Arrival in Italy

So I’ve managed to survive my first two full days in Italy and am quite tired out in the attempt, although that might mainly be from switching languages and the long walks I’ve taken around the city the last two evenings. In case I forget to mention it later, I have my flickr account up and running, with my first big bunch of pictures in the clearly marked set called “First Week in Ferrara”. They’re mainly pictures of the house and neighborhood, which will hopefully interest some of you. I promise to get some pictures proving that I’m acutally here up at some point. My user name on flickr is rishao262 and the url for this set of pictures is: http://www.flickr.com/photos/93629374@N00/sets/72157607233669829/ I’ll be hopefully adding pictures regularly to the account. Enjoy!

!!! One more thing that hopefully people will be kind enough to pay attention to: Any suggestions for recipes? I’m going food shopping tomorrow, as so far I only have had some pretty basic stuff in my fridge (bread, cheese, tomotoes, prosciutto, yogurt, pb/j, fruit and juice). Any recipes that are easy to make, not too expensive, and yummy, or suggestions for generally useful food items to buy, would be VERY welcome. There’s only a little food store near me, but I’ll figure out something. In the past, I’ve been able to follow a recipe, but don’t know much of anything off the top of my head, and as I am going to mostly have to feed myself, this is something of a problem. So please, help feed the hungry Emmons, she’s begs of you.

I guess I should start at the beginning of the journey on Monday night. For those of you who didn’t know, my sister Sarah was expecting, and so we went to see her for a few hours in the hospital on Monday afternoon, but had to leave to bring me to the airport before anything really happened. But apparently as I disappeared from my parents’ sight through security, they got a call saying that their new granddaughter, and my neice, Julia Ann Collins Moyer, had arrived safely in this world! Yay! As my mom pointed out, it seemed somewhat ironic that as the youngest of my generation of siblings was embarking on a journey out of kid-hood, the oldest of the next generation was entering into it. So this was a happy way to start my trip, nervous as I was.

The Germans with Lufthansa and at the airport in Munich did quite a good job of being timely, organized, helpful and had good signage, thankfully fulfilling the cultural stereotype. The next leg of the trip was a little rougher; after getting the plane in Bologna, I had to find a bus to the train station, take a train to Ferrara, and find a way to contact my landlady, who had offered to pick me up. Sounded easy. Unfortunately, at this point I was already kind of hungry, very thirsty and very tired, as I hadn’t been able to sleep well on the flight over. To make matters worse, there were no elevators anywhere, lots of stairs, a ticketing machine that didn’t give me the right ticket (it was valid for 3 months, instead of just one ride…) and not stamping it appropriately, causing the train conductor to charge me again, bad signage, no water fountains, and I ended up having to spend 45 minutes asking everyone I saw if they would led me a cell phone for a short moment. Even the people who had cell phones in their hands would literally tell me that they didn’t have one. Kind of ridiculous. At least it eventually ended up alright, and nothing really terrible or dangerous actually happened. Thank god. I basically ended up sleeping the entire afternoon, unpacked, and went for a bit of pizza at a nearby pizzeria with Gardenia (my landlady)’s cousin. The pizza was more like a pita with some thin melted mozzarella and red sauce, than like what we normally think of as pizza, and both the sauce and cheese tasted different, but were still good. My jet lag kicked in at that point, and kept me half-awake until past 3. And then there was sleep and much of it. Yay.

The last two days have also been eventful, but at least they were rather more pleasant. I’m going to put comments on those into another post so that this one doesn’t get to be overly long.

Un momento per favore.