Grosseto and the Sea

11/12/2009

Today we woke up at the usual time, got ready, and headed down to breakfast at 9:30. We woke up to another nice day. Two in a row and Id say we are getting pretty lucky. Anna told us that normally the weather in Tuscany is very on and off, so I guess it is our turn to experience then on weather. The plan for today was to go to Grosseto and shop around in the free open air market and then go to the seaside for lunch. Since now it is only Francesco working Villa Gaia, the breakfast spread was not what it normally was when Anna put it out, but that was ok with us.

Around 10 we got in the car and drove for about an hour to Grosseto. The open-air free market was very interesting. Not only were there, like the market in Florence, that sold leather goods, scarves, jewelry, and knick-knack items, but there were also booths that sold clothes, kitchen appliances, flowers, food, linens, and even sewing materials. It was all very interesting to walk around and see what everyone was selling. There were so many people shopping here that the market was packed. There were some food booths that were selling roasted chickens that smelled incredible and the smell permeated throughout the entire market. Since we have pretty much been shopping nonstop from the time mom got to Italy, we didn’t have anything else on our list that we were looking for, so we just cruised around the market looking and seeing what was there.

We spent about two hours at the market and then met back up with Francesco. He then drove us to the seaside town of Castigillone della Pescano. It was very interesting to see a seaside town, because when you think of Tuscany that is not what comes to mind. The water was the Tyrannian Sea, which is a part of the Mediterranean. The sea air felt nothing like how it does at home.

We ate at a restaurant that was right on the water. It had a great outdoor patio, which we ate out on. Lunch was just ok. It was our first meal with Francesco that was just ok, but that was probably our fault. We told him that seafood wasn’t our favorite (especially seafood in Europe because they serve it whole) so he didn’t take us to his favorite restaurant because it was a strictly seafood restaurant. Despite the mediocre food, the view and atmosphere was great, so everything equaled out. At lunch we learned Francesco’s entire story of how he got to be the owner of Villa Gaia, his family history, and a lot about himself, which answered a lot of questions that mom and I had been wondering about. Now that we could piece everything together that we learned about him, his family, and Villa Gaia over the week so that it all made a lot more sense.

After lunch we walked up to the top of the town, which is situated on cliffs and looked out over the water. It was a spectacular view on a beautiful day. Each town that we have visited has been different and yet similar at the same time. Francesco told us that towns used to be for entire families, which is why they are all a little different because the families ways of doing things were different, but all of the towns are a little similar too because they are in the same region. I wanted some gelato before we got back in the car but unfortunately all of the gelato places in town were closed for the winter. Apparently the town is an extremely happening place to be and have your holiday at during the summer time. They have a lot of accommodations, including campgrounds and bungalows, for people to stay in.

We got back in the car and drove back to Villa Gaia. Mom and my project for the afternoon was to get everything packed up and make sure that we were ok on weight. So when we got to Rome everything would be pretty much ready to go. After some craft packing and deliberation, we got everything in the bags and have a good plan. We should be just fine getting everything that we bought back into the States.

For dinner, Francesco is cooking for us some of his specialties. I am very excited to see what he prepares. Last night we had an interesting conversation about cooking. Roman said that because the quality and the history of the ingredients and then the climate of where you cook varies in different places all around the world, no matter if you cooked the exact same way, the food would taste different, not better or worse just different. I am very interest in seeing how using what we have learned over here will taste when we cook at home.

Tomorrow we are leaving Villa Gaia around 10 and driving to Rome, where we will spend the night before flying out on Saturday. It has been a wonderful stay at Villa Gaia and my whole European Backpacking adventure has been incredible, but Saturday will be my 55th day of traveling and I think I will be ready to go home by then and sleep in my own bed. I am looking forward to the holidays and will have to jump right into that rush when I get home. I am extremely excited to see what 2010 has in store for me.

Relaxing Day

11/11/2009

Today we woke up to the sun shining over the beautiful Tuscan countryside. This was the first time we had seen the sun since we left Florence and the clear view from Villa Gaia was incredible. It was son nice to feel the sun again. Since we had been going nonstop from the time we arrive, we had today to relax. We very much appreciated this break, in addition to that Francesco told us that it is very important in Italy to take time and relax.

We didn’t set the alarm last night so that we could sleep in. Then we took our time getting ready in the morning. We ate breakfast around 10:30 and since we did not have anything set on the agenda for the morning, I brought my computer along with me to the restaurant so I could get caught up with things on the Internet.

After breakfast, Mom and I took the two beagles, Gina and Uggo, for a walk. This was quite an experience because they are both very strong willed beagles that only wanted to follow their noses and smell everything. I have no idea how Francesco walks them both at the same time. They were everywhere, tugging very hard at their leashes, wanting to go into the woods and then down in the ravines. It was quite the task. We have known since we arrived that it is very important not to let those two out of the house without a leash on. Anna told us later on that one time Gina got loose and was gone for five days. When she came back to the house, she had broken ribs, a hole in her lung, and required a blood transfusion from the big dog, Sara. Sara also walked around with us, but since she is old and stays on the property she just mosied along side us without a leash.

We spent the rest of the morning relaxing. Mom read her book in the sun and I hung out. Anna prepared an unbelievable spaghetti lunch for us, which we ate around 1:20. It was done with a mascarpone light cream sauce and then had zucchini in it. We had the custard cake that we finished making last night for dessert. I have to say that we did a fantastic job with the custard cake and it was so easy! This was the first lunch we have eaten at Villa Gaia.

The plan for the afternoon was to go with Francesco and Anna to Grosseto and drop Anna off at the train station so that she could start her holiday to Israel. She was taking the train to Rome, spending the night in Rome with a friend, and then taking an early morning flight from Rome to Israel with a bunch of her friends. She will be gone for about 10 days and this is the first holiday away from Italy that she has gone on in about two years. Francesco is pretty excited about being separated from his mother for a while. They do spend quite a bit of time together on a regular basis between running Villa Gaia and then they live in adjoining apartments in Seggiano.

While Francesco dropped Anna off, Mom and I looked around the town center of Grosseto. We needed to buy another bag so that we could bring all of our souvenirs back to the states and still stay under the bag weight restriction limit. I did some research online and mom’s airline allows her two free bags, while mine only allows me one and if I want to bring a second one it will cost me 50 USD. To ship a 10 kilo box (which is not very heavy at all) back to the states, it would cost us 100 euro. We have some flexibility with how we want to go about packing everything up, in addition to being allowed two carry ons, and I am sure that we will figure out the best way. We ended up finding a good quality American Tourister duffle bag on wheels, which will replace a ratty brown bag that is normally used for a shoe bag. It should do the trick.

While Francesco was out, he also mailed a package for us to a friend of mine in Italy. Inter-Italian mail is relatively cheap and always gets to the destination then next day, which is not bad at all. We drove back to Villa Gaia, which was about an hour from Grosseto, and spent the rest of the afternoon and beginning of the evening relaxing some more. It was a very restful, nice day.

Francesco’s friend, Roman, stopped by the Villa yesterday to stay for a few days. Roman is French and has been traveling with his two dogs, a Dalmatian and little terrier mutt, in a conversion van for the past six months. A couple of years ago, Roman came to Villa Gaia on holiday and liked it so much that he wanted to stay for a while. So Francesco put him to work and they became good friends. Roman is very into Tibetan culture and Buddhism, which works out perfectly with the Buddhist temple so close to Villa Gaia. He is very interesting. He is on his way back to his home in France because his van (which he bought six months ago) is starting to make funny noises, and he wants to go to another Buddhist temple in Venezuela so he needs to drop the dogs off. He says that he loves coming to Tuscany because all of the people here are so nice, some of the nicest he has ever come across, and Mom and I definitely agreed with him.

At 8, Mom, Roman, and I met Francesco at the restaurant and all got in the car to go into Seggiano for a pizza dinner. WE wanted to have a pizza dinner so mom could try the Italian pizza Seggiano is the closest town to Villa Gaia. It is where Francesco and Anna live on a regular basis. There is only one pizza place and that is where we had dinner. The first thing I noticed when we sat down was the peculiar looking bread on the table. It was extremely lumpy and covered with corn meal. Turns out it was friend bread and it was unbelievably delicious. I could have eaten an entire loaf of it.

For dinner, mom and I split a pizza and salad, which was a perfect amount especially with me ravenously consuming the fantastic fried bread. The pizza that was brought to the table was not the pizza that we ordered, but that was ok. We ate it anyways and it was good. Mom and I wanted to have red wine with our dinner and since the owner of the restaurant was a friend of Francesco’s, he wanted us to try a wine that his family had made. The wine was so good and smooth and had apparently won many awards. We had three bottles of it and definitely could have had more, but Francesco said that he needed to drive home, Roman keeps everything within limits (as good Buddhists do), and Mom and I didn’t want them to think that we drink like fish, so we cut it off there. We asked the owner if his family wine is sold in the US and he said it was, so we wrote down the name of the bottle.

It was a very enjoyable day, followed by a great night full of good food, good drink, and good people.

