finally a little computer time...

My internet time has been severly restricted lately, due to some national Italian holiday and the Italians on the base not working much this month. Apparently August is the vacation month in this country, so many things are closed and many people are off work, but I'm not sure how that's any different from any other month, considering things close here every day from around 1-5pm and I always seem to see tons of Italians out at the beach on week days when you'd think they'd be at work... My work schedule has changed for the last 2 weeks and now I don't start work until 11:30am, which gives me some time to get to the library before hanging out at the pool all day.

This past weekend was fairly uneventful, so I'm going to post some pictures and stuff from the weekend before. On Sunday, my first day off of the weekend, I got up and went to Taormina with a few Air Force guys. Taormina is definitely my favorite city here. It is sooo beautiful, even though the beach is kind of rocky. It was really fun because I got to go on my first scuba diving experience. You have to be certified to go scuba diving, but if you're not certified then you can go on what's called a discovery dive with an instructor. It was so cool. I really liked it, but I don't think I'd actually get certified unless I was living somewhere on the coast where I could go frequently and make it worthwhile.

After we went on our dive, the people who were with us who are certified were going to go and Zora and Heather and I were going to just stay on the boat and tan. Unfortunately, as soon as the instructor who drove the boat jumped off the boat, the Italian Coast Guard came and yelled at us in Italian for a while and told us we couldn't be diving there. So when the instructor finally came back up, we told him and the CG was still so mad at us that they tied our boat to their boat and yelled at us again for about 45 minutes. It was really strange... so after that whole ordeal, the instructor (who happened to be a French guy) took us back to shore and I found a little hammock in a cove behind the dive shop to read and sleep in for the rest of the afternoon. It was really nice... the rest of our group, the ones who were trying earlier, went out and finished their diving while we hung out back on the beach.

After our afternoon at the beach, we drove to a reeeeeally good gelato shop in Taormina (I know I say that I've had the best ice cream ever each weekend, but this was seriously the best). I got caramel flavored gelato and they put it in this roll that was kind of a sweet bread. It was like a literal ice cream sandwich, and it was sooo good. The guys I was hanging out with really know how it's done because we went and had our ice cream before we went to the restaurant and had dinner (my mom always says that's the way to do it; it's easier than saving room for the dessert). The restaurant was really good, too. It was a cute family place with a great view of the ocean from our table.


We got back kind of late that night and decided to get up early the next morning so that we could go hiking at a place about an hour and a half south of the base. The drive down there was beautiful, and we ended up at this mountain that you start at the top of and climb down and then back up. We thought the climb down sucked because it was really steep and there were some places where there were big steps and some places just had big rocks instead. It was hard to climb down, but the bottom was absolutely beautiful. There were these big turquoise lakes of fresh water at the bottom and waterfalls and cliffs you can jump off of. We jumped in and swam around for a while with a ton of Italians, and took a bunch of pictures. It was a lot of fun, but one of the times I jumped in I did something to my ears that hurt really bad and I had the worst headache and earache for the rest of the day that I've ever had in my life. The climb back up was rough; it seemed even more steep going up, and my head hurt so bad. But we made it back up in about 45 minutes (took only 30 minutes to get down) and each consumed a 2L bottle of water at the top. I felt soooo crappy and couldn't even really speak on the way home because of my headache. I think that my head being messed up by the water and hurting so bad had something to do with how carsick I felt on the way back home. I didn't think I was going to make it, and when someone wanted to stop and take a picture of a church, I opened the door and lost it. I couldn't even get out quick enough and threw up all over my feet, and then threw up a few more times before I felt well enough to get back in the car. It was lovely... I saw lots of lettuce from the sandwich I had for lunch. Gross. After that I felt a little better, but still was miserable on the way home. We laughed at ourselves, though, because it was so hot that on the way back up we hiked in our bikinis and running shoes, with our sweaty backpacks on our backs. It was quite comfortable feeling like I wasn't wearing anything, but we probably looked silly to others. Oh well - the Italians are always wearing practically nothing in public.

I can't believe we have less than 2 weeks left here. I'm a little nervous to go back since I still don't know where I'm going to live (any suggestions?) or how I'm going to make money... Hopefully these things will fall in to place. I might get a little more time off next week, so I'll post more exciting pictures soon.