Inflatable Rampage

Next on the 100% linen tour of the Mediterranean came Cinque Terre, a series of quaint fishing villages strung out along the Ligurian coast like beached seaweed. All we had to do was penetrate Spumante Magnum, gateway to The Five Lands, as they are known in ancient touristic scriptures, and it would be nary a hop, skip and commando roll to Parmigiano Grosso, the pungent and crumbling finish to a complex palate of sightseeing.

Nat was as prepared as a heavily developed yet developmentally-challenged girl scout in a blinding pair of trotters procured from the locker room of a nearby bleach factory.

Impending starvation rendering her stomach dashingly concave, Liz finds herself nonetheless in sartorial purgatory after happening upon this couture candy store, only to find her Northern European dimensions unforgiving in the silken face of Italian rompwear. We are forced into a mission of drastically unhip proportions...

Finally mounting the lip of the Magnum, we are faced with local reinforcements of an enthusiasm we had not anticipated. Clearly they possessed something worth protecting, and we doubted it was either small or inedible. Our stomachs leisurely eating themselves, we push on towards the epicureal satisfaction hiding playfully beyond the next outcrop.

Our hunger eclipsing our humanity, the dregs of our energy reserve are just sufficient to studiously ignore these stranded Scots on the rocks.

Reaching a trident in the road, we are in several minds as to the reliability of these clearly vintage directions. Anyone with vertical penmanship this artless can't have J-Ho on their side*. Our escalating gastric reflux urges us to choose the "Spiaggia" prong in the fervent hope that it is some kind of giant communal pasta dish. If only we had read the surtitle....

For it is in fact the beach!

And all we find to appease the toil & trouble brewing deep within are these edible swimsuits in eight great Ligurian flavours. Highlights included Quince, Melon and Just Like Mamma Makes It, with the lowlight being Algae (fourth from left).

Eight kilometres along the next inside leg between villages, Liz loses both confidence in the likelihood of ever ingesting nutrients, as well as an ability to express this verbally to Nat, and instead contorts her features into this expressive and fugly mask. Nat is about to throw up at her feet when she spies Liz's rocky doppelganger in an adjacent cliff face. It is not until we are airlifted to the nearest greasy spoon that a misshapen waitress explains to us the cautionary purpose of this ancient crag of doom: never allow one's tastebuds to become tour guide of the Five Lands, lest they lead you on a merry dance of malnutrition.

*poor script formation = insufficient fraternisation with Godman/J-Hovah = a desire to reroute tourists to your underground lair. Was it really so cryptic?

Liz reenacts Nat's theory of what Nonna is doing out back to give the watermelon gelato that authentic fruit feel.

In Florence our speed-sampling of the cafe culture shot us to a level of consciousness from which Nescafe and weakened import beans had thus far sheltered us. Even this miniature albino demigod seemed like a feasible tourist guide.

And he might as well have been; lining up for cultural baptism outside the Uffizi Gallery, it occurred to us that a much more interactive and rampagey way to immerse ourselves in Italian art would be to have one of these moes render us more grotesque than thought possible, even by those with the misfortune of having ever awoken next to us.

So here's our moe of choice. A charming man: an Italian in every sense of the word, whatever that means, and judging by his impressive visual client list, he is able to draw. He is also willing to exaggerate others' unfortunate facial blips while wearing a coiff like this. Conclusion: moe is still running off the confidence of having caricatured all 6 members of the All-Star Celebrity Tour to Florence in 1986.

After some batting of eyelashes and signing over of souls, we have ourselves a deal of moderate bargainness. Our sketchy friend seems disturbingly mirthful at losing a few pennies, and his apparently immobile sidekick has remained immobile. This bodes oddly, but we press on, crazed.

We attempt to retain an air of cool beyond our reach even in normal circumstances, our maniacal smiles growing parallel to our unease. Unbeknownst to us but knownst to the crowd of Americans drawn to the scene like iron filings to a magnet, our faces have begun to take their really, really munted shapes.

Growing more Skeksie-like with each stroke of the charcoal, our mulleted portraitist takes a moment to incite the assembled into a facial evaluation of the work so far. Judging by these mugs it's fairly safe to assume this was the point at which he endowed us with chestal accessories worthy of an ancient fertility goddess.

And Lo, here is the result of 25 euros and social flagellation. Get it? Get it? We're AUSTRALIAN, and we're at the beach! Inspired!
At first...few..... glances, we thought that Nat just had a disproportionately full lower lip. On closer inspection, it would seem that's her teeth. On the other hand, Liz's piercing has become a gaping hole, and she is the love object of a shark with lockjaw.

We decide to hide out in the ruins of an old concrete wall for a closer look. Moments later the moe himself actually caught us using our full combined weight to stamp his masterwork into the cobbles. He just took another puff and strode on by.....

In other news, we were no less disturbed on sight of this weirdass pharaoh-mermaid, whose principal move consisted of leaning forward creepily at whoever was misguided enough to drop five cents into his receptacle. You know street art's lost its mystique when after a long day of leaning, the "artiste" slings a black gym bag over one shoulder and slopes off in a gold full-body condom.

One of the joys of being a hard-line Anglophone traveller is poncing out to dinner sans-phrasebook & being handed an endearingly-translated rendition of tonight's offerings from the bain-marie. We suspect there may be some non-specific-European guy meandering across the continent with a sandwich board advertising this service, along with an endorsement from the Welsh penpal he's written to biannually since 1963.

The following are a few extracts snapped thus far from his broad body of work, along with our "Universal Language" take on what we assume, based on the abstractions provided, would have come to the table had we dared to expend our cake money on any of them. Good appetite!