Moonzilla

Dear Mouse #3,

Well, it’s been a full week now since we came home from our honeymoon in Italy, only to find cute and adorable You waiting for us in the kitchen! I must say, the look on your sleepy little mouse face peeking out from the mouse trap was priceless. Someone doesn’t have a very good poker face! I don’t think I’ll ever figure out just how you managed to squeeze yourself length-wise through the entire trap! Needless to say, you’ll be receiving a bill from me in the mail for a replacement, since you weren’t exactly in a position to be easily disposed of! LOL!!! :P

Anyways, Italy was great! Now that I’m over my jetlag, I’ve been trying to figure out how to best capture our experience there. In the interest of time and space, I thought a top ten list might suffice. Here goes!



Top Ten Tips on Honeymooning in Italy

1) Keep your accommodation expectations low. One hotel may have comfortable beds and a modernized bathroom, but an underhanded management staff and tins of liverwurst on the breakfast table. Another may have a gracious staff and a community International Tabloid table, but a perpetually damp bathroom that smells of eggs. Then again, you may strike it rich with a place like La Poesia, in Monterosso al Mare, where the beds are clean, the showers are hot, and Nicoletta gives you prosciutto and cannolis for breakfast. Or, you may get bumped out of your hotel on your last night in Rome, but upgraded to a better place with an enormous bathroom and a suspicious but memorable mirror over the bed.






2) Eat and drink a lot. As in, constantly. After the third or fourth day, a casual glance at the locals’ tables will cause you to reconsider the need to order three courses each, and you will discover creative ways to have your prosciutto and gnocchi and lamb and veal and risotto and bread and pizza and focaccia, and eat it, too. Without spending needless Euros. You will also discover the joys of table wine by the carafe. Here you should feel free to ignore the fact that most of the locals order a half-bottle of wine and stretch it out between two people over two hours. It is a sin to leave an enormous 7-Euro carafe of wine unpurchased and/or unfinished. That goes for lunchtime, too.








3) Gelato. Don’t be the six hundredth annoying person to come back from Italy gloating to anyone who will listen about having found the best Gelato in Italy. Do eat it. Every day. At least once, maybe twice. You can even call it ice cream if you want, because that’s pretty much what it is. Common decency should restrain you from taking the Midwestern Tourist route of shuffling down the middle of the street trying to keep up with your tour group whilst negotiating your foot-long cone piled with 3 quarts of multi-flavored gelato, but two or three or four scoops are perfectly acceptable.




4) Speaking of which, swear right now on your mother’s mother’s grave that you will never, under no circumstances, without exception, travel to Italy with a tour group. They are evil and should be eradicated. They push you against the wall when you’ve only had three seconds to consider Boticelli’s Birth of Venus, and they ruin your trip to the gelato store. They cut lines at every museum, and their leaders confuse and irritate you with the multicolored umbrellas and scarves-on-antennae which serve as evil tour group rallying sticks. If you are low on cash and high on cunning, however, you will learn to look vacantly at a wall or a tree while the tour guide next to you unknowingly provides you with his or her expertise on the statue or painting or ruin at hand, free of charge.




5) Museums in Rome and Florence don’t appreciate amateur photography. While the man in the Sistine Chapel may sound as though he is groaning unintelligibly in an obscure Eastern European dialect, he is actually repeating, over and over, the simple transinternational phrase, No Photo. You will find yourself first sheepishly considering that your camera flash might have contributed to the premature peeling and fading of countless frescoes. Soon thereafter you will find yourself wondering why flashless photos are also prohibited or, more confusingly, what damage a flashless photo could possibly do to a marble statue. As you pass through the museum store on the way to the exit, you will appreciate the Italian Museum Bureau’s plan to steal your Euros with postcards and prints and coffee table books full of the countless pieces of art which were unable to find their way to your memory card. Unless, of course, you acted fast and carried your camera at your hip.






6) A reframing of point 5. Italy is full of statues and paintings and columns and whatnots. All of which look famous. Many of which are not. Only the most diligent of honeymooners will take the time to check their Rick Steves guidebook to make note of each and every piece of art they encounter. That being said, only take photographs of the ones you absolutely know are famous. Sprinkled in with a few that may not be famous, but which you really, really like. But don’t bother trying to remember what they’re called. Chances are you’ll get home and upload your photos and forget what any of them are, and then you’ll type “Uffizi statue” into Google Images to try and figure it out so you can label your online photo gallery, and you’ll get 50 pages of results documenting 3.2 million other honeymooners’ perfectly captured one-of-a-kind shots of the exact same stuff you photographed, famous and otherwise.








