Paolo Does Europe - Sept. 2

I rolled out of Genova this morning and met this cool dude Christian (pictured far left, ordering the goods).

Christian is 30 and also Italian-American. We met at the bus stop outside the hostel at 7 a.m. and realized that we were both going to Cinque Terra. He speaks excellent Italian and basically got me here to Monterosso, the northern-most city of the Cinque Terra.

We ditched the shitty hostels and are splitting a double room in a hotel called Souvenir right off the main drag and two minutes from the public beach -- and that's right where we headed after dropping our luggage. This place is paradise. The end.

Christian and I had "appertizi" or Italian happy hour and scored a couple bottles of wine from a local named Benjamin. The wine was very tasty and now I'm a little tipsy and my penmanship sucks.

Our first dinner in Monterosso was um... interesting. We went out with some other Americans we met at our hotel. The actual food was great. I had a black pasta made of squid with prawns. Everyone else enjoyed their meals, too. But dude, these other Americans were assholes. They spoke plain English and made no attempts to try translations. They complained about their trip and really only wanted to get drunk. Do that at your frats, dumbshits.

One guy in particular was a real pessimist and probably gets off on telling young children that Santa isn't real. The other downer was that our dinner was quite expensive because we didn't understand that we were ordering two servings of several dishes and were therefore double-charged. I believe this happened in part because our company were such dicks to the waitstaff.

After dinner, we all went to the wine shop and I got a great bottle of a local D.O.C. 2002 Rosso for half off, approximately $15E. We took our drinks down to a "beach party" which consisted of a lot of techno-mixed American music, teens and a constant strobe light. Ek.

Upon talking more to the other Americans, I discovered that a lot of people traveling are in their late 20s to early 30s. It surprised me at first, but makes sense because they actually have the means to travel for an extended period of time.

I met a couple of 18-year-old English girls. God I love those accents. They had an odd obsession with American clothing, especially Abercrombie and Fitch? As I speak to more Europeans I realize they have no idea where Seattle is, don't know Washington is a state and think California is the entire West Coast. My thoughts are becoming sloppy and random now, which must means it's time to retire from this writing business for the evening.