Where has all the gelato gone?

We were planning to wait on our Italy post until we got to Eritrea, but we've been getting angry emails from friends of Meg's parents who want the dirt on Cathy and John's exploits on the Amalfi Coast and are threatening to boycott "TMTTV" (as one self-described addict dubbed it) unless we deliver the goods promptly. So without further ado, The Six Best Things About Our Week in Italy:

1. The Night Before: We arrived in Rome at 4pm, a mere 15 hours before the rest of the Pearson clan was scheduled to land. We knew that we could spend most of those hours asleep in a comfy hotel bed, or we could romp around town till their plane landed. Which one do you think we chose? On the train ride into downtown, we drained the mini-bottles of red wine we had nabbed from Alitalia (hey, when in Rome...), and proceeded to scamper through the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, a bunch of piazzas and charming cobblestone streets. We ate the hugest cone of gelato (Nutella flavor=genius) we'd ever seen, drank more wine in the Piazza Navona, marvelled at how lively the whole city was at midnight on a Monday, and spent the wee hours composing a song for the Pearson clan while sitting in the shadow of the Coliseum. Around 2:30am, we hit a wall and hopped on a bus back to the airport, where we slept on chairs in the arrival lounge till the Pearsons landed....
2. The Reunion: Cathy and John arrived first, and we stuck funny hats on their heads - a Turkish fez for John, and a funny Tibetan fur-flap number for Cathy. Cathy shocked us all by not breaking down in tears at the first sight of her daughter in six months, bringing into question her membership in the "Hormone Sisters" circle. But she and John hugged us tight, and we felt the love all around. Then Dunagan and Philip showed up, and the reunion was on. Rahul didn't quite know how to feel when everyone's first words to him were "Wow, you're so skinny now!" You too can lose 15 pounds in just 5 months on the developing country diet! Yay for diarrhea!
3. The Amalfi Villa: In a word, perfect. Not too fancy, not too shabby, not too big, not too small. But juuuust right. A mere 135 steps up from the street led us to a pretty little flat with our own roof deck (where we could drink wine and stare at the Mediterranean), washing machine (where we could wash away 5 months of accumulated nastiness from the road) and kitchen (where Meg could burn plastic pots to the stove).
4. The Food, Ah, The Food: Salad we could eat without worrying about peeing out of our butt the next day, water we could drink straight from the tap (wow!), homemade pasta (al dente, of course), luscious fresh fruit (including lemons bigger than your head), free-flowing wine, buffalo mozarella, cappuccinos and a brand new Magnum ice cream bar with bits of chocloate-covered espresso beans embedded in the chocolate shell. Every night, Rahul's hardest decision was: gelato, or Magnum; Magnum, or gelato? The answer, of course, was: both.
5. The Daily Excursions: Although we would have happily never left our little villa of paradise (especially because we knew that we'd have to climb 135 steps every time we came back), we actually managed to get out and see the rest of the Amalfi Coast. We ferried our way to Positano and the Isle of Capri, where we stumbled upon a chairlift to take us hundreds of meters to the top of the island. We walked down thousands of stairs from the town of Ravello back to our home as the sun set. And we went on a little hike out of our front door that led to a spontaneous skinny-dip in a grotto (a little river cave/canyon thingy). Photo evidence not to follow until Rahul gets a job and Meg gets into residency.
6. Parents' Day: Father's Day happened to fall on the next to last day of our week together, and since we were somewhere in Asia for Mother's Day, we decided to redub it: Parents' Day! We went to a five-star brunch at the aptly-named St. Caterina Hotel where we had our first wine-less meal (we had mimosas instead) and spotted our first celebrity of the trip - Maura Tierney from ER. We relaxed at home in the afternoon in preparation for the night's debauchery - the Pearson kids singing "Redneck Parents" - a spoof on Jerry Jeff Walker's classic, Redneck Mother. The Pearson parents paraded around in their new XXX aprons (starring well-placed tomato, basil, and sheep) given to them by their adoring children. Incriminating photo and video evidence will be posted in the next few days, we promise.

There's so much more we can say (how's that for subject-verb agreement, Cathy?), but we're hoping this'll give the TMTTV addicts the fix they need till Dunagan gets home and posts the photos on his super high-speed American internet connection. (Thanks Dunny for letting us spend our last day in Egypt seeing Islamic Cairo and eating hummus 5 times a day instead of being glued to a computer screen). Stay tuned for the scoop on our whirlwind tour through Egypt with the Pearson boys. For now, we leave for Eritrea in 26 hours and we're going to soak up as much Egyptian flavor as we can. So, arrivederci, and ma'as salaama!

