The Croissant Smuggler

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I head down to breakfast alone. Issy's asked me to bring her back a croissant. There's a large sign on the buffet saying that all food is to be eaten in the restaurant, and there's to be no takeaway. I wonder if I've got the courage to smuggle a croissant back to the room, and what they might do to me if I get caught. I casually walk over to the croissant table, and sneak one into a serviette. I'm pretty sure that no one saw me. I hope that Issy's grateful for the enormous risk that I've just taken.

The booking site for the hotel said that it had a shuttle transfer service to take guests to and from the town, so I ask the receptionist when this leaves. She isn't very friendly, and she wasn't overly friendly when we checked in last night either. I think she's probably in the wrong job. She says that the shuttle service is only for when people first arrive and finally leave, and there's nothing in between times. The hotel doesn't have a restaurant, and it's about two kilometres from town up a steep hill with no lighting. The shuttle service was supposed to pick us up from the port when we arrived last night, but it didn't turn up. Some shuttle "service".

We walk down into the town. It's very pretty and much bigger than we thought it'd be. The centre's closed off to cars and is awash with shops and restaurants. The main street connects the port we arrived at last night to a smaller but much prettier port at the other end of town.

We've noticed that just about everyone here seems to be Italian, which is in stark contrast to Sorrento where about half the people were English. So this is where Italians come for their holidays, well except of course for the rich and famous amongst them who go to Capri and Positano. I think I prefer here, although maybe that's got a bit to do with the streets not all being lined with the luxury clothing and jewellery shops that the more well heeled among us seem to need, on holidays or not.

We walk up the hill from the waterfront to the original ancient walled town - the Castello di Lipari. The castle wall encloses the castle itself, a cathedral, an archaeological site, and an archaeological museum. It seems that Lipari was first colonised by the Greeks in the fifth century BC, and the archaeological site is the excavated remains of the Greek Acropolis. Lipari seems to have been invaded at some stage or another by just about everyone who's anyone from around the Mediterranean. After the Greeks came the Carthaginians, followed by the Romans, the Saracens, the Normans, the Spanish, and finally the Italians. The Turkish pirate Barbarossa savaged the island in the sixteenth century and carted virtually all the inhabitants off into slavery. We go into the very impressive and peaceful Cathedral, which has a twelfth century Norman cloister off to the side. We move onto the museum which houses displays of artefacts from all periods of human settlement from all over the Aeolian Islands. Standouts includes burial sarchophaguses and Greek masks. It also has a large collection of urns recovered from Spanish ships which were sunk off the coast. These are all stacked up together in a number of different displays. They're all pointy at the bottom, so it's not all that clear what's holding them up, and why they don't all fall over. I manage to resist the almost irresistible urge to accidentally nudge one of them to see what happens, which is probably just as well; I've got no reason to believe that an Italian jail would be any more pleasant than any of its international counterparts. We look a bit more closely and see that the urns are held together by bits of fishing line. I hope it's strong. One of the display boards makes reference to a famous eleventh century Lipari resident named Count Ruggerio The Old. I assume he wasn't always called that.

We walk back up to the hotel. It's hot, and the last bit of the climb is up a precipitously steep driveway. I reflect again on the hotel shuttle "service" or lack thereof. I try to make friends with the hotel dog, but it tries to bite my arm off. They say that dogs are like their owners, so I suspect it's probably owned by the receptionist. I go for a dip and we both have a well earned siesta.

We make the long trek back down into town and dine at a restaurant in one of the many narrow alleyways off the main street. In Sorrento just about everyone spoke English, but because everyone here is Italian, it seems that English is not that widely spoken or understood. Ordering food is proving to be a bit of a challenge. We struggle to communicate with our first waiter, so he calls for reinforcements. Issy says that she's heard that Italian and Spanish are quite similar. She's noticed that I've been trying to learn some Spanish for the past year and a half from an app on my iPad. I suspect she's found this a bit hard not to notice. I wear headphones when I use the app, and it gets you to repeat words and phrases to make sure that you're pronouncing them correctly. I suspect that maybe I tend to talk a bit loudly while I'm wearing the headphones, and I usually practice sitting next to her on the couch while she's trying to watch TV. She says that if Spanish and Italian are so similar, maybe I should try to speak to the waiters in Spanish. I think they understood us better when we were speaking English.

We finish dinner with a couple of limoncellos and catch a taxi back to the hotel, which costs us north of twenty dollars for a five minute ride. I wonder if we can claim the cost back from the same booking site that spruiked the phantom "shuttle service".

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