Finding familiarity in Sorrento's palm trees and taxi drivers

April 10th - Sorrento and Naples, Italy

Before I left to study abroad, I was testing out my camera here in Laredo. I remember I posted it to Instagram with text over it that said: "back to the house under the palm trees."  Ever since I lived in Mexico, I don't know why, but our house has always had at least one palm tree.  So when I first left for Urbino, and all I saw was some sort of pine tree and other kinds of trees I didn't know a single thing about, I loved it. It was beautiful to see different kinds of terrain and environments.  But as we arrived in Sorrento, I turned to Sofia with what was perhaps the goofiest and biggest smile on my face, saying, "Look, there are palm trees!"  I hadn't realized how much I missed them until we arrived, and I remember my first night there, I called my mom, telling her exactly that same thing and expressing to her how I very much wanted to get off the bus in that moment and go hug the palm tree for being something familiar. Sorrento was a fun reminder that plans change, things never happen as you expect, and even then, they will be so much fun.  While we were there, there were multiple instances when things didn't exactly turn out as we thought. But the moment we arrived, we made plans to go to a Cove that we ended up moving to the next day. We asked for affordable restaurant recommendations and somehow ended up at a quite high-end restaurant,  and everything still turned out great. 

In one of our many taxi driver interactions we ran into this kind woman in Sorrento who said I was her third Latin American customer that day and told me about how she loved Mexico. We had a nice conversation (to the best of my ability) in Italian about what we were studying and how her experience has been with tourism while living in the outskirts of Sorrento. I found it quite nice how a lot of the drivers we met were kind enough to not only bear our language, but also share a bit of their lives with us.

Did we wander aimlessly through Naples, dying of heat and perhaps some sunburn? Yes.  Did it sort of lead us to me reaching a language goal by giving directions to our taxi driver who was lost, and also letting us have some traditional pizza? Also yes.  :)