Today we go to Como, my friends. Right now, actually, I have to confess that I am sort of still in Como. I didn’t take too many pictures there because I was having such an intensely good time and I didn’t want to spoil it by messing with the camera. Also, of course, because the camera didn’t feel like working a lot of the time.
Anyway, I give you the wrapper of my favorite chocolate bar, purchased at a Swiss grocery store in anticipation of my journey to Northern Italy. It was a very long train ride and I spent a lot of it working on my orange and pink hat, which somehow managed to get a lot of holes in it while I was decreasing for the crown. I was afraid to unstitch the whole thing when I had it off the needles so I just took some extra yarn and sewed up the holes. It looks okay though.
As I mentioned earlier, I was unable to decipher the Geneva train station and had to say goodbye to Dave and Joey while they were waiting in line to change their money back to euros and run over to find my train. I could not figure out where I was supposed to be. I asked someone in Italian if this was the right train, and lo and behold it was the right train, but then there was a whole thing about what car I was supposed to sit in because at some point during the journey the train would split like a dividing yeast cell and if I was in the wrong car I would end up who knows where. So it was a little tense. I finally found where I was supposed to be and sat and knit, and began to freak out about not being able to speak Italian.
And if there’s anything to make you really freak out it’s alighting in Milano Centrale station when you have half an hour to find your connecting train and you are convinced that you need to get an Italian-English dictionary. So I did that and ran around and got on the second train and hated Italy for a while and thought longingly of the quiet train station in Tours where I could find the trains and speak the language and knew how to validate my ticket and where I could have a sausage-and-butter sandwich and my beloved Volvic Citron Vert, of which I bought a six-pack in France and ought to have bought at least three more because it was the best water ever, if water can be said to be the best. I was scared of the terrifying carabinieri with their assault rifles and sniffer dogs and I didn’t exactly know how I was going to find the hostel and my last experience at a hostel had been fair to middling at best. So it was with a heavy heart that I arrived at La Primula and got settled in.
It got better though, almost immediately. I was sulking in a corner on the veranda (the hot spot of Menaggio nightlife, apparently) and finally got over myself to join another table comprised mostly of 20-year-old American college girls and one lone Brit, and it all went uphill from there. Once I had some risotto in me I was rapidly becoming best friends with everyone there and also had the sublime experience of introducing myself to an actual Italian and being told that my name was a little easier to remember amongst all the Erins and Lexis and so forth. Man, I love that.
The whole week was spent walking around the little town piazza and walking around other little piazzas in other little towns and eating gelato and meeting new people and talking and laughing and generally enjoying myself. It was so beautiful there too…not the most exciting place ever, probably, but staying at the hostel itself was so fun that I didn’t care. Anyway, who am I kidding, it’s not as though if it had been a happening town that I would have taken advantage of it anyway, right? It was sort of like being at camp, what with the bunk beds and the easy friendships and the little currents of flirtation and the long, easy days. In my head I’m there right now.
As I mentioned, I didn’t take many pictures (I had things to do, okay?) but I did manage to get a few at the gorgeous Villa Monastero gardens in beautiful Varenna, across the lake by ferry from Menaggio. We’d been hanging out in Varenna all day, just wandering around goggling at the lake and feeding some swans that wanted to kill me, right before a big wave came along and soaked me from ankle to knee:
and happened to find these gardens. They cost two euros to get in and I was not about to spend money on blah blah blah but of course we went in and I was immediately struck by Stendahlismo, which is what happens when you are hot and tired and sweaty and you get into a garden full of Greek temples and pine trees and roses and the lake. You see what I mean, right? It’s like it’s not even real.
Every day seemed like it had eight hundred hours to it, so there was time to eat lunch and sit in the piazza and walk by the lake and drink wine on the hostel veranda (well, everyone else drank wine) and confess secrets to strangers and swing in the porch swing and discover a jar of Nutella in the grocery store literally bigger than my head (again, no picture! Just pretend!) and find myself apologizing on behalf of one’s nation’s policy vis-