We hiked up to some old castle ruins above the vineyards the other day. It seems that every hilltop has old ruins to explore. There were two older French couples picnicking at the ruins. They had packed in a tablecloth, bottles of wine, and a buffet-worthy assortment of food. I brought half a bottle of tap water.
Foreign travel has its relaxing days, but it seems that the way we do it there isn't much "vacation" involved. I packed along a book but have yet to read one page. After map-reading, cooking meals, shopping, driving, setting up and tearing down camp, and writing journals and blogs there just isn't much down time. I like it that way but an occasional day holed up in a junky hotel is kind of a nice rest.
Our biggest moments of comedy come from language misunderstandings. We could write a book about the silly things that we've said or done. One that comes to mind happened in a shopping mall in Italy. The mall corridors had a lot of those kiosks, like the ones in the U.S. where they sell phones and cheap jewelry. They were all manned by aggressive sales people who would come out and try to pitch their wares to you as you walked by. We became experts at waving our hands and saying, "No, grazie", not even listening to their sales pitch. We split up for a while to do some shopping and when the four of us met up again we stopped to discuss our plans for the rest of the day. A vendor came up to us to pitch his wares and Jolene automatically waved her hands and said in Italian, "No thank you". We then continued our discussion, laughing about something. Agitated, the man returned and in broken English asked us to quit blocking the entry to his store. We then realized that he had originally asked us in Italian to please move out of the way and our response was to say "no thanks", laugh, and keep blocking his store entrance. We cracked up thinking about how brash us foreigners must be to say no then laugh at him.
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