This forced downtime isn’t all bad.  The solitude has allowed us to put together a plan for the next few weeks, fill our bellies with greasy eggs and muesli, and identify suitable day excursions that aren’t taxing to body or wallet.  Yesterday wasn’t an exhaustive effort by any means.  A 16:30 departure into Sorrento for 3 hours meant we had time to nap and squeeze in a swim before our nightly 3 hour wander in search of non-resort food.  Gelato too of course.

Wandering and dawdling are two words that seem to be typical of the tourists.  Aimless, slow, no apparent direction as they bump into you while backing away from a rack of scarves or porcelain figurines.  Here in Sorrento, it’s not the tourists that are sauntering though.  I know we saw this last year in La Spezia, but here we have the nightly promenade of what appears to be everyone…slowly taking over the main thoroughfare to the point of eliminating vehicular traffic.  We are talking thousands of people, starting from about 5PM until…we don’t know.  The only ones not on the streets are shopkeepers, who are using this time to pitch their wares to those that they know will be there to support them when the tourist dollars disappear.

There are a few of you zombie fans watching The Walking Dead (great show by the way).  These Italian speaking ‘undead’ push strollers, greet each other loudly with cheek kisses and hugs, and seem to have a general lack of consideration for any passersby around them.  A flock of 8 may stop on a sidewalk to chat, forcing mothers with newborn filled strollers into the street just to get around.  Little bambinos will ride their bikes alongside scooters and cars zipping by at speeds that seem all too quick.  I am sure we’re just conditioned to be a bit more cautious, but yikes.

So, promenading is a nightly thing here, and a good practice as well.  It gets everyone out of the house, encourages less boob tube time and more face to face interaction instead of facebooking your evening away.  We passed a small group of boys, maybe 7 or 8 years old, playing an impromptu game of football in a plaza, with benches and poles outlining the boundaries for scoring.  Cheers, high fives, and your typical soccer celebrations upon scoring…great to see there were no video games in the hands of these kids.

More interestingly though, bus drivers down at the port that were engaged in what appeared to be some invented game to pass the time.  A game that consisted of dragging a broken gate into the middle of a relatively crowed parking lot, then lightly drop kicking what looked like a basketball over the gate into the other team’s ‘court’.  A single bounce on the ground followed up with a mandatory first strike of the ball with your head in order to put the ball back over the gate for the opposition to return in a similar manner.  Maybe volleyball-like, maybe a little like table tennis, maybe it was just to piss off the owners of the cars when they came back to find these little dents and scratches in the hood from that ball.  Obviously I wanted to get in there and play too, but dinner and our scheduled ride back still had to be completed in a timely fashion.

Another smoke-free restaurant, another early return to the hotel.  Another surprise appearance with Melanie doing a few jazz standards with the house lounge act…but we’ll save that for another article.