Today we decided to go to Avellino and change some dollars to Euros.  As the town that Antonella’s parents live in is so incredibly small, there was not a place to change money.  It is most likely due to the fact that there is not much of a tourist base there.  In fact, when I come into town, everyone says, “Ciao, Americano!”  Not only do they know my nationality, they also know what I am doing there and whom I am visiting.  I like it like that.

We catch a bus from the front steps of Antonella’s parents’ house and wind down a narrow road the 20 or so kilometers to Avellino.  From the bus stop, we walked to the joint we exchanged the money.  Five hundred dollars almost got me three hundred Euros!

Avellino is a pretty town, though there is not a whole lot to do there.  We walked around and window shopped.  We stopped at a travel agency, to find out the best way to get to Caserta and Capri the following week.   The line was incredibly long, and did not seem to move, so we walked around trying to find another one.  As with most shopping ventures, we never go straight there–we window shop all the way there.  Down the main road, they were working on utilities, so we could not hear one another, or think, due to the jack hammers.  Once we stopped at another travel agent, we really didn’t find out anything useful.

After we left there, we made a wrong turn, which costed us a couple of minutes.  It really wasn’t a big deal, other than we had walked a bit already.  Eventually we found our way back to the bus station.  We went ahead and purchased our tickets for Caserta for our trip in the coming week. 

The big problem is not getting to Avellino from their small town–there are buses running just about every hour or so.  The problem is getting back.  We waited at the bus station, and the drivers just stand around for a while until they are ready to go.  Then they crank their buses and change the sign, and they are off with no announcement or warning of any kind.  So, we waited for a while.  And waited.  Then, after perhaps two hours, Antonella called her parents to see if her Dad would come get us, which he did.  However, since traffic is quite bad around that time (rush hour), we had to walk about a mile and a half to meet him.  Antonella thought we would have plenty of time, so she stopped and looked at perfume on the way.  When we got there, her Dad was waiting, and had been since we stopped to smell the roses.

I woke up at about 9 and we all discussed what we were going to do for the day.  Since Laura (Antonella’s sister) and Teresa (their mother) were there, Sophia had plenty of attention.  Guido, Antonella’s brother, came by as Laura was cutting Antonella’s hair.  Teresa was telling Antonella how we should cut Sophia’s hair.  She thought it being uneven with the little curls was unacceptable.  I told her that it was cute, and it stayed.  Guido was wanting me to “fix” his computer.  He said he had some virus or something.  I would say I am always glad to help people with their computers, but I was on vacation.  Besides, people don’t usually complain until the computers are hosed up pretty bad and unusable.  I fixed the problem, which was the Genuine Advantage Notification popping up every time he logged in.  Apparently, it can be turned off by deleting an .exe in the System32 folder.

After that, Guido started showing me some prefabricated house kits he was thinking about purchasing.  Prefab houses in the U.S. means either “modular shit house” or “log cabin”.  But in Europe, it means a nice little Swiss Chalet.  There were some very nice kits.  Guido fixed us some coffee and we had a shot of Grappa.  We then loaded up in the car to go to Avellino, which was about 20km away.

In Italy, they keep some pretty peculiar hours.  Most ”Mom ‘n’ Pops” usually open from around seven or eight o’clock and then close at eleven o’clock, only to reopen at four o’clock and close around six or seven o’clock.  The place Guido wanted to go was closed, so we went to a department store called “Progress.”  It had a lot of interesting stuff to look at, from furniture to bathroom fixtures, to light fixtures.  All of the stuff in Europe is so much classier.  There isn’t any of that cheesy “country” stuff.  Guido was looking at a new chair for his computer.  He wanted a red one, which he found after about 30 minutes.  Well, he got a receipt to go pick it up at the warehouse.  We then browsed the store and headed to checkout.  Guido bought a phone charger, since his dog Taffy had mangled the old one.  We stopped at the warehouse and picked up the chair and went back to the place Guido wanted to go, now that it was a little after four o’clock.

The place was an electronics store.  Guido was picking up his Asus Handheld computer that he had getting repaired.  He mainly used it for the GPS feature.  He said it was neat, but it made him lazy.  Now he required it to go most anywhere.  He hooked it up and we drove back to Bonzano while basking in the warm glow of its display, transfixed.

I went back to Antonella’s parents’ house and recounted the day to Antonella.  We then ate dinner and didn’t do much else.  Sophia was ready for bed at around eleven, which was welcomed change.

We woke up around noon, as dictated by Sophia having gone to sleep at five in the morning, and had breakfast.  Italian breakfast is usually just some pastry and a cappucino.  Unfortunately, I had no change of clothes.  I still had on my jeans that were “marked” by Sophia.  After breakfast Guido, Antonella’s brother, took me to his house to get some clothes.  He gave me some orange pants, a beige windbreaker, and some beige shoes that had eights on the side like bowling shoes or something.  The pants made me look like an escaped convict, but at least they were clean.

From there, we went to the market and bought some T-shirts and some underwear.  Shopping in a small store like that is just strange.  They keep most of the merchandise behind the counter, and you just tell the person what you need and they get it for you.  Normally that would be fine, though I don’t know if I needed help picking out underwear.  Another thing about shopping in Italy is there is no refund policy.  You bought it, you got it for the long haul.  Of course, you may be able to exchange it for a similar item, but you will not get money back.

