Walking Backwards

I just got off of the phone with my mother and I'm going to be getting a very large grand piano. Hmmmm, this seems like it shouldn't be happening in my tiny house.

Ah, crazy day. I forgot that I would have to start heading up the whole domestic front when I got home. Today was spent running errands and going to the grocery store and cleaning. Damn life returning to normal.

More on my trip (a brief summary). We did so much while we were there (I mean we were there for a month, come on) that I don't think that I can remember and record all of the idiosyncrasies it.

- We went to Rome for several days and still didn't fit in everything that I wanted to do. It rained for the first two days and was so very cold that I was inclined to stay at the hotel and watch Italian TV most of the time. Italian television was mostly just bad American television dubbed in Italian or game shows. They have a version of MTV's 'Pimp my Ride' called 'Pimp my Wheels' where they re-make scooters. The sun did come out and my mom found a baby store that sold strollers (I am not going to even go into this because it is as bad as you can imagine - never go to Europe without a goddamn stroller) so my trip was brightened vastly. We went to the Vatican and saw the Sistine Chapel. We threw coins into the Trevi Fountain. I had some really good pasta with grilled vegetables. We took a tour of the Colosseum. I ate some really, really bad Chinese food. I honestly can't remember it all, but I know it was fun. I was hoping to make it to Ostia Antica, but plans fell through at the last minute and we couldn't go. Our group took the Eurostar back to Florence and went through so many tunnels I lost count. Nicholas also got an ear infection and I got a cold.

- The town in which the villa was located had this incredible restaurant called La Saletta. They made this soup called zuppa di cipolle, which is translated as simply "onion soup". It is so much more than that, though. Love in a spoonful, it is amazing. I'll probably be in the kitchen trying to replicate it for the next several months. La Saletta will always have a special place in my heart because of it. They did get on my bad side, though, when I ordered a bottle of an Ornelaia thinking they would bring me one of the cheaper ones and they brought our group the hundred dollar bottle. It was so incredibly good, but we ordered three bottles and that wasn't a pretty bill. I had many people pissed off at me that night.

- We went to Florence a lot. I love Florence and had the best cup of hot chocolate I had ever had in my life there at Cafeé Rivoire in Piazza della Signore. Sure it was five and a half euro, but I would pay it again. I also had my special Italy moment in Florence. My mother and I were walking out of the Uffizi down to the duomo and I was looking up at these amazing buildings and it was perfect fall weather and Nicholas was back at the villa with his dad. While I thought it couldn't get any better and as soon as I started blissing out, two street musicians started playing Vivaldi and I started crying. It was my ultimate Italy moment.

- One of my favorite cities in Italy was Lucca, which I had never heard of before I got there, but it's this really cool walled city that is almost entirely pedestrian and has several small but amazing churches. We went to an exhibit of DaVinci machines there and I bought a lot of gelato and some great olive oil. You're allowed to walk along the tops of the walls and Joe, Nico, and I headed up there at sunset with the leaves falling around us. When we were sitting on the swings at one of the playscapes on top of the walls, a group of Italian women started singing children's songs. I want to remember that for awhile.

- I missed Venice and am still pissed about it, but it is not a city for children.

- We went to San Gimignano and Volterra on the same day and were wowed by the drive there. It was some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen in my life. We bought some alabaster for my dad and made our way quietly back to the villa. Both cities are rated very highly for their wine, but we were all wiped out and I had a hangover from drinking a half of a bottle of limoncello the night before so we didn't feel like being tourists that day. I did learn how to play rummy, though.

- For some reason everyone thought I was Italian or that I could speak Italian. Whenever we would go to restaurants the waitress would look directly at me after everyone fumbled over their orders like I could somehow make it clear to her what they were trying to get across. People would ask me directions on the street in Italian. Once, we went to the grocery store and a woman tried desperately to get across to me, in Italian of course, that she needed to find the pine nuts and would I help her "in inglese, per favore"? This is after I had told her that I speak English, too. People are weird.

- The men in Italy are so incredibly hot and so polite (if you have a child with you). I had so many guys stop and ask me if I needed help with my bags or with Nicholas, that I had a skewed view of what these men were really like. After I went out on my own without Nico, I learned that they're all pigs, but damn gorgeous pigs.

Well, I think I'll stop here for now. My network card isn't working, so I'll have to wait until I can burn a cd to get pictures up. Right now, though, I'm going to bed. I've been working on this entry for two hours and I don't think I can concentrate on anything anymore.

