It’s a wonderful vacation so far, the apartment where we are staying has a long, connecting balcony so our whole party of 15 can sit together and enjoy the spectacular view of Lago di Garda and the sunsets over the mountains across the lake. All of the adults look pretty much the same as the last time I saw them, an average of about 5 years , which is a good thing at our age, and the kids are all much taller, which is also a good thing. One of my nephews can do the Rubik’s Cube thing, which amazed me enough, but it only took him about 2 or 3 minutes, which knocked me out. The beach is not crowded at all, the weather has been hot, in between the rainstorms, the food is Italian, you can’t go wrong with that, and it hasn’t been quite as expensive as I feared.
Juliet’s Tourist Trap
But getting internet access has been a fucking nightmare, which is why I missed blogging for two days and I apologize. First, we thought we would have wi-fi in our room, but that was just an unwarranted assumption on our part and, since the place is satisfactory in every other respect, I can’t complain too much. I thought perhaps if we walked into the village we would find some place that had wi-fi, a cafe or something, but the village is basically a couple of restaurants and a really cool old white church with a very tall belltower at a clogged crossroad, population I’m guessing under 100, and nobody seemed even slightly interested in the internet. Maybe this is a good thing, I have been forced to actually participate in reality for the last couple of days and that is an important thing, a refresher course in life away from the computer.
Today we decided to visit Verona and I thought, being a real city, it would be no problem. Well, it’s been a problem, even in the restaurant where we are sitting now they got me connected, after giving me a scrawled out password which we couldn’t read – the H looked like an M and the M looked like 14, but we harrassed the poor waiter enough that eventually he did it for me and here we are.
One note about Verona, the major tourist attraction here is “Juliet’s Balcony” which of course is nonsense, but it’s interesting to me that a fictional character in a work by a foreign author from over 400 years ago has become real enough, in history, that people are lined up to pay money to go in and stand on that balcony and get their picture taken. Fiction becomes reality, when it’s good enough.
www.gurukalehuru.com 