So Italian

Ha ha ha, Naples is freaking crazy. There was a MASSIVE pile of garbage outside my hostel that someone ended up burning because nobody was getting around to picking it up. Now the public transportation is on strike -- for no reason really. Someone told me that in Italy, the Unions are so powerful that they often go on strike to remind people that they can. I was talking to a person who immigrated from Palestine, he said that if you can live in Naples for a few months, you can live anywhere.

I do like it though. Naples has its problems, but there is a lot of beauty here too. The coast is beautiful, the Tyrrhenian sea is warm, and the history is amazing.

Yesterday I went to Pompeii with my friends Peter and Dianne. We missed our stop and ended up riding the bus for 2 hours longer than we would have had to. It was entertaining though. Our bus driver was messing with us, even though he barely spoke a word of English. He was trying to tell us that we had to walk back, then he changed it to "OK - €20," and then he kept trying to steal Peter's peach that he was saving for lunch. It loses something when you write about it, but it was all pretty funny. We walked around Pompeii for a few hours, it was absolutely huge. I didn't get any pictures though because my camera broke, and now I can't afford to do anything because I spent all my extra money on a new one! There is a beautiful waterfront street nearby, I am going to go go sit, read and eat gelato this afternoon.

Back on the road

I just arrived in Naples! This city is...

Well...

Cook's Tourist's Handbook of 1884 stated:

"Naples is an ill-built, ill-paved, ill-lighted, ill-drained, ill-watched, ill-governed, ill-ventilated city."

I don't think much has changed! This has by far the craziest, most disorganized traffic system I have ever seen.

Seems a lot more dirty and disorganized than Paris. A lot of crosswalks on extremely busy streets don't even have signals. Its kind of cool watching the locals calmly walk across the road in the midst of speeding cars on a road that doesn't have lanes. I tend to wait for a slight slowdown in traffic and then run for my life until I reach the other side.

I read that when seatbelts became manditory in italy, people in Naples started wearing shirts with pictures of seatbelts on them. I think everyone in this town has a death wish.

But I am excited to see the other places close to the town. I'm going to see the ruins at Pompei tomorrow and then take a ferry to the Amalfi coast or the island of Capri the day after that.

Second Home

It sucks; it almost feels like a family is breaking up. I was watching The Godfather with some friends here at the hostel, and Pablo turns to me and says, “God it feels like this is my home.” He was totally right! New people are coming into the hostel and its like “what are you doing here? I didn't invite you.” It's cool though, they are all nice, it's just not the same though. Anyways, Pablo and Carla took off, the other day, John took off today, it feels like I had the perfect group of people in my life and now they are leaving. It’s cool though! The house with Tai, David, and Marcos will be really great, it still feels like a second home here in Italy.

Yesterday I went to Rimini with this girl named Petra from Argentina. She was totally great, I really get along with the South Americans. I will try to keep in touch with her, she felt like such a good old friend even though I only knew her for like 10 hours.

Rimini is this beach town on the Adriatic coast. It was the perfect day for me, just lying on the beach all day and relaxing. I needed it! I The weather was good too, its been perfect since I arrived in Italy.

I went swimming in the Adriatic Sea, which was really nice. I was freaking exhausted from the past couple of days, it was exactly what I needed. But Petra left this morning – Marcos said that the worst part of his job is that he has to say goodbye to people all the time, now I know exactly what he means.

This is the last night for me in the hostel; I have to figure out what I want to do for the next week. I am going to travel for a little while longer and then return to Florence to get the house together and start school.

Best day ever

Yesterday was by far the highlight of this trip. I woke up at about 9 in the morning and me and some friends rented a car to explore the Tuscan countryside. It is absolutely beautiful out here. We went to a bunch of small towns and sampled local wines, cheeses and meats. In one of the towns Tai saw a poster for an opening night party for this new dance club -- put on by Ministry of Sound who are supposedly the best you can get for House(techno) music. Not usually my kind of thing, but I didn't fly 5000 miles to not try new things. Anyways, one of the people we were hanging out with is fluent in Italian, so he called and got us on the list, and we bought some cheese, olives, bread, sausage and Chianti and brought it back to the hostel to eat and get ready.

The party was a couple towns away from Florence, and we ended up leaving the hostel until about 11:00pm -- we were all so antsy to leave that we forgot to get directions or an address or anything, we just got on the road. We made it to the town we thought it was in, we drove around for a while and didn't find anything, so we asked someone who pointed us in the general direction but pretty much said that we had no chance of ever finding it. It is a total "locals only" club, its out in the middle of nowhere in a sort of industrial park/warehouse area between towns. We drove around for a while, ended up driving through a f*ing castle and almost off a cliff, and after asking a few more people for general directions, and with a lot of luck we actually found it. We finished the last of my Absinthe in the parking lot and went in.

It was actually a lot of fun, we ended up outlasting most of the locals and stayed until 5:00am when they finally turned the lights on. Poor Pablo, the absinthe didn't sit with him and he spent the last 3 hours puking in the parking lot -- but even he says it was totally worth it.

I ended up getting back to the hostel and going to bed at 6 in the morning, and we had to get up at 10 to return the car. The night before I didn't get much sleep because I was out until 4 in the morning playing darts against some really nice Irishmen (America won!), so I am running myself a little ragged. Pablo is still hung over, and Tai took a 5 day trip up to Amsterdam, so I look foreword to some sleep tonight.

Holy shit I'm moving to Italy!

Wow, I can’t believe how much shit is coming together here. I am starting to get a little bit scared because too much random shit just worked out in such a perfect way. I wasn’t even supposed to be in Italy right now! I still have hostels booked in Austria that are going to be charging me for not showing up. I wasn’t even supposed to be here, and now I am going to stay.

Anyways, I signed up for the 6-week language program, and convinced Tye to stay with me too. Tye was not even going to come to Florence either, and when he did he was only going to stay for one night.

My hostel manager, Marcos, has been living and working in the hostel for 2 years now. He loves it, but you can’t be stuck in one place for so long and he just needs a break. When he found out that we wanted to stay for 6 weeks and would need his help to find an apartment, he said that if we wanted to stay for 6 months instead, he would get an apartment with us. It makes it 10 times easier to have him deal with the logistics of apartment contracts and dealing with landlords in Italian

So that’s it! I’m staying in Florence for at least 6 months now! I’ll probably extend the language program over that entire time too; I am going to be fucking great at Italian. This is exactly the thing that I needed. This is exactly why I came out here. I don’t know why or how the hell this all worked out, but I feel like this is exactly where I need to be.

Anyways, to keep the current events updated, two days ago I went to some museum (I can’t remember the name) and saw the most amazing art. It featured the Birth Of Venus, the first and last paintings of Leonardo Da Vinci’s career. They also had on display a lot of sketches, the Vitruvian Man, his famous self-portrait, a lot of his sketchbooks and notes. It was absolutely amazing.

I love this city!