Metaponto really means "prison" in English!

We arrived in Bari, got our rental car and set off for the 90 minute drive to Metaponto.  Metaponto is a beach town in southern Italy - supposedly where the Italians go to vacation.  The drive was nice with hill towns in the distance and vineyards on the side of the road.  However, once we took the turn for Metaponto the picture changed drastically.  Suddenly we are in the heart of graffiti ridden buildings, run-down neighborhoods and it is just plain ugly!  If we had been in Seattle we would have never driven through that neighborhood if you get my drift.   

We found the entrance to Alessidamo “Resort” and made it through the guard gate. We were still smiling bravely at this point but let’s just say that it didn’t look as nice as the pictures and the pictures weren’t exactly exquisite. Our room was like a room in Cabo might look which was dealable.  However, a few things were not dealable:

1.  No internet usage in the room and no wi-fi.  Jeff had to drive to a camp ground, sit in his car and use the free wi-fi.  The glares from the camp ground staff were enough to make you cringe and hence no blogs during that time period.  Not a happy camper!

2.  No one spoke English (in the resort and surrounding areas) which I know we are in Italy but come on, it is a resort.  In Northern Italy we could communicate quite well but in Metaponto we were mute.  And there was no TV station that we could understand.  Mind you that up until now we had CNN.

3. No air conditioning – temp was in the 80’s and humid and buggy!

4.  The laundry area is shared with the cleaning crew so dream on if you want to do laundry – and we NEEDED to do laundry by this point.  Remember, we traveled with carry-on only.

5.  There is nothing to do unless you drive 2 hours…we went to the beach one day but the bugs were terrible and we heard the jelly fish were all over the place.  We went to the pool for one day but the music was so loud you couldn’t read a book plus, heavy set women in bikinis and heavy set men in g-strings became a bit too much after a couple of hours. Our highlight was Matera which I will describe in a future blog (it is blog worthy).

6.  All of this may have been good for a laugh or two or three (and we did laugh on days 1 and 2) IF it had not been for the disco music they played every night until 1:00 am which was blaring and kept EVERYONE at the resort awake.  We officially hate Italian disco music!

7.  I am pretty positive that our room had bed bugs.  It is possible that I say that because we saw mass media coverage regarding bed bugs before we left for Italy...or I may be saying that because I am covered in bites.

Miss Italy Pageant (the final 3 but one on left wins "Francessca")

A few highlights were our trip to Matera, meeting a group from Seattle and complaining together, Jeff and I playing name that tune alone in our room and then watching the the Miss Italy Pageant.  The Miss Italy Pageant deserves a mention; it is on TV for 3 nights from 9pm to 1am and very different that Miss America Pageant (very provocative). 

We MUST escape this prison!