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!