easily to me, I've never considered myself a good writer. Every moving experience comes with the desire to express in words what I'm feeling or seeing. And yet, when it's important the words always fall short. Saying I feel safe in someones arms doesn't convey that feeling and "beautiful" doesn't even begin to describe Florence. If I go on too much or lack eloquence in this blog, it's because I'm afraid I will miss something. I don't want to forget the way I trip on an uneven cobblestone at least once a day, or how the vendors sometimes see that you're American and call you the spice girls. Sylvia Plath said it best: “Some things are hard to write about. After something happens to you, you go to write it down, and either you over dramatize it, or underplay it, exaggerate the wrong parts or ignore the important ones. At any rate, you never write it quite the way you want to.” I'm making an attempt to record my life in Florence for everyone at home, but also for myself. Even still, I know the written account will never compare to the real deal and when I look back in on my mind on the memories, words will fail.

Florence is a Walking City

I am willing to admit that I am kind of a whiner. Especially when it comes to walking. I have been known to complain when someone parks a few spaces farther away than necessary in the parking lot and friends have created a drinking game after how many times I ask "How much further is it?" But part of the whole studying abroad thing is growing as a person and I'm making it a personal goal not to complain about the fact that the transportation of choice in Florence is by foot. Besides, how can I complain when my walk to school leads me past a cathedral, an amazing pizzeria whose owner we have already befriended and four or five gelato places. The fact that in Florence one never seems to be more than 20 feet from gelato is a reason to be grateful for all the forced exercise.
Florence is a very manageable city, small enough that by the time I leave I will know my way around pretty well. As bad as I am with directions, I am already starting to get the hang of the area around my apartment. At the same time I feel like there are not enough meals in the next four months to eat at all the amazing places the city has to offer. So far we have just been eating at whatever place we stumble upon whenever we are hungry, and nothing has disappointed. I had the most AMAZING bruschetta at lunch today. I will probably have dreams about it tonight. Well that and the hazelnut gelato I just had about 15 minutes ago.
Unfortunately as well as I have been eating, the mosquitoes have been eating better. By some act of God we have a private backyard and we have been leaving the doors open to let in the light, giving the mosquitoes the perfect opportunity to leave me about 10 bites all over my legs. Well then and during all the walking we've been doing.