Italy!

FYI: because the posts from Italy are so crazy long with lots of pictures, they will not all show on the front page of the blog at the same time.  You have to click the "Older Posts" link at the bottom of the blog to see the rest of them.

I’ve said this before, but currently this blog is my blended scrap book/journal/photo album for our family. All of the following new posts are from our trip in Italy. It took me forever to get everything organized. The posts are all pretty long, and likely not that interesting to you! I just wanted to record some of our experiences and impressions for our sake. So feel free to skim or skip, we’ll still love you either way. ;-) This post is a combination of pictures as well as random observations and experiences about Italy.

In the US, we have Italian food, Mexican food, Chinese food, American food, etc. In Italy? They have Italian food. Specifically they have pizza and pasta. Their pizza is completely different from pizza in the US. The pizzas have thick crusts and are really thin in the center. The sauce is really watery, kind of like soup. They’ll top their pizza’s with anything from chunks of cheese to French fries. Some of the best pizza we had came from a small pizzeria down a random street in Naples. We paid a euro each for some 8-10 inch pizzas that came fresh out of a wood burning stove. Yummy!! That being said, after a while I was done eating pizza and pasta for every meal. It was amazingly good food, but no variety! I needed something different! Well, about that time we went to the grocery store and saw tortillas and decided to try and make tacos at home… it was a disaster. What they called “salsa” was actually tomato paste. In the end, we ended up with sloppy joe mix on tortillas. There were probable fifty kinds of cheese at the grocery store, but not a chance you're going to find cheddar, so we ended up with mozzarella... not the first choice for tacos. Liz was amazing enough to use her shopping connections at the military base to buy some American ingredients, and round two a few days later was a complete success! And luckily towards the end of our trip in Florence we found a McDonalds. Where I was previously not a McDonald’s fan, it will always have a soft place in my heart now for providing me French fries, chicken nuggets and a strawberry shake when the only other option was more pizza!!

Okay, so moving on to some pictures. This is Liz's house, which is both beautiful and comfortable, and became our home sweet home while we were gone. You can barely see one of the lemon trees in her backyard on the left.

Driving in Italy is an adventure. The really big cities like Rome and Florence weren’t bad at all (comparatively at least), but southern Italy? Specifically Naples where we were staying? No traffic lights, stop signs, or even lines in the road. (Okay, maybe like two traffic lights… in the whole city.) You might ask how you know how many lanes of traffic there are. Why, as many as will fit. And when the cars stop fitting, they start merging. There are no set right of way rules, just a somewhat aggressive “start moving” and be aware of the car who starts moving in front of you. Should you come across an actual stop sign and come to a complete stop, you will get rear ended. Guaranteed. It’s super fun. Parking is another barrel of fun. Smart cars really are smart in Europe. You can fit two of them in a parallel parking spot because you can park them perpendicular to the curb. While searching for a parking spot once with Liz we got turned around in some TINY alleyways that I would have been convinced were not intended for cars, and while negotiating a turn may have ripped the back bumper off Liz’s car. Sad, huh?! She wasn’t too disturbed by this though, apparently these nicks and scratches of bumpers are called “Naples kisses” and every car has them. After a bit of twine and packing tape we were on our way again. Jonathan and I didn’t drive at all the first week we were there. Liz drove us a few places while explaining all the crazy unofficial driving rules and patterns, and when she wasn’t there we took the trains. About a week in we rented a car to go up to Florence, and did a small amount of driving down the Amalfi coast to return to Sorrento for inlaid wood souvenirs we didn’t buy the first time we were there. There was really only one point when I truly thought we might die. But thankfully we didn’t. ;-) So this is the cute and very tiny Fiat Panda we rented while we were there:




I definitely need to mention the Italians and Benjamin. So Benjamin was pretty much our ambassador into Italy. Liz told to us before we went out there that the Italians love children, but we were still in no way prepared for the attention he got! Something about all that blond hair and blue eyes I guess! People would constantly pause in the street to lean over his stroller and say hello and try to get him to smile. Now, people in the US will occasionally do this, but not even close to this extent or with this level of consistency. We went into a small restaurant once, and one of the employees there picked up Benjamin to help him inside. While doing this she noticed his hands were cold, and while chattering away in Italian took him into the back of the restaurant to warm them up by the brick oven stove for cooking fresh pizza. Don’t worry mom- he was within eyesight. (As a side note their pizza was amazing!) People stopped and played with him on the train, in the subways, in the grocery stores, pretty much everywhere.

There are two trains that go from Naples to Pozzouli, the small town outside of Naples where Liz lives. Once, we took the wrong train and ended up one stop past Pozzouli because we were looking for the landmarks of the other station instead of looking at the signs. The stop we ended up at was completely deserted and covered in graffiti. Nice. When we got off the train and started looking around, it must have been obvious that we had no idea what we were doing, because an older woman who had also gotten off hung around to watch us for a minute, then came up and tried to talk to us, obviously very concerned. Realizing we didn’t speak Italian she shuffled her teenage son over to talk to us, and once everyone realized through minimal English and miming that we just needed to go one stop back in the other direction, she visibly relaxed and smiled. This really wasn’t a one time incident either, there were many instances of people pausing to help us out. Liz mentioned once that between Benjamin and me being pregnant it provided a strange level of safety because the locals would look out for us, and we really felt like they did.

Speaking of people who love Benjamin, he had SO much fun with his Auntie Liz! She never failed to get him to giggle and smile. :-)

This is a view of the Island of Ischia from Pozzouli, where Liz lived. We took a ferry out there and did some shopping and walking around. Much of the island is very seasonal, and being winter the beaches weren't quite what they are in the summer, but it was still a lot of fun.

Down a street in Pozzouli:

This is the Port of Pozzouli:

These pictures are on the Island of Capri (as in capri pants, which come from there):

 

We would have fonder memories of Capri if our trip there had gone a bit smoother. We had intended to go to the Blue Grotto, but it was closed due to choppy water. We hadn't planned on doing much else, which resulted in us trecking up a mountain instead of taking a ferry like we would have if we had done the research to know any better. It was beautiful though, even during the winter!