Free The Thong Also Rises by Jennifer L. Leo Page B

turning on the light, relieving himself in utter darkness. When finished, still semi-conscious with sleep, he blindly gropes and gives a hard turn to the doorknob, which to his horror, sends a shock of cold water exploding from the wall, dousing him from head to toe. Instinctively, he flinches and panics, fearing the ship has sprung a leak, and is bursting a geyser of frigid water into our cabin.
    It takes a moment before he gets his wits about him and realizes that in his bleary stupor, his hand has mistaken the knob for the door with the one for the cold shower spray and there will be no need for anyone to write a screenplay about our brush with a Caribbean iceberg. Meanwhile, I sleep soundly, dreaming equal parts rum swizzle, Johnny Depp, and golden doubloons.
    As he recounts the story of his comeuppance to me early the next morning, I can only smile to myself at the discovery that even those without princess complexes are prey to the perils of small sailing vessels. I roll over in my lower bunkand fall back into a peaceful slumber, the gentle sea slowly rocking me toward home.
    Julie Eisenberg lives in Miami, Florida. She and her husband Randy just bought their first fixer-upper boat, a twenty-five-foot trawler, which they plan to live aboard on weekends in the Florida Keys, once the mold-encrusted toilet, air conditioning, and 1970s orange-plaid upholstery are refurbished.

    A tour group is not like family. A tour group is an endless, round-robin blind date. You utter the same information about yourself over and over and over again. By the eighth, ninth, kajillionth time you tell someone what you do and where you’re from, you’ll start making up stuff just to make yourself sound interesting—to yourself. I estimate I shared my personal data approximately one hundred times over the course of my travels. By the ninth rehash, I was telling people that I was a part-time rodeo clown and married to a rich, elderly Weimaraner.
    â€”Mary Jo Pehl, “Your Tour Group and You”

MARCY GORDON

Gently You Have to Avoid a Frightening Behavior
    It was an emergency in a foreign tongue.
    L AST YEAR I DECIDED TO IMPROVE MY SCANT KNOWLEDGE of Italian and enrolled in a three-month intensive course at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, the world-renowned language school for foreigners in Umbria, Italy. As part of the total immersion method, your first lesson starts in the basement of the university during registration week where you wait in line for hours with confused and disoriented people from all over the world—China, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Russia, and Spain—with only one language in common—Italian.
    while waiting in line for a permit of stay, I helped a completely bewildered Australian couple decipher their enrollment papers and informed them that they had been standing in the wrong line for the last two hours and then directed them to the registrar’s office. Later, in another endless line, a girl from Japan wearing a Marilyn Manson t-shirt and a Hello Kitty backpack told me that Hello Kitty was “ in-ten-sho-no-lee i-row-nic. ” Any previous doubts I had about Hello Kitty’s intentions were now cleared up.
    After negotiating the chaos of registration I received my student ID and could now eat for cheap in the student canteen as soon as I found out where it was. As I asked for directions, I noticed the Japanese girl, and the couple from Australia I had helped earlier, watching me intently. I set off for the cafeteria and all three followed me. I immediately jaywalked across four lanes of speeding traffic figuring I would lose them, but that only set in their minds that I was brazen and well versed in Italian culture. At the next intersection they caught up to me and I confessed I had no idea where I was going, only a vague sense of the general direction.The Australians said they didn’t care where we ended up—they were just relieved to be with someone who spoke