11/10/2009 Recipes

11/10/2009

Base of the Multi-Purpose Cake
- 8 eggs separated, 300g flour, 300g sugar, 1 lemon of zest (optional), vanilla (optional), 1 tsp yeast
- Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until fluffy
- Beat the egg yolks
- Add vanilla (which was in the powder form) and years to the flour and sift into beaten egg yolks, beat slowly, add lemon zest
- Slowly and gently incorporate the fluffy egg whites into the batter
- Put parchment paper over cake pan and pour batter into, evening out throughout the pan
- Bake at 160 degree C, finished when fluffy, turn oven off and wait 5 minutes to take out
Ice Cream Cake
- (Way before) Boil water and sugar to make a very liquidy sweet syrup
- Cut the top of the multi-purpose cake off, so that you have a 1cm thick layer and place in the bottom of a cake pan, making a crust around the edges
- Pour “syrup” over cake layer to make moist
- Spread ice cream over moist cake to make another layer, make the ice cream layer thick
o Anna had made this ice cream earlier in the day, but it would just be easiest for us to buy it at the stores even though Ana’s was incredible
- Cut another 1cm layer off the multi-purpose cake and place on top of ice cream layer
- Moisten cake with syrup again
- Add another thick layer of ice cream and smooth out to make pretty
- Place back in freezer
Custard Cake
- Take a layer from the multi-purpose cake and moisten with syrup
- To make the custard
o 3 egg yolks, 60g flour, a bit less than 180g sugar (depending on how sweet you want the custard to be), a piece of vanilla bean, 1/3 liter of milk
o Combine yolks and sugar fist, gradually add flour and then milk, and add vanilla bean (cut open so that you can get paste out)
o Mix in an aluminum bowl (which you can also put on the stove)
o Boil, stirring constantly until thick
o Take off heat and stir more, let cool
- Spread a custard layer over the first layer of moistened cake, add a 2nd layer of moistened cake, spread rest of custard over the top and sides of the cake
- Decorate as you will

Pork
- Chop up rosemary, sage, and garlic all together, add 2 tbs of butter at room temperature, salt and pepper, and combine to make a paste
- Take a pork tenderloin and tie up with a string and butterfly knots
- Take a knife and bore large holes into the tenderloin, filling each hole with the butter/herb paste
- Sauté the tenderloin in a pan with EVOO and garlic cloves, add a bit of salt
o Make sure not to poke anymore holes in the tenderloin
o Brown on all sides
- Add water to the pan and cover
- Turn down heat after a minute
- After a period add more water for gravy

Potatoes Done Two Ways
- Peel potatoes and soak in water
- Cut potatoes into chunks and distribute throughout two pans
- Way #1
o Dice up one small tomato and a half of an onion and add to pan
o Add a little water, drizzle EVOO
o Sprinkle oregano and salt and pepper over potatoes
- Way #2
o Slice up cloves of garlic and add to pan with rosemary
o Add a little water, drizzle EVOO
o Salt and Pepper
- Bake both pans full of potatoes in the oven

Pici Pasta
- Sauce
o The base of the sauce is EVOO, tomato paste, salt, and water, which is boiled and then cooled
o Press garlic cloves into the cooled sauce (1 clove/person) add salt
o Boil
o Add more water after a period of time
o Right before serving, heat sauce back up, add one more pressed clove of garlic
- Homemade Pasta
o 1 kilo of 00 flour, 300g warm water (a little more water in the summer time), 1 Tbs EVOO, salt
o Mix together using the circular technique with a fork
• Want the dough to be soft, dry, and elastic (same texture as pizza)
o Let relax for 30 minutes in a bun shape
o Cut slices and snake roll into long “snakes”
• It is better to mix up pici in multiple small quantities if making for a large group of people
• Pici must be cooked right after it is prepared
o Drop it carefully in the water to make sure the pieces are not stuck together

A day of wine tasting

11/10/2009

Today we had plans to see some more Tuscan towns and so some wine tasting in them. We work up and did our usual morning routine of getting ready and having breakfast at the restaurant. Come to find out, Francesco’s mom is not named Isabella, her name is Anna. Isabella is the head lady of the Tuscan Way and organizes multiple villas’ that are involved in the program. Mom kept calling her Anna and I thought she was just losing it, but I was looking at some papers and realized that she was right all along. Despite how dumb I felt after making this realization, I am really glad that I officially never addressed her by her name.

Anna really impresses me. She made us the equivalent of chestnut nutella, using chestnuts that she had found inn the forest around the villa. I think it is so cool how everything she cooks and serves from ice cream to pasta is homemade. She says that she thinks the best restaurant is her own kitchen. Last night she showed us the menus from the weddings that were at Villa Gaia this past summer, and whoa talk about a lot of work. It all sounded amazing. The largest number of people she has ever cooked for at once is 150.

Francesco arrived at the restaurant to pick us up, and head out for the day. Our first stop was the town of Montelpulciano, but before we got there we had a couple of mini stops, saw a lot of neat things, and learned many interesting facts. As we were driving we saw some people picking olives. The way they do this is by spreading out a large net underneath the olive tree. Then they pick the olives by hand and drop them down into the net. From the net, the olives go directly to a box and then directly to the olive oil making machine for first press. As soon as the olives are off the tree they start ripening and do so fairly quickly, so it is important to also be quick with getting them to the pressing machine. The olives are ready to be picked when they are a violet color with a little bit of green in them. Later on in the day, we did see some people picking olives by using a machine to shake the branches. This would probably be faster to do it this way, but I don’t know if you would damage the olives like that.

Some fun facts that we learned in the car ride are the following..
At one point, we were driving along the crest of a mountain. If you looked down one side of the mountain it was very green, and if you looked down the other side it was brown. The green side was Montalcino and the brown side was Chianti. It was neat to see how two different types of grapes could so drastically affect the look of the land and be so close together. We will be doing our wine tasting on the Montecino side, but maybe we could work a Chianti wine tasting in if we have some extra time.
I knew that the choices of places you could eat in Italy went from a bar, to a trattoria, to a ristorante, and each one was more expensive than the last. We kept eating and passing places that were osteria’s. Turns out an osteria is similar to a trattoria but when you eat there you know a family is doing the cooking and you are eating food typical from the region, which is prepared with fresh local ingredients. In the old days, at both a trattoria and an osteria, when you stopped there for dinner you could also spend the night there. A cool concept of figuring out what type of restaurant you would like to go to and what you will get in return
Truffles are harvested twice a year, once around October and once around April. Black truffles are native to Tuscany and white truffles are grown up neat Torino. Now a days they are harvested with dogs. It takes three years to train a dog to find truffles and you absolutely need them in order to find the truffle. The truffle is located about 20cm deep in the ground. The dog sniffs if out and then the farmer comes over and hand digs the truffle out. Truffles are so expensive because of the time it takes to train the dog and hand dig the truffle out. You can use a machine to dig them out because they are too delicate and deep and it would crush the truffle. Truffles could really be all over Tuscany, but you would never know because you don’t have dogs sniffing all over Tuscany.
Every time we go into a new town, Francesco points out the color of stone that all of the buildings are build with and tells us that this is the native stone to this town. If one were to build a new building in the town they would need to do so by using the native stone. They would go to the stone store and buy a huge chunk of the native stone from there. Then they would go home and hand cut the huge chunk of stone to hand build their new building. Talk about a lot of work, but “it is the way it must be” says Francesco.
A lot of times we ask Francesco and Anna questions and our questions get ignored because they have no idea what we just said. So we just ask the question again a couple of minutes later and normally it gets answered then. It works out.

The first mini stop was the town of Bagno Vignoni. It is famous because it is over hot mineral springs. The town uses the hot water to have a naturally heated swimming pool in the town center and also has a couple of water mills. Francesco told us that the other night he was a party at a bar in Bagno Vignoni. After he left the bar, he sat with his feet in the how water spring for an hour, just relaxing. How nice! The town also has a couple of spas in it that people come to from all over, year after year, to heal from the mineral water.

The second mini stop was at a ceramic factory. This place was unbelievable. It had huge ceramic statues, tables, pots, plates, pretty much anything you could ever want of beautiful Italian ceramics. Patricia told me that the style of painting ceramics differs from the region. I think it would be so cool to do a giant trip all around Italy and pick up a tile and place setting from each region so that they all had different styles of painting on them. I got a picture next to one of the ceramic statues. The lady is plump and curvy, which is exactly what I am gong to look like when I leave Italy! All of the ceramics are made to be kept outside and do just fine in the elements.

So we finally made it Montepulciano. This town is famous for its wine. It also is a town that to walk around in it, you are always walking up hill. Francesco gave us an hour to walk around and explore the town. He pointed out a very cool bar (café) and leather store. We got a hot chocolate in the bar that was very similar to the hot chocolate that I got in Venice. It was extremely thick dark chocolate, which just seemed to be melted, that you ate it with a spoon. It was rich and wonderful. The leather store was a factory store. We did some more shopping! Haha we just cant help ourselves because we know the quality is good and we keep finding exactly what we are looking for. It is a famous leather brand, and since it was the factory store you really can beat the prices. Even with the Euro being expensive, you cant find prices like these for these products in the States!
Then we met up with Francesco to take a tour of the “old city’ and to do a wine tasting. To start the tour of the old city, we walked into a wine store and down a stone stair well, which seemed to lead into a basement. There were many rooms and staircases below the store that housed many wine barrels. Now the store uses the rooms for storing the wine it makes because it is the perfect atmosphere (dark and 13 degrees C) but the rooms used to be an underground city. Francesco also explained how the wine making process with the wooden barrels, which was cool to see how it was done in the old days and now. For the wine tasting we tasted montepulciano wine (obviously), but the wine we liked best was the nobile montepulciano. It had stayed in the wood for a bit longer.

Our next stop was the Town of Piensa. Piensa is famous for two things, pecorino cheese and a pope lived there. It is the only other place in Italy that can fly the flags of the Vatican other than the Vatican. We went inside the Pope’s church, but it really wasn’t the most impressive church we have seen so far. What a claim to fame though! We ate lunch in Piensa. The original plan for lunch was to just try a bunch of different cheese and meats special to Piensa, but Francesco’s favorite place that did this was closed, so we ate at the next best thing. We still ordered a meat and cheese platter for our first course that served three different kinds of pecorino (aged young, medium, and old) with four different kinds of marmalade (onion (my favorite), strawberry/balsamic (my second favorite), a fig/orange, and an orange). I really love the combination of cheese and honey and marmalade. Mom and I also split a vegetable soup and wild boar soup at lunch and by the end I was so full, I thought I was going to explode. The wild boar stew had an unbelievable gravy with it, which Francesco said the key to making it was marinating the wild boar in wine and then making the gravy with tomatoes. We also had wine with lunch too, even after the wine tasting in Montepulciano and so when I got back in the car to go to the next town, I had to take a little nap on the way. The last thing that Piensa is famous for is the picture of Tuscany that is on Windows PC is taken from a look out point in Piensa.

Next we went to a wine production site in Montalcino. Francesco said that the town of Montalcino was nothing special, so he always prefers to just go directly to what makes it famous, the wine. We did another wine tasting here of Rosso and Brunello wines, but nothing really knocked out socks off. The one we liked best was the riserva (because it is the nicest) but it wasn’t anything magnificent and was very expensive. We were also very tired at this point in the day and ready to get back to the villa. On the way back, we stopped briefly at an abbey that was from the last millennium. It was cool that it was so old, but by far the least impressive church we had seen. When we walked in, the man working the desk was humming and we felt like we were almost imposing on his quiet time.

