It is hot here.
Holy poop.
And I can’t even say “It’s a dry heat” because it’s not. It is, however, still beautiful despite the fountains of sweat.
My room opens up onto one of the back patios, and I can see the Mediterranean from bed if I leave the shutters open. But because I’m on the ground floor, the trees in the back yard cut the wind coming off the sea significantly, so it’s super warm. So I leave those shutters open whenever I’m home.
I woke about an hour before sunrise on Monday, so I decided to get up and get a few sunrise photos. We don’t get as spectacular sunrises as we do sunsets here, of course, because Italy is in the way. But the illuminated storm clouds were pretty.
The day started off quiet. We got cleaned up, and then ventured out to the little local grocery store.
The produce section at Supermercado AZ
And I’m not kidding when I say little. Most aisles should have been one way.
We successfully acquired lunch meat, rolls, fruit and some other sundries, and then proceeded to get lost on the way home because Clay didn’t turn on Waze as soon as he should have. We got a nice tour of the dirt roads in the foothills.
We had a great lunch on the patio, and then adjourned to the tv room for couch naps.
Mmmm… naps.
Completely forgetting that everything shuts down between 1:30 and 4:30, we headed into Vibo Marina again in search of a bigger grocery store so that we could pick up some supplies for the babies before they got here. The marina was nigh on abandoned at 3:30. So we wandered around for a while, and found a church with a sign about a festival starting this week in honor of Maria of the Rosary of Pompeii. There are church events and secular events for a few days. Should prove to be fun.
When 4:00 rolled around, everyone started moving, on their way back to work. The Sun, our gelato destination from the previous night, opened pretty quickly, so we got some sodas and sat in the shade. I “checked in” to the location again using Swarm, and it turns out that I’m now “The Mayor” of The Sun!
I might as well be walking on the sun…
We were able to find a nice grocery store that had everything we needed. I tried to get at least the basics in with Google Translate. “Small container of olives.” “Quarter kilo of Napoli salame.” Those were pretty simple. But a few times I had to use Vocre, a translation app, especially at the deli counter. It’s kinda cool. You speak into it, and it processes and spits out the words in Italian (or whatever language you set it to). I have no idea how accurate it is, but everyone I used it with broke out into a huge smile when I ended the conversation with “Thank you for your patience.”
We were also able to find a small electronics store to get a curling iron for mom. The first gentleman, when I tried with just the Google Translate, started rattling off Italian that pretty much ended with “my head explodes” before he waved his daughter over to help us. I told her “ferro arricciacapelli” and she smiled, nodded, and dug through her shelves until she found one. She plugged it in to test it, nodded again, and charged us ten Euro.
We got home without another trek into the hills. Mom and I went down to swim at the beach for a bit. Then we made a nice, simple dinner of pasta with pesto and a salad, and we were all in bed by 11:00.
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