italy

Italy! I was a bit apprehensive about going to Italy. I imagined the people would be loud and outgoing and that socially it would be quite demanding, which made me feel nervous and shy in advance. However, we have loved our encounters with Italians so far - they are talkative, as I imagined, but very gentle and smiling, and they speak Italian to us slowly which is comforting even though we do not know the language. Consistently, despite knowing we don't speak Italian, they speak Italian to us anyway and magically we seem to understand a lot of what they are saying. They use hand gestures and look you in the eye as they speak. During this trip we have realised you can converse quite well with people without sharing a word of each other's language as long as you are both up for it. Miming, gesturing and facial expressions can go a long way and the most important factor seems to be not so much whether someone knows some English but whether they are willing to just have a conversation anyway. We had a great time talking to the train conductor when we caught a train with our bikes in desperation on a particularly rainy day. He was so impressed by our journey that he kept telling other passengers about us as they got on and off.
Anyway, here are some photos from Italy thus far..

we tried to snap some of the snazzy passers-by while we had a coffee in Bari

Matthew eating a gelato in his new (free) hat. He also got a Skoda one (bright orange) - tough choice.

I was excited to see a quote by Walter Benjamin as I've been reading his essays on the road - I think this translates to "There is nothing more epic than the sea" (please correct me if I'm wrong)