Monday, April 2, 2012

Exploring Sorrento

As planned today we headed into Sorrento for the day.  Well, it wasn’t quite a full day, but more of a half day and it was more than enough for the kids who overall were pretty good.  We had a nice and mellow morning with watching movies, reading and just hanging out.

Clouds roll in during the night and then clear slowly as the sun burns them off


A little morning horseplay with daddy

Around lunchtime we managed to get ourselves into Sorrento.  It turns out that they block off the main road in Sorrento on Sunday mornings, my guess is for the churchgoers.  Surprisingly most stores were open which we don’t get the luxury of in Barcelona.  One of the things we noticed was that many people were carrying olive branches.  This was a mystery to me – was it some kind of olive holiday?  Was it a sign of the start of spring where maybe you plant the branch or something like that? 

Guy with olive branches in his bag


 
More olive branches

It turns out that has something to do with church.  We stopped to get balloon swords made by a balloon guy and he happened to have some olive branches so I asked him (since he spoke English).  I have no idea what it has to do with church but he was really nice and gave me a few of his branches (which I carried for about an hour and then tossed – what was I going to do with them??).   I've since spoken to my friend Brenda who said she believes it has to do with Palm Sunday... question answered!
Thumbs up - I'm having a great time!
Liam's balloon sword and hat
Me with my olive branches ;)
Sword fight!
They actually posed for this one...
We made our way around town for about an hour and then found a place for lunch.  Sadly on day 2, I’m about pizza-ed out.  So tomorrow I’ve got to eat something either non-carb or just non-pizza.  But the pizza was delish as were the mussels that Josh and Aidan had.  Unbeknownst to us, we had seen most of the city (the parts that we wanted to see at least) yesterday so a lot of it was a repeat but with a few extras. 





They found a gecko
This part of Italy is known for it's citrus - we see lemon and orange trees everywhere!! 
Hitching a ride
I was about 5 seconds too late on this one as he was flat on the ground while I tried to get my camera out.  Does that make me a bad mom that I was looking to take a picture of that?




And like any good tourist, we did the little tourist train. Liam begged and begged and we finally acquiesced. The route looked good too so we figured this would save some walking with the kids later. Sadly, the tour wasn’t all that but at least it was about 45 mins to just chill and watch the world go by. And we did learn some fun facts about the city such as it was included in Ulysses – Sorrento was where the sirens were that Ulysses and his crew had to put wax in their ears in order to avoid hearing the sirens’ call to them (henceforth crashing their ships into the rocks). 
Mommy, why is this music in Italian and not in English???

Cheesy train tour
Cool bench
Stunning view that I didn't quite catch while on the train
With Liam passing the meltdown phase we decided it was time to come back to the villa around 4PM.  This time I remembered to take video as we went up the narrow windy road to the villa.  And it’s good that I did because it was during this video that we realized the reason that we almost crashed into a wall yesterday – turns out the way the hill is angled and when you turn, one of the wheels of the car isn’t touching the ground… so now we know.  And we’ll learn… but we’ll still only do this journey once a day!!

Here are some videos of us going up the mountain road to the villa...



Tomorrow we are hoping to be off to Capri as it’s expected to be the nicest day of the week!!

Besos,
Julie

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