We got back to the villa and had about an hour and a half before we had to be down at the restaurant for our last official cooking course with Anna. She is going to Israel tomorrow on holiday with her girlfriends. Mom and I both took much needed naps in order to have enough energy to get through the night. Tonight’s cooking course, was by far the easier, but nonetheless just as delicious as the rest. We had been meaning to take pictures of all of the dishes that we prepared, but tonight was the first night that we actually remembered. I have a whole list of pictures that I wished I had taken, oh well. Some of Francesco’s friends joined us, which was great because it meant that all of the food we made got served and we didn’t have to stuff ourselves. The friends were very nice. One spoke great English and worked at a spa/resort in Bagno Vignoni. The other one was very excited to meet us and wanted to know exactly where we lived and what type of city Norfolk was. When I was able to show her a picture of our how, she got very excited. Mom told her that she liked her scarf and she gave it to mom, because “that is the Italian way”! We all had a very nice time at dinner and got in a lot of pictures. Gina, the beagle, was being very naughty tonight and kept trying to pick fights with her brother, Uggo. She is the boss, even though she is the littlest, and lets everybody know it. Tomorrow, we have the morning off, so it will be very nice to sleep in and take out time in the morning. As with everyday at Villa Gaia, today was a great day!

11/9/2009 Recipes

11/09/2009 Recipes

Marmalade Tart Cake
- 4 egg yolks, 400g sift flour, 200g sugar, 200g butter at room temperature, 1 lemon of zest, 1 tsp yeast, a pinch of salt
- Mix together in a circular fashion (with egg yolks in the middle) with a fork, gently and then harder
o Not looking for elasticity, just combining everything together like cookie dough
- Let relax in a bun
- Cover the pan cake with parchment paper
- Use half of the bun, cut into slices and pat the slices into the bottom of the pan
o Make the base of the pan thinner than the sides, which form into a crust
o Pour marmalade mixture over dough into the pan
• Marmalade mixture is marmalade with water mixed together very well (or pureed) so that it is liquid
- Use a portion of the other half of the bun to form a lattice to go over marmalade
o Roll slices out like a snake
o Design the edges with a fork
o Press lattice intersection with a knife in a v shape for design and attachment
- Can use the rest of the bun to make little cookies, which can be cooked separately or put in the middle of the lattice squares

Chick Pea Soup
- Set in water for 2 hours 200g of dried chickpeas to allow to expand
- Boil for 1 hour (so 3 hours total)
- Tie together with a string a bunch of springs of rosemary
o So can get the rosemary flavor without having the leaves in the soup
- In EVOO, sauté rosemary and 2 garlic cloves
o But only for a minute
- Add 1 ladle of chick peas to oil to sauté
o Puree the rest of the chick peas and add them to the sauté pan
- Add more water for soupy consistency
- Leave on heat and cover
o Add more water (from chick pea juice) as time goes on
o Add a large vegetable bullion cube
- Top with EVOO for decoration before serving

Stuffed Peppers
- Sauté two whole red and yellow peppers in EVOO, let cool then clean seeds out and cut into long strips
o Lay peppers out (skin side down) and sprinkle with salt and pepper
- Cut up 1 eggplant into pieces (without seeds) and sauté in EVOO with 4 cloves of garlic, once cooked let cool and add salt
o Chop up some parsley (without stems, which you can do with scissors) and add to eggplant
- Wash capers, olives (green and black) from jars to get all of the brine off of them (wash 2-3 times)
o Depit olives and add with capers to oil used for eggplants and sauté
o Add a diced tomato to mixture
o Once cooked, take off fire and add the number of peppers of spoonfuls of breadcrumbs to sauté pan.
- Combine eggplant/parsley mixture and caper/olives/tomato/breadcrumb mixture in a bowl and mix in 1 egg
- Roll final combined mixture up in peppers
- Roll pepper rolls in breadcrumbs
- Bake in an EVOO pan in the oven (sprinkle EVOO on top of peppers too)

Chicken
- Filet chicken breasts, pound thin (with parchment paper over breasts)
- Sprinkle salt, pepper, and shaved parmesan over breasts
- Add a piece of ham on top of each filet, then roll up and pin with a toothpick
- Cover each of the rolls in EVOO
- Saute the rolls in a pan with EVOO and garlic cloves
- When chicken rolls are mostly cooked, grate some carrots over them, add salt and milk and let boil
- Take off heat and add fontina cheese to pan, mix together and cover

Sienaaaa

11/9/2009

Today we went to Siena for the day. Siena is another fantastic Tuscan town, which is a bit bigger than the previous three that we visited, and as a result has a lot more going on in it as for restaurants, shopping, and people. We woke up earlier so that we could be on the road by 10. Siena is about an hour and some change drive from the villa in the direction of Florence. Breakfast at the villa was once again an incredible spread of very fresh fruit. I really enjoy eating yogurt, cornflakes, and a bit of jam as a well-balanced breakfast. Mom and I seriously lucked out coming this week and having the villa all to ourselves. Francesco told us that last week the villa was complexly booked and full. The weather today was cloudy skies, but Francesco said that tomorrow’s forecast looked clear. Apparently the weather in November in Tuscany is very random with one day nice and the next gross and always alternating.

Francesco is pretty amazing. After growing up in Naples, he went to school to be a lawyer, but at the age of 23 he realized that he did not want to pursue that profession and bought Villa Gaia. For the past ten years, he and his mom (and sometimes his brother is “he is not being lazy, which is rare”) worked on fixing the place up. Now they do a wonderful business. In addition to the regular guests, restaurant, and olive grove, Villa Gaia also hosts artist exhibitions and weddings, which of course are catered by the Villa. They work extremely hard and it shows, but definitely pays off. Francesco is about to go on a three-week vacation all over the east. He really lives a fantastic life because he works with what he loves. He told mom the other day that he wished he had gone to culinary school instead of studying law. He isn’t and doesn’t want to get married so he just has his mother, the villa, and his three dogs to worry about.

Once we got to Siena, Mom and I had about 2 hours of free time to walk around and take in the city. We strolled along the streets looking in store windows and popping into a few to see what they had to offer. We found ourselves by a bus station and figured we better turn around so that we could meet Francesco in time for lunch. We got some ideas of things we would like to buy, but decided to save our shopping for after lunch. We were supposed to meet Francesco at 1, but arrived at the meeting place early and decided to call dad before he went to work.

Siena is a very cool, very old town. It has a famous horse race throughout the town a couple of times a year. The history or all of the old Tuscan towns and their families is incredibly long and interesting. It is amazing that many of the building have been standing since before Christ. In addition to that, Siena is located on a hill so that it offers a great view.

Francesco took us to an unbelievable restaurant for lunch. It was unlike any building I had ever been in. Francesco said the interior was very similar to the way the houses were in the three towns that we visited yesterday. The entire interior of the restaurant was built into the rocks, giving each room a very rustic cave like appearance. It was extremely cool. In addition to that, lunch was a seriously delicious fine dining experience. Per usual, Mom and I split an appetizer of a porcini mushroom tart that was garnished with blueberries and walnuts, a very thin parmesan bowl filled with gnocchi covered in a pumpkin sauce, and then pork rolls that were stuffed with ricotta cheese, spinach, and sausage smothered in a truffle sauce and served with a potato cake. We literally thought we had died and gone to heaven. Everything was perfect. Mom has also been on a kick of trying white wines, because there are actually some over here that she enjoys the taste of, so we had two glasses of a very crisp fresh white wine of the region that had a serious pear flavor to it.

After lunch we went to see the duomo of Siena. It was an absolutely beautiful church. We admired all of the intricate details for a while. There was a painting by Rafael in there, which was cool to see, even though I don’t take much stock in religious artwork. There was a very cool bookstore tent beside the duomo. It was cool because it was a clear tent and had some great classical music blasting from it. Mom looked for a while for a nice coffee table book about Tuscany, but I couldn’t last long in the tent because I was roasting from the sunlight. By the afternoon, the clouds had clear and the sun with blue skies came out. Mom didn’t end up finding a coffee table book, so we have on our list to keep our eyes peeled for that item.

As we walked to the edge of the city, we stopped in many ceramic shops. We were looking for some reasonably priced wine holders and Christmas ornaments that said Tuscany on them. Eventually we lucked out and found a deal. We looked in a could more boutiques on the way out too and made some purchases, which are to be kept confidential. Since we didn’t have dessert at lunch (Note: We are in Italy to eat and not to diet. 2010 will be for serious dieting, but until then I will enjoy every bite) and since Mom had not had gelato in Italy yet, we stopped in a Gelateria and got Mom her first. She has strawberry and I had black cherry, and both were incredibly tasty.

On the way home, with the skies cleared, there was a beautiful sunset. We got back to the villa around 5:30 and had to be at the restaurant at 6 for our third cooking course. It was another great night of cooking delicious and nutritious food and enjoying good wine and company. The beagles were being especially playful tonight and it was entertaining to watch. A major priority of ours now is to figure out how we are going to get all of our purchases back to the US. I did a bit a research on possible methods and it looks like we have some options, which takes some stress off our shoulders. But lets be realistic, how stressed can you be shopping, cooking, eating, and drinking your way through Tuscany?

