O Sole Mio!

Ciao, Assisi!  Buongiorno, beautiful pink city on a hill!  Arrivaderci, life-changing Ravioli!

We took our leave of our first city this morning.  We arrived fairly early at the train station (I misread the train schedule) and got to chill for a while.  First, we had a lunch of Panini made of flour tortillas, dried meat and cheese.  Then we serenaded people waiting for the trains (Hannah brought her travel guitar).  Nobody spat on us which was good. 

We even had smoke effects for our performance.  Note: Hannah doesn’t feel like she fits in in Porland because she doesn’t have tattoos.  Here in Italy, she doesn’t feel like she fits in because she doesn’t smoke 5 packs a day (or at all).   

It took quite a while to get to Rome Termini Station.  When we finally did, we got in line to get tickets to Naples and immediately got on another train – this time a high speed train.  We went 310 km/hr! 

We arrived in Napoli a little after 6:00PM and took a cab to our hotel, Hotel del Golfo.  NAPLES IS CRAZY!  Streets are a tight mix of cars, scooters and people – all of whom act like it’s everybody else’s job to watch where they’re going.  I’ve never seen streets so chaotic.  Rome looks like a country town in comparison. 

Our new room is pretty sweet.  The hotel doesn’t look like much from the outside, but our room on the 3^rd floor is HUGE and has a balcony!  Okay, the balcony overlooks cars and some garbage (they collected it this evening and it took them 20 minutes to get it all) but hey, it’s a BALCONY!

We took a walk about a quarter mile to a pizzeria that I found in my travel book.  The people here are quite a mix, but I’m pretty sure everybody here “knows somebody who knows somebody”, if you get my drift.  Everywhere you look, it’s like watching the Sopranos.

Our first pizza was soooo good – fire oven baked with a fantastic mix of cheeses, meats, funghi (mushrooms) and sauce.  YUM.  Accompanied by a cold Fanta, it doesn’t get much better.

Hannah continues to practice her Italian.  Tonight, she has been repeating, "Mi dispiace" which means "I'm sorry".  I asked her why she kept repeating it.  She said, "I'm just practicing being sorry."

Tomorrow we go exploring!  Naples is gi-normous so there’s no way we can even see a fraction of the sites.  But we’ll do our best.  Where there’s a will, you know.  Hope all is well with you all.  Love you!