Washing Clothes in the Bidet, 3/31

Today is our third day in Italy. It’s hard to believe that’s it because of all the craziness since leaving Greece. Our last day in Greece, we arrived at the Igoumenitsa ferry dock at 3:30 pm to wait for our 11 pm ferry departure. At least that was one day that I was caught up on my reading. When the ferry docked at 6:30 (after a little confusion about the one hour time change and some people being ready to go at 4:45 in the morning), we didn’t really have any idea where the train station was or how we were all going to get there. Luckily, we weren’t too far into exploring when Jarrett realized that there was a free shuttle to take us to the downtown area, but still not especially close to the train station. So for our first morning all 22 of us were dragging our huge suitcases for blocks and blocks down the main street of Brindisi at 7 am. At the train station, I got my first Italian cappuccino out of a machine for 60 cents- it was great!
At 9 am we got on our first of four trains of the day for a total of eight more hours of travel to reach our final destination, Reggio di Calabria on the southern tip of Italy. Once in Reggio, there was no shuttle to take us to the hotel and 22 of us and our bags were not about to get on a public bus so we all piled into six very small cabs. After a tiring day, night and day I was really ready to check into our hotel but as it turned out our travel agent gave us the name of the wrong hotel so the Primavera, which is where we were, was definitely not ready to take in 21 Americans and one crazy Cypriot. So after an hour, we all got into six more cabs and drove twenty more minutes to our correct hotel.
The whole day of mayhem, while it may have been frighteningly similar to being in Egypt, was more funny than stressful. The best part though was that I got to have my first Italian grocery store experience at Di Per Di and it was great. I made my first tomato, basil and mozzerella salad of the trip for dinner.
All our time on the train also allowed everyone to start getting excited about learning Italian so everyone had their phrase books and dictionaries out. Rick Steves proved to have some interesting tips for women in his “Help for Women” section; we learned phrases like “my male/female friend has a venereal disease,” “Police, I have a communicable disease” and “sono lesbica”.