6a. Save yourself the trouble of lugging a camera around Italy and, when you get home, go onto Google Images and steal everyone else’s photographs. Because they will quite literally be identical to the ones you took. Photoshop your faces into the foreground.




6b. Rick Steves gets things right about 2% of the time. Do not read his book in public or you will be thrown to the tour groups and scowled at.




7) Speaking of which, if Rick Steves mentions a “long tunnel” leading to a beach in Cinque Terre, what he actually means is the most terrifying experience of your honeymoon, encompassing a rusty steel door that creaks open after the scary Italian voice over the intercom mumbles “Pronto” and then slams shut behind you, leaving you alone in a tunnel full of scary alcoves and lit only by the faintest of miniscule lights. A really long tunnel. Like, a mile. Literally. Your instincts will scream at you to turn around, to get out, to not be like the stupid girl who climbs the stairs in the horror movie, but you will press onwards, mainly because you harassed your new husband to go there in the first place, and you will lie to each other about how it looks like there’s daylight just around the next corner, and then you will come to a scary abandoned camper in the middle of the tunnel, and it is at that point that you fully understand that this is where you will die, this is where the scary tunnel people will come out of their camper to slit your throats and drink your blood. You will take unrecognizable pictures of the dark tunnel ahead of and behind you, and you will know in your heart that these will be the last pictures they see when they discover your lifeless and violated body three years from now, and it is at that point that your mother will look to the heavens and gnash her teeth and wonder aloud why her son would have kept going into the tunnel, and more importantly, a tunnel to a nude beach. Then you will come to the end of the tunnel, pay your 10 Euro ransom fee to exit the tunnel, and spend exactly nine minutes on a rocky, 50-yards wide beach populated by exactly seven nudists who will not stop staring at you in an unwelcoming manner. You will take off your bathing suits and sit huddled together on your blanket with your legs crossed and, when that doesn’t make the starers stop staring, you will put your clothes back on and go back through the tunnel. Sheepishly.








8) Cinque Terre is quite possibly the most beautiful place on earth. Definitely the most beautiful place in Italy. Best of all, between the claustrophobic and dark beach tunnel and the death-defying drops along the trail between Monterosso and Vernazza, all fears will be conquered. Go here for more than two nights or you will spend the better part of the first day trying to figure out why you didn’t.










9) The Cappucin crypt in Rome is the singularly most creepy-outy thing you will ever see. Everything is bones. Walls, bones. Ceilings, bones. Chandeliers, bones. Cappucin means creepy in Italian. Evidently.






10) No trip to Italy is complete without a final one-night stop in Amsterdam, where of course your friend is generous and savvy enough to score you a surprise private champagne canal tour with a lascivious skipper and a pan full of Bitterballen. Followed by Chinese Indonesian food and, of course, a stop at Lelebelle.






11) Cats in a boat? Cats in the forum? Cats in Italy are cat-dorable?







So that’s all for now, Mouse #3. I was sorry to come home last night to find your friend Mouse #4 in a similar predicament to your own. You can only imagine the guttural shriek that erupted from somewhere beyond my bowels when his little head started moving! The emotional distress of having to dispose of yet another trap, rather than simply disposing of its contents like the pack of the package said we could, was matched only by the emotional distress of having to quadruple-bag your tiny friend in the hopes that four plastic bags would suffocate him four times as fast. I hardly slept a wink, wondering what terrifying thoughts must have been running through his tiny, half-crushed head! If it weren’t for the venomous rage I felt towards him for having traipsed his dirty little paws through my kitchen cabinets, I might have tried a little harder for a rescue-and-release on 9th Avenue. Dr. Faustus was right, you little guys really do love Swiss Miss!

You’ll notice - - or your friend will, anyways - - that the pest man was here today to seal your entryway with poisonous goo. You’ll also notice that we spent the day performing a top-to-bottom cleaning in preparation for and celebration of the arrival of our Brand New Couches. Hadn’t noticed the collection of feces you’d accumulated behind the trash can!! Let it be said now that if we catch any of your little friends sullying our freshly cleansed living space, we’ll crush your tiny fucking skulls faster than you can say Arrivederci!

Have fun in Hell!

Luv,

Groomzilla