Senza il gato, per favore

I will never again doubt the power and truth of superstition. Please, dear reader (do I sound so official and professional?), think twice the next time you come across the path of a black cat in the dead of night. Rather than scoffing at myths and wife’s tales, I beseech you to immediately about-face and walk swiftly in the other direction. If my earnest plea is not enough to dissuade you, perhaps my tale of mishap and misfortune will do the trick.

It was early on the morning of Friday October 10th and the day dawned cold and wet. Two solitary girls walked swiftly through the deserted streets, eager to begin their long anticipated journey to the enchanting villages of Cinque Terre. It wasn’t long before the two girls noticed a curious black object some distance to their right. Soon they were certain that it was a perfectly innocent black cat, watching them make their progress across the abandoned streets. The girls thought nothing of it and continued on their way, crossing the path of the sinister black feline. Little did they know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act, would result in their imminent deaths.

…Ok, the death part is obviously not true. By the way, who caught the movie reference? Really though, we actually did pass a black cat walking to the train station Friday morning. And an uncanny string of bad luck did follow us from then on for the rest of the weekend. I’ll lay it out for you. It started out on our train ride to Cinque Terre. There were a few times that we had to get out of the train we were on and get onto another one. First, we missed one of our connecting trains by three minutes and had to wait for an hour in the station until the next train. Then, straight off the train we were walking down the street and Christina stepped in a big ol’ pile of disagreeable-ness ifyouknowwhatImean. Soon after that we went for a swim in the GORGEOUS Mediterranean Sea. We were not swimming for long until Cailey and Christina got stung by jelly fish! A quick evacuation of the water followed. And swimming for the day was over. The next morning we found an incredible lookout point and watched the sunrise over the hills. While we were enjoying the view, a cat meandered up the stairs and decided to relive himself all over Kimberly’s backpack. We considered throwing the cat over the wall into the ocean to see if it would land on its feet, but we satisfied ourselves with glaring viciously and muttering angry words. On our way down the stairs from the lookout point, Rachel tripped on the last step and twisted her ankle. Things went pretty well for a while after that, until we were on our train ride home. Between two cities the train stopped for quite a while, and we were just beginning to get restless when the train conductor came through and explained (in very broken English) that one of the cars was broken and they were waiting for the police to come so they could fix it. So we waited in the train. For two hours. By that point four out of the six girls in our group had experienced some misfortune or other. Lauren and I were the last to fall. So, naturally, we blamed the train difficulties on Lauren and decided that I contracted a parasite. Meanwhile, back in Siena, little did we know that Friday afternoon Peter (our program director) was tromping through the forest by his house and got bit by a viper. And spent the whole night and next day in the hospital!! …Moral of the story is, kick more cats.

Lest you think my weekend in the most beautiful heavenly Cinque Terre was less than beautiful and heavenly, here are some incredible pictures that do more than my words could to convey to you what an amazing place I spent two days in.

In other news, I bought my very first nectarine ever!! And it was just my luck that there was a surprise inside: a giant mutant disgusting seed/alien thing. Which might be the source of my parasite.