SAVONA

Today was a day of exploration in the old port city of Savona.  What a lovely place.  Via Paleocapa is the central shopping street and is complete covered by a plaster and possibly brick underneath archway which protects the wide sidewalk from inclement weather and possibly deadening heat in the summer months.  It was fun wandering around looking in the shop windows.  Prices are very expensive here – so we really did more looking than anything else. 

We saw two of the Costa ships in the harbour and were glad they were both floating upright.  It is a good sign for our embarkation tomorrow.  As our hotel doesn’t have free WiFi, we found a coffee shop where we could sit and relax and putter on the internet.  Then didn’t chase us away from the table so we were able to catch up on any email and facebook.  I was able to put up the blog from the previous day albeit without pictures attached – I only took two pictures that day anyway.  We enjoyed Café Americano and a café latte for me.  What is it about European coffee that makes it strong, but so delicious – never bitter.  Even the prices aren’t terrible.  Latte was 2 euro and a coffee was 1 euro and good to the last drop!

Ports and old cities are wonderful places to take pictures.  I took lots today and will be glad to share them as soon as I can get them downloaded and into the blog.  We took a little city tour on one of three open cars pulled by a small train looking thing.  All set for our 7 euro adventure to and old fort, a beach and a few other significant areas off we went.  So, the tour was in Italian…the beach was obscured from the road …the fort we saw but didn’t stop and the other significant areas….well we couldn’t understand the Italian but it was a delightful 30 minute ride around on a pleasant day.

Back to wander around the city – oh wait – I forgot about parts of Europe.  They close for 2 hours for lunch and sometimes on a Saturday, they don’t reopen.  We wandered around anyway (bad day to forget to wear the fitbit) and hoped to have early dinner downtown.  Oh I forgot AGAIN, this is cosmopolitan Europe – most of the restaurants close at 3:30 or 4:00 and stay closed to reopen for dinner at 7:00.  So we found a little place and had wonderful fresh bread with tomatoes, arugula, mozzarella and olive oil served open face and toasted.  We had this with wine.  Who knew I would find moscato so easily.  It was a delicious repast that would definitely tide us over for the rest of the afternoon.

Finally after more walking and poking around little alley ways, it was time to make our way back to the hotel.  So another walk to the taxi stand and 15 euro later and we were back in the hotel.  The only channel that was in English was the European Bloomberg Channel and 5 minutes in, I was tired of hearing about South African’s need for dependable power and I was surfing the channels again.  I finally settled on figure skating – that didn’t need English interpretation and was way better than the dozens of shopping channels available for viewing.

We watched the skating for a couple of hours and then at 7:30, we thought we should go have something to eat in the hotel restaurant.  It was more than passable, it was downright delicious.  I had spaghetti carbonara and Diana had the pesto gnocchi.  Together with 2 350 ml of wine, the bill came to 26 euro.  Not bad at all and we had the pleasure of enjoying our meal with a couple from a small town near Venice.  Both the husband and wife spoke English very well and with ein bissl Deutsche, and petit peu Francaise, we were able to figure out everything they were telling us.  It was a pleasant evening.

About our room in Savona….it is certainly decent and even had a towel warming rack in the bathroom that was perfect for drying our handwashing – we now have enough clean underwear to stay 3 more days!  There are no drawers in our room – how very odd.  I guess Gideon was out of luck when he approached the Idea Hotel in Italy.  Now the really weird part…there are mirrors everywhere.  At first I thought we were sharing the room with other people.  Mirror headboard, wall mirror, mirror from desk to ceiling with a cutout for the TV to show through.  We just keep the lights off a lot.

So now back in the room it is bedtime once again and then our embarkation tomorrow!