The Frogmarch

"I've got to pull up my stakes and roll, man." --Jean-Jacques Libris de Kerouac

Sunday, January 09, 2011

"Enjoy your stay in Italy, Signor. Also, your son's passport expires today."

File under "things you do not want to hear on the first day of your Christmas vacation."

[photo: all the essentials, Ravello, Italy]

So instead of relaxing on the Amalfi coast, we spent a day scurrying around Rome trying to get Boog a new passport . Fortunately, the staff at the US Embassy in Rome were miracle workers, being able to issue a temporary passport within a few hours, and even more amazing, to find me a secure parking spot in central Rome on a Wednesday afternoon. After four years in France, I found the competence and willingness-to-help of government functionaries to be something of a shock.

[Photo: semi-submerged nativity scene in public drinking fountain, Amalfi, Italy. You really need to enlarge this one to understand how wonderfully strange it is]