Bubbles!

I fell asleep in a bathtub on the Amalfi Coast. It was nearly full-sized, the first of its kind we'd encountered in all of Italy.

The night before we'd stayed in a hotel room with a bathtub that was two and a half feet square with a faucet that protruded right into the middle, such that you bashed your leg into it no matter how you stood or sat. The shower head was four and a half feet high, too short for even me to really use effectively and the lack of a shower curtain ensured that your towels and clothes were thoroughly soaked by the time you were finished.

The night before that there was a shower curtain around a drain in the floor. The curtain clung to you if you were unfortunate enough to accidentally touch it, and the whole contraption left a rather large puddle in front of the toilet that I managed to step in in the middle of the night.

It was a warm day, though not unpleasant. Much to our dismay, the tour guide had shortened the length of our stops so we'd spent most of our time on the bus listening to the driver's collection of cheesy Neapolitan music. Stopping in the evening was a relief.

The hotel was a labyrinth of stepped floors and stairwells etched into the side of a cliff overlooking the ocean. We ran off in search of our rooms. Jess and I had been assigned to what seemed to be the honeymoon suite with our own private balcony, though the smog really did wonders to destroy the view.

What we were really excited about was the fact that we had our own private bathroom, which was more than could be said about some of the others in our party. It was larger than we'd had previously and covered floor to ceiling with azure tiles. Most importantly, it had a normal sized bathtub and a shower that matched up to our stuck-up North American standards. Joy!

After about half an hour sitting in the bar upstairs and having fun reading and massacring the names of every drink on the list, I suddenly decided that I wanted to have a bath. If I remember correctly, I announced this quite loudly with a really childish giggle.

I hadn't had a bath for over ten years because I'm a shower person, but for some reason it was suddenly a huge novelty, especially since the room came with complementary bottles of bubble bath. Bubbles!

I slid down into the water so that the only thing not submerged was my face, letting the water lap at the edges of my scalp. I closed my eyes, only to open them again when Jess banged on the door. "You still alive in there?" she shouted. The water was suddenly cold.

I haven't had a bath since.