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Strangely accurate and something for my bored self to do.

Jamie took the free ColorQuiz.com personality test! "Wants to establish herself and make an impact desp..." Click here to read the rest of the results.

I'm awake in a quiet household (for now) so we'll see how far I get on my travel saga before Nicholas declares that he's awake and makes me play playdough with him in our darkened playroom.

First, the trip over wasn't easy. Despite what some may think, entertaining a three year-old on that long of a plane ride is an arduous task by myself. Especially when your sitting in a row that is far removed from the nearest powerport thereby making the DVD player you brought totally useless. We played games, we read books, we colored, we used up every thing in my bag of tricks. He only slept for two hours on the trans-Atlantic leg and I felt so guilty getting him up to transfer planes. He was good, though. Very few times did I have to pretend he was just a stray child belonging to some unknown other passenger. My brother read the whole time. Asshole.

So, after we land in Pisa we hop a train to Florence which is a little over an hour away because of all of the stops. I performed the amazing feat of changing Nico on the moving and swaying seat (we decided this wasn't the best time to continue with the militant potty training) and learned a valuable lesson about the Italian train systems: for the love of GOD validate your ticket before you get on the train. Apparently you have to punch your ticket in one of the little yellow boxes by the platform which stamps it with the date and time and location. It is a 40€ fine if you don't. The conductor took pity on us and didn't charge us, but I felt that wave of "oh crap, not something else".

When we arrived in Florence we had to wait for a taxi to go to the car rental place. A task made all the more difficult by Nicholas who kept trying to run away to explore and chase pigeons. I can't blame him; by that time I was ready to give up on any future traveling and just live at the Florence train station (which is unbelievably dirty, so this is saying a lot). The taxi eventually got us and drove through the Florence streets to the car rental place. This was our first experience with the wonders of Italian driving. First of all, there are very few traffic laws and those rules that do exist do not have to be followed by the ten thousand scooters that are buzzing around. We almost lost our lives about a dozen times in that ten minute ride. But it was only almost.

We pick up the rental car and I get to drive on these streets that are crazy and dangerous and I haven't had any sleep and I have no idea where I'm going. Yay! The reason I have no idea where I'm going is because Italian street signs are not helpful to someone who has not been to Italy or thoroughly studied an Italian map because they don't use street names or numbers (which all our travel maps had), they use directions of cities to get you places. Turn here to reach Sienna, Turn here to go back to Pisa, Turn here to reach a number of cities that no person has ever heard of and that don't exist on the map. Our city was not on the sign. We did find it two hours later by pure chance.

We find the villa and go downstairs to sign the paperwork and give them the deposit. A task made all the more difficult because we don't speak Italian and their English, while far better than our Italian, came up short of fluency. But we did it, we got the villa keys and drug our luggage inside the huge house. Now, if we were lucky this would be the end of our travels, but we are not lucky people. After situating our luggage so that it could have a nice and comfortable rest, we turned around to drive back to Florence to pick up my mother who was landing at the airport. We left over an hour early because we were guaranteed to get lost, which we did. I had to pull over to throw-up a few times because my body was trying to think of anything that it could do to get me to go to bed. But we found the airport and managed to get there twenty minutes before my mom landed. She drove home.

So that was our trip there. I'm going to find myself some tea now and start yet another load of laundry. More later today with pictures (my sleeping brother has the laptop in his room). I promise not to be so long-winded with the rest of my entries, it's just that the memory my first day will be burned into my brain for the rest of my existence as proof of what I am capable of surviving.

We're back. I'll do a very detailed write-up of the trip later, but for now all I have to say is jetlag is a BITCH!!! We got home yesterday evening after twenty hours of flying and running through airports and customs and other hell and went to bed around 9. Around four in the morning everyone was up and doing stuff and acting surly to one another. Not one of us could go back to sleep. We tried to make at least Nico sleep longer, but he wasn't having any of that. So now I'm glazed and useless, but I have gotten most of my unpacking and laundry done and am ready to tackle my filthy house tomorrow. I've got a party to go to tonight, but I'm probably going to turn in early so my super long entry is going to have to wait. Tomorrow, expect a few photos and some captions and phone calls to those I owe a phone call to. For now, I'm going to try not to set the house on fire or fall asleep in the bathtub.