She started to look nervously for a waiter, but nobody was showing up. She just noticed a man sitting at a table behind her. He looked easy and relaxed. She smiled to him nervously.
He smiled back.
- New Tourist? – he asked
- Yes, is it so evident?
- Oh yes, your skin is extremely pale and you don’t know that in Italy lunch time ends at 2 pm. Nobody will serve you now until the 7 pm.
- Oh, silly me – she said embarrassed.
He came closer to her table and asked if he could offer her the best ice cream on the entire coast. The mind was suggesting her to refuse the invitation from a stranger but the empty stomach was shouting: go for it, girl! “What the hell, it’s just an ice cream and I am really starving…”. She smiled and let him lead her to the best ice cream laboratory around.
While they were walking through the streets of the village, he kept entertaining her with a nice conversation. His English was surprisingly good and she really enjoyed his company. He told her that he was an English teacher in a local primary school and during summer he was helping out his parents running a small souvenir store.
The ice cream was really delicious, the company was too. After two hours of visiting the village she felt tired and decided to have some rest in the hotel room. He was a real gentleman, he walked her to the hotel, kissed her cheek for goodbye and said: “By the way, I am Sandro and I hope to see you again”. She said: “nice to meet you Sandro, I am Lucy” and blushed entering into the hotel.
On the next day she decided to work on her pale skin and to get some sun. She went to the beach nearby her hotel. The sand was clean, the water was transparent and there were
many tourists like her to expose their pale bodies to the sun. Around noon she was really exhausted and so she decided to find a nice place to have something to eat before all bars would close for siesta. She wore a pareo and sat at the counter to have a fresh salad bowl.