Last day in Sorrento

At this point it's clear I'm in a different place from my traveling companions, who arrived in Italy a week before I did. They are definitely ready to go home. I'm ready to stay.

Sorrento is a really nice place. The town is a funny mix between fancy kinds of things and cheap trinkets and regular town kinds of stores. Beach towns are the same everywhere, and though technically this isn't a beach town (because of the lack of beach) it's a shore resort town, and that's what they have around here. You can here all you want about the Amalfi coast (which Sorrento lies just north of), but you won't here much about beaches. Positano, probably the most famous town around here, has no beach to speak of. I was talking with someone in a store today whose son is spending a few months in Cape May, and I was saying that he would see what a real beach looks like.

That said, we went to the beach today. If the purpose of said visit was to get fried, we succeeded. Celia and I both got burnt. Her worse, but both of us got it. If the purpose was to see where the locals go to the beach, we succeeded at that too. For once in a long time, we were in a place where nobody else was speaking English. But there were lots of Italians with their kids, jabbering away. I should say that the Italian language is structured such that even a sober, rational conversation will sound like jabbering to a non-Italian person, but most of it really sounds like jabbering anyway and it probably is. People are very expressive here, in whatever way you an think of.

After all that time in the sun, it was nice to get back to the hotel, sit in the shade and have lunch. It was very pleasant. We spent the afternoon inside. I went for a dip in one of the hotel pools (they have 5, each spilling down into the next) and had a beautiful view of the bay and the town.

After a few hours, we decided to get dinner, so we walked through a few of the side streets, which are all full of shops selling all kinds of things with lemons. Sorrento is famous for their lemons, which grow to about the size of large navel oranges and are a little sweeter than the ones we’re used to. You can buy lemoncello everywhere, and many other things made into sweet liqueurs and with lemons painted or pictured on them.

The street was packed with people, some local, many of them tourists. We ended up in the main square, where we ate at the sprawling café smack in the middle of everything. It was fun peoplewatching and the food was pretty good. Then a last stop for a last gelato and then back to finish packing. Home tomorrow.