So many great new pics you won’t believe it!
We had a going away party in the big city park near our place, and many friends showed up. Some former students, Gianluca and his wife Roberta, another former student Roberta, her husband Graziano and their friends Monica and Davide, and Giancarlo, as well as our friend Cat from Church, our co-worker Paul, Rachelle and Luciano and baby Gaia, Kirsten and Massimo, and even our friend Enzo whom we met when he picked us up late one night when we were hitchhiking home from a club in the freezing cold, all these good people came to say goodbye, and seeing them all together, these who have invited us into their homes and their lives, made us incredible meals, taken us on daytrips around Italy, invited us to dog agility competitions, made us realize all the more how blessed we’ve been here, that these people have made Bologna a home. Trying to tell them this was rough, a bit like thanking our friends and family at our rehearsal dinner (some of you know what I’m talking about). I got through most of it after a long pause for Claire and I to stare at each other. I hope and pray that we will see these friends again, in the States, or back in Italy.
Tomorrow we fly to New York where we’ll visit our great friends Justin and Cassandra. As of August ninth our address will be:
2225 E. 37th St.
Edmond, OK 73013
Goodbye Bologna July 31, 2008
The South of France July 29, 2008
How to describe what we’ve seen today, the periwinkle shutters on fairytale buildings, brick outlined with rectangle stones, the kind streets, and then the church, St. Enenne, the oddest shape, layered woodwork old, old, a wall of confessionals and winding wooden staircase, my childhood dream of a pirate ship, old, old, back in the predawn crawling into tight spaces of meaning, life unlocked, here is a love unchallenged, never mentioned, I’m never leaving this café.
We took three trains out to Grenoble, surrounded by Alpine mountains, where Tony picked us up and drove us south through the French countryside, fields of lavender creeping into the sunny cab. We stayed with his friend Nathaniel at a sort of hippie-commune in a series of old farmhouses. We stopped in the small town of Nyons, where there’s an incredible open market. We bought a Mediterranean dish of chicken, seafood and rice, as well as three kinds of salami, four of cheese. We lunched on these in a park, said goodbye to Nathaniel and headed to Toulouse where we picked up Tony’s fiancée Laetitia from work and then headed to their place, outside of Toulouse, at a, ahem, castle. The next morning Claire and I explored Toulouse after Laetitia led us into town via subway. We were completely enchanted with the city. The vendors were friendly, the streets clean, and the buildings’ color combinations were, to us, novel. I also learned that French is the most beautiful language I’ve heard. The next day we visited Europe’s largest cave, in the Pyrenees, along with our host’s friend Romu and his parents. The following day we returned to the mountains and went on a gorgeous hike which ended at a clear mountain lake where wild horses were grazing. We were nearly ready to forget home for another year and look into rent costs in Toulouse…
T minus Two Weeks July 29, 2008
Two weeks from today, it’s arrevederci a Italia. We’re mostly excited to head back stateside, but after a year, there are some big goodbyes. We’ve been welcomed into the lives of some amazing people here, coworkers, students, and folks from the little Anglican church we’ve attended. Eleven months and it still feels bizzare that we live in Italy, even while feeling more and more at home in the city.
What will we miss? The colors of the buildings and the care that went in to making them unique. The food, at trattorias and in the markets, meats and cheeses, fruits and veggies of a completely different order than what we’d known. Shopping for said foodstuffs, in the rain or sun, through the brick or cobblestone little streets, no florescent lights, no scanning of credit cards, no competing for the best parking spot. Walking everyday, usually for an hour or two. Biking through anarchic traffic. The daytrips into nearby towns so distinct one from the next. The lack of giant store-chains. Travelling by train.
sorry, but it’s factual. June 24, 2008
maybe this post should be for girls only. i got myself into quite the situation the other day at the salon. please dont read if you are offended by traumarama waxing stories from seventeen magazine. if you’ve never heard the term traumarama, you might not want to read. sorry if i offend. here she goes.
we decided to go to the sea last weekend because the weather is hot hot HOT! seriously hot. so i thought i would stop by the place my friend cassandra and i usually get waxed. its always been nice having cassandra there for support (really) and to explain what we will need to have done that day. the brows, the stash or the bikini.
this particular day cassandra had a lesson, so i had to go alone. i was feeling a bit nervous as i walked up to the place, and was rehearsing in my head the partial italian i could use and the best possible way to explain that i just needed a bikini wax. unfortunately, i couldn’t remember the name for bikini.
so, i walk up to the salon and try and open the door. it’s locked and i need to ring the buzzer. this is great, because once i ring the buzzer, everyone in the salon immediately knows that i have now arrived.
a woman comes up to me as i walk in, and i’m now trying to remember what i’m supposed to get across. she looks at me expectantly. “is valentina here?” (italian out the window).
