1. I wish we’d had more time in NYC. We’ll have to go back and explore north of Central Park, for starters – we only got to see small parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattan.
Technically, I guess we could have ventured up there on the Sunday – our last full day there – but we were zonked after Saturday night out (karaoke and drinks for T’s birthday with our New York friends whom we met in Halong Bay). That was followed by a long walk home when we realised our train wasn’t running and had to catch a different one. We got back to our apartment about 2 or 3am and spent most of Sunday recovering (you’d honestly think we were middle aged or something).
I wouldn’t have minded longer on the East Coast overall, or in SF, but in order to meet some people in particular cities (of COURSE they would be planning to leave town round about when we were coming!) we had to move through some areas a little faster than I’d hoped.
2. I wish I’d tried to talk to the man at that restaurant in Naples, the restaurant that might or might not have been the one we’d been looking for, but I chickened out. He was yammering away at me in Italian, and instead of using my very limited Italian to explain I didn’t understand and did he speak English? I just froze. Then I walked away. I have a feeling that restaurant had been just about to open up for dinner, though not quite yet at that moment, but now I’ll never know – and I bet it would’ve been amazing, because it was tiny and totally untouristy.
3. I wish I’d been quicker off the mark with that word puzzle. On the train from Rome to Salerno, we were seated in a cabin in the middle of a raucous Italian family. Only one of them spoke English with any fluency at all. She and one of the other passengers were playing Guess the City on their iPads – a word scramble with a travel theme. Whenever they had trouble, they would ask me and T if we knew the answer. We were all stuck on one question in particular for the longest time, and we got off before it was solved. I was close – I could see that ‘Iguazu’ was one of the words – but just couldn’t decipher the rest of the letters. Not till about an hour or two later did it strike me – Puerto Iguazu. I wonder if they ever did figure it out.
