Italy (Puglia): Beach Life and Otranto

 

Our hotel had a very convenient agreement with one of the nearby beach clubs.  We took advantage of the complimentary shuttle to Caipiriña Beach and booked an umbrella and two sunbeds.  The water was gorgeously blue and a wave break kept the Ionian Sea calm for swimmers.  For some reason I can't find any of the photos that I took with my phone except for the one that I posted in Instagram previously.  It doesn't matter much since I was trying to respect other beach-goers' privacy anyway.  I mostly wanted to document how dang beautiful it was!

I think one of my favorite things was how chill all of the other patrons were.  Everyone quietly enjoyed their time and kept to themselves.  Lots of good reading time if you're not in the water.

When we were ready to return to the hotel I cringed because my Italian language teacher would have been disappointed: I blanked on the word for "let's go" as the driver and I struggled to communicate.  I'll never forget "andiamo" ever again!

 

 So relaxing!

Once again we found ourselves to be a little tired and not really interested in lunch so we hopped into the rental car (now that I knew how to properly use the gear box) and we drove to the seaside town of Otranto.

The city was decorated with elaborate white luminaria structures for the weekend's Feast of the Madonna dell'Altomare Church.  We walked in front of the church and descended the cliff-side stairs right before the marching band (who's members we'd accidentally followed through the streets as we parked) began to play and a procession with the Madonna statue was brought down to a stage where many townspeople had assembled.  By the time we reached the other side of the town center beach we had a view of both those who were enjoying the blue waters and also the religious event going on a few dozen meters further.

The view towards the old fortified town

 

In the below picture you can see the zoom in on what was going on below the church

The mosaics in the Otranto Cathedral are from the 12th century

 

 

 

 

After returning back to Santa Maria al Bagno neither of us wanted the fuss of trying to get a restaurant table for dinner so instead we went to one of the many late-night food stands near our hotel.  We each got a sandwich with all of the fixings.  Hans' was a bunch of German wursts smooshed into a burger bun and mine was a 90% buffalo 10% pork "burger" patty inside a bun with the usual fixings like tomato, lettuce, mayo, etc but ALSO fries.  Hah.  Honestly they were pretty decent but we definitely did not want to eat like that too much on this trip!