Pisa and Lucca

On the road to Pisa and Lucca. My first trip out and about in the Tuscay....


Aside from a very wet sky and the 5-Euro lesson on how to validate your ticket before you get on the train, there isn't much to share about my trip to Pisa and Lucca today aside from a few pictures.




Trust me, it's not as large in live as you'd expect.

This is in Lucca, a tiny Italian town in between Florence and Pisa.


The walls of Lucca are the most famous thing about the city. They've been standing since the 1600s.

So that's all, I'm trying to plan out a trip to Milan next weekend, so I hope to have some more pictures of that as well. Also, I hope to add some photos of actual Florence, just waiting for the weather to clear up a bit.

Rainy and chilly in Italy,

Scott

Culinary Improvisation

One of the small hang-ups I've come to find while here in Florence is the lack of that one essential go-to thing in everyone's life. It can make the difference between lonesome emptiness and filling glee.

I'm talking of course, about the single man's best friend: the microwave oven.

While microwaves are very much available in Florence and not at all unpopular in Italy, our apartment is sorely lacking when it comes to them. Tonight, I met this problem head on.

If you've lived with me for more than a few days, you may be aware that if I can be around when cooked chicken meets BBQ sauce, I am usually a happy happy man. Having cooked extra chicken breast last night but with no familiar means of heating it up for dinner tonight, I set out to get myself a warm meal.

Enter: cooking pots.


Garrett, my roommate, made Brie one of the first nights we had in the apartment, so I got to work setting up the pot of boiling water with another smaller bowl/pot over it. With my chicken under indirect heat I relished in my shrewd think-on-my-feet idea.


The finished product, with incredibly cheap milk, incredibly expensive bbq, and incredibly small bread:


(and yes, that's Mantis on my computer background)


I'm hopefully headed to Pisa tomorrow for a fairly rainy run-in with the leaning tower. Should anything especially interesting happen, I'll be sure to post about it. Hope friends and family back home are having a good time. Keep warm!


Scott

Sometimes you only have to walk three blocks

I had probably my first truly remarkable experience here in Florence just a few minutes ago. True, the past few days of wandering around, eating great food, having a few drinks in bars and meeting a whole lot of people have been great, but this was just incredible.

My roommate Kevin thought he had lost his wallet last night after coming back from the center of Florence. He and Garret took a cab back to our place on a street called Via del Mezzetta, which is about a 20 minute drive from the middle of town. He panicked all day and eventually used most of all our phone cards to call home and cancel his credit cards, knowing he now really had no way of getting to his money back home, bank or credit. Long story short, the wallet turned up and we set off to thank the man who had found it and turned it in.

Expecting a short and awkward conversation with a man knowing little Italian, Kevin brought Garret and I along in order to have some sort of Italian know-how present. Steve came as well. When we got there, we found a welcoming old man speaking English in a British accent. He took no time in ushering us into his apartment and sitting us down for a chat. A chat that turned out to be an hour long talk, mostly about his life. This man, last name Ballerini, (I chuckled a little inside), was born in Florence to Italian parents, then moved to England for school with three brothers. This was in the mid 1930s. As WWII started, he joined the Italian air force, one of his borthers the British air force, and another brother the Italian army. After the war, he married an Italian woman and settled down in Florence, where he was a bus driver for 28 years. This man retired when he was 48 or 49 years old. That alone just blew my mind. With a great government pension and a lifetime buspass, he and his wife (married 63 years!) raised their daughters (now aged 57 and 63) in Italy and would vacation in America in the 1970s and 80s.

Having lost his wife in 2007, this man goes about life in the most admirable, picturesque way imaginable. He's up and to the cemetery at 8am every day to see his wife, out for a walk afterward, frequently to nearby villages to buy his preferred wine, and is overall leading a diligent, dignified solitary life in Florence Italy after a life that's brought him all over the world and among all kinds of people. Sitting there for over an hour, I was shocked when he told us he was 86 years old. He spoke and looked as if he was at least fifteen years younger. Expecting to find an ornery Italian crank, we instead landed upon a man who had lived longer than the four of us combined, with more stories to tell and people to remember than I may ever have. Signore Ballerini was a treasure, and I really hope run into him in the morning here near Via del Mezzetta.

This is why I decided to study abroad.

Scott

Inagural post, traveling, moving in.

So, to kick off this blog, I have just a little bit to share. I left MSP airport at around 10am local time on Thursday, finally getting to Florence at 9:25am local time, making my total travel time around 17 hours, but in reality nearly exactly one whole day, due to time zone changes. Getting off the plane at Florence was a joy in and of itself, going from -20˚ wind chills to near 50s was a great welcome from Italy.

After a somewhat terrifying and exciting taxi drive, Stephen, Tyler and I got to our apartment, on the second floor of Via del Mezzetta 4a, Firenze. The place itself is incredible. Very roomy and balconies with great views. The three of us had some quick spaghetti (my first Italian meal, who would have expected spaghetti?) and are currently awaiting Garrett and Kevin, our other roommates. I hope the frigid Minnesota weather has calmed down a bit, and I promise to have a bit more exciting news with the next post. That's all for now, ciao.

Scott