Guanti Neri   That spring-break trip we took in 1962 out of Mainz has a number of memories. It was one of the few non-summer trips we've taken: I picture us in Venice with topcoats on. We have a picture of Bev feeding the pigeons in St Mark's Square with birds on her head, shoulders, and arms.

I do not like to bargain, and it's part of the Mediterranean culture. In Florence, Bev took to it with a passion. She armed herself with a knowledge of the Italian numbers, and off she went.

I remember once, she wanted a cosmetic facial sponge, and found one on a street vendor's cart. He wanted maybe the equivalent in lire of 50 cents. She didn't get him down to a quarter.

But she triumphed with her guanti neri. Florence is known for leather goods, and Bev decided on some black gloves. We figured out that gloves were guanti and black gloves would be guanti neri. Off she went, and got a pair at a price she liked. Unfortunately, she didn't have them for too long, as explained below.

A Sense of Time   When we got to Napoli on that trip, we somehow got it into our heads that we had to go see a performance at the Teatro di San Carlo / Saint Charles Theater (Photo by Pask00), which dates from 1737 and is the oldest continuously active public opera house in Europe, including La Scala in Milan (1778) and La Fenice in Venice (1792). The performance was the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, but we are not particularly ballet fans, but bought tickets nevertheless. At the theater that evening, Bev wore her guanti neri. During the performance, she found she was missing one, and we looked all over and never found it. It wasn't so much the loss of the gloves themselves as the loss of a bargaining prize.

But the main memory of that evening was not the theater, or the ballet, or even the guanti neri. It was the time lesson we learned. Unfortunately, we had planned too much for that day. During the day we took the boat to Capri, and it wasn't today's 40-minute hydrofoil, it was a slow, 90-minute ferry trip each way. We were exhausted when we got back. We took a quick nap, had a quick bite, and rushed to the theater. In New York, curtains go up at 8:00. They open the doors at 7:30 and everyone arrives in that half-hour. Actually, they always hold the curtain until 8:05 for possible latecomers.

Our tickets in Napoli said the curtain was at 7:00. We got there shortly after 6:30. It could just as well have been three in the morning. No one was there, and there wasn't even a light on inside. And the curtain was in a half-hour! By "curtain time" at 7:00 there was a bit of activity. A light went on inside. By 7:30, a couple of ushers arrived. Actually, they looked quite nice in their outfits with buckle shoes, white stockings, and white wigs. Now with an announced curtain time of 7:00 on the tickets in our hands, we started drifting in by about 8:00.

As in many older European theaters, there is no balcony. Around the seats in the orchestra there is ring upon ring of horseshoe-shaped seating areas, one directly above the other. Naturally, we had bought the cheapest seats, on the 6th, or top, level. We were exhausted from our day, and there was no elevator.

Now not only were we way delayed in starting (we could have napped longer) the performance was divided into five acts of about twenty minutes. Bad enough, but each intermission also lasted about twenty minutes. You see, the purpose of this seating layout is to see, be seen, and socialize. I suppose the performance must be secondary. It went on for hours. And so our lesson for the day was about the different Mediterranean sense of, and treatment of, time.

Genova   Now a jump almost ten years ahead, from Spring 1962 to the late Fall of 1971. We were completing the first four-month period of our sabbatical, were ready to go home for the winter, and had just driven back to Nice to return the car we had taken on a short-term lease. We then spent a well-remembered cozy few days in Nice and took the train to Genova (JENova, which is Genoa, famous for the salami) the port in near-by northern Italy. And from Genova come more tales.

Food & Drink   There are so many changes we've watched happen in the travel world, and one involves food and drink that we experienced first in Europe and either didn't exist, or wasn't paid attention to, in the US, but today are everyday items.

Wine From our first arrival in Europe it was so obvious how wine was a daily part of life on the continent. It became no surprise after a while, that in cafeterias in France there were small bottles of wine alongside bottles of soda at the end of the line. And, of course, the wine was cheaper. It is amazing to have watched wine suddenly become so vastly more appreciated in the US (and in the UK) over the years. Now so many people have their favorite pinot grigio or shiraz.

Espresso Everyone in Italy went to the espresso bars for a quick stand-up cup, and it spread across Europe. We, too, got used to it. But in the US, people would go for nothing more than a good-old cuppa Merkin coffee. Now, you'll be hard pressed to find an American restaurant who doesn't serve espresso. (For the record, a language point: please note there is no X in espresso.) Then Starbucks got started, and there are now plenty of Starbucks in Europe. Talk about carrying coals to Newcastle.

Gyros (and Pita) On our only trip to Greece, we stayed at a very small hotel. In Greece, in smaller hotels and restaurants, there is a communication problem, since most people speak only Greek. Not to worry. That's where the adventure begins. $5-a-Day recommended a certain restaurant where they said this would happen, and it did: they took us into the kitchen to look at what was cooking on the stove, so we could choose.

