Four Things My Geeky-Jock-of-a-Best-Friend Must Do in Europe Read Online Free

into, uh, ANYONE.
    It is PARADISE here, Delia, let me tell you. The sun is shining, and here I am, next to a sparkling pool, looking at Mount Vesuvius and listening to a Caribbean band. (And wondering if this band realizes they are on the wrong sea.) I slept twelve hours last night and then ran some laps on the top deck of the boat, gazing out at the INCREDIBLE, hypnotic BLUE of the Mediterranean. It doesn’t look at all like the Atlantic Ocean. It’s SO much darker. Somewhere between Hope-diamond blue and midnight blue. How nice it is to be surrounded by all this blueness. Mediterranean blue is my NEW favorite shade of BLUE.
    I am TOTALLY rejuvenated now, and except for the obnoxious flower on my cheek, and the stupid writing all over my hand, life is GREAT. I’m actually wearing the bikini today, Delia, BELIEVE it or not. (SEE? I’m making progress with the LIST.) I put it on and looked in the mirror of our stateroom (that’s cruise-speak for bedroom), and I started to think that maybe I didn’t look too awfully bad in it, and I was STEPPING OUT of the cute, little door (which makes it seem like we’re living in a hobbit hole), when my mother said, “You know, Brady, you really HAVE developed quite a bit lately.” At which point, I grabbed a big T-shirt from my bag and put it over the bikini.
    SORRY. I’m just not ready. There’s NOTHING wrong with swimming in a T-shirt, anyway. So WHAT if it gets caught up around your neck and keeps your arms from going over your head when you’re trying to do the freestyle? Who CARES if it bloats up and makes you look like a blowfish when you’re doing the backstroke? What of it?
    Through the fog of jet lag, I am starting to remember some things about yesterday’s arrival at port. It wasn’t “thrilling,” but I’m going to tell you about it anyway. In Civitavecchia, we went to this building at the docks, where bunches of people were sitting around on benches with their suitcases, all looking extremely tired. Every once in a while, someone in a uniform called out a number or a letter or something, and people slowly got up and grabbed their suitcases, woke up their other family members, and schlepped (as my grandmother says), slow motion, across the hot room and into a line.
    I watched this for a while, and in my quasi-sleep-state I was convinced I was on Ellis Island. It made perfect sense, too—at least in the la-la land I was in. It was not air and land travel which had worn me out, but TIME travel. I was a composite of my ancestors who had journeyed from Russia and Germany and Ireland, sick of Cossacks and Nazis and bad potatoes. I was ONE with their struggles. That IS, until I fell asleep again on my backpack.
    I woke up thinking about those ancestors this morning. I felt, at first, kind of guilty, because they were poor immigrants, and they couldn’t afford to take vacations, I’m sure. Of course, they probably would have had no interest at all in going back across the Atlantic to get on a BOAT, of all things. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that my great-great-grandparents (or whoever) would be really happy if they knew I was able to take such a COOL trip. It would mean that their idea to come to America had been a good one. Right? Didn’t they want their descendants to have better lives? Wasn’t that the point?
    Okay. I’m done with that now. I feel better.
    The ship sailed during the night and arrived early this morning in the port of Naples, Italy. My mother keeps saying we should go see the city, but I keep saying we should stay at the pool for a while longer. The water is actually very cold in the pool, and—here’s a shocker—it’s salty. This weirded me out at first, but then some waiter-type person who was delivering drinks with little umbrellas (the drinks had the little umbrellas, not the waiter-type person) told us that the pool is emptied every night and then filled up with water right out of the sea. Is that cool, or what?