"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]