Off to Sardegna

Ciao..

The theme of the past few days has been "the Amazing Race", because we have been travelling a ton.. by land and sea.. we finally arrived in Sardegna at 2 a.m. Sat evening, after an 8 hour ferry crossing with our group that left from Rome... and have had a couple of free days, that everyone really needed, to just relax and enjoy the sun... it's fantastic here.. Sardegna is the vacation spot of Italy I guess and I see why.. we are staying at this fabulous hotel, just outside of Cagliari (the capital), called Nora - it's this tiny little place with one church and a few restaurants, but our hotel is right on the beach and we each have little bungalows that open up onto it.. it's wonderful! (no trace of the Sopranos) I have been appointed the evening entertainment, as all of our hotels have pianos, so with a little after dinner "grappa" I've been entertaining the troops most nights.. Volare is the most popular, althoguh on the ferry over, the waiter in the dining room made me play "I Did it My Way", while he sang in broken English...

We spent the day on Friday last week touring around another smaller island off the coast of Napoli, called Ischia... it was lovely and just enough for a day - we took the ferry over there as well and toured perimeter of the island for the morning and then had a free afternoon - we did a little limoncello tasting (as there are millions of lemon groves in this region) and I managed to find myself a gorgeous Italian leather purse (rosso!) I felt totally justified given my own having been stolen (at least that's what I'm telling myself)

Anyway, back to the food.. the food at our hotel is unbelievable.. all sorts of fresh seafood, plus one of the specialties of Sardegna is peccorino cheese (made from sheep's milk) and it is just about the best cheese i've ever tasted!

Today we spent the day exploring la costa del sud (the south coast) of Sardegna, which was very interesting - we went to some ancient ruin way up on the hillside, which had all kinds of stone tombs (Noracian) dating back 2500 BC. Then we went to this amazing grotto (massive cave) and spent the afternoon about 130 feet below the surface checking out all the caves and rock formations... I wasn't too keen on it at first, but it was amazing and well worth the trip.

The Italian is coming along well. I think I mentioned that my roommate (Marisa) and I have befriended our driver, Emilio, who speaks un piccolo anglese, but not much, so if we want to speak with him we pretty much have to do it in Italian. It's been great though, b/c we have spent a couple free days with him (he's our age) and the whole day is spent speaking Italian (I asked him whether he thought my accent was good or bad, and he said is was very entertaining.. gives you an idea of his sense of humour anyway!

Can't believe this is the last week, so I'm making the most of it.. we've got a couple more days of exploring, including a live mercato in Pula tomorrow and apparently we're having lunch with the shepards (like real sheep shepards) somewhere up in the hills on Wed - we have to take Land Rovers up there... and apparently they haven't seen women in about 10 years or something like that.. should be interesting.

I'm heading to Rome Thursday and have a packed agenda of things to see there and then home... and I'm just starting to get into vacation mode now.. this is not good.

So, if you don't hear from me again, don't be surprised - I might just decide to stay..

Ciao! a presto
Nancy