My Ode to Turkey, Meg and Rahul

Editor's Note: We just got to Egypt today after an absolutely amazing week with the Pearsons in Italy in a gorgeous villa on the Amalfi coast of Italy. While we were enjoying countless 3-hour decadent meals, the stupendous Amy Dickie was working hard in our absence. This is the second in a series of "guest blogs" where we require the people who've travelled with us to extol our virtues and say as many nice things as they can in order to convince the rest of y'all to come out and visit us. Hope it works:

Turkey, Meg and Rahul - what a fantastic combination! Really, I cannot imagine a better travelling situation. After all, what other combination could provide several mosque visits, biking through canyons, brilliant navigation of the Istanbul ferry system while enjoying the views of the Bosphorus with a Nalgene of wine, rock jumping in the Mediterranean, insane amounts of bread, extended jovial visits with Charlie Chaplin, Ali the Jandarme, the hairy potter and his wife, Bekir, the thoughtful bike rental guy whose name continues to elude me, a plethora of crazy hats, conversations on everything from tampons to the US healthcare system, magnums, the whole Ihlara Valley walk, the most humorous bargaining ever, Tom Petty, raki, heated hearts and backgammon games and three overnight bus rides all in one week! In the words of both Cathy Pearson and Wesley Willis, you guys are AWESOME, or rather "ahsim". I love you. I miss you. Let's do it again. South East Asia 2009! :)

Hoşça kalin, Turkey!

Meg hits the houka .

We've got some new photos up - Turkey, Tibet, and some karaoke shots in Kathmandu. We didn't get to finish all the captions. Forgive us.

We roll on to Rome tomorrow to meet the uproarious Pearson clan. It's going to be off the hizook. We've got many Turkey stories left to tell, but they'll have to wait. But for now, we'll just say: Go there! As soon as possible. It's an awesome place, it's changing fast, and it's only going to get more expensive. Turkey's been good to us.

The Future of Turkey Is In Your Hands

The rockin' Amy Dickie takes off for Istanbul in 45 minutes, but we're not letting her go without a guest blog contribution. Yes! Amy came to Turkey straight from Switzerland and Greece, and as you know, we came here from India, Nepal, and Tibet, so we discovered early on that we have different perspectives on Turkey's place in the world. Amy found herself saying "whoa, you wouldn't see that in Europe" and we kept saying "whoa, you wouldn't see that in Asia." And, given that Turkey's now trying desperately to enter the European Union, and facing equally desperate opposition by countries like France because it's "not European enough," we thought we'd give you our take on this debate. You be the judge. Turkey: Europe or Asia?

"You wouldn't see that in Europe":

• squat toilets that make you happy that there's nowhere to put your bum
• leeches for sale
• raw meat for sale in an open-air market
• carpet vendors inviting you in for tea saying "hello lady, I have nice carpets, only looking, no buy, let me help you spend your money"
• men selling spiral doodles on the street
• men carrying multiple carpets on their backs walking down the street
• a ten-seater bus carrying twenty people
• tap water you have to iodinize in order to avoid diarrhea
• currency where you pay for something worth 1 lira with a 5 lira bill and get 4,000,000 lira in change
• prayer calls being broadcast over a loudspeaker and reverberating through the city
• bad english store signs (e.g. Sorry, We're Open)
• a $10 room, including breakfast and dinner

"You wouldn't see that in Asia":

• bathrooms with toilet paper and soap
• bathrooms that make you pay to pee that locals actually use instead of walking around the back and peeing on the wall (like rahul and meg did)
• cobblestone streets with actual sidewalks
• streets with stoplights, traffic lanes, and a general lack of farm animals
• a new gleaming-white Mercedes Benz bus with neither chickens inside nor passengers on the roof and a conductor (wearing a bow tie) who chastises you for putting your feet on the seat
• a subway that's cleaner than the one in New York City
• salads that don't make you pee out of your butt a day later
• men wearing speedos and women in thongs on the beach
• a $10 room, including breakfast and dinner

We're not sophisticated enough to put an actual "vote" button on our website, but hey, we want to know your opinion. Use the Comment button below to cast your ballot.

--amy and meg and rahul