“you speak ENGLISH?”she asks with a worried look on her face.
“yes” (nodding my head and smiling and thinking desperately, ‘please just tell me if valentina is here. i just need to speak to valentina. PLEASE’. getting more nervous here.
i repeat the question, and point, and just say, “valentina? here?” pointing at the floor.
she says something in italian, turns from me, and asks the salon, full of men and women, if anyone speaks english. so a male hairdresser bravely steps forward with hairdryer in hand, and asks me what i want. awesome.
“i would like a bikini wax” (using my quietest and most confident-sounding voice)
he raises his eyebrows, turns to the original lady, says something in italian, and they start giggling. i am standing there cringing and about to walk out. i’m sweating now. please let this be over. i dont really need it. i’ll just shave or something.
at this point the guy opens the question up to the whole salon and points to me and shrugs. “what she needs?”
i just decide to get it over with. i point to my poor bikini region and say, “wax please”. and the whole salon erupts. men and women and children alike.
boof.
needless to say, i am getting excited about not playing the fool everywhere i go. i think this whole year in italy has been humbling and, lets say, character building…but this last experience i’ve had…pretty rich.
In the Middle of the Night May 28, 2008
Don’t sleep on these new pics!
We woke up in the night to our doorbell buzzing. The control panel is next to the door on street level and we are three floors up and sometimes people buzz all ten apartments trying to get in. We were still asleep and decided that we would ignore the caller, that they would ring again if it was important. We awoke again, Claire first, to noises inside our apartment. I turned on my cell-phone flashlight and put on my glasses and as we sat up two figures entered out room and our eyes were full of a powerful light.
We speak a little survival Italian but in the middle of the night, with two men in uniform making demands behind a submachine gun, we speak nothing. We managed to ask, “Do you have a problem?” but didn’t understand the reply.
We were more confused than afraid when our neighbor Sara came in behind the Carabinierei and told us what happened. She and her boyfriend had gone out and when they returned at two our door was wide open. They knocked and called out but we hadn’t heard them. When we didn’t answer the bell they called the police. Claire and I put on some clothes and joined them in the kitchen. Nothing was missing, our door just hadn’t latched well and had blown open in the night. The police asked to see our id’s and filled out a short report which we signed. While fetching our passports I thought, “well, maybe we go home tonight” (we’re not exactly ‘legal’, and they can send us home whenever they like) but the police left with their submachine gun after we thanked them and our neighbor and we were back in bed five minutes after hearing noises in the night. Our hearts were racing and it took some time to return to sleep and then it was bright morning in our room and while getting ready for work we spoke about the weird dream from the night before.
CINZIA! April 18, 2008
i got home the other day from a long day of teaching, and in our living room was a BIKE! an old but refurbished awesome red italian bike. its name is cinzia. i was delighted that it was already named, with its nametag on the frame, written in jazzy font. such a perfect name and font for this bike.
this was of course the work of my sweet and thoughtful husband. i took it out and couldnt stop smiling as i rode around our neighborhood and to the park. so great! thank you, mr. newton!
picture to come!
Update on ‘The Facts’ April 2, 2008
Our landlord offered to split the difference, we’d pay e100 and he’d be out 100, which seems fair. We are all, he, our neighbor and us too, at least a little guilty for participating in his tax-evasion. We learned from our friends who lived in the apartment before us the punch-line. Our landlord works for the Guardia Finazia, the monetary police, and therefore knows exactly how to get around the rules. On a similar note, I was teaching an advanced class yesterday using the second conditional (If ___ then ___). I handed them a pile of hypothetical questions, one of which read, “would you cheat on a test if you could be certain that you would not get caught?” One student read the question out loud and all five immediately erupted in smiles and cries of “of course! We did that in school all the time!”
Ultimitalian April 2, 2008
I love Ultimate, the team sport like football or soccer or basketball but with a frisbee, and wasn’t sure if it existed in Italy. I looked around on-line and found a league and wrote an e-mail and was told to meet at the entrance to the park, Giardina Margerita and 7:30 to be picked up.
Davide arrived on scooter, handed me a helmet with a broken chin strap and I hopped on, wondering where to put my feet. He talked non-stop, his head turned to address me and occasionally glancing ahead into rush-hour Bologna traffic. He spoke very good English and explained that scooter riding was usually frightening to Americans. I told him it was like an amusement park ride but I don’t think he understood me. We weaved in and out of traffic, into the opposite lane to swing around cars in the usual Italian scooter-driver fashion, but Davide took it further, creeping under red-lights until perpenduicular traffic slowed for us. Three or four times I had to literally close my eyes and fight the urge to say look out. I wondered what the pavement would feel like and if my helmet would stay attatched to my head.
