Positano Day3

(Originally written 27 May 2013)


Good gracious, keeping track of time has become a real chore.  Wait, is today “Day 3” of our vacation?  Let’s count.  Oh, but wait, first somebody remind me what day of the week it is.

We had a nice, lazy breakfast in our apartment followed by several hours of hang-out time on the beach.  The sun was shiny and hot today, but there was gentle breeze to cool things down and if anyone needs an immediate cool down, all they had to do was put their feet and ankles into the freezing cold water.

Our kids often remind me of our old dog, Enzo.  They take to water like it was their mission in life to find it and frolic in it.  If they even see a body of water somewhere, it is almost an inevitability that they will find their way into it.  Here are your choices as a parent: take a bathing suit and towel, strip them naked, or accept the reality that their clothes will become wet.  Does it matter that it is icicle cold?  Certainly not.  And just like Enzo, there is such unadulterated joy when they are out there playing in the water.

After lunch, we decided that we would venture into the town of Amalfi for a little touring around and dinner.  A little mix-up at the bus stop caused us some delay and inconvenience, but I suppose it also provided an up-close and personal view of the insane scenes that occur on the local roads throughout the day.  Nothing in the American experience can relate to how narrow the roads are, how sharp the turns are, how fast the people drive, how many scooters zip in and out of the flow of traffic, how many pedestrians are out meandering around on pathetic excuses for sidewalks, how utterly inconsequential any of these conditions matter to where people park, and how there seems to be a complete disregard for personal property, safety, and the value of life itself.

The town of Amalfi is very nice.  Suzanne observed that the waterfront areas are a little more like ports or marinas as opposed to the sunbathing beaches of Positano.  The narrow, cobblestones streets are the same though, with steep slopes and lined with crowded shops of ceramics, lemoncello, jewelry, bars/cafes, beachware, and tobaccorias.  It has a beautiful church in the center of town, at the top of a pretty impressive set of stone steps.  We went inside and sat down for a while, enjoying some quiet time and the beginning of an evening mass.

Suzanne asked one of the local women for a trattoria recommendation and that led us to a small, local place where we “ate very well” and enjoyed (finally) some more reasonable prices. 

I have always found that Italian expression to be an interesting clue into the way Italians view food and eating.  As Americans we would ask, “Did you have good food?”  The Italian way of asking that is, “Did you eat well?”  I’ve talked about that on several occasions with Italians.  From the Italians’ perspective (and I tend to agree with them), Americans view eating as more of a transaction.  More often than not, you go someplace for food, food is prepared and served, you eat the food and hope that it is good, then you leave.   For the Italians, it’s an event, an attitude, a way to spend time with family and friends.  It’s not that Americans never do that.  Thanksgiving is a good example.  With most Italians, though, Thanksgiving happens pretty much every Sunday.

Here’s another example, for the first several months we were in Italy, we were still figuring out when places were open, when people ate, and when it was appropriate (or required) to make reservations.  It took us some time more to get adjusted to the process of making a reservation.  It is often the case that the person taking your reservation will not ask about the time of your reservation.  That is for a couple of reasons.  First, like other very culturally rigid things here, people generally eat dinner at about the same time.  Go to a restaurant at 7:00pm and it is empty, if it’s open at all.  We often eat in restaurants completely by ourselves, wondering why more people don’t patronize such a fantastic place, only to see the parking lots and tables become packed with people about the time we are leaving at 8:00 or 8:30. 

The second reason you generally don’t need to state a time with your reservation is because it is generally accepted that whatever table you get will be your table for the whole night.  From what I can tell, it is by far the exception to “turn over” a table and have more than one patron eat at that table on a given night.  No one restaurant owner will take offense to you taking 45 minutes to drink your after-dinner coffee, because they didn’t expect to use that table for another patron that night anyway.  In a lot of places, they don’t even bother taking your name when you call for reservations.  Really, all they want to know is how many people are showing up for dinner tonight so they know how much food to prepare.  So you call and ask for a reservation for 4 or 8 or whatever, and that’s it.  Then you show up and let them know that one of their 4-person reservations has arrived and they show you to your table.  Basta (that’s it.).

 

And so it goes.
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