Last known, I was on my midnight ferry on my way to Corfu. Ahhhhh Corfu..... how beautiful it was. Imagine basically the next 5 days spent lounging around on a beautiful beach and doing nothing. It was G-R-E-A-T! The hostel that I stayed at there (Sunrock) near Pelekas was really cool and had a lot of atmosphere. I decided to avoid the 700 bed Pink Palace hostel though it's really famous because I didn't want to be around 18 something year olds getting trashed and screaming, etc. If anyone is familiar with Contiki bus tours, imagine the same thing but a hostel. I just wanted to chill since it was the half-way mark of my trip. The hostel owners actually have a farm nearby that they grow almost all of the food they serve for dinner at which was included in the price of my night's stay = awesome. Not only that, they served real cooked breakfast until 1 in the afternoon = sleeping in!!! One of the days I rented a scooter and took off tearing around the island. I drove up to Paleokastritsa beach, about half an hour away from where I was staying to see where Odysseus from Homer's The Odyssey washed ashore on his way back from fighting. Yes, it really was beautiful even with all of the scary tourists crowding the beaches. Luckily I parked my scooter half-way up the hill to the monastery and walked back down a bit and found a hidden walking path through the brush that let me check out some great views. Note to self - need to check out some hiking trails in Iowa because I definitely love it! Later that day I ventured into Corfu Town with Erick from the hostel on my hot wheels. We checked out the old fortress and the new fortress, which neither were really all that impressive but still worth seeing for free. After leaving Corfu Town I took Erick out to Ermones beach, one that I had almost stopped at earlier in the day on my way to Paleokastritsa where I proceeded to do some barefoot rock climbing before coming back to the "mainland" to watch the sunset. As I was climbing back up to the walking path though I started picking up a bunch of the trash people left out there since conveniently there was also a plastic bag to collect everything in. Heineken cans, empty water bottles, spam cans, cigarette packs, used condoms (okay so I admit I left those where they laid), etc. Captain Planet motto definitely came to mind as Erick pitched in as well and some elderly Greeks out enjoying the sunset thanked us on our way out. It was nice, but at the same time I wondered how much of the trash was there because of the Greeks who don't care and how much of it was really from tourists... We left quick to try to beat the dark and cold and went adventure driving which actually ended up taking us way way up into the hills and through Pelekas the small village itself before winding us back down to where we wanted to be. Brrr!!! More lazy days on the beach.... ahhhhh.

The only other super interesting part of Corfu was my last night there. Madalena, the owner, has a 7 year old autistic son that is generally pretty well behaved as long as he has full access to the computer so he can continually play all different forms of pacman online. No problem there. However, on our last night he was watching a fish documentary on the TV which he also enjoys. He loved "petting" the fish on the TV and at one point when he was doing that, the fish left the screen, so he went around the corner of the TV to look for it. He didn't mean to, but had bumped the back of the TV while looking and the stand it was on started to topple, just as we were finishing dinner and the girl sitting next to me saw it happen at the same time I did and we both screamed, the TV crashed down in slow-mo and luckily a coffee table in front of it absorbed most of the shock before sliding out of the way and it hitting the ground. It wasn't actually broken, but one of the vertical filaments inside the screen was, as well as had a huge discolored circle where it had hit the coffee table hard. s***ty luck. Later that evening a few guys went out drinking and we got quite a show when they returned... at 5:30 in the morning!! I awoke to some shouting in the hallway, strung with multiple expletives. This continued on for a good 15 min or so before Nick, one of the other guys went out to settle whatever the issue was. Come to find out that morning that one of the guys who had only been there a day got separated from the other two, one who works there and the other who had been there for a couple weeks. He had no idea where he was or how to get home, plus he was drunk and it was his first time traveling,, so needless to say he didn't handle it well and was freaking out in the middle of Corfu. He finally managed to wave down someone driving on the road and got them to take him to the hostel. However, the real problem began there. He had only ever gone through the bar area to get to his room and didn't realize he could walk around the balcony to get there. So, already freaked out from earlier, he starts banging on all of the doors and windows to try to wake someone up to unlock the bar to let him through. No one wakes up though and as he's banging on one of the windows, it opened. So, he climbed through the window and then was trapped inside the bar area because the doors can only be unlocked by a key. So he just chilled out in there for a bit until the other 2 guys got back, super intoxicated, and thought he was breaking in and trying to steal s*** so they proceeded to yell and scream obscenities at him, roughed him up a bit, and forced him back out through the window. They then took it down our hallway with the screaming, etc. Stupid drunks. So an interesting start to the day and since bad things happen in circles of 3 they say, to top it off was when Madalena's son threw her cell phone into the sea.