Afterwards, we went back and just talked a bit before dinner and saw some more relatives.  Laura, Antonella’s sister whom lives in Florence, bugged out to go visit some old friends.  I went to Guido’s and we watched Minority Report and some Hallmark-esque movie about Montessori, the woman who started the teaching method employed by those schools of the same name.  I didn’t understand a lot, as the former was dubbed and the latter was made in Italian; that is, neither had subtitles.  Guido started to fall asleep so I returned to Antonella’s parents’ house to go to sleep.  It was 1:30 A.M.

Upon returning, I discovered that Laura had returned before me and locked me out of the house.  Right then, as if it was planned, it started to rain.  I grabbed an umbrella and went around to the room we were staying.  The room was on the second floor, but the house was built into the side of a hill, so the window was only about 8 feet off the ground.  I used the umbrella to tap on the shutter.  I did this a couple of times without success, where I would walk back to the porch to escape the rain.  After about the third or fourth time, I walked back around and Antonella could see me through the glass paned front door.  This was largely due to the fact I was wearing the bright orange pants.  So we laughed about the pants and then went to bed.  Sophia finally went to sleep at 3 A.M., which was two hours earlier than the previous night, and we were happy about that.

I suppose I should have expected a little bit of a problem on the flight over.  There are various degrees of trouble, and ours was between the extremes–somewhere between Amelia Earhardt and a hangnail.  We had arrived plenty early to catch the flight; we left the house six hours before.  And with only about a two hour drive, we figured that would still give us plenty of time.  You could feel the forces of evil drawing nigh.

Absentmindedly, I had put my wife’s married name on her ticket when I should have put her maiden name, which was still the name on her passport.  She would have changed it by now, but her passport is Italian and she is about to file her citizenship paperwork.  It would be a waste of time and money to go through changing her passport only to then get a U.S. passport six months later.  I think the last time she got her passport it was like three hundred dollars (there were some extra fees for doing it abroad through the consulate.)

Changing a name on a ticket apparently can be done, but not without a great deal of trouble.  One would think that in the information age such a feat would be trivial.  This is not true.  The manager at the counter took her ticket and went back to fix it and returned almost an hour later.  We were getting some evil stares from the queue of people for holding things up, even with our ten month old talisman, Sophia.

Once he finally emerged, he told us of all the rigamarole he had to perform to get her name changed and that we probably would have to do it again on the way back.  He also told us that our flight had been delayed two hours, but that we would have no trouble making our connection (we only had a two-hour layover).  I told him that and he said, “Relax, they can make that up in the air.”  That’s nice, but if they could make it up in the air, why don’t they just fly that fast to begin with, make it a seven hour flight?

Sophia was good on the flight, as many elderly people were quick to point out.  She cried during the last thirty minutes, as she was just so tired.  She could not get comfortable enough to sleep and just kept playing and eating the whole trip.  But, I guess that was not a big deal to people who had kids before.  Of course, I am sure those that did not have kids were grumbling under their breath.

We landed at Heathrow only five minutes later than our original time.  As I walked up the jetway and into the airport I remember thinking, “What a shithole of an airport.”  For a socialized government, I would have expected a little more.  I mean, Heathrow is the busiest airport in England, and I would expect some show of economic power.  I guess they spend all of their money on their Royals. 

I remember reading somewhere, probably in a Bill Bryson book, that British people loved to wait in queues.  I do not know if that was a sarcastic remark, or if they British people are just so obedient and courteous that they dare not protest.  I got my first taste of that when I saw there were queues to get on the moving walkway.  They had the tapes like the people corrals at check-in, and someone that was an airport employee that would play traffic cop, and open and close the tapes.  It was both amusing and aggravating.  I usually like to hustle to the gate to make my connection and I don’t usually stop until I get there.  Lucky for us, we made the flight with no problems.

About halfway on the two-hour flight from London to Rome, Sophia decided to “go poopie.”  Of course whomever put the diaper on put it on a little loose, so crap was oozing from one of the sides.  Antonella grabbed a cloth diaper that she was using as a burp cloth and held it underneath to keep it from making more of a mess; however, the damage was done.  I was the unfortunate soul that was holding her at the time, so my jeans had a little camouflage action added to them.  I went to the bathroom and let the changing table down.  I was trying to clean her up and me up and she was rolling over and crawling around on the table playing peek-a-boo with herself in the lavatory mirror, which was just around the corner.  She was laughing and having a big time.  After about ten minutes of trying to clean everything up, Antonella knocked and asked me if everything was alright.  I told her about it and she started laughing.  She had brought a diaper and offered to finish, so I let her.  That was the last diaper, and about forty-five minutes later, she used that one up.  I had originally packed about 30 diapers, but Antonella thought it was excessive and removed all but ten.  I think that was a pretty bad decision.

Once we arrived in Rome, we waited by the baggage carousel for our bags.  We saw the two hundred and some odd people grab their bags and head off to their destinations.  Eventually there were only about ten of us, and one bag that nobody wanted that kept running the serpentine course through the lobby and then back behind the wall.  I watched it go around about three or four times thinking that one last load of baggage would join it.  Great, even with a two hour layover our bags did not make it.  And we did not know it yet but they would not find us for another two days.

Antonella’s brother Guido and his wife Manuella were waiting for us.  I went out to wait with them while Antonella told them our information to deliver our luggage.  It was about a two hour drive to their house from Rome.  At that point, we were exhausted.  Sophia slept most of the way back. 

Once we got there, they had a big sign hanging from the door “Bienvenuti Sofia” and a lot of balloons.  There were a lot of people.  We got to see her cousins’ babies and say “Hi” to everyone then they left, saying they would see us the next day.  We thought that we would be able to go straight to sleep, but Sophia had other plans.  She did not go to sleep until five in the morning.