Five days, Five Pounds

No, that's not five pounds sterling - although I wish it were that cheap - that's how much weight I gained on my recent trip to visit family in Italy. I had lost about 5 pounds since I got to London just from having to walk all over the place and prepare my own meals (which means I eat less). I had no problem getting the weight back after eating at Zia Idin's for the long weekend. I got up at about 4:30 am after going to sleep at 1:30 am and headed out to catch the tube to the bus stop to stansted airport. I flew Ryan Air so of course it was delayed and I ended up arriving in Pisa a little after 1 pm Italy time. My Aunt Margy and her co-worker Mary met me at the gate and we hopped in the car for the drive to Mercallo - a small town north west of Milan - where we have family. My zia Idin and zio Luigi live there with their daughter Grazia. Zia Idin is my great-grandmother's sister. I visited them once before during christmas my freshman year of college and I am so happy I had the opportunity to go back. We ran into a lot of traffic going through Milan but finally made it to zio and zia's house. 

We were greeted by a dinner of Rissotto and Ossobuchi. It was amazingly delicious. My zia Idin is a fantastic cook and always yells at you to keep eating! So I ate, and ate and ate... We talked for a long time - although only Grazia speaks english and she has to translate for zia and zio. My aunt Margy also speaks Italian so she was able to help translate too. The next day Grazia, Margy, Mary and I went to the nearby town of Arona. They told me it was one of my great-grandmother's favorite places to go. I was lucky enough to know my great grandmother and it was very cool walking around her favorite town. We stopped at a little cafe and had pastries and coffee and stocked up on sweets for the weekend (they made some great Canoli). We walked around a while then headed over to the Esselunga, a big grocery store, to get some food. We got three types of cheese from the alps which were very very good and I was able to bring some back with me to London! We ate lunch at the cafe in the store - i know what you're thinking, hmm eating in a grocery store, that sounds questionable at best. But no, it was amazing. I had one of the best ham sandwiches ever! We then went back to the house for a little bit then went over to the convent to visit with Sister Raphaella (the picture above). I met her the last time I visited and I was really nice to see her again, she is such a sweet lady and has a great sense of humor. We stopped back at the house for a little while and zia had made fritelle, a carnival dessert that was absolutely amazing:

 

Then we came back and went to mass at the church in Mercallo, it was all in Italian but it was cool to be there with my family. It's such a small town, that everyone in the church realized we were there and a lot of them came over to say hi and about half of them ended up being part of the extended family! After mass we came back and had dinner of cheese filled crepes, veal steaks, french fries, roasted carrots and cheese. It was all so good, I kept eating even though I was full. It's hard to stop with zia yelling at you to keep eating after she had served you a ridiculously big portion of everything. She also won't let you out of the house with your hair wet and will smack you on the arm if you walk downstairs in shorts and a t-shirt (my pajamas) because she thinks you will be too cold, as I found out. 

The next morning we took the train into Milan. We hopped on the underground and went to see the Last Supper. It was amazing to see the actual painting and was much bigger than I expected. After that we went to the Piazza Duomo to see the church which was huge and beautiful and then walked around the Galleria and the Rinascente - two big shopping centers right on the square. Everything was ridiculously overpriced but it was fun to walk around and look. We ate lunch on the top floor of the Rinascente, looking straight across at the Duomo, which was pretty cool. We got some Gelato, which was amazing - I got creme caramel and amaretto. Then we tried to catch a train at Milano Centrale and missed it by mere seconds - we watched it pull away from the opposite platform. So we took the tube to a different train station and caught a train back to Mercallo. 

When we got back, Aunt Margy and I helped zio set the time on a pen that had a built in clock. It was fun trying to communicate with him and eventually he was able to do it. Zia and Grazia went to mass and we were supposed to turn on the oven and get things ready for dinner. We were distracted by the pen and forgot to do it and we all got slapped by zia when she got back and it wasn't ready. We eventually had dinner of lasagne, veal roast, roasted cauliflower, stewed peppers, cheese and canoli.

On monday I woke up, had breakfast and visited with everyone for a while. I was really excited to be able to understand a few sentences of Italian and communicate directly with zia and zio. I really loved being there and it was hard for me to leave. It did help that zia made pizza for us to take back. They packed up the car with an insane amount of food and we headed back to Pisa.

We got back to Aunt Margy's house in Pisa in the early afternoon. It's a really nice place, not as big as the house in Germany, but still nice. We went down to the leaning tower and walked around a bit. It's really striking to see it in person. I mean, you know it leans but when you actually see it you're like wow, it really is leaning a lot. It's also a little weird to be there after seeing the place on tv and in history books, it's kind of surreal. The weather was really nice the whole time I was there. I am already missing the sunshine and warmth. Later on, we went down to the coast and the sunset was amazing. 

When we got back to the house, Aunt Margy made banana nut pancakes and we watched Gladiator - one of my favorite movies of all time. We also had some amaretto cookies which were unbelievable. We got them from an Italian bakery and they were seriously some of the best cookies I've ever had. On tuesday, I slept in a bit and then my aunt picked me up and took me to the military base. It was a lot smaller than the base in Germany - the commissary was like 4 aisles wide - but the office was a lot nicer than her old one. I got a genuine american hamburger - which was delicious - and we headed off the base to the airport. The rest of the trip was pretty much uneventful. 