But at our hotel the people were very helpful, even with the language problem, and pointed out that there were many tiny shops, or street stands, that served what went by the Turkish name of döner kebab, that we should look into. Pressed, ground, lamb would rotate on a vertical spit to be grilled, then sliced off and served with vegetables and sauce on what turned out to be pita bread.

Well, that was our first experience with pita, which hardly existed in the US, and which now is in every market. The Greeks also called the rotating (gyrating) meat "gyro", and pronounced it YEE ro. We ate YEE ros every day in Athens. A few years later, we heard that a restaurant off Fifth Avenue, of all places, served gyros, and we went out of our way to get our first American gyro. Now you can get them at the food court of every mall, and they've become standard fast food.

Pesto Now let's get back to Genova in the chilly fall of 1971. We got good at finding nice, simple restaurants with good food. At one, they offered pasta with pesto sauce. What, a green sauce? Well, we each ordered a portion, and then seconds. Now, pesto sauce can be found in every US supermarket, although it hasn't yet made it to all restaurants. By the way, "pesto" is the Italian word for pestle, as in mortar and pestle, a reference to the grinding of the ingredients.

But then we got to our 15 minutes of fame. $5-a-Day was divided into many chapters, each covering a major European city, but then there was an appendix called "A Tale of Many Cities" in which readers' recommendations for hotels and restaurants of more minor cities were listed. So, in the next edition of $5-a-Day, under Genoa, was our recommendation, with our names, of the restaurant with the great pesto sauce. The listing stayed in new editions of the book for a few years.

L'italiano   We had come to Genova because we were going back to the US on our one-and-only freighter trip. We had booked passage on the Yugoslavian freighter Tuhobić, which left Rijeka (now in Croatia), sailed entirely around Italy to Genova, where we would get on, then make a stop in Tangier, Morocco, and then go on to New York. We would be on board for 11 days. Actually, because of a port strike in New York, we ended up in Boston and were bused to New York.

We spent a couple of days we'd planned in Genova, where there isn't a huge amount of things to see. Then we heard that the ship would be delayed for three days, because of an Italian strike. What to do? We were getting bored, and here we had three more days. Well, what else would language people do? We found a bookstore, rummaged around, and found a book that teaches Italian. We spent those three days working on l'italiano. I remember sitting with our book on a park bench overlooking the sea. In retrospect, We used time on the ship as well to study. It was a fun choice of thing to use our time.

The Pennybakers   I'll generalize about freighters from our one-and-only trip. Your schedule has to be flexible, since the freight schedule is primary and the passenger schedule is secondary. There is a tendency to stop at out-of-the-way ports. The accommodations are fine, and not as cheap as you may think.

On the Tuhobić from the passenger area you'd look down at the containers on the deck. The passengers' quarters were fine, and there was a dining room (all inclusive), and a lounge. But that's all. If the charm of a transatlantic crossing is being cut off from the world for a period of isolation, that is even truer on a freighter. There is no entertainment (although maybe nowadays, they may have VCRs). You get to know people and entertain yourselves. There is the atmosphere of an Agatha Christie mystery where everyone is suddenly isolated in a country manor house because of a storm. Everyone takes care of themselves.

[Never cross the North Atlantic in November. Out of our porthole the horizon separated a dark gray sky from a slightly darker gray sea. And we rolled from side to side. You'd see: horizon sky sky sky horizon sea sea sea horizon .... But I digress.]

Back to people. Freighters carry a maximum of 12 passengers. They tended to fall into categories. There was a group traveling together, maybe three couples or six people. Now people who know each other already will tend to stick together, and they made no attempt to mix. It is just as well, since they were a loud-mouthed, hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, bright-shirt-wearing bunch of Floridians.

Considering the year, you will not be surprised that there were a number of hippies. I remember a young woman, and also vaguely, a young man, that we got to talking to somewhat.

But then there were the Pennybakers. They stood out from the crowd maybe as much as we did. They were older, maybe in their seventies, and twice our age at the time. They were from California, well-dressed, and dignified. They could just as well have been from Pasadena, since they were that type. We hooked up with them for most of the trip, talking and playing cards. We never found out their first names. They were always Mr and Mrs Pennybaker to us.

Their story was of interest to us. They didn't have any kids. Not only were they travelers, they had been around the world many times, and almost always by freighter. They were passionate freighter travelers.

In addition, there was one more point. Not that much before that, they had been crossing the Pacific on a freighter and a monsoon came up. As Mrs Pennybaker was going down a corridor during the storm, although she was holding onto the railings, she was suddenly thrown against one wall and broke a number of ribs. At the next port she had to be flown out to a hospital.

They say when you fall off a horse, you should get right back on again. And as soon as she was able to, both Pennybakers were back on their freighters again.

The Pennybakers must be gone by now.

I think we've turned into the Pennybakers.

And that's just fine with me.