Ponte Vecchio, Pizza Man and Thumper

As I said, my journal is a bit mixed up. I am not sure which day was which. For the 5th of July 1986 I have this entry.

"I played volleyball with Annie (France), Alain (France) and Richard (Turkey). It was really fun. Alain looks a bit like Sean Penn. He is so funny. Well, after that, Annie and I played soccer, then we went for an exploration of some of the mountains.

That night Tom and Tom (Americans), Rolf (Holland) and Caroline (Belgium) and I went to town. We drank and played quarters. Went to one small bar and played a trick on one of the people there. You place the coasters like a cross on the table one in the center, above and below, one left and right. then you ask the person to point to a card while your back is turned. Then when you turn around, you must guess which card the other player pointed to. If he guesses correctly, the loser must buy you a drink. So while Tom sat with his back to the italian man, Rolf was standing beside the Italian. Rolf had a drink in his hand and a coaster on his hand too. So when Tom turned back to look at the table. Rolf would put his drink down on the coaster to tip Tom off as to the correct location. The man never knew. We won lots of free drinks from the poor man. They did it so well. I was impressed.They could not have had time to practice a lot, Tom and Rolf had just met.

We showed them how to play quarters. The italian man was good at that. We then left that bar and went to Ponte Vecchio restaurant overlooking the river. There were other people from the camp there already. We taught the owner how to play the drinking game "thumper". The owner and his brother got so drunk! We all did. When we got back to the camp, there was a party going on. Wine, Danish beer, asti. We drank and danced and then I hit the sack."
It sounds like at first I was the marathon girl playing one sport after another. July in Italy is rather warm, remember. Then marathon drinking. It was rather like that. We did a lot of walking, soccer and such. Then lots of drinking in the evening.

Here is a picture of the owner of the Ponte Vecchio Restaurant. Pizza Man! He knows "what's the name of the game?" He drank those huge beers in liter mugs. How did he survive those 2 weeks with us? I have an album of pictures and things. One of the things I saved was this label of Giraf beer. It is Danish. I don't know why I saved it. I am not a beer drinker, never was. I switched to mixed drinks long ago. I remember Tom from the States trying to get some kind of mixed drink, I think a Tequila sunrise or something crazy. They mixed something together for him, it was expensive and disgusting tasting.

Ok, I do happen to have a life other than campo blogging, so I can't promise to be able to post every day. I will spend some time now telling people about the blog so we can get some more comments going. Ciao!