On the night of the 3rd, I took a 7PM ferry to Igomenitsa where I spent 3 hours before taking another ferry at midnight to Bari, Italy. I didn't sleep great, but at least my ticket was only 15Euro for the port taxes. Directly from Bari in the morning I began my trek west across the country to Salerno, arriving finally around 8PM and crashed out at the hostel. On the 5th I spent the day exploring Salerno and visited St. Michael's Cathedral as well as a public park, etc. On the 6th I went up to Mount Vesuvius from Pompeii. A guy from the hostel wanted to tag along with me so no worries, but the problem with that was that he is from Tunisia and speaks Italian, French, and Arabic fluently but absolutely no English, whereas I speak English, Spanish, and only a bit of German. So, I spent the ENTIRE day trying desperately to make my Spanish and his Italian work together where they could. I had a really good time but by the end of the night I was completely drained. I had originally wanted to visit the Pompeii ruins as well that day, but it was pretty damn expensive after I had already spent 10Euro to see Vesuvius (Pompeii was another 11Euro). So, we decided to go back to Salerno and then later we went down to dinner at a proper cafeteria, as in where city workers go to eat during their shifts, etc. However, we got sooo much food and a drink for only 5Euro - it was great! The next day, Oct. 7th, went back to Pompeii with Julian and Cara, a couple staying in my room from Canada. It was crappy weather out but luckily it cleared off enough in the afternoon that we didn't have any problems. Pompeii was pretty cool, but I was a bit upset at the same time that they added so much modern stuff to the ruins themselves and they don't say what is original and what isn't. Obviously iron doors blocking off certain areas were not original, but you know what I mean. We wandered around by ourselves and did not take a tour. It would ave been nice for more information but Pompeii is so big that the tour would never cover all of it and plus you'd be stuck with other stupid tourists asking the most ridiculous questions. No thank you. I did hear one cool fact though as I was passing by a tour group - that the water pipes used in Pompeii were actually made of lead. So, does that mean that if Mount Vesuvius hadn't erupted and killed everyone that eventually they all would have been poisoned to death anyway??? Hmmm.... And yes, we did go see the "dead people". Since the whole city was just buried in ash from the eruption, everyone suffocated and their bodies were preserved by the heat and ash or something to that extent. So when they were doing excavations they found those bodies in whatever position they were when they died. The most moving of them was one who was sitting with their legs drawn up to their chest and hands covering its face like it was crying. I would have been too honey. On the 8th I headed back up north to Florence but spent the ENTIRE day on the train. I HATE Italian trains. Long story. As I was waiting the last 5 minutes for the train to get to Florence I was standing in the corridor with my pack on and I wish I hadn't been. Some guy started harassing me, saying my pack stuck out too far, then asked where I was from and when I told his from the States he said "what? not canada?". I politely told him no, I don't need to hide where I'm from, I'm from America (some travelers from the u.s. who don't want to run into problems being associated with our country lie and say they are canadian instead). That opened a whole can of worms with this guy and he kept going on about how silly americans are, asking if we have internet access in the country because obviously we don't since Bush was reelected, etc. etc. I don't want to put the whole conversation down because it's tiring, but if you want to know more, just ask me. Stupid Italian - thank you so much for blaming me for everything my country has done - a country that is 32 times larger by land mass and has over 5 times the population of Italy - but yes, it is my fault. Oh well!!!!!!!! More to come once I get it typed!