11/8/2009 Recipes

11/8/2009 Dinner Recipes
(serves 6-8 people)

Two kinds of gnocchi (regular potato and pumpkin)
Potato Gnocchi
- Boil 1 kilo of potatoes
o Peel and put through a ricer
- Mix together like pasta (working in the circular formation with a fork) 300g flour, 2 eggs, a pinch of salt
o Add these ingredients to the potatoes half at a time
- Mix gently and completely so that when you cut into to the dough bun, you only see potato and no flour
o Let the bun relax
- Sauce
o The base of the sauce is EVOO, tomatoe paste, a little water, and salt
• Bring to a slow boil
• Then add garlic cloves and you can add vegetable bullion if you want
o Take pieces of lamb, beef, pork (whatever you have)
• Sprinkle them with salt, parmesan, and pepper
• Roll the meat up and stick it with a toothpick
• Sautee the meat in EVOO with garlic cloves
• Add a ladle of the tomato sauce and bring to a slow boil
• Add another ladle and mix, and another ladle, and another until you can see minimal oil in the sauce
o In between each ladle let the sauce mix and absorb with the oil
• All while mixing over a slow boil
• Can add basil here
o When you can finally see minimal oil, add one last ladle of sauce over meat, reduce heat, and cover
• After 20 minutes add some water.
- Heat up some of the sauce with cooked gnocchi in it
o Do not include the meat rolls in final sauce
o Add pepper and shaved Parmesan
Pumpkin Gnocchi
- More than 1 kilo of raw pumpkin, but when it is baked, skinned, and pureed it should come out to 700g, 200g ricotta cheese, 200g flour, 60g of grated parmesan, a pinch of salt, pepper, nutmeg, and 3 eggs
- Flour is very important with the mixing because the pumpkin will be wetter
- Mix the same way as above
- Sauce
o Melt butter with sage leaves in it and a bit of cream
• Bring to a boil
• Then turn down the heat
When forming the gnocchi
- Cut off pieces of bun
- Snake roll the dough and get the outside covered with flour
o Roll out by fanning out with your hands and don’t roll back towards you
o Looking for very circular roll, cut into pieces
o Roll the pieces over a grooved edge like a fork
When cooking the gnocchi
- Boil water, EVOO, and salt in a wide pan so you will be able to see everything
- Gnocchi are finished when they float
o It does not take very long

*Using flour in these mixtures is important but you also must be careful and pay attention to the texture

Veal Cutlets
- Pat cutlets in flour
- Cook only right before you are about to eat them
- To cook, sautéed cutlets in butter and a bit of water mixture
o Do not brown
- Sauce
o 30 g butter, 1.5 tsp Dijon mustard, 3tbs green pepper, 100g heavy cream
o Stirred together
- Add sauce to butter/water mixture
- Add 80g walnuts

Carrots
- Boil carrots and cut into pieces
- Sautee in EVOO with garlic cloves
- Add salt

Fritelle Dessert
- 250g boiled potatoes, pealed and put through the ricer, 250 g flour, 1 eggs, 50g butter, 50g sugar, pinch of salt, an entire lemon of zest, 1 packet of yeast mixed with warm milk
o All mixed together like you would with pasta.
o Flour is important here for mixing
- Cut off pieces of bun and roll out pieces, so that you can loop them around to make a ribbon shape
- Let rise all set out
- Fry in EVOO after risen in a small amount of oil
- Sprinkle powdered sugar on the top

Three Tuscan Towns

11/8/2009

Today was our first official day at Villa Gaia. We woke up at 8:30 so that we could be down at the restaurant at 9:30. Our room is great. It is the perfect temperature and the shutters on the windows black out all light. We literally slept for 10 hours straight. It was glorious. The shower has great water pressure and someone turned the heat on in the morning so that we didn’t have to get out of bed into a freezing cold room. Isabella had laid out an incredible breakfast spread for us. We had yogurt, cornflakes, fruit, ham, cheese, bread, jam, orange juice, coffee, and left over cake from last night. I ate entirely too much and I have a feeling that is going to be a reoccurring situation for me this week.

Francesco came at 10 to pick us up so that we could begin our dial excursion. Yesterday we had talked about how since we were the only two people doing the course, we could be flexible with the schedule. As a result, when we started off this morning, we had no idea what we were in for. The weather looked ominous for today’s forecast and we only saw the sun try to peek through the clouds in the morning. Right around the time we left the villa, the rain started.

Our first stop for the day was at a local grocery store to pick up some ricotta cheese for tonight’s dinner. Francesco said that this was not their normal grocery store, but it was the only one open on Sunday and it would have to do. I still thought it was pretty impressive with their spread of meats and cheeses. We looked around for a while and eventually came across the wine section. There was a bottle of wine for .99 euro. Francesco said that wine was pretty bad, but he did pick out a bottle for 2.50 that he said it was very good. Ah yes, you have got to love Italian wine and how good and cheap it can be.

Then we started driving around the Tuscan countryside. Francesco told us that we were over a dead volcanic area, but because a volcano used to exist there are now mineral water springs. We could see the steam all over the countryside from where geysers were running. Francesco also drove us past a Buddhist temple, which seemed very out of place but was cool nonetheless to see. The fall colors are out in full force in Tuscany now. Even on a day with gross weather, the fall foliage was beautiful. We saw some dead sunflowers and Francesco told us that now they are used to extract the oil from. I really like that idea of still using something, even though it is dead.

Our second stop of the day was the town of Sorano. This town is particularly cool because it was built into the rocks. The houses are all built into the side of the mountain and don’t really resemble the class look for a house at all. Mom said that Sorano was exactly what she imagined a Tuscan town to look like, but Francesco said that there is not another town in the entire world that is built like Sorano. Walking down the streets was almost like walking partly thorough tunnels. You could see the stone work changed as people built onto houses as the years went by. The town is older than Christ and is constantly changing. It was extremely cool. It is also a place that many artists gather and live so the shops are pretty unique. If we were to come in the summer, we would not have been able to walk throughout the town. The silver lining to the bad weather was that due to the rain we did not have to pay the fee to go to the top of the city because nobody was in the booth collecting on such a nasty day. Francesco said that everyone in the town is very close to each other. Can you imagine being a teenager and growing up in a community like that? We also saw the last remaining part of the oldest Roman church in Tuscany. It was just a bell tower, but kudos to it for being able to stand up through all of the elements for all of these years.

The next town we stopped in was Sovana. This town is known for a very old abbey that it has in it. We stopped and took pictures of the abbey, which is so old it is not in use anymore. There was a pomegranate tree in the abbey courtyard that was pretty cool. Pomegranates are ready to be picked after the leaves fall off the trees, so that they look like the barren tree was decorated for Halloween with little pumpkin decorations on it. It is a cool sight. The best part of Sovana to us was we got to stop into an olive oil press production site and see the first press of extra virgin olive oil. This was on Mom’s to do list and she was thoroughly entertained by the whole process. It is pretty cool to see how they do it all. Francesco told us that we were very lucky to come to Tuscany at this time because everybody is working. So when you come and are interested in what they are doing, they will treat you like family and invite you to eat and drink with them. That is exactly what these olive oil people did and we were able to sample to fresh product. Of course we bought a tin for a souvenir. It was a very cool experience.

Our last stop for our daily excursion was another town, Pitigliano. This town was similar to Sorano but much bigger and more out in the open as opposed to in the rocks. Pitigliano is famous because it has a section in it called little Jerusalem. There is a pretty famous synagogue there. By now the weather had cleared up a bit and the rain had stopped. There was still a grey misty look over the Tuscan countryside, which made for some really cool views. We ate lunch in this town at a small restaurant. I ordered a vegetable soup that had a poached egg in it and mom had a wild boar stew, which we shared both of and both were native to Tuscany and extremely good. Tuscany has a lot of wild boars and rice fields in it. For the appetizer we also had crustinis with truffle and mushroom pate on them and then for dessert we had panna cotta. Whew, it was a lot of food, but after lunch we walked around the town for a while, which helped with the digestion. We admired the views, popped into shops, and just enjoyed the unique nature of the town. There is really nothing like it in the United States.

On the way back to the villa, we both took a little nap. I think the jet lag is starting to catch up with mom and it was so warm and comfortable in the car compared to the damp cold outside. When we got back to the villa we rested for an hour before out second cooking course began at six. On tonight’s menu we made two different types of gnocchi, a regular potato one with a ragu sauce and then a pumpkin one with a butter sage sauce, veal cutlets with a creamy Dijon sauce, sautéed carrots, and then for dessert some excellent lemon flavored, potato based fried dough. As with everything I have eaten at Villa Gaia, it was incredible. Surprisingly, the carrots were my favorite. The way we cooked them was so easy and actually made a vegetable that I don’t normally care for, delicious. I have decided that homemade food is always three trillion times better than what you normally eat when you go out. We had limoncello with dessert and it was a perfect way to end the night.

Francesco emailed me some recipes he had typed up, which is great especially because some of the recipes will be for things we wont cook. I will type up my notes from tonight’s menu and post them along with this blog!

11/7/2009 Recipes

11/7/2009 Eggplant Parmesan Dinner Recipes
(cooked for 4 people)

Typical Tuscan Rustic Cake
- 2 apples, 2 pears medium sized (can do all four of one fruit)
- 120g sugar
- 60g butter
- Caramelize all, for 20 min, cool
o Key to the cake is the caramelization of the fruit, get it nice and golden brown
o Get all of the caramel sauce and fruit out of pan if stuck after cooling by putting over heat and add a tad of water
- Parchment paper to bottom of pan, add fruit to thin layer on paper
o This will eventually be the tip of the cake because you flip it up side down to get it out of the pan
- Dough
o OO flour 240g
o Butter (unsalted) 120g (room temp)
o Pinch of salt
o Hot water, just enough to melt butter, so splash it on
o Mix together then let relax for 20 min
• Really work the dough like a throttle of a motorcycle
• Looking for the dough to be ELASTIC and not easily break apart
o Roll out into a circle and then cover the fruit in pan with it (so that it actually turns into the bottom of the cake)
- Bake at 180 C
- Cool out of oven, flip over after cooled
- Add crème to top
o Use real cream, not heavy cream, add powdered sugar and whisk together
o Add crème to the side of the plate as to not drown the cake

Eggplant Parmesan
- 2 eggplants, peel all the way around and then slice very very thin
o Put in water with salt to clean
o Squeeze to get excess water out of eggplants before putting them into fry
- Get the EVOO extra hot and fry the eggplant slices for about 3 min till brown
- Sauce
o Fresh crushed tomatoes (diluted with water), garlic, bit of EVOO, basil, pinch of salt, cook down
• Take out garlic cloves of sauce before using
o Spread over cake pan before 1st layer of eggplant
- Layering
o Sauce, Eggplant, Cheese, Sauce, Eggplant, Cheese, etc…
o Place the pieces of mozzarella all throughout the eggplant, not just in the cheese layer
o Use more parmesan (grated) than mozzarella, because it is eggplant parmesan after all
o You know you are when finished when you press down on the eggplant and the sauce covers eggplant

Homemade Pasta and Sauce
- Sauce
o 3 Carrot (for sweetness), 2 stalks of celery, and 1 onions diced and sautéed in EVOO until cooked down
• Eyeball the amount of EVOO
• Only use very good EVOO
o After cooked down, add small can of tomato paste with 2-3 cans of water (add gradually)
• Will probably add 2 cans of water at first and then after 5-8 minutes add the 3rd can of water so that it is the consistency of a sauce
- Pasta
o 400g flour with 4 eggs (100g and 1 egg per person)
o Need OO flour
o Combine eggs and flour with fork,
• Combine gently at first and then when you have a good mixed solid dough, you can go full throttle to become elastic!
o Roll out mixture with rolling pin till thin, from the center out, roll up, and then cut into pieces
• Flour is the key to rolling out and then when rolling up and cutting the pieces
o Bring to a boil salted water
*If you want to have flavored pasta
• Take out one of the eggs that you would use and replace it with a puree of whatever flavor you want
• Will probably want to add a little bit of butter to the puree to make it smooth
• You can also get different colors of pasta with different colored flour
- Add 3tbs of butter to sauce, then add pasta

Veal Cutlets Marsala
- Melt a bit of butter in a pan, once melted add EVOO and some garlic cloves
- Turn up heat to fry
- Add veal cutlets to the oil/butter
o Oil should just barely cover the cutlets
o Cook only for the time that you add the veal cutlets and then immediately turn them over (so probably about a minute max) and then take the cutlets out of the oil/butter
- Add marsala wine to the oil/butter and let it combine nicely
- Re-add the cutlets to finish cooking
o Small amount of time until they start to brown up a bit.

