rxdxt

ok I LOVE Italy, where I just spent 6 days in San Felice Circeo (which is the mythical site of Odysseus' encounter with Circes). BTW if you haven't been there it's amazing. The food is to die for; chicken, fish, buffalo mozzarella, pasta. We had a lovely woman named Maria who came with the house - MAN she could cook. It was truly fabulous. The house overlooked the water, I could walk them down to a series of natural rock pools and swim in them and check out the crabs and fish (I did cut my foot on some coral, but hey, it's vacation you need to shed a little blood to really relax - it's a contact sport)

At night, I'd coat myself with mosquito repellent and sit out on a patio overlooking the water and work on strategic docs for two of my news projects, one which is top-secret, and one which is Your Truman Show whose board I joined last week. Seriously it made me want to move there forever and escape.

EXCEPT. Barely working cell phones, non-working blackberry, and apparently the entire nation of Italy has NO WIFI!

I don't mean limited wifi, I don't mean drive down to town to get it wifi, I mean NO wifi. even more so, the only internet cafe would only let you use their virus ridden, slow computers during their opening hours which seemed to shift every day and in no way even roughly resemble those posted on their website or sign (which were different). Literally I could not get on email. Normally, this would have been amazing and relaxing, but i had some VERY critical things I needed to do and couldn't do and it became quite stressful, especially when we would get in the car, drive into town and find them not open with no sign of when they would return.

So then we went to Rome. Now supposedly the entire central park borghese is wired for wifi, and in fact there were full bars of signals, but there was no way to register without an it alien cell phone, or really even with one. the log-in code was broken. Again classic italy, wifi everywhere but no way to actually use it. When we got on the train for a train home, (Tavin has an injury to hear ear and cannot fly for a week so we had to train it back) we met loads of Americans, none of whom could, in any way find working wifi in the city of Rome, or even anywhere in Italy south of Milano.

The train ride was excruciating. A sleeper train it was a rough ride. the kids cried, there were gypsies on the train who robbed most of us (not us because I was up with a screaming Zoe and blocked them from sneaking into the cube!) Seriously the train sucked - an I had such romantic imaginings. Then we got dumped in a paris train station like 10 miles south of paris! not Du Nord, or Du Gare, or one of the metro stops, but literally out in the boonies. NO TAXI's! Almost missed the chunnel home.

With that said, on reflection, it was still a nice, if frantic vacation. I do love Italy, i'll just plan next time to tell everyone I'm going to Italy, it's like the north pole, assume I'm dead till you hear I've returned.

ciao