Photos and First Few Days in Scotland in Brief

Most pictures from Scotland are up on flickr, fyi, in several sets accessible on the right side, split up by days. And almost all of my photos on there are now mapped, using a "geotagging" feature which I think is just dandy for people like me who... like both maps and photography a lot. So, if anybody cares, you can actually see where things took place by looking at my map on flickr, too!

And now, my first few days in Scotland in brief (by my normal standards, at least), as a break from studying.

Day 0: Spending all day traveling, with a successful arrival. Only hiccups were when the customs man in London yelled at me for being American and for messing up the entry form a little bit, and when I thought the airplane being late in Italy made me miss my connecting flight to Edinburgh because I forgot about the time difference and freaked out for a little while as I ran through the airport. However, all went well in the end. Eleanor was nice and picked me up at the airport, and for dinner I had a wonderfully home-tasting meal of a BLT and a milkshake with Eleanor and her Irish flatmate Gareth, before chilling out with the amusing movie "American Splendor."

Day 1: Food shopping! Oh man, I am so jealous of the amount of diversity in Scottish markets - lots of variety of food types, for considerably less money that it is here, even with the pound-euro-dollar differences. One of many things that would occur over the week to make me feel more at home. Then came the German Christmas Market near the Prince's Street Gardens, where they have lots of Christmas-season goings-on. Apparently in Europe, the Germans are the only ones who really know how to do a Christmas Market, or so they say, so a whole bunch of Germans come to Edinburgh with their stalls and food and jewelry and neat little things and set up for a month and a half! Got some decent german food and some traditional mulled wine, talked for a long time, and spent a while looking at the pretty jewelry. Yay.

Then came going to a Buddhism class with Eleanor and seeing the really-old-manuscripts section of the New College (religion/philosophy/etc.) library; wandering around the city; visiting a small vintage store called the Rusty Zip, playing dress-up back at the flat with Eleanor's lots of fun/cute clothes (aka being girly), meeting Eleanor's flatmates and her friends Zoe and Mark; getting a chance to webcam for a little with my brother Alex; making dinner and hanging out talking for a long time. We intended to go dancing at Caberet Voltaire... and had too much fun talking until late. Fortunately or unfortunately, this became a trend for the week, and I was regularly too tired to go out past midnight. Not an easy schedule for me, probably to my brother's disappointment (he wanted me to see Cab Volt while there). O well. At least hanging out with new, lively, friendly and interesting people was a relief from my quiet life here in Italy.

Day 2: Heading up to St. Andrews to see Zoe, a friend and suitemate of mine from Arabic School, who is a Vermonter but goes to undergrad at St. Andrews all year round. It's a cute, little, medieval fishing/pilgrimage town, with lots of fantastic ruins just above the shore of the North Sea. There are only three main streets (whose shops oddly enough reminded me of Denville, near home in NJ, or of Middlebury), plus the university, the fishing neighborhoods and the ruins of the medieval cathedral, chapel, castle and some other things, which have whole walls missing and then a single wall or tower just rising up from the earth. They were as though ghost buildings, beautiful skeletons. A storm was brewing up and it rained on and off all afternoon, which unfortunately precluded some intended destinations, but the rain, wind and clouds just made the whole place more surreal and the ruins on the crashing sea the more wild and intriguing. So awesome, in several senses of the word. It was also great to see Zoe and get to catch up for the whole afternoon, talking over tea and Indian food and as we wandered through the very-much-ruins of the epic cathedral. I'm really glad I got to see her while in Scotland, even if it was just for one day. Feeling welcomed by friends was a constant and very key highlight to the trip, and was very comforting.

Day 3: A very full day. Started out with a trip to the Farmer's Market, which was down below the Grassmarket and near the foot of the cliff on which the Castle sits. Much of the food was quite tempting-looking, but we went for some porridge for breakfast. Wow was it good. Raspberries and oats and cream and I don't remember what all, but a good way to start the day. Next was Armstrongs, this enoooormous vintage store in the Grassmarket. Old clothes and accessories from the 1800s through to the 70s, although mainly, from what it appeared, from the early 20th century. More fragile or really unusual and not for sale items were hanging from the ceiling, so the store feels a whirlwind den of weird, colorful old things. SO MUCH COOL STUFF. We had fun playing dress up and digging up cool things from the racks for quite some time. This place would be a LARPers dream-store, I expect. I need to get the pictures of this morning from Eleanor at some point, since my camera was out of batteries, but that's the only point that I don't have, I think.

Afterwards, Eleanor had to study for an exam she had on the coming Monday, so I went off on my own to climb Arthur's Seat, the massive volcanic rock and heath-covered mound rising up in the middle of the city, on the side near the Firth of Forth (the bay-ish stretch of the North Sea reaching into the island near Edinburgh). There are several paths of various difficulties that wind back and forth up the rocky hill, and which lead to the grassy hillocks of the plateau at the top. The sun was starting to go down as I went up (not long after 3 pm...), which meant that I got some fantastic views of Edinburgh and this gorgeous sunset from the rocky volcanic highest point, where I hung out for a while with some other hikers and ravens braving the wind for the sake of the sunset.