Davide explained the Ultimate scene and also that he was a flower-deliveryman and he had to make one more for the day. We stopped in front of his shop and I spent a few minutes standing in the street with the bike, and then off to the delivery with Davide, in shorts and hoodie and helmet walking around trying to find the address. He had a trick of inserting his phone between head and helmet so it’d stay there. I stayed on the bike and even walked it forward to make room for a parking car and watched the busy café beside me and, disguised in my helmet, dressed just like my driver/host (and future coach) never felt more Italian.
On the way to the fields on the outskirts Davide told me about the team, the league, how they are third in Italy and eighth in Europe, how some players play for the national team, the team’s history, etc. We hopped up on a narrow sidewalk and went quickly, branches from hedges whacking our windshield and helmets. We were obviously on a short-cut, using sidewalk and winding through gates and around sign-posts. Davide’s driving agility impressed me, making tighter turns that I could on bicycle. I had been nervous about the practice, not knowing what to expect and believing, correctly as it turned out, that I would be the only non-Italian speaker there, but it occurred to me, as we arrived to the fields, that after the scooter ride I felt oddly courageous. I could only be embarrassed on the grass; I had escaped physical death.
Twenty or so guys gathered and Davide, the team captain, and Matteo, the guy I had origianally e-mailed barked instructions and we were running. I stayed just behind the front group and everyone was chattering in typical Italian fashion. After lap two everyone was quiet and I realized, though I’d been running lately with my friend Luciano, I had not been moving at this speed. By lap three I was praying that it was our last and plotting an escape route. After four or five laps, with the lead group well ahead, we stopped. We lined up for sprints, three abreast and I always lost, but respectably so. Next came a series of hurdles spaced a few feet apart over which we hopped. I managed to clear them all.
It was apparent that I would not make the A league. These guys were big and in shape. Though I’m taller in Italy, I was under the average here. We moved onto frisbee drills, running and throwing in complicated patterns like guarding one guy while he threw then sprinting to catch from someone else, then waiting in line to throw yourself, then guarding and running the other way. I understood almost nothing of the instructions, though they used ‘launch’ for ‘throw’, but did ok just following the guy ahead of me. I was not the worst catcher/thrower, nor was I in the worst shape. The pressure felt higher even then if it had been strangers in America as I felt I was representing my country, my continent even, and that there were probably certain expectations from someone who shared a birth-country with the sport. As the drills stopped and started I had two feelings: that it was growing quite late and that this was unbelievably fun.
I’ve never played organized Ultimate, and hadn’t done organized sports of any kind since my ill-chosen football days which I quit abruptly in the spring of 10th grade. Memories of those practices were returning, though now I felt that I could at least compete. I was always the smallest kid in school, and American football was the last sport I should’ve pursued. In defense of my intellect, it was Oklahoma where football is held just below the Christian faith.
Frisbee is magical, the way the disc spins and floats in the sky waiting to be plucked like a flowery bloom, the grass cool beneath bare feet, your friend far, far away sending the disc through all that air and light to stop in your folding hand, the way you can wind and unwind and fling with all your might.
The guys were all very friendly and some of them spoke English and many of them were med, or pre-med students at Europe’s oldest university. Two of them, Tomasso and Lorenzo drove me home in a car, with seatbelts and windows. There was to be another practice the following night but I begged off knowing my legs and back would need some time.
Sicilia March 31, 2008
New Pics!
We spent five days and four nights in Sicily and arriving at the airport in Catania we picked up the rental car and drove north until we found a beach and changed and spread our towels wide and took a nap, the five of us roasting before the Ionian Sea.