It was so nice to relax with family and I miss them all already. As for now, I will think of the trip every time I sit down to eat, wishing that my meal of frosted flakes was zia Idin's lasagne and veal steaks.

Venice!

I got back on Sunday from a spectacular trip to Venice. I went with three good buddies and we had a blast. Things got off to a rocky start as our flight was delayed two hours and we couldn't find our hotel when we did actually get into the city. Venice is a maze - we got lost about everytime we tried to go anywhere, but that was part of the fun and when you don't really have a schedule for the day except finding fun things to do, getting lost can actually be great. We ended up getting to our hotel about 3 am saturday morning. We got up early the next day, ate our amazing free breakfast at the hotel and then headed downstairs to leave the hotel. We had been wondering what the awful smell in the hotel was that morning and we found out when we got to the bottom of the stairs and the ground floor of the hotel was flooded with about a foot of water. Luckily, the hotel gave us boots to wear around the city so we could still get around. Evidently, about two weeks out of the year in the winter, the high tide will flood the streets of Venice. So we were just that lucky to be there at that point in time. So we waded through the streets until we got to St. Mark's Square, the main point in Venice, but also the lowest point in Venice. The water came up past my knees and started filling my boots and it was really cold! So we found our way to the other end of the square where they had some elevated sidewalks to keep you out of the water. We ended up taking a tour of the Doge's Palace which was really cool. I learned a lot about the government of Venice. By the time we finished there, the high tide was over and the water was almost completely gone. We walked next door to St. Mark's Basilica and toured that (the picture above is from the roof of the Basilica on the side facing the sea). By the time that was done, the flooding was completely gone and we were able to enjoy the city completely. 

It also got a lot warmer and the sun came out, so we figured it was the perfect time for our Gondola ride! It was really expensive (20 Euro each for a 30 minute ride) but it was probably the highlight of the trip and definitely worth it. Our Gondolier was named Roberto and he was cool because he made his dislike of the French known, which resonated well with all of us. We went through a few small canals, then out into the grand canal up to the ponto rialto then backtracked to the start. It was really cool.

From there we wandered from pastry shop to gelato shop to pizza place to another gelato shop and just enjoying the uniqueness of the city. Here's a picture from the ponto rialto (a bridge) looking down the Grand Canal.

After walking around most of the day, we found a little place to sit an get a glass of wine and relax for a little bit. After that we went in search of a good place for dinner. We decided that we should find a nice place where we could get a meal that we would remember. We picked a place off the beaten path and we very happy with our choice. It was pricey (40 euro for my dinner) but tasted great and was a lot of fun. We split a decent bottle of white wine to go with our seafood. After a very light swordfish appetizer, bread, and some strange orange drink they gave us, I ordered the grilled Scampi. Although it looked a little intimidating, it was so good and I am so glad that I ordered it. Here's a visual for you:

After our meal we sat for about an hour and finished our wine. They even gave us some free dessert, some type of donut things they make for Carnival. However, we noticed that the streets were starting to flood - it was high tide again - so we headed out. We had gone back to the hotel to swap our boots out for our shoes earlier in the day, so we wandered the dry streets we could find and even managed to find a place making crepes on our way back. (I seriously ate so much this weekend). We went back to our hotel after that as the city pretty much shuts down at 11 and we were all tired.

On sunday we donned our boots again and went to 8 am mass at St. Mark's Basilica. Strangely, there were only about 15 people there in this pretty big church. I figure that there aren't that many tourists right now, the locals probably go to their own churches near their homes, and the flooding kept some people away. But after that we came back to the hotel, ate our breakfast and then I took a nap before we checked out. Unfortunately, we couldn't take the boots with us, and the water was still high so we went barefoot and rolled up our jeans. We waded through a foot or more of ice cold water in the lobby and out onto the streets. We were headed to the other end of the island to catch our bus to the airport and by the time we got to the rialto bridge to cross the grand canal, we put our shoes back on and found enough dry streets to get to the bus stop. After that it was an uneventful trip back.

I had a lot of fun and really enjoyed Venice, hopefully the rest of my trips will be as successful as this one!

Snow Day!

So what if I didn't have class today to begin with, it's still a snow day! London got about 6 inches of snow and the whole city shut down, no buses, limited underground use and Heathrow airport has also shut down. I was actually out in the worst of it last night, not fun - blinding snow and winds whipping through the streets - it felt a little too much like South Bend. But I need to write a paper today so it's not really much of a break for me, it actually just ruined my plans for going to the class building so I could concentrate better. There is no way I'm walking half an hour in this mess - it's still snowing by the way and the sidewalks are full of nasty slush. So I'll just sit here alongside my bedbugs and write an incredibly boring paper on Accountancy in the UK.

AHHH!!!!!

I may never sleep again. It has come to my attention that my bed - that I sleep in every night - has bedbugs. I am terrified, nervous, scared, angry, shocked, bewildered, and indignant all at once. I don't really know what to do about it, but I am washing all my bedding in hot water and then drying it on the hottest temperature. I hope that takes care of it. But I don't know what to do about my pillows and mattress. I get all weirded out whenever I think of little bugs sucking my blood all night - I have bites up and down my arms, on my neck, and some on my legs. They are red dots and blotches that are itchy and annoying. So I don't think I am going to sleep tonight, and if I do, I think it will be on the couch. Hooray for new international experiences!