Laura

In a nice little dovetail with my last entry, on the day of the beer fest, my French sister Laura arrived in Lecce for a couple days of vacation. We had a great dinner when she arrived and enjoyed a bottle of Champagne. I’d like to pause here to clarify that this was Champagne from the Champagne region of France. Classy shit, amirite?!?! After dinner and some sparkling conversation, Laura was exhausted from two hours of sleep and twelve hours of travel, so she headed to bed as we headed to the beer fest.
The next day, Laura and I wandered centro a bit and bought some typical Leccese food for her to try. Then, being French, she complained a little. It was a great time and it didn’t seem like that long ago that we were living together and arguing all the time. We did, however, discover that it has been seven years since Laura lived in the states with us.
The next day, we decided to take Laura to one of the many famous beaches surrounding Lecce. Unfortunately we were just a little too late to catch a bus to any famous beaches and had to settle for Lecce’s local beach, San Cataldo. After a bus ride that lasted all of fifteen minutes, we arrived at the beach which was absolutely deserted. The three Senegalese guys on the bus with aims of selling their cheap shit on the beach looked crushed. They dismounted with us and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering aimlessly and trying repeatedly to convince us that we needed plastic watches and bracelets made out of beads and twine. We, however, had different aims and spent the day basking in the sun and enjoying the exfoliating effects of sand in a strong wind. The water was fairly chilly and fully of bits of wood. I’m not sure where they were from. Laura was the only one of us with the desire and dedication to submerse herself fully in the water.
We returned to Lecce in a timely fashion so Laura had plenty of time to purchase some gifts for the important men in her life. She then had a nearly sickeningly amorous phone conversation with her boyfriend and I caught snippets like mon cheri, and mon amour. Then we had a conversation about love approached in a logical fashion, which was just as silly as it sounds. We had dinner at the apartment and, per usual, headed to centro to enjoy Laura’s last night in town.