*Bolognese (onion)
*Tuscan Sauce (3 vegetables)

Al dente pasta is not quite cooked all of the way
- Pasta that is al dente is easier for the stomach to digest
- Many Italians eat pasta this way because it helps them stay thin

We have arrived!

11/7/2009

Today we woke up on the earlier side, around 8, so that we could finish off our shopping before we went to the cooking school. The plan for the day was to finish shopping, then meet Tyler for lunch, and then at one we were scheduled to meet a representative from the school at the hotel so that they could drive us to the Villa. How convenient for us! So after getting ready we went back to the San Lorenzo market. We decided to skip breakfast because we knew we would have an early lunch and we both were not very hungry after our delicious meal from the night before. At San Lorenzo, we made sure that we bought everything that we needed to and were fully covered in the gift department of the items that we cold find at the market.

The Mercado Central food market is located right amongst the San Lorenzo market. It was closed yesterday, but open today. I was excited to showed mom what all of these food markets I had been visiting were like. She was amazed. We spent a lot of time at a salami and cheese shop that had tasters and ended up buying some really cool products. Now the question is how are we going to get all of this food back into the States. I am sure that we will also buy stuff like this while we are at the cooking school, so hopefully they have some suggestions on how to go about this.

We headed back to the hotel to meet Tyler for lunch. I had some serious technology issues with using my phone to call him on his European number, so I just gave up and figured it would all work out anyways. Unfortunately, I used up the rest of my hour of Internet this morning, so I couldn’t check my messages to see if he got my last message about moving the lunchtime up. I had a funny feeling that he had left a message for me, but decided to just wait and see if he turned up instead of paying another 5 euro to check my messages. He ended up not showing up, so I figured my gut feeling was right and something came up. (When I checked my messages later on, Tyler had left me one that morning saying that he had gotten really sick and would just see me when we both got back to the States)

We asked the front desk for a recommendation for a close, delicious, affordable lunch place. The trattoria they pointed us two was literally around the corner from the hotel and was very cute. When we walked in it had Rodrigo y Gabriella playing, so I knew it couldn’t be half bad with good musical tastes. The restaurant had a boar theme going on because it was also located right next to the statue of the lucky wild boar. For lunch mom and I split a grilled cheese platter, lasagna, and a mixed greens salad. We liked two of the three cheeses on the platter a lot. The third cheese was some sort of smoked cheese, which neither mom nor I care for. The lasagna was also very good. It was crunchy in some parts around the edges, which I really liked a lot.

We went back to the hotel to wait to meet up with the cooking school representative. He had phoned the hotel and told the front desk to please inform us that he was running late because he had gotten stuck in traffic, which was caused by an accident. I took this as an opportunity to take a little nap because my food coma from lunch was setting in. About 20 minutes after one we finally got to meet Francesco, the tour guide to our trip at the Villa Gaia and the owner (he also is an artist and has his art on display in the restaurant). He informed us that we were officially the only ones at the villa this week, which meant that we could absolutely tweak our stay to do the things that we wanted to do. This was fantastic news for us to hear because it was what we had been hoping for all along! It was a 2-hour drive from Florence to the villa, all through the Tuscan countryside. During the drive, we saw a white Lamborghini, which I thought was pretty cool. It passed us going extremely fast, as was to be expected.

We pulled up to the villa around sunset. It is a beautiful property that has a great view of the hills of Tuscany. We got settled in to our room, which is in a great old house that we have all to ourselves. Francesco and him mom have done a ton of work on the property and made it to be extremely luxurious but at the same time have the old Tuscan house feel. Its extremely cool. We were beginning out first cooking lesson tonight so we headed down to the restaurant for some appetizers before it began.

Villa Gaia is in fact an agritourismo and it triples as a cooking course/tour Tuscany getaway, a restaurant in the summer time, and an olive grove. It is very cool to see how they make everything work. Isabella is Francesco’s mom and is in charge of the cooking course. She is pretty amazing. She is a vegetarian who cooks everything not by taste testing but by smelling. Francesco has another brother, Fabrisio, who works at the villa in the summertime, but he is in Orlando now with his girlfriend. Apparently that is for the better because Fabrisio and Francesco do not get along that well only being one year apart and also the villa is Francesco’s and Fabrisio is very difficult and lazy to work with. I know all of this because Isabella and Francesco have essentially welcomed us into their family. It was a wonderful welcoming. They also have three dogs, two beagles on one very large wolf related dog, which is the icing on the cake to the family atmosphere. The family is originally from Naples but moved to Tuscany about 10 years ago to open Villa Gaia. They also had some family in Tuscany. This was very exciting news for us, because their not only is Naples known for some of the best food in Italy, but their Naples background meant that they use garlic in their cooking, our favorite!

The first cooking lesson was great. We learned a lot of good information and different ways to go about cooking (hopefully healthier and tastier ways). We also drank a lot of wine while cooking, which was so much fun. I made detailed notes about what we made, how to make it, and the little tips we learned that I will also post. Tonight’s menu was homemade pasta with a Tuscan vegetable sauce, eggplant parmesan, veal cutlets marsala, and a classic rustic Tuscan cake with homemade cream. Everything was incredible and it wasn’t just because we made it. Everything was so fresh and the different takes on the dishes were very cool to try, not to mention the through the rook delicious factor.

Shopping and Divine Food!

11/6/2009

Today we slept till nine to help mom deal with jet lag. Last night I had some ambitious thoughts about getting up early and going to the Uffizi Museum, but when the alarm went off at 7:30, I took great pleasure in turning it off and rolling over. The beds in our hotel room are extremely firm, which mom likes a lot but they tend to stretch out my back too much. It is also extremely warm in our room and we cant open the window because our room is right above a dumpster. Other than that, the hotel is really nice and has worked out great. We are in the center of everything and can walk everywhere!

After getting ready, we left the hotel to cross some things off of our “To do” list. For whatever reason, I kept getting turned around as we would leave our hotel, but eventually I got my sense of direction straightened out. We first rubbed the nose of the wild boar for good luck and then headed over to the Pontevecchio Bridge to look in the jewelry shop windows. Since we had not had breakfast yet, we stopped at a waffle stand and shared an unbelievable sweet waffle cream sandwich. I think I could probably eat one of those waffles a day. They are so good with the chunks of sugar in them. There was also a glove shop by the bridge that someone had told mom to go to, so we also checked that out.

Then we turned around and headed in the direction of the Duomo. Rexanne had told us about a jewelry store in the piazza duomo that we had to go see. It was quite the store. We looked around there for a while and then it was time to do an early lunch.

I wanted to take mom to Mario’s, the place that I ate with Katherine, Tyler, and Joe and had the Florentine steak because it is such an incredible hole in the wall place that has been written up in unbelievable magazines (see previous post). I knew we had to do an earlier lunch because if we tried for a later one we would get stuck in a line and might not be able to eat there since it closes down after lunch. On the menu for the day, we ordered chick pea soup, a salad with beans, potatoes, and tomatoes in it, and a roasted chicken breast. As with everything that I have had at Mario’s, the entire meal was mouthwatering delicious, the chicken especially. It was cooked in something that allowed the chicken to be moist and cooked to perfection. We ordered a liter of the house wine, which ended up being a little to much wine for lunch so we shared it with the Australians that we were sharing our four person table with. We had lovely conversations with them and all of the people from Connecticut that were sitting around us. One of my favorite parts of Mario’s is their close, welcoming, and friendly atmosphere. You are literally rubbing elbows with your neighbor as you dine.

After Mario’s we stumbled upon the massive tent market around San Lorenzo. We had so much fun looking at all of the booths and it seemed like the tents went on forever. Even with the dollar being so bad compared to the Euro, we got a lot of Christmas shopping done, so I can divulge what we bought, but its all good. It was a great long day shopping. Mom and I also happen to have the same sneakers from Running Etc… and we both had them on, which was probably why we could last so long.

We got back to the hotel around 5 and rested for a while. I checked my mail because I had been in contact with Tyler about meeting him for dinner. He ended up having to work at night so he couldn’t join us but he did give us some recommendations. Hopefully we will be able to meet up with him tomorrow for lunch before we get picked up to go to the cooking school. The concierge strongly agreed with one of the places on Tyler’s list and it was not very far from the hotel, so we decided we would try it out. The place was called Quattro Leoni.

When we got to the restaurant, we were told that it would be an hour wait but the people in front of us told us that the wait was definitely worth it. They had been in Florence for about a week and came here on their first night in town. It was so good that they decided to also make it their last meal in Florence. With a review like that, the restaurant had to be good. They also gave us some free champagne as we waited for a table. We stood outside and talked with the people, who were in front of us in line, and it made the time pass by fast. The wait also was shorter than an hour.