Skip to Taurmina, charming? lovely? perched atop a rock? overlooking coastline? friendly, friendly people? Like the owner of Ban Bar who directed us to a seafood eatery in the tiny neighboring hill-village of Forza D’Argo where I had the best food of my life. The town was high up a dark windy road and we searched and stopped for places to pull over and spot the full moon bouncing on the sea. We found the restaurant on the main drag of the tiny town and they told us they open at 9:30, we’d have to come back in an hour, so we walked up the long approach to the church, a soft glow though its opened doors. The church and the streets were empty and we followed Cassandra down a very narrow, maybe three feet wide path between houses. In the back alleys were personal belongings lying around, not in a mess or from lack of care but simply the way things would lean around in a town with no crime. We explored the mazes with occasional steep views, cats, and plant filled balconies (all of Sicilia has balconies on nearly every window, which adds a surprising amount to the charm of the towns). We came out of the maze into the main square to find a Good Friday procession with six or eight white hooded and robed figures carrying a platter up on their shoulders while a priest spoke through a megaphone and twenty or so townspeople followed silently. The men in white were dressed exactly like American KKK, but there was obviously no relation. We believe they were acting the part of Jesus’ condemners. It was an eerie scene in the quiet night and I decided it inappropriate to use the flash and hence no photos of the spectacle. The procession ended at the back of another church where the priest led prayers that everyone knew and spoke in unison.
Back at the restaurant we were served by a rotation of three men, two older and one younger, who started us with glasses of a non-alcoholic ginger drink to clean the palate, as well as white wine. Next they brought around ten appetizers, all incredible seafood prepared all kinds of ways. The octopus was fantastic. Matt, Laura, Cassandra, Claire and I began to compete to see if any of us could eat all that was put before us. We did pretty well, but I don’t believe anyone completed the mission. After the antipasti came three primi and one large secondi, then dessert, café, and a bottle of amaro, a bittersweet liquor. They left the bottle and glasses on our table, though we only tried a little. Somewhere mid-meal the proprietor, apparently through intuition, discovered that Cassandra likes to sing and started an impromptu session of karaoke with “New York, New York”. The whole affair cost e30 per person.
We drove day two up the volcano, Mt. Etna, and hiked around its craters. Black earth and clouds bouncing against the lava rock and we were cold. We descended down and towards the coast and looked for a place to eat the lunch purchased that morning my Laura, Matt and Cassandra. It was agriculture land, green lush flowery and we spotted a large garden along the winding highway and I pulled off and parked and we followed a path away from the buildings along an orange and lemon grove and spied a large oval of grass and a few flowering shadetrees and stopped to eat and I stole an orange off a tree thinking “haven’t you heard what David did when he took the bread of the alter…” and the orange was sweet, and this being Good Friday we thought it reasonable that no-one would appear to call us trespassers, and that if they did appear it would be quite different than on the mainland or in the U.S., and that if Sicilian hospitality continued they would probably invite us in for café. And so we had bread and cheese and wine and I took a picture of the largest lemon ever wearing my sunglasses. And we hiked out and drove away happy and into the oddly typical beach town feel of Giardina-Naxos.
Flip to Ragusa, a city on a hill and another city on another hill connected by a thin road, many, many steps and tree-surrounded waterfalls. The lower, older section hosts the most outrageous, (along with Siena) church imaginable, baroque and blue domed, spiral endowed, tall columned and narrow. But this is how we found it, we parked mid town, saw the drop to the next town section, decided to drive down, park, and walked down a long, long tall-walled windy street growing darker and more and more quiet and we were ready to find something and I said, “around the next bend is a side street which leads to a piazza with glittering gelaterias and dancing girls skipping rope (and a pool-party adds Claire) and on until we’ve built the piazza grande of our dreams and there the dark street and I raced ahead, up some shallow steps and there a fountain, some people, three gelaterias, and the above mentioned church and we tried cannoli and red and white wine gelato… … …
If we ever do it again we’ll stay only in Ragusa and Taurmina, but then we’d miss this guy à Gigi, (pro: gee-gee) short for Luigi (but not that short), and he took the friendliness cake, or rather gave it, we literally left with bags of food, from a hostel! and a much greater knowledge of Sicilian history, this man, but accchh, to leave and not to introduce you here and now.
We spent Easter Sunday in Ortigia, the little islet of Syracuse with cutesy balconied streets, it’s own spirally church and cheap delicious food, and here on the steps of the church before mass my mouth salivated not with appetite but with sickness, yesterday’s day old cheese, and I decided non, and left the group and puked down a luckily unoccupied side street on the way back to the hostel and Laura got cheese-sick that night.
The cheese left our systems in time for the fifteen hour train ride, the little six seat room converting into six bunks, three per side, and at Messina our train and others boarded a ferry, and we got out and on the next level up: cars, and one more flight of metal stairs: passengers and cafeteria and doors to the rainy sea night, and never will I forget feeling our train-car rocking in the ferry in the sea.
Our Actual Address March 12, 2008
Via Mirasole 21, #8 Bologna, 40124 Italia We’ve had our zip wrong, which might account for some returned packages. Also, if you have to list the value, we have to be home to receive anything worth more than twenty bucks. Sorry about any returned gifts!
