Monterosso Day 2

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Sleep…hmm well I’m sure I did but seemed that I was awake more often than sleeping. Although we are off the main drag, (what I mean by that is we re back of the narrow lane that serves as the main street here, it is classed as “the old part” so everything seems tiny) it is still really noisy. Between the church bells and some other bell something goes off every half an hour, trains, lost tourists, locals that stagger home drunk and have a discussion in the laneway under our window, dogs, cats, stereo’s, tv’s, babies crying and all sorts of other noises neither of us slept well. It feels like we are living with everyone else in Monterosso as the walls of the other buildings are that close I could touch them. We both thought as we had had a pretty full on day and the 3 days and (late) nights with H we would both pass out…maybe tonight?

We went for a run/walk this morning to have a look around and then decided to take care of domestic stuff like phoning banks, booking train tickets to Rome and making enquires about the cost of sending all the excess stuff we don’t need home at the post office. It will cost between $100-$200 to send stuff home, money well spent we reckon cause we don’t have to cart it and pay any excess on it. Phoning home is proving difficult as all instructions when using reverse charges or phone cards are in Italian. Now we do understand quite a bit of the lingo but not a voice on the other end of the phone! Next plan is to phone the guy who has rented us the apartment…he did say if we need anything…and it is so we can pay him!

We are both not that impressed with Monterosso so far, it just doesn’t have the feel of the rest of the country that we have experienced so far. It feels like a place where tourists are a plenty (yes I know we are 2 of them) and money is extracted at the rate of knots. A focaccia for e.g. is 5.10E at one place just at the end of our laneway which is around $8.30 and is nothing special. We called into a beachfront place today and had the same thing for just 3.50E. Being beachfront we expected the prices to be the other way round…anyway it was delicious and we may return this evening for dinner.

The locals seem fed up to the back teeth with tourists and can be quite abrupt. We have found just a few Italian words (which must sound really bad to them) and a smile generally goes down well!

Finally got the phone thing sorted out with no help from the guy who has rented us the apartment, I think I have worn a path to the phone box! I was able to draw some money out and we’ll pay the guy tomorrow.

Dinner was at a little Trattoria and we had what is now becoming our staple diet of spaghetti al regu, bread and vino blanco. After dinner we waltzed along the promenade the breeze from the sea was lovely and cool after such a hot steamy day.

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