The first thing I see when we get to our table is a collage of a bunch of different pictures that have famous people in them! The first picture I see has Anthony Kedis, who is the lead singer of The Red Hot Chili Peppers and who I also recently read a book about him, in it so I think that is really cool. Once again, with so many famous people coming to this restaurant, the place has to be good.

Typically the menu was in all Italian so we asked our waitress to point us in the right direction of what to order. She recommended cheese stuffed eggplant, spinach and ricotta filled baked with tomato and cheesy sauce pancakes, and a steak. We took her up on her recommendations in addition to ordering the Florentine steak because mom had to try it since we were after all in Florence and a liter and a half of wine. The food absolutely lived up to the rave reviews. The eggplant was grilled and the cheese mixture that it wrapped around was goat cheese, mascarpone, some garlic and chives, very simple and so delicious. The pancakes were an extremely unique take on the classic pairing of ricotta cheese and spinach. The Florentine steak was incredible. Obviously on the rare side because that is how they cook their meat here, but seasoned to perfection. To top off our feast, we split a tiramisu, my favorite.

The whole meal was incredible! To tell you the truth we have not had a bad meal since we have gotten together, everything has been way above par. We went back to the hotel and with full bellies went right to sleep. It was a great night!

MOM'S HERE!!!!

11/5/2009

Today I met my mom in Rome! After my day yesterday, I was starting to think that it was necessary for me to start traveling with someone again to help keep me focused! Last night was one of those times where spending the extra energy and money was totally worth it. If I had not gotten fed up with being soaking wet and standing in the pouring waiting for a stupid bus to come, I probably would not have reached a point where I thought paying for a taxi was worth it. If I had not gotten a taxi, I probably would not have realized that I had lost my credit card soon enough and would not have even been able to walk back to the lunch restaurant because it would have been too late. If I had not convinced myself to walk all the way back to the lunch restaurant just to make sure I covered all of my bases, even though I didn’t think my credit card was there, I would have never have found it. Talk about a lot of “ifs” that thank goodness worked out in my favor.

Last night and dinner I had a revelation. I think that Italians drink espresso after dinner because the intense rush of caffeine helps off set the major food coma that eating the heavy Italian food can bring on. The little shot of espresso allows them to be able to finish their drinks and dessert at the table without falling asleep right there. Its almost brilliant.

This morning was another example of how I am starting to lose it. When I woke up, I didn’t set an alarm, and looked at my watch and thought it said 8:40. I had to put a move on it because I still needed to fold my laundry, repack my pack, and take a shower (all of which would take a while) before 10, which was the time I had to check out. So I get it all done on time and I am sitting at the hostel bar having breakfast and look at my watch again and it says 9:40. I think to myself that there is no way that can be right, I made check out right on time, maybe my watch is starting to slow down. Nope my watch was showing the right time, but all morning I was misreading it. Yep, its time to have someone help keep me in check.

Mom’s flight was due in at 12:05 so I spent the morning sitting in the bar, checking my email, having breakfast, and reading until it was time to go to the train station and catch the direct train to the airport. Unfortunately and extremely lamely, my Eurail pass didn’t cover the train ride to the airport and I had to buy a 12 Euro ticket. Good thing that I didn’t chance not buying one because the ticket man did come through checking tickets. I got to the airport and to the arrivals section no problem. As I was looking for the place where I thought she would come out, I heard a familiar voice ask me if I was looking for someone. It was Mom! Her flight landed early at 11:15 and she sped through customs and the baggage claim.

We got on the next train back to Rome’s main station and from there made a pit stop to exchange some money and then went to check out my hostel. Mom wanted to see what a hostel looked like in person, but the Yellow was being very difficult with us and would not let her take a peak into a room or even store her luggage in the luggage room. So instead of walking to a place that “Lets Go” recommended for lunch, we just had lunch at a ristorante next to the hostel, which ended up being very good. We sat outside because it was nice out and the inside was jammed backed with locals (always a good sign). We split a salami, proscuitto, and cheese platter, a huge bowl of minestrone soup, a green salad, and a liter of red wine (this was good for mom especially because it was a good way for her to unwind after her flight and helped put her right to sleep when we got on the train to Florence). Everything was delicious and the restaurant also gave us some free bruscetta and some sort of coffee liquor for after our meal. We also ordered an unbelievable profiterole dessert (which was pretty much two types of creams on philodough covered with chocolate). It was so fresh and pretty much to die for.

After lunch, I grabbed my pack from the luggage room and we went to the train station to catch the next train to Florence. There was one leaving soon, so we hopped on it and both of us pretty much slept the entire way. Unfortunately I didn’t look at what station in Florence the train was going to. It was a train to Bergamo and as a result it stopped at the Refirdi station, which is a little bit further out of town, instead of the Santa Maria Novella stations, so that it would pass through Florence. We were planning on taxing a taxi to the hotel anyways, so we caught one and our ride was a little longer than if we were to go to SMN. Not really a big deal, but I wish I had planned it better. Yet another example of how I am starting to lose it. That was my last train ride of my European backpacking adventure!

Our hotel in Florence is so nice and it is in the middle of everything, so it is super easy and pretty short to walk everywhere. We got a great deal on the room on hotels.com. We got an addition 25% off the room rate because we booked it for two nights. Mom says that she is never using a travel agent again because it is so easy to go online and find even better deals herself. The room is a lot bigger than I expected it to be. Typically European hotel rooms are teeny tiny, as I learned in Paris, but I think we really lucked out with this one.

The front desk recommended an restaurant off the beaten path to us for dinner. It ended up being unbelievable. Mom and I split a very nice tasty bottle of wine. The only thing I would have changed about this restaurant is that I wished it served cheap, delicious, house/table wine. Then for dinner we split homemade ravioli that was filled with gorgonzola cheese and smothered in a pumpkin sauce (it was a gigantic ravioli), a pork steak that was served over arugula and topped with a black truffles and a sauce made from them, and then a side of spinach that was sautéed in garlic and EVOO. Everything was delicious and cooked to perfection, a truly enjoyable fine dining dinner. After our also very good lunch, we skipped on dessert.

We got back to the hotel and promptly fell asleep. It is so nice to have my mom over here in Italy, finishing up my unbelievable trip with her. It is also very nice to fall asleep in a comfy hotel room and not hostel. I am so excited for this next week that I can hardly stand it.

Walk around Rome

11/4/2009

Today was a wild day. I woke up this morning with the intentions of having a wonderful last day of solo traveling. I didn’t set an alarm, which was a nice change to wake up on my own, and ended up rolling out of bed around 9:30. Two of the guys that I share my hostel dorm with are mega snorers; in addition to that, the majority of them are major stinkbugs. I went to the bar next door for a hostel discounted breakfast of French toast and a banana and also took the opportunity to use their wifi and check my email.

After breakfast, I considered taking a shower because I hadn’t done that in a while, but then decided against it because I was going to be doing laundry later on that day and iddnt really have any clean clothes to put on. In addition to that, it was a kinda grey, dreary, chilly day and I didn’t want to start walking around with Rome with wet hair.

I decided to make my first activity for the day a Grace Kelly exhibit. The exhibit was on display at a museum that was across town, but Rome is a very walkable city and I enjoyed stretching my legs. The route that I took lead me down a high fashion street, which was enjoyable to look into the windows. Once again, I find a lot of aspects of high fashion to be mind-boggling and I cannot relate to spending some of the figures that they put on the price tags on clothing items. As I started walking, I realized that it looked a lot colder outside than it really was. I had broken into a nice cardio workout by the time I reached the Grace Kelly exhibit and had to sit down on some church steps to cool down before I entered.

I really enjoyed the exhibit even though it was on display in French (why? I have no idea especially because I was in Italy). I didn’t really know that much about Grace Kelly other than she was married to Prince Rainier. Since she was stunningly gorgeous actress with impeccable fashion sense, the exhibit was just fun to look at in general. I spent about two hours looking at pictures and memorabilia from her life (this included an Oscar that she won, how cool to see one in person!). My favorite part was her dresses and jewels that were on display. They were breath taking and I found it unbelievable how tiny she was! Most of the dresses were Dior.

It was lunchtime when I left the exhibit and I had planned on eating lunch at a restaurant that “Let’s go” recommended that was located near the exhibit. This worked out nicely. The book recommended ordering the pecorino cheese that was served with honey and walnuts. I didn’t know what else to get so I made a random decision to also order a six-cheese pizza. The pecorino cheese was unbelievable. It was baked, so there were some crunchy parts around the melted middle, and the honey and walnuts were drizzled over it. After I finished gobbling it up and was waiting for my pizza, I realized that I probably over did it with ordering cheese. My pizza was ok, I was already pretty cheesed out by the time it came, which probably had a good deal to do with me not being able to enjoy it at its maximum potential. I have definitely had better four-cheese pizzas. Vegetables or a salad would have been a better compliment, but oh well. After I finished, I sat at the table and digested for a while reading my book. All in all, the restaurant was a totally winner with very reasonable prices.
After lunch I walked a ways in another direction to see the Bocca della verita. On my way, I passed a bunch of random ruins in the middle of the city and that is when I realized that I was in the “ancient” part of the city. This is the face on the wall of the church in “Roman Holiday” with Audrey Hepburn, that supposedly if you put your hand in its mouth and it bites it off you are a liar. It was a nice walk, especially after such a cheesey meal. When I finally arrived at the site there was an extremely long line, so I snapped some pics and watched some people put their hands in the hole and then decided it was time for me to head back to my hotel.

I was doing so good with figuring out my way around Rome and directions until this point. I got really turned around in the ancient part of the city and ended up walking all the ways around it. I saw a lot of ruins and got a really good look at “ancient Rome” without paying for a thing. Finally an hour and a half later from the time I set off in the direction of my hostel, I arrived back. My legs were pretty tired from walking all around the city and I was parched, so I took full advantage of the free water and wifi at the bar.

At around 6 o’clock I decided I needed to get my night going, which I had planned to fill up with laundry, a shower, another delicious “Let’s Go” dinner, and possibly to packing. This is when my night started to get interesting. When I got up to my room to take a shower and assemble my laundry, a couple of my dorm mates were asleep so I decided to be courteous do everything in the dark with the aid of my head lamp. I took a fantastic shower, great water pressure. Even though the hostel bathrooms were unisex, they had hair dryers, which evened everything out in my book. The only clean clothes I had left were some leggings and a big t-shirt, so needless to say I was looking pretty “cute” in that outfit with my sneakers too.

