A Good Rub

An unintended and unexpected part of this trip has been the large amount I've been able to massage people. I suspect most of you know I enjoy a good massage, both to give and receive. Those of you lucky enough to have received one of my massages should know that I'm reasonably decent at giving said massages and that I have some unique talents that allow me to give good massages.

Well, a big aspect of learning to give good massages is massaging people. Both massaging a variety of people, and massaging some people a fair bit. Well, I've had the opportunity to do both of those things in addition to massaging on a very regular basis. During my trip I have massaged no less than 17 different people. While in London I started trading massages for the promise of beer. My skills were in demand so I figured I could start charging. Besides going out with the group is fun, but spending money on beer is expensive in London :-p

I have learned a lot about massage in the last 6 weeks. Even in the last year I had learned more about massage than I had in several previous years. In the last 6 weeks I may have learned as much as I had in the last year. My ability to identify, diagnose, and recognize locations on the body has jumped dramatically. In addition, I have learned how to be significantly more careful while massaging (sorry to any of you I've bruised over the years!) I think I'm getting close to identifying ticklish spots without needing to be told what is ticklish. I'm capable of using an extraordinary number of parts of my body to massage people.

I could probably talk about massage for a good number of hours, but I'll spare you. I've just seen a lot of growth, it's been great, and I've really enjoyed it.

Italy is still awesome. Went to church today, which was in Italian and pretty cool. I also wrestled Michael, who is taller than me, not quite twice my weight, and pretty unquestionably stronger than me. He did give me a wedgie, but I did give him about 9 wet willies and had him pinned on several occasions (to be fair, he did have a good pin on me once or twice). He did surrender though, but even if he hadn't I would still claim victory. We did some shopping. Wine is sickeningly cheap, and it isn't even mediocre wine - it's all good, all of it. Ugh, if only it was like that at home - great wine for a few bucks a bottle. When I say sickeningly cheap, when we go to expensive stores like the local supermarket, wine is between like, 1,20 Euros and 5,80 Euros. For the sake of easy math, a Euro is about 1.5 US dollars. That means a good bottle of wine is $1.80 and a great bottle of wine is $8.80.

If I haven't mentioned, I'm staying right next to the Alps that border France. Yes, they are beautiful. I intend to do some good hiking in the next couple days! Oh, and getting through Italian customs was the most ridiculously simple process. I waited for the whole one person in front of me in line to finish, walked up to the guy at the stand who barely spares me a glance and stamps my passport in the time it takes him to flip to an empty page. That was it. It was like a one minute process in entirety.

That's all for now. Italy has been wonderful :-)