Comments on: Wish you were here, no really

By: Romeo

Romeo — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 05:06:30 +0000

Nah, didn’t work. You were supposed to just see a ROFL emoticon… you get the point :)

By: Romeo

Romeo — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 05:05:46 +0000

[img]http://liis.iasi.us/images/smiles/rofl.gif[/img]

By: Maureen

Maureen — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:34:27 +0000

Poor lonely writer-guy traveling in Tuscany…wonderful hearing of your trials and tribulations driving in Italia. I do believe the worse your experiece is, the funnier you get. April 31st is a few days away; try to find a Knopf map – very good & pretty easy to read as it has great index of all the towns. When we were in Sienna, they MOVED the main street light twice in one week; prior to that Italian experience, did not realize street lights were actually portable.

By: Leif

Leif — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 07:15:38 +0000

hey guys,

OK, so far on this trip, I’ve had a cold, food poisoning and now bed bugs. All in two weeks. The upshot is the weather is perfect every single day, the scenery makes me which I was walking rather than driving (without my bags of course) and the food is soooooo good. I had rabbit stewed in a Brunello red wine sauce last night…. sweet jesus…

Lucas – The LP Romania and Moldova book comes out in May. I checked, they spelled my name right in that one.

Natalie – my parking skills are god-like compared to the Italians who just sort of aim their car into a general area and stop when 50% of it occupies the parking spot, with the rest in other parking spots, the street, the sidewalk, a storefront…

Jessie – since when are you coming to Italy? I’d offer to give advice, but I don’t even have time to write this message. I’ll have to eat my two bananas in the car to make up for this indulgence.

James, you can have the roads in Liguria. I hearby give you all rights. I’m turning in my rental car on April 31st and never driving in Italy again. The train is the way.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:00:14 +0000

hey man i was in borders today and they had the eastern europe book on display out front of the travel section. good work man. i was going to check for the romania book but eventually gave up on finding ‘r’ in the alphabet.

By: Jessie

Jessie — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 09:51:37 +0000

I can’t wait to get to Italy next week … by way of public transit. I would rather leave a semi-experienced exciteable professional to the navigation of alleys. That way, when the inevitable collision comes, at least I’m not fiscally responsible.
We talked to some Canadian girls in Ireland who had rented a car and lost years of longevity trying to reprogram their brains into opposite-side driving along single-lane country roads versus a tide of kamikaze Irishmen. We took the train.

By: Natalie (flyingnat82)

Natalie (flyingnat82) — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:48:52 +0000

I wish to challenge your paralell parking skills!

Hope you survive the bad directions, curvy roads, steep hills, and eternally long meals. But it all sounds like a major improvement over Romania.

By: Lucas

Lucas — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 04:50:26 +0000

great read! I liked the video too. That pedestrian crossing scene where the italian driver chases the guy around offroad had me laughing pretty hard.

By: James

James — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 11:34:07 +0000

Benvenuti in Italia!! The land where nothing works and nobody notices! I am consistently amazed by the beautiful places that are just neglected enough to suck any inspiration out of them and turn them into possibly beautiful run-down dumps.

In fact you are lucky to be in a richer area like toscana that has a large contingent of tourists (in fact I think the mayor of Firenze is an american?!). If you come to Liguria things will be different. Autostrada are designed to test your formula one driving skills as the teams that built the tunnels and bridges didn’t communicate, and as such there is almost always a scary dog leg when you enter and leave tunnels.

Good luck on your quest. If I may, I would like to suggest a new by-line for your book. “How best to not be ripped off ALL the time, just most of the time”