Return of Ugly Naked Guy and Sting! – June 20-23

The work week went through with no real excitement. Working internationally is a lot like working in the home office, I just happen to be in a different country.

Like I said, the week was pretty unexciting, until Friday that is. Friday at lunch we were sitting there in the cafeteria talking about American television with our Italian translator. CSI is very popular here. So is Lost. The Sopranos is just starting up, which is weird since it’s been around 10 or so years at home. All of the sudden there’s a commotion at the table next to us. Everybody was turning around to look up and out the window and there were a lot of exclamations of surprise and laughing. So I turned around to see what all the commotion was about. I mostly saw sky until I looked at the apartment building next door. There was a guy standing out on his balcony with a newspaper in his tidy whities. I think he’d noticed everyone looking at him because he was looking back at us. But there he was, hanging out on his balcony in his underwear. And lest you think this was some beautiful Neapolitan god hanging out in his underwear, this guy was more of the fat and hairy version than the slim and suave type. It was a good laugh.

I found out on Friday at that same lunch that Sting was going to be in town playing at the plaza around the Duomo. I debated going for a long time, but in the end it was one of those things where you have to say that this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and you’d be an idiot to pass it up. So around 9:00, after dinner, I and “dad” caught the subway down to downtown. The plaza was insanely crowded. I couldn’t being to estimate the number of people there, but it was more than 10 and probably less than 100,000. We had to sit through three songs from some random Italian band. I have no idea if they were good or not, since it all sounded pretty jumbled to me. After that we had to sit through an interview with them and them a whole bunch of excerpts from Sting interviews while his roadies set up the stage. Then he got on. We only stayed to listen to three songs, one of which was Message in a Bottle. I don’t know what the other two were even though I was familiar with the songs. It was really crowded and I couldn’t see anything, so we decided to take off. Besides, I needed to catch some sleep before we trained off to Florence.