Thursday, June 26

 
ack! i have so much to say... I LOVE NAPLES! have i even said that yet? i am ECSTATIC here... thus the big capitals. every day is amazing here, like i'm at the happiest place on earth every day (ironic, because in four months... well... i will be.) it feels surreal, like it's too good to be true. i'm in a rush, as always, so i'll do away with you usual clever commentary and just start typing like mad.

so this is what a normal day is like: i wake up around 6:30 (gag) in my little room at the denza, which is a parochial boarding school by academic year, a haven for lost souls like myself by summer. basically, it's filled with other students right now (yes, i still consider myself a student - it's either that or admit that i am simply unemployed. i actually nearly threw up the other day when examining one of our passport applications, because i realized that in the "employment" box i no longer have the nice little out of claiming myself a member of academia... but back to the [less suicide-inducing] subject at hand.) other than trisha and myself, and the two french-canadian girls who are here working at the aquarium (who don't even know who patrick roy or j-s giguere are - IDIOTS!!! it's like a foreigner asking me who marilyn monroe and abraham lincoln are, and me answering with a blank stare), it is all italians. which is so great! it's like a hundred built-in italian friends. i hardly have to make any effort. and since none of them speak english, i look extremely worldly and interesting flashing a little bit of italian.

anyway, so i peel myself out of my sticky bed in my non-air-conditioned room. after counting the new mosquito bites and applying appropriate ointments, i take a shower and brush my teeth (not consecutively, but rather, at the same time, as there is absolutely no divide between the shower and the toilet/sink area; some might call this appalling, but i call it italian convenience at its best.) after completing the preparation rituals i catch the shiny bright orange bus outside my door at 7:26 and head off to work.

the denza is great because it is closed off, "molto tranquillo", with tons of greenery (which i usually find lacking in italy.) but the drive to work is not too shabby, either. the whole way to work is on a road that hugs a cliff over the bay of naples, so it's all mediterranean waves and sailboats as i make my way toward the old grind. it is beautiful and still makes me pause every morning and realize that i am so lucky to be here.

work is always entertaining (though not without some slow times) and usually surprising. i am positioned in american citizen services, which means that in addition to the humdrum work of issuing passports and consular reports of births abroad, i get to meet all the wackos who run into problems in italy. my second day was the luckiest, when i got to meet this crazy lady who had gotten off her cruise ship when it docked in marseilles (read: hundreds of miles from naples) and missed her appointment to reboard. whoops. too bad that, in addition to her passport and wallet, her medication was still on board. tut tut. better even than the fact that I got to interview her outside, watching her tottering around in sweatpants and white pumps (she looked damn good!) was discovering her story once we contacted the consulate in marseilles: girlfriend had been to the consulates and embassies of marseilles, paris, munich, frankfurt, vienna, strausburg, salzburg and athens before she got to us! even when we don't get people as well-traveled as that lady, we do get to see 21-year-old american navy sailors coming in with knocked-up 17-year-old italians to get marriage certificates, or just neat traveling 20-something who got their passports lost or stolen. i also get to use my italian a fair amount, because a lot of our american citizens don't speak a lick of english - they have lived here their wholes lives and only have citizenship by parents or qualcosa.

eek, just got a pop-up letting me know i'm about to get kicked off by the american government! apparently classified fun ends at 7pm. well, i will continue this soon! hope that has opened a small window onto my life here...

buona serata!
posted by from shannon at 9:59 AM

Wednesday, June 25

 
first: i have to apologize to everyone who writes me emails that don't get resonses for days at a time - and even when i do respond, i realize my replies are usually pretty limited. sadly, i only get about 30 minutes of email time on a good day, and more often only about 10. so please know that i will get back to you and that i adore everyone's electronic letters!

that's all for now, but i promise there is a spunkier post in the making. teaser: it involves me, a priest and a floorful of strapping young italian stallions. yes, i'm living la dolce vita.
posted by from shannon at 8:54 AM

Tuesday, June 24

 
a small fire broke out today in the basement of the consulate. the main result, other than a few scorched meatball in the cafeteria, was the knocking out of our main power supply. we're running on a generator right now. we have to go home at one o'clock because it's sweltering - the air conditioning is out - and the alarms keep going off. i'm one hyena away from working at the american embassy in the congo.
posted by from shannon at 4:06 AM

Monday, June 23

 
today my left knee is so tight i can barely walk. the air is really dirty here so i always have black boogers coming out of my nose. i have an arguably infected spider bite on my calf i swear is not only growing bigger, but is also inching up my leg (toward my heart, which it obviously intends to poison.) and my fellow intern sneezed on me today after warning me that she thought she had caught a disease she read about called "monkey pox".

i am obviously not going to make it out of naples alive.
posted by from shannon at 8:14 AM