Ciao!

Where do I even begin to try to depict the story of my time in Italy? It will forever live to be one of the best weeks of my life, & I will forever live on being jealous of myself for that experience. Sadly I can’t go in to full detail as to what I did while I was there, it would take days, but this is my attempt to convey what I saw/experienced.

            It was an early Saturday morning (2 AM kind of early) and Tricia and I had to head downstairs from her flat in order to start our two-hour journey to the Stansted airport. Unfortunately for us, London, one of the worlds most populated cities, does not believe in 24-hour train services or underground, our flight gate closed at 5:30. To make things short, because this story could go on for days, we missed our first bus, got on the wrong second bus got off at Vauxhall and were at a loss as to how to get to Liverpool Station, which is where we needed to catch the train to take us to the airport. We flagged for a taxi to take us and got a nice tour of the city and the pissed people who littered the street. We arrived at the train station with 10 minutes to spare and were thankfully on our way. We arrived at the airport at about 5:00 and had 30 minutes to make it through bag check as well as security. By the grace of God we made it through everything and had about 5 minutes to spare and so the running began. Now normally I would be the one sitting comfortably at my gate watching as these idiotic people dashed to their gates, wondering why they simply could not make it on time, but now I found myself in the same predicament and couldn’t help but be a bit mad. So here is my apology to anyone I have ever laughed at for being late for his or her gate, because I now completely understand what you’ve been through. Thankfully through the struggle and running on zero hours of sleep, we made the flight and were now on our way to Calabria, Italy.

            My friend Tricia has some family who lives in this quite little town so we lucked out and were able to stay in this quant little Bed and Breakfast located among the main road. The scenery was quite breath taking. Standing on the back balcony the lining of trees and hills in the distance were beautiful, and it did not help that it was sunny and warm. There was even an adorable old lady outside, an apron adorning her waist, grabbing the laundry she had hanging out to dry. When i picture Italy, cute little old ladies such as this one are exactly what I picture so this made it completely surreal that I was in this beautiful country.  If you walked through to the kitchen and stood along that balcony you could look out and see exactly where the Mediterranean Sea lined with the skyline and couldn’t help but smile at how pretty it all was.

            Once we got settled in we decided to go out and explore this little town, where everyone knows everyone, and we were those American girls who had come for a visit. We had to walk along the man highway and when I tell you the men do not hold back on the honks, I am not kidding we had our own little theme music along our walk. It did give a nice little boost of confidence but was also very comical as well. Even the men who were driving with their wives did not hold back on the honks and were sometimes the worst offenders.

            We took a nice little hike through the town, finding the city center and realized everything was closed so we decided to scope out the grocery store and snag some food. We thought we were ahead of the game by grabbing things for Easter dinner, seeing as literally nothing would be open, but boy were we wrong. Our dinner ended up consisting of frozen Cordon Bleu and chocolate nutella sandwiches. Let’s just say that’s one holiday dinner I’d never forget.

            Later Saturday night, after some much needed rest we were picked up by the owner of the B&B and brought to this cute little bar. We didn’t have to pay for anything, which I was shocked to experience and the owner was nice enough to introduce us to some of the local boys around town, they even invited us to a BBQ on the beach that coming Monday, which happens to be a holiday in Italy.

            So when Monday rolled around some of the boys came to pick us up to drive us to the beach where they had a BBQ set up and began to make us food. For one, I have never eaten so much in my life I was afraid they were going to keep feeding us and never stop, two this delicious meal was prepared by GUYS, which is simply a shocker in itself. It was nice to be let in on this tradition and to experience with locals that were our age. While communication was a bit difficult it was nice to be out of the touristy areas and in to normal everyday life. While we were at this BBQ I must also point out that a large cattle of goats stampeded down the trail we were on with the head herder on a four wheeler, the most hilarious site I’ve seen.

Throughout the week we visited the beach, which was a crystal clear blue and were able to relax on the sand underneath the warm sun. I also had the chance to try real pasta, gelato, wine as well as PIZZA (the thing I had been looking forward to the most)! The people in this little town were some of the nicest people I have ever met. They worked with us on trying to convey exactly what we wanted or needed and didn’t become snobby when they realized all we knew how to say was hello, goodbye and thank you. Even the little old man who I’ve dubbed Donatello was helpful and tried communicating with us the best way he knew how. When they say Italians know how to be hospitable they were not lying. I honestly cannot wait to go back and do it all over again. It was a beautiful country with some beautiful people (if you know what I mean) and if you ever have the opportunity to take a trip to Italy, do not be afraid to break out of the tourist area’s. Try to travel down the path less traveled by people such as yourself, you’ll never know what you’re bound to find.