I decided to use my big pack to transport my laundry to the Laundromat, which was a couple of blocks away. I wasn’t planning on taking my messenger back with messenger bag with me to the Laundromat, so I took all of my essential important things out of it and stuck them in random places in my big pack. This includes my keys to my locker. At the Laundromat, the man gave me a hostel discount and said that he would do my laundry for me, which was fine with me because European washers, dryers, and soap confuse me, everything would be done in an hour and a half and all for the price of 10 euro.

At this point, I realized that I cant find my keys so my locker. I didn’t see them in the pocket of my pack that I remembered putting them in. So I decided to go to dinner at this time and just worry about the keys later on. The restaurant that I want to go to is across town, near where the Grace Kelly Exhibit was. On my way over there, I stopped back at my hostel to see if I had left my keys sitting out on my bed, but no luck. I also realized at this point that I had locked my cell phone in my messenger bag in my locker and it would be nice to have in case my mom called me with an issue on her way over here.

So time is ticking away as I am power walking to the restaurant across town. I need to get some more Euro, so I stop at a random Bancomat on my way to the restaurant. As I am nearing the restaurant, the skies decided to open up. I do not have my rain coat or umbrella and so much time has passed on my walk that I realize I will only have about a half an hour to enjoy my dinner. I didn’t think that was nearly enough time, so I decided to try to catch a bus back to the Laundromat part of town and get dinner after I get my laundry. While I am waiting for a bus to come, the rain really starts pouring and I am quickly becoming drenched. I probably stood out in the rain waiting for a stupid bus for about 20 minutes and it never came. At this point, I felt like it was a reasonable decision to take a taxi to the Laundromat. Not only would it get me there in time to pick up my laundry, but it would get me comfortably out of the rain.

As I pull out my wallet to pay the taxi driver, I realize that my credit card is no longer in my wallet. At this point I looked up at the sky and wondered if the night could get any worse. I gathered all of my laundry and ran back to the hostel with my pack on my back so that I could #1 hopefully not get any wetter and #2 get a move on trying to find everything that I had misplaced this evening.

I storm into my room soaking wet. Thank goodness my roommates are up and I can search with the lights on. They all look at me like I am crazy, but when I explained to them what I was going through they all ere very kind to me, helpful, and tried to calm me down. Stuff like this hardly happens to me and when it doees, it is the absolute worst! I attempted to poke around in my locker by sticking my fingers through the cage holes and see if I had accidentally locked my keys in there. One of my roommates even lifted our bunk beds to help me shift things around, but no luck there. I am starting to panic and hope that the hostel has metal cutters for situations like this. Eventually, I do an extremely thorough search of the pocket of my pack that I thought I had put my keys in, and low and behold, there they were hiding in the very bottom.

With my keys found, I could start to calm. The first thing missing is found. I got my laundry sorted, checked through everything to see if I put my credit card in any random spot or it fell lose some where, and then got sorted to retrace my steps. Luckily, the last time I remembered having my credit card was at lunch so that gave me a shorter time frame of possible places where I could have lost it. I had only brought my wallet out three other times since lunch, at the Laundromat, ATM machine, and then in the cab. That left me with a good path, yet very long to take to retrace my steps.

I first went to the Laundromat, no luck there, but I left my name and where I was staying in case it did turn up. Then I rewalked the path I took to where I decided that I needed to turn around so that I could check the ATM machine, no luck there. I was really hoping that it had fallen out of my wallet there and by some grace of God it was still sitting on the wet side walk. At this point I am starting to lose hope because I knew there was no way I would ever be able to locate the cab I took and if it had fallen out in the cab, it was a goner. I decided to check the restaurant that I had lunch in just in case. It was a really long walk to get there, but I made myself do it just to be positive that I looked everywhere.

When I got to the restaurant, I explained to them that I had eaten lunch there and since then I had realized I had lost my credit card and was wondering if I possibly left it there. The man said that they had one credit card left there from lunch today and if I would please sign a piece of paper he would compare signatures. I saw a light of hope and in my excitement I did not sign a very good signature. My signature normally varies on a daily basis and with this guy, the language barrier, and my messy signature, he said that he could not accept it. So I pleaded with him, the card I left was a capital one card and I had my receipt with me, would that suffice? By the luck of the Irish, he did have my credit card! I swear that I am never that lucky. When things like this happen to me, they are goners. All of the speed walking around town was totally worth it and I thanked my lucky stars.

I decided to head to the original restaurant that I was going to go to for a celebration dinner. I had a serious skip in my step when I walked, despite how tired my legs were and how much my foot hurt. When I got to the restaurant it was closed, which I thought was weird because it was supposed to be a pub that stayed open till three. I have a feeling the place might have closed and there was a new place there instead. So now that it was 11 o’clock, which even for Italians is on the later side to go to a restaurant, I decided to go to the closest place that was open.

That ended up being a very reasonably priced restaurant down the street a bit. I asked the waiter what was good and he recommended the carbonara, which I got with grilled veggies and wine and water. The waiter started talking with me, which I greatly appreciated because I was dining alone, but then another waitress said a snide comment to him and that was the last I saw of him that night. The mean waitress waited on me for the rest of the night and she had a serious attitude problem. The carbonara was ok, not my favorite, but the grilled veggies were very good. I ordered chocolate moose thar was so light and tasty. It was really the icing on the cake. I didn’t finish my bottle of water and tried to take it with me for later on in the middle of the night, but once again the mean waitress shot that down.

I was luckily able to catch a bus back to the hostel. When I got back to my room and informed my roommates that I found my credit card, we all did a victory cheer. At this point I was exhausted from walking around the city three times that day and as soon as my head hit the pillow, I was fast asleep.

Ah Rome, at last, but just literally

11/3/2009

Today I woke up very early so that I could catch a morning train from Cinque Terra to Rome. I wanted to get all settled in Rome and ready for my interview. I made all of my connections, the bus to the train station, the train from Corniglia to La Spezia, and then finally the train from La Spezia to Rome. I had to pay another 10 stinking euros for my seat reservation for my train ride from La Spezia to Rome. When I first got on the train and saw, well more like smelled who I was supposed to sit next to, I had to do a 180 and find somewhere else to park. My seat reservation was next to a total stinkbug. I sat a couple of rows behind him and luckily no one asked me to move or bothered me.

Of course the one day I am actually in Cinque Terra, ready to do the walk through the towns, it rains. This morning when I was leaving it was absolutely beautiful, gorgeous pink clouds in the sky and temperate weather. At least I got to see some of the beauty in my arrival and departure.

Trains are a funny way of transportation. They absolutely do not wait for anybody. While I was waiting on the platform for my train to Rome, I watched another train board and depart. A family of about 7 Mexicans was trying to get on the train with about 18 suitcases. All of them had not made it up to the platform yet and they were running up and down the stairs attempting to lug all of their suitcases onto the train. They successfully got the train to hold on for a couple of minutes, but they were still two slow and four of them and about 8 pieces of luggage were left behind at the train station, while the rest of their party and luggage went on with the train. When this happened they looked dumbfounded and mildly offended. It was quite a spectacle to see. I have also noticed that on the train people tend to stare a lot. Almost to the rude point and they normally do not care if you stare back at them. It surprisingly doesn’t bother me.

It was raining as the train pulled into Rome, but as soon as I walked outside of the train stations, blue skies came out. My hostel was a short walking distance from the train station, which was a very pleasant change from my first trip to Rome. This particular hostel is extremely cheap and seems like a very legitimate place. It has free wifi, but only discounted breakfast at the bar next store, which I was actually ok with because they have eggs on the menu. I feel like I have not had eggs in ages. They put me in a dorm with five other guys. It should be interesting. Thank god for my ipod. The bar next door, which is associated with the hostel gave me some free jelly and honey for some bread that I had been saving. For the past to days I have seriously been scrapping for my breakfast and lunch meals. In general, I got a very good vibe from this hostel. It will be absolutely fine for my last two nights as a true backpacker.

One thing I have noticed as I have come into contact with Australians is that they say “Cheers” as another way of saying “you’re welcome”. I dig that. I was walking around by the train station, scoping out possible Internet cafes that had phones where I could do my interview, and I came across a money exchange place that advertised no commission. I had been carrying around 15 New Zealand dollars that Rexanne gave me to use up at a place just like this while I was over here, I just had never come across one. I traded my monies in for five euro and some change and was extremely pleased with myself. I had some time to kill before my interview, so I sat outside a church and looked over my notes and read.


It finally got close to the time I was supposed to call into a number for a free conference call for my interview so I got all set up in one of the booths at an internet café and waited. As I was waiting two women almost engaged in a full-fledged fistfight. Apparently one of the women was talking too loud on Skype and the other woman got annoyed. It was intense and just my luck that it would happen right as I am about to start an important phone call. Finally 3 o’clock came, the time I was supposed to call in, and I could not get the phone to work. I brought the lady who ran the internet café over and she couldn’t get the phone to work. She said it was my number, but I know that is not right because it was the same number I used when I called in to talk to Ted. So I ran down to the next internet café down the street. The same thing happened. It must be the way the internet café’s phones are set up. So I called the guy I was supposed to be interviewing with on my cell phone and let him a message telling him what was happening and that he cold call me back anytime today on my cell phone to do the interview, and that I was immensely sorry for the technical difficulties and my inconvenience.

As I was walking back to my hostel, my cell phone rings and it is the interviewer. He immediately starts talking to, so I quickly sat down at some tables at a sidewalk café and started the interview. I was pretty frazzled and didn’t have my notes in order, but I think the interview went ok. It could have gone better, but it definitely did not go badly. Well see what happens. It was my first interview and it would not be the worst thing in the world if I just ended up chalking it up to a learning experience. The interview kind of plopped itself down in my lap and if the verdict turns out bad from it, then it just wasn’t in the cards for things to work out considering the outrageous sequence of events that happened before the interview.

