I am testing this space for image posting, so I will post some more of the pictures I made during my last trip to Italy. Hahaha… I hope you are not bored with the whole Italy thing. Trust me, I have been meaning to write and share a lot of my journeys, but didn’t have the time. These blogging thing looks easy, but it really is time and energy consuming 🙂 I hope the story is not stale/basi already.

I have said it to all the people I’ve met, and I will say it again: If you have a chance to visit Europe, make sure you put Amalfi, South Italy into your itinerary. You *won’t* regret it. I know I haven’t been around the world that much. But the coastal towns of Sorrento, Positano, Amalfi are breathtakingly beautiful.

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As you can see from the map (you can move and zoom around), it took some time getting from Rome to Sorrento, the largest town in the Amalfi Coast, where we stayed. If I remembered correctly, it took me and Francy almost 12 hours to finally stepped our feet in the Central Station of Sorrento after leaving our plane. We get off our flight in Rome, took the train to the Central Rome Station, where we catch our next train to Napoli, then took the Circumvesuviana Line (Vesuvius being the famous Volcano that is right on the side of the line) to get us to Sorrento, all the while pulling our luggage frantically across Binary (platforms in Italian).

I remember being seriously sleep depriviated, while arriving in Rome Grand Station, asking some big Italiano where the heck is my next Binary. Since everyone in Europe seems reluctant to speak English, we wound up in using some kind of English+Italian+Sign for the Deaf+Tarzan Language of some sort. Can you imagine the scene? I was shouting in English (since I know that I am 5 minutes late) and the guy talked back in Italian, and I cannot understand a word he said, and I talk back in English, and he didn’t understand a word that I said. Eventually, after a show of tickets and a lot of Tarzanesque gesture I finally ran into wherever direction the guy was pointing, and miraculously arrived in my train on time. Don’t be fooled. These trains leave exactly at the dot. While running beside a moving train looks romantic in Holywood movies, I can assure you the feeling of seeing your train leaving the platform without you inside it, is not.

The Grand Station of Milan, Italy. All the train stations here are huge, with platforms up to 50 rows.

The Sorrento train station is way up in the hill overlooking the town. The first thing that crossed my mind after, “Boy, do I need a bath”, is “This town is really pretty.” We arrived quite late, but because it was summer, the sky was still bright, like a 6pm sky here in Jakarta. Raymond picked us up, checked us in, and then we join his family for a late dinner in the middle of the town.

The town scene seems to be alive until late at night. There’s wine, pasta, laughter and singing all over the place 🙂

You know when they say ‘you never eat a sushi until you eat one in Japan’? I think the same is true about eating pasta in Italy. I mean, the pasta here is really-really different from the ones I had in Jakarta. Spaghettis are spaghetti with minced meat and garlic and tomato sauce, a lot of times with some cheese on top of it. But here, spaghetti is just some pasta with some olive oil and very thin tomato juice, definetely with some fresh basil leaves. If you order ‘Spaghetti Frutti di Mare’, which I speculate is ‘Fruits of the Sea’ (read: seafood), you will find some scallop, prawns, calamari, fillet of fish and clams. Boy do I need some of those right now.

This, my friend, is Spaghetti. Or to be more exact, ‘Spaghetti Frutti Di Mare’ If you are in Italy and you say these words to the waiter, you cannot go wrong 🙂

We closed the nite with some gelato (ice cream) and a stroll along the streets of Sorrento. Tomorrow we planned to take the trip to Amalfi coastal towns with Raymond and Stacey, while taking their pictures casually.

As you can see, it is a bit touristy, but still a great atmosphere. The first picture is the view from our hotel balcony, up in the hill.

italy prewedding