Italia

Arrived in Italy on saturday night and started off with a wonderful cliche; a beautiful, suave Italian man named Francesco. He works at the restaurant pretty much next to my bed so I see him every day. All the little girls here are madly in love with him, it's quite funny. Unfortunately, with him I also get a few hundred Dutch people; not exactly the reason I came to Italy, so I am trying to find as much to do as possible so that I am not hanging around here too much. All we hear all day is Dutch apres-ski music that is hugely popular with the kids here, "Ik heb een heli-heli-heli-helikopter" over and over and over again. It makes us very sad. The campsite next to ours is atleast twice as big and sells frikandellen and bitterballen... all we get is cheese and the Telegraaf newspaper.


Started off with a walk into Peshiera del Garda by night which was lovely. Very tourist oriented and always busy, but quite pretty nonetheless. Went back again on monday morning to see the local market that was described as "really good" but was crazy busy with foreigners (mostly Dutch people) and only sold touristic crap, and fake designer clothes/shoes/bags so was ultimately very dissappointing. Also one of the big give aways that pretty much nothing in Peshiera is authentically Italian.


Went to Verona to see if that was any better, and it was. Only the so called "casa della Guilietta" made me a bit sad. Supposedly it is the house where Shakespeare's Juliet lived, bu t the famous balcony wasn't built until a few hundred years later, so the touristy feeling came right back. The Arena was lovely though; a miniature colloseum that is still operational and does regular showings of Aida, Romeo and Juliet, Comedy of Errors, Don Giovanni and other lovely things like that. The general feeling of the town is great, and the market there was a lot better (and quite importantly, a lot less crowded with tourists), though it too sold only shotglasses, bad souvenirs and Venetian masks, which is funny because Venice is another 150 km to the East.

Tomorrow we're going to visit Sermione, and Friday we'll head off to Venice by train. I wanted to post photos, but they are in RAW format, and my sad little laptop cannot understand nor convert them for you, so they'll have to wait till I return.


Now I'm off to work on the real reason why I got myself some WIFI in the first place: my thesis, which I really need to get finished if I want to start my MA in September.


Much love, and see you soon.


Evi