I ate dinner at a restaurant that was recommended in the book “Let’s go to Europe”. It was locate only two blocks from my hostel, and seemed like a perfect place for me to spend my evening. The restaurant was just what I was looking for. I ordered tomatoes and mozzarella cheese plate that was drizzled with EVOO and sprinkled with salt, and then an eggplant parmesan (which Uncle Buddy, knocked the socks off Rosalita’s and Franco’s. It was so simple, grilled eggplant, a great tomato sauce and lots of Parmesan cheese. I had some wine to accompany my dinner and read my book. It was very pleasant. The best thing about this dinner was that everything was so cheap, especially considering the large portions I received. I have not run into a place with prices and flavors like that since I have been over here. One thing that I am continually amazed about is how many Italians can speak moderate English. There are so few Americans that can moderately speak any other foreign language.

Tomorrow is my last day of traveling solo. I plan to sleep in, which really means not setting an alarm. In the morning I am going to see a Grace Kelly exhibit, eat lunch at a pizzarria that “Let’s go” also recommended, spend the afternoon walking around Rome just taking in the city, and spend the evening eating at another one of “Let’s Go’s” recommendations (my last day on my own, might as well do it up), and do some laundry. I know, it all sounds very exciting, but at this point in my trip, it is a perfect pace for me to be moving at.

Corniglia, my bad weathered friend

11/2/2009

Today I have traveling for exactly six weeks. Tomorrow I will get on a train to Rome, which will be my last solo stop and I have two and a half more days until I see my mothers beautiful face.

So as pleasant as arriving in Cinque Terra last night at sunset was, things continued to move downhill during my stay. Last night I had my first bad meal in Italy. I went to a seafood restaurant that was down the street from my hostel. I figured, why not, I am right my the sea, so things couldn’t be but so bad. I was wrong. I ordered shrimp scampi and what came out was not at all what I was expecting. They served me the entire shrimp, which after talking to my mother today I realized is the way Europeans serve shrimp. I do not understand this practice because it is a complete waste of space on your plate and energy eating. There is not much meat in a shrimp to begin with. The only worthwhile part is the tail, the bodys taste like sandy mud and there is pratically no meat in their claws. So why bother serving the entire shrimp, shell and all. That is an answer I will never know, and will always think this practice is silly. If that wasn’t pad enough. The sauce that they served the shrimp and pasta in did not taste good. Now folks, I am not a picky eater and this sauce was bad. The only positive of the meal was that the restaurant served really good homemade bread, which I proceeded to wrap the remains up in a napkin and take with me. I was pretty bummed out when I returned to the hostel.

There are only three other people staying at this hostel with me, which could be an eerie situation, but all three speak English and are very friendly… a huge plus. Two of the three are brother and sister and the third guy, I did not see until tonight, name is Kyle and he is from Chicago. He said he took the train to see all five of the towns today, which while not as bad ass of an idea as hiking to them is, but in the end made him a lot smarter than I was.

So for my daily activity, I was planning on doing the walk/hike between all five of the towns. I have heard that the views are just breath taking and each town is cool in its own right. I am staying in the third town of Cinque Terra, Corniglia, which I thought put me in a good position for breaking up the hike throughout my day. When I checked the weather forecast for today last night, the outlook was grim, but I said my prayers before I went to bed and hoped that the weatherman was wrong.

Low and behold, the weatherman was dead on and my ambitious outdoors plans for the day were washed out. I woke up to nasty, drizzle, windy weather. I thought that the hostel served a breakfast for three euro, but it turns out that they only do that on request. So in the morning I went in search of a market, with some very vague broken English directions that the lady at the front desk gave me. After wandering around for a while in the midst. I finally asked a very nice man, who understood what I was saying and pointed me in the right direction. Apparently the village of the town is one alleyway off the a little round about that makes up the town center.

At the market I bought two bananas, an apple, an orange, a chunk of delicious homemade cinnamon raisin bread and a big thing of orange juice. I felt like I was coming down with a bit of a cold and wanted to pump myself full of vitamins, especially because after battling off a couple of colds this trip, I have started rationing my over the counter cold medicine. I have put in a request for my mother to bring supplies when she comes over. Also these items should get me through breakfast and lunch today and tomorrow, which is good for my wallet.

I was hoping that the weather would die down in the afternoon so I could do a portion of the walk, so I spent the morning reading and sleeping to help pass the time. As the afternoon came the weather got worse. Go figure that all of the times I have wanted to do outdoorsy activities on this trip are the only times that I have encountered bad weather. Today was probably the worst weather I have come across. Maybe it is God telling me something? And wouldn’t you know it, but when I looked up the weather forecast for tomorrow, it is nothing but sunny skies. Just my luck that I am taking an early train to Rome tomorrow morning.

The bad weather really could be a blessing in disguise. Being forced to hang out today is good for helping me fend off my cold. I got to catch up on sleep and read a lot. It also gave me a lot of time to prepare for my interview. I have never done an interview like this before and am keeping my fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly, with all this preparation, I feel as confident as I can be not really knowing what to expect.

The hostel closes from 1-3 for a siesta, so they kicked us out into the rain. We knew this ahead of time so it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was pouring at this point, so we ran into a little café. I had an espresso and worked on my notes for the two hours. The café played good music, so I was content being where I was. My favorite song they played was purple rain. Unfortunately at three they didn’t open their doors on time and we all got drenched waiting for them to do so.

For the rest of the day, I just hung around and got a lot of stuff done and straightened out. I probably should have shown some more initiative and done what Kyle did and saw all of the towns by train, but now that is all water under the bridge. I still dig the vibe of Corniglia and Cinque Terrra in general and could see how in good weather this place could have magical qualities. Hopefully I will get to experience that at another time in my life… maybe from a boat?

For dinner the four of us staying in the hostel went to a small restaurant in the village and had dinner. The menu at this restaurant was written up on a chalkboard and was all in Italian. I was able to decipher a little bit and ended up ordering this homemade pasta and mushrooms. The pasta was unlike any other pasta I have ever seen. It was square inch bites of pasta that had little holes in it like lacy Swiss cheese. It was good, nothing extraordinary, but very pleasant nonetheless. Kyle and I split a bottle of wine, dinner was served with delicious bread and olive crustinis. WE all ordered tiramisu (my new favorite dessert) and while it wasn’t the best I have ever had, the sweet treat hit the spot.

I got all packed and ready to walk out the door so that when my early wake up call comes, I can just get up and go. Despite the bad weather, I have enjoyed my time in Cinque Terra. I am extremely grateful that the three other people staying in the hostel were cool and friendly. I made some great progress in my book and completely distressed, which I think is a good way to be before an interview, but who knows, I have never done one before.

5 towns

11/1/2009

Today I woke up right before my alarm went off, which has not happened in so long. I had such a relaxing restful night last night, and it was so nice to sleep in a clean feeling bed and be able to get up in the middle of the night and not bother anyone. Im surprised I have not had more issues with that staying at hostels, but it really does make you realize the luxuries of regular life. I got up around 8 because I had a call scheduled with my cousin Ted, who lives in London at 9. Then it occurred to me that London is not in the same time zone as Italy so I actually had more time on my hands before the call than I thought I would.

I went down stairs for my free breakfast and was absolutely amazed by the spread of delicious food the hotel had out. It was by far the best free breakfast that I have come across. I am talking a bunch of different sweets, cakes, multiple types of stuffed croissants, meats and cheeses, cereal, yogurt, fresh fruit, all sorts of different types of coffees, juices, toast. It was practically everything I could ever ask for in a free breakfast. I took full advantage of this situation and filled myself to the brim and then grabbed an apple, banana, orange, two croissants, and a ham and cheese sandwich to take with me for the rest of my food for the day.

I went back to my room, got organized and started getting ready. Since I was in a private room and had more time on my hands than usual, I decided to shave my legs for the second time on this trip. The first time was in Salzburg and my legs were starting to become unbearably itchy. I took a wonderful shower, got dressed, and BLOW DRIED m hair (another luxury I had forgotten how nice it was).

At this point it was time for my phone call with Ted. His secretary worked it out so that I could call a free number from an Italian land line and not get charged for the phone call or have to use up minutes on the prepay phone I have with me (in case of emergencies). I talked to Ted for a while. He gave me a bunch of great pointers and advice for the phone interview I have on Tuesday for a position with Goldman Sachs. Hopefully I can get it set up so that I can do the interview the same free number way. I really appreciated Ted taking time to help me get started in preparing for the interview. These next two nights I will be in a small town where there is not much going on at night and will use those nights to get fully prepared.

With the free phone call, awesome breakfast that will feed me for the rest of the day, private room for a moderate price, and hair dryer, I was thoroughly pleased with my hotel room and definitely think that it was worth the extra money and actually think it paid itself off in benefits. It allowed me to have by far the most luxurious morning I have had in a long while.

I made my way to the train station, got my seat reservation (another 10 euros for the train to Florence…I am so over paying for these reservations), and got on the train well before it left the station. Unlucky for me, they never checked my ticket on this train ride, so I could have gotten away with not paying for the reservation, but I guess it is better be safe than sorry. I had to make a connection in Florence for the La Spieza train, which I had plenty of time to do. It was a beautiful day that made for an enjoyable scenic train ride. On the second train, I saw the second whackest thing I have come across so far on this trip. A woman was breast-feeding her baby out in the open. Please, nobody wants to see that. The number one whackest thing I have come across was in Milan. I was an Asian man with about inch and a half long hairs coming out of a chin mole. I was extremely curious as to why he grew them out so long.

I got into Corniglia, which is the third town of Cinque Terra coming from La Spieza, around sunset. It was beautiful. I opted to take a bus up to the town instead of climbing up 360 stairs. The bus driver was extremely nice and let me pay less than exact change for the ticket because he didn’t feel like breaking my 50. The bus dropped me off right in the center of town and as soon as I got off the bus, the old Italian woman jumped up to help me and pointed me in the right direction. My hostel was literally only 15 feet away, which I was thankful for. When I was picking out a hostel for my stay in Cinque Terra, the pickings were not very good. I finally settled on one and so far it has proven to be very nice. It is clean and the woman at the desk gave me free access to the Internet even though she wasn’t supposed to. At last I can finally get all caught up with everything. Breakfast is three euros but hopefully I can snag some stuff to take with me on my hike tomorrow.

It is going to be a mellow night and then a busy day tomorrow followed by and even busier day on Tuesday, Mom flies out on Thursday and I am so excited!