urchin. capri. refugee.

the other day my friend francesco, who i met through ilaria, and i went to swim in the sea a bit but its kinda cold and im chicken so i waded. he found a sea urchin (he is kind of like the crocodile hunter but for things in the water) and its little sticky arms came out like snail eyeballs and stuck to my finger, tickling, red.
i want to go to the castle and i dont care how many euro it costs.
last night i ate octopus prepared in a nice restaurant, drank fancy red wine and all for free. my friend ramzi keeps inviting me to the events of the university here, and it is pretty sweet. tonight i am seeing him play for belly dancers. he is an odd character, like everyone here, but seems to have alot of connections and has hooked me up with the volunteer work as a refugee art teacher, a bicycle, and maybe an apartment, and maybe a job as the photographer for these events. i will tell you when i see the euro!
today i found my first money here. ten shiny euro gold and glinting perfect in the sun. i also found a little disk, a medal from a necklace with jesus and his little halo holding a baby.
today i walked to the sea. there was a fire made by local kids, supposedly, burning grass. nobody thought a thing of it but me. ramzi and i picked capri, capers the size of small limes.
liam and valentina have an orange tree that is producing! it looks just like my lemon tree but with fruit on it... russ how are those plants doing? send photos!
i decided when i have an apartment i will not have any cacti. they are nice to look at but very impractical as they are under the laundry on the terrazza and your towels are in danger of becoming full of prickles only to surprise you after a shower and also because my skirt flows into them and then i have cacti spurs on me.

i was painting some plant stands for liam. i made a watercolor-oil pastel drawing for valentina that was my trademark vangogh'esque swirly circles that were orange and blue but they looked like tits and valentina said so. i said one tit was hers and one was mine. she wanted me to paint their plant stands to look like the orangeboobs. i said yay i've been wanting to make art!

i am ready to start knitting and producing scarves but must wait until settled in an apartment. soon.
i wake up covered in sweat, it is so hot.
today i did yoga by the sea and valentina does things i didnt know a body could do. she is literally superwoman. liam looks like a little jumping bean doing exercises by the sea.
i saw a dead pigeon down by the rocks, freshly dead. looked like it had flown into the wall and fallen to its death. then i saw a gecko peering at me from the wall.

and little crablike creatures everywhere. i thought i saw a roach on the sidewalk crawling the other day but it was a crab. grancci they call it.

when i shower i have learned not to be a pussy about it. you just have to take the shower head (only works when detached, like a hose) and hold it above your head and flip the water on real fast and indulge yourself in the cold slightly salty water. these are the fastest showers of my life.

in liam's house we use stones found in the sea for soap dishes and stones from the ocean to work the calluses off our feet in the shower.

they clean the entire house every morning after the yoga. valentina does exercises with weights on her feet and she is RELENTLESS. today i learned that i am to be challenged to do a pushup. i cannot currently complete one. valentina does like a hundred every day, with her feet elevated.
when she comes back from work, selling oranges in the streets and orange juice, she is like a tornado, full of energy, cleaning like a fiend, not speaking, unstoppable. russians are so odd and so intriguing.
we are teaching one another. she is teaching me italian and i am teaching her english. she has me translate the tolvstoj book anna karinina (that is spelled incorrectly for sure). the first sentence, which is as far as we have gotten so far is, translated into english because i dont remember the italian version and dont have time to look it up

every happy family is similar, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.


she asks me to tell her what it means, why the author wrote it. i say there is a key to happiness and many ways to be unhappy? she says yes and the key is equilibrium. which is not present in the compost pile remove your pizza crust from it immediately!

her english phrases she uses for me are currently 'bad girl' pronounced 'bod gerrrl' with a trilled r and 'shutup' pronounced 'shitup'

she is a character.

i want to go to the gorge so badly. i miss the clouds in kentucky and last night i imagined i heard it raining. i miss the rain.


love you.