Day 19- Right Place, Right Time

FREE BREAKFAST, WOOHOO!!

Breakfast at hotel Calypso

Any day that starts out with a free French breakfast is bound to be an excellent one. We woke up rejuvenated; it was the first time we slept for the recommended 8 hours in a few weeks. A little breakfast, bathing suits and a map we were ready for a day in the sun!

Phil’s birthday was a few days ago, he asked if when I was in Italy I could try to go to a Kappa store (famous for soccer items, located solely in Italy) and he would love something from there for his gift. Simple enough, there was a store only 3 miles down the road. The plan was to sit on a beach walk a little sit on another beach then walk a little until we reached our final destination.

First beach

Jills Beach experience

Jill was pretty burnt from the previous day in the sun, so we didn’t stay on the beaches of very long. In the end it worked out because it took us hours to find this imaginary kappa store. 

Pretty Flower from our walk

Walking around and seeing everything in Italian really made me appreciate the little French that I know. It was frustrating that we couldn’t stop for directions anywhere we pleased, we had to find a store where they might know French, which can get tricky, because I am not fluent, and they aren’t fluent either. We had almost given up after hours of searching, and getting burned by the hot Mediterranean sun when I decided to walk into a shop and pray they spoke English or French. Thankfully she spoke French, and we were less than a mile away. Her directions were perfect, we made it.

Kappa Store

After shopping, we trudged home exhausted. First item of business when we were back in our area was find dinner. Again we sat at a little café and relaxed. We were slightly upset that we were given sparkling water. It didn’t quench our thirst the way a cup of nice cold tap water would have. While we were eating a parade of floats went by. They were all made up of thousands of flowers, beautiful perfect flowers; thousands of dollars must have been put into the ornate floats. We watched not knowing what was going on, my assumption was that it was just some sort of town flower show. We finished our dinner and went back to our hotel

One of the floats (Mostly lilies, my favorite!)

Olympics flower float

 I felt pretty dehydrated, and sick after a long day in the sun with no water. After skypeing with my mom and Phil, and drinking a large quantity of water, I decided to suck it up and go out for our last night in Italy. While we got ready we heard a band playing from our window, we figured it was just the café next door as we had seen drums being set up earlier in the day. What really caught us off guard was the sound of fire works.

 We quickly got ready and headed outside to see what was going on.

When we opened the door the street was flooded with people. It slightly felt like walking into a surprise party, where the heck did all of the people come from!?

The crowd here is small!

We made our way down the street to watch the last 5 minutes of the fire works. When the fireworks ended everyone in the crowed scattered, but it didn’t feel like anyone left. The streets were so congested you could barely move, at night there was a band on every single corner playing for the vast crowd I felt like I was in a movie. Everything was right on the beach like a boardwalk, with no boards. One of the bars sectioned off part of the beach, put up a temporary out side bar and hired a DJ for a giant beach party. Every one was so full of energy. While we were on the beach two ladies Noticed that Jill and I spoke English and asked where we were from. They then told us that we had stumbled upon Ventimille on the right day because it was their start of the summer party that only happens once a year. Not sure how we got so lucky. Jill and I ended our night at 4:30 am, half of the people were still awake and moving around at this time. When we got back to our hotel the iron gate was closed in front of it! We tried to pull it open but no luck. We didn’t know we had a curfew! After a few minutes a woman let us in, but in those few minutes Jill and I thought we were about to sleep on the rocky beach! it was a perfect memorable last night in Italy.