The downside of seeing the sunset from the top, that I didn't think of until too late, was having to make my way down (the much smoother backside through a valley and past a ruined chapel!) in the near-dark, but luckily there were other people around and no problems. But I'm really glad I got to make it back up there (my dad, brother Alex and I climbed it last spring, too). I've discovered this fall something of a love for climbing iconic tall points in cities - it's exhilirating and brings great views! I think I want to hike more often once back in the States again, although nothing too intense for little me. I do go to school in Vermont, after all; why not take better advantage of the landscape?

But the busy day wasn't over yet! Eleanor, her friend Natasha (who I'd met for a while sometime earlier in the trip) and I went ice skating in the Prince's Street Gardens Christmas ice rink. They hadn't cleaned up the skater-shavings for several hours, so there was an odd layer of "snow" over the whole rink, and it was kind of crowded, but besides that it was quite fun! Last winter, I tried ice skating for the first time, and am glad that I did so, because I'm kind of awkward still but can do it without falling at all and definitely enjoy myself. We met up with Leah and Mary Katherine briefly afterwards, but they had had a long day of walking (with seeing an exciting penguin march at the zoo!) and were ready for an early night, and so I ended up back at Eleanor's flat to watch the strange but very funny movie "Wet, Hot American Summer" with her and Natasha, at the recommendation of the movie-store guy. (We hadn't intended to watch two "typical American (fill-in-the-blank) experience" movies, but ended up doing so somehow, I just realized). A relaxing way to end the day.

Days 4, 5 and 6: Coming Soon.

Immediate plans:

Well, I should get back to trying to be productive soon. This is going to be a very very busy week (after the last month of being quite busy but feeling unproductive and a lack of posting, sorry about that!), but I will do my best at writing about the other few days in Scotland and how life has been in general. My family (parents and Alex) are coming next Monday to Italy for over a week for Christmas, and I am sooooo looking forward to it.

I had been thinking of going to Rome next weekend for a short visit, since I haven't made it there at all yet, but cousin Gina has proposed, if things work out for her, staying with her and going for a short ski trip - over the border into Austria! Which would also be exciting. So, either way, once I make it through this busy week (and hopefully get some important things worked on), I will get to have a much-looked-forward-to vacation for a bit of time before the crazy exam month of January. That last bit I'm not eager about, as I don't feel at all prepared. I've learned a ton this term about emotionally taking care of and living by myself in a new environment, and some more Italian, of course, but very little academically, less than I need to know for exams (which is partly my fault, partly my language skills, partly the confusing set up here and how difficult it is to get books). I know that learning to take care of myself and learning about myself is the more important thing by far and what I care about more, but I'd like to do ok on exams, as the grades do actually count for Middlebury... I'll just have to keep plugging along with this frustrating university. Almost there! Almost there! Just keep swimming...

This has been a good experience over all, this fall, but I will be quite glad to get home. And in the meantime, I will be sooo happy to see my family next week. Ok. Back to work.

Tigre Contro Tigre

Tonight was quite fun. Andrea is leaving tomorrow for a month in Rome to work with his horses, and so Flavia (Gardenia's daughter) made dinner for all of us. Her house is a few blocks away and has art covering almost every surface. The dinner was very yummy and consisted of too much good food that was piled onto my plate for me - grilled veggies, polenta, tagliatelle al ragu', beef and chicken stew, and baguette, and a local specialty with chocolate and almonds for desert. An exciting thing was that I could understand almost everything that was said over the few hours, which was great. Flavia's husband was difficult to understand, as is Giorgio (my landlord/Gardenia's husband), but I think that's because the former is from southern Italy and the latter... is old with bad teeth, a former-smoker's voice, and some use of dialect. I'm not sure what started it, maybe the fact that we had been exchanging tongue-twisters (and no, I don't remember any yet, but will!), but Giorgio decided as a joke at one point to start repeating "tigre contro tigre" over and over as fast as he could - one of those "say this ten times fast" kind of things. Which he continued to do on and off for at least the next ten minutes among everybody joking around and joining in the joke with occasional things about tigers. This part I didn't catch everything of, but it was still amusing, and good for getting everybody laughing.

Something that did seem a little odd, although it could have just been coincidence, was that the men all sat on one end of the table, and the women/girls on the other, and Flavia's husband (I didn't even catch his name) seemed nice but said almost nothing to me, or to the females in general. When the puppy and Aurora were running around for a bit, too, they were just ignored and allowed to run in this crowded, art-filled living room almost knocking things over, and they didn't even know if Angelica was going to make it home for dinner or not - a different family dynamic than what I'm used to, at least.

