You Miss Me?

I am a wooly-headed, gullible, sleep-addled imbecile with no situational awareness or any sort of common sense or rationality. Whew. I just wanted to get that off of my chest. You'll see my reasoning in just a minute.
I have just returned to school from half-term, during which I was in Italy and Chester. I had spotty internet at times, but I will admit that I probably could have posted had I not crawled into bed exhausted each night, often around 4 or 5am. I shall leave two posts for the time I missed in recompense so that I can give both parts of the trip justice and so that I don't bore you guys with a long ramble by giving you a break in the middle.
I have to say that Manchester airport is one of the best I have ever seen. It is clean, well lit and maintained, and has tons of places to shop that are reasonably priced while the ceiling tiles are weird semi-transparent grates shaded into patterns of leaves and vines that veil the wiring and pipes behind them. Forget all of that though, THEY HAVE AN ENORMOUS ALCOHOL SECTION!!! I have never seen so much alcohol in an entire airport before and this was all just within two-hundred square feet floorspace! Apparently, since the UK airports are duty-free zones, alcohol's a lot cheaper and is thus a big seller! I'm not even sure if you can buy a whole bottle of wine to bring onto the plane in America, but here I'd bet that you could buy a whole carton of whiskey without anyone batting an eye! Past that there were more stands and shelves selling a variety of products and I couldn't help but wonder if I'd been thrown back into a mall at home. To top it all off, as I was walking through, I noticed that all traffic had to follow a strip of beige tiles that wound back and forth through the whole thing, forcing everyone past all of the goods for a much longer time than necessary. That, to me, was the best part. Just looking at the setup, I had to give silent praise to whoever engineered this so that potential customers are exposed to the tempting, cheaper products for a long time (possibly while waiting in line to get through the area) and thus improving the airport's profits. Furthermore, I bet that the vendors closest to the tile strip have to pay at least double what the further removed merchants have to pay, as they are more conspicuous and thus more likely to profit. In any situation, the airport rakes in the dough. To me, that was kind of entertaining, or at least it was at 2am after two hours of sleep since 7:00 the previous morning. To make it even better, they didn't force us to take off our shoes or jewelry at security. I like England!
While there, I met an affable Romanian guy (25 years old?) from Mehadia (I think) named Dragosh, aka Dragos. Awesome name, right? It's like something straight out of the Song of Ice and Fire books (Game of Thrones to you TV goers)! Having nothing to do, we chatted and walked around together for the eight hours before our flights. He told me about his life and his troubles with work and trying to do weekend university courses. The worst part, listening to him, was that he had "no vocation." This prevented him from making any set plan that he could advance, other than to become the mayor of his town, which left him in a rut. While we talked for quite some time, I don't tend to trust anyone for weeks, no less someone I'd met in a train station four hours before. Thus, when he started relaxing in a massage chair, I wanted to test him a bit by pretending to fall asleep while lying on a bench to see if he would try to take anything. I remained vigilant, watching him through my eyelashes as he leaned back. I watched, carefully observing... and waiting... and the next thing I knew he was waking me up. Shit. Well so much for that. He didn't take anything, though, so it's all good and we continued to talk. He was just generally a really nice guy, from what I could tell, though when he asked to see my passport, I told him it was buried deep in my bag as I pretended to drowse. Forgive my paranoia! One last note on this guy, he also thinks that the Tea Partiers in the US are nut jobs! I'm sorry you crazy fools, but the world outside of the US (and most of the US) thinks that you're absolutely batty!
Before my flight to Italy, I had spent the entire week with, at most, five hours of sleep per night after which I had to stay awake for another thirty-six hours on the Tuesday I left school, as my train left at 10:30pm and my flight left the next day at 7am. I counted my nap on the train as a blessing and felt decent once I arrived in the Fiumicino airport. However, I needed to wait for another ten hours before my rendezvous's flight came in. I went through the fastest customs ever (the guy barely glanced at each passport before waving nearly one hundred people through in two minutes) and decided to wander the coastal town of Fiumicino. When getting onto the bus, the first thing I noticed was that the Italians drive on the correct side of the road, as in the RIGHT side. Get with the program England! The landscape and architecture that we passed reminded me a lot of southern California and New Mexico. Honestly, if you had dropped me there and not shown me a sign, I would have guessed that I was in LA. Much of the place was in disrepair (I was wondering if I'd stepped into a ghetto), but all I had to do was cross one street to find rotting, chipped walls giving way to picturesque stretches of cafés, restaurants, and shops on a plaza. Here I was introduced to the wonders of gelato, which is vastly superior to American ice cream in flavor, but lacks our variety, and Italian pizza which is no different to ours aside from a thinner crust and better ingredients. Just a margarita pizza with no seasonings in the sauce was equal to or better than whatever I'd get at home with a bunch of herbs in it, as the tomatoes are just more flavorful in Italy (which is backwards since they are a New World fruit). I tried stumbling through some of the Italian that Dragos had tried to teach me (he lived in Italy for nine years) to order another gelato elsewhere, but I guess that it was so obvious that I was an English speaker that the clerk started to stumble through English to help me. I'm not even sure what flavor I got then. What does "Nocciola" mean?
I meandered past the various shops and restaurants nearby, taking in the sights and having a laugh at the "Old Wild West Steakhouse" in the dead center of the street (it looked very little like what I'd find back in New Mexico). Soon, however, the rhythmic washing of waves reached my ears. Like a dog following the distant call of a bird, I was led to the coastline. I found a wide stone path that stretched over the shore and ended in a spacious circle that hovered over the water, supported by thick shafts of stone and hedged by carved railings on all sides. I did not enter the circle at first. I stood at its edge where the straight bricks began to curve and I hesitated. I felt... relieved to be there. Imagine a man returning home and reuniting with a friend, that he had not seen or thought of in years, to discover that he had felt solitary without this companion. That is much how I felt standing there. Something that felt like a long held breath escaped from me and I shuddered. I could not bring myself to cross into the circle and surround myself with the ocean, much as the returning man might fear to speak with his friend after so many years of negligent silence. A wave crashed over the rocks and I took a step through the intangible barrier. I took another and another and I was elated! I wanted to dance and run to the edge of the railing to look out over the sea and call for joy "I'm back!" However, my superego got the better of me and I contented myself with plastering an idiotic smile across my face. I am not a sailor, nor a marine biologist, nor do I even particularly like fish (save sushi), so I would never have imagined that seeing the ocean again after these months would have such a profound effect on me. Now, weeks later, I still think of the sea and wonder when I shall hear it again and smell the air. That's another thing; I have spent most of my life by the sea, so I grew up accustomed to the smell that everyone else found so novel. That day, in Fiumicino, I smelled the ocean for the first time in my memory. Of course everyone, myself included, noticed the odors of low tide and when the quahogers hauled in their catch nearby, but never before can I recall smelling the brine.
Naturally, I went to the shore after that, kissed the Mediterranean's water just to say that I'd done it, wished I'd brought a swimsuit, and stayed within sight of the ocean for the next five hours. When I went to eat, I made sure to find a place with a view of the sea just so that I could soak it all in (and the restaurant made a good half calzone, half pizza thing while they kept playing American hits from the '50s by Sam Cook and the rest, which I got a kick out of). I walked back to the stone pier to discover that I was about an hour shy of sunset, yet found myself staying there the entire time.
A man had set up a stool and was playing the guitar for all present as the sun began to sink. I looked out again, the soft music behind me, the warm wind before me, the murmuring of the ocean all around, and all of it painted in oranges, greens, and blues. This would be a wonderful place to bring a girl, I couldn't help but think. If I had one that is. I turned back around and saw a couple settle near my left while the pretty girl began to dance to the guitar. She's got the right idea at least. I considered joining her, but decided to just let her boyfriend enjoy the scene. She looked like she was having fun though...
Aside from that, the guitarist made me laugh by playing "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and "The Entertainer" in the middle of his more traditional tunes while I noticed another man who, I kid you not, was unable to turn left. I am not imaginative enough to make this stuff up. Soon I had to depart, and I passed a limber girl doing rather impressive tricks on roller-skates, several couples, and then myself had to hit the emergency stop on a bus and caused an old lady to fall over. Well, shit.

Have a good night one and all! I shall post again tomorrow night so that you can catch up on my exploits, homework be damned! Tune in tomorrow night to discover why I stated earlier that "I am a wooly-headed, gullible, sleep-addled imbecile with no situational awareness or any sort of common sense or rationality."