Aurora, the 11-year old granddaughter, is quite amusing, and seems to really like me, as she gets really excited every time I see her. I've met Angelica, the 18 year old (last year of highschool) granddaughter a little bit before, but saw her more this evening. She seems really nice, too, but we didn't get to talk much, since she came home late from a long dance practice and was tired/ still had homework to do. Gardenia and Flavia want me to do weekly english conversations with Angelica for practice for pocketmoney, a proposition with which I have no problem. I've already occasionally helped Aurora with her English and French homework when she's been over here; it's very interesting for me to see how the English is taught (it's British, of course, although they speak with semi-american/semi-british accents), as well as the French. Angelica said that sometime we could hang out and she could introduce me to some other italians, which was good to hear. I don't have a problem with getting to know people who have a few years difference from me, as evidenced by the range of people whom I call my friends. Also, their family has a 3 month old puppy, Arturo, called Artu (said like R2, which always amuses me... which in turn created more such in-my-head entertainment since they didn't know to what I was refering when I mentioned that R2-D2 is the robot in Star Wars in explanation for my amusement...). Artu is SUPER hyper, and has a bit of a biting problem as he was bred for hunting, and hasn't gotten any proper training yet. Hopefully he'll be trained somewhat before getting big and actually being able to do more than just little scratches with his teeth.

Gardenia has almost never asked me questions about my family, home, school, anything - which is really weird, since it's not like she's been unfriendly or distant or anything. Tonight she did a bit, though, almost mostly as follow-ups to things Flavia or Andrea were talking to me about. But hey, conversation is always good. She also said she would be glad to teach me how to cook some traditional food, which was fantastic news! That is something I was really glad to hear her response about. Yay! I'm going to have to pursue this, to make sure that I don't let the opportunity slip by. We had been talking about the changing situation in Italy with dialects versus the "standard" Italian language, and Gardenia expressed the sentiment that although it's very important to be educated and learn the standard, that most of the generation of even her children Flavia and Dario not only don't learn the dialects (they're considered a sign of lower class or provinciality), but don't learn many traditional recipes and skills, and how it's a confusing and saddening situation for the loss of culture.

Gardenia has one of the accents that is more understandable to me (thankfully, since I talk to her more than others) since she's well educated, but I think she also knows the dialect of her mother. Andrea has been teaching me different ways of saying "let's go" in various dialects, which is fun. This came out of my comment that I have trouble understanding old people I run into in town, probably because they use some dialect, and teenagers, because they use some dialect, a lot of slang, and just plain don't speak "proper" Italian with good enunciation (no surprise, it's the same in any language, I guess...).

As a record for myself, I'm going to list the ones I remember of what he told me on here. So, "andiamo cene" would be the imperative, and "cene andiamo?" the interoggative, for "let's go" and "shall we go?", respectively. Napolitano: Iammo scenne. Genovese: Scianemmo. Piemontese/Milanese: Anduma. Ferrarese: Andem. There were some more that I forget... And some other things, although I don't remember which dialects they are from: ca vulite fa = cosa volete fare (what do you want to do?), c'ammo a fa = cosa vogliamo fare (what do we want to do?), insci = cosi (this way), te vuri minga = io non ti voglio (I don't want you).

On one hand, I'm glad that I can talk to people usually well enough without having to learn the dialects, unlike in Arabic, but on the other hand, they are really interesting, especially since they can vary between towns that are only 10 minutes apart by car, sometimes, and are often unintelligible if you only have my level of experience with the standard. The more unintelligible ones I've been told are not above, since I couldn't even remember them yet. I'm regularly amazed at the diversity of how the same basic phrases transform in the dialects. I'm taking a class on linguistics and dialects of Italian, which looks like it might be kind of hard, since I'm not a native speaker and don't have anywhere near the appropriately wide reference vocabulary nor a sense of a dialect. However, it also looks very intriguing, the professor is friendly and unlike Leah's other linguistics prof. didn't freak out at me for being a foreigner in a linguistics class, and taking this will likely help my understanding of the structure, development and vocabularly of Italian = I'm sticking with it. I've always loved linguistics, but have never gotten a chance to study it formally or learn a huge amount about it, so this should be a good opportunity. I can already tell that my previous experience with French is going to be a help, as so far she's given a number of examples in class comparing the development of the various romance languages to the original latin. This will certainly be interesting once we actually get into Italian dialects, for the above knowledge reasons, for bad and very good. So, I'm happy about the start of that course.

I can tell that my comprehension skills have jumped hugely in the last two weeks, which is fantastic, as it means less stress in class. I can understand waaay more than I can say, and I still make grammatical mistakes (agreement, subjunctive - especially in hypothetical clauses...), but less so than before, even if most of the others in the Midd program are better than I at speaking. But I realized something - I am one of the very few (or maybe the only one?) in the group who neither has 3 years of experience, went to language school for level 2 or 3, or lived in the Italian house. Which was something of a relief to notice, because it makes a lot of sense that everyone else has, duh, a lot more time-experience speaking in Italian, even the others who only have 1 year during the year and 2nd year during Summer School, like Leah. I of course want to keep improving, but at least I can accept being behind them somewhat, having realized this. As long as I can do alright on my finals and make significant progress while here, I'll be happy, given that I won't be able to get fluent after only 5 months here.

I can tell that a communal, delicious meal, as well as getting to talk to Will a little earlier today and seeing some extended family last weekend, in Venice for dinner on Tuesday, and tomorrow in Florence is all doing a lot for my mood. It's very easy to feel isolated here, even with Leah here and me getting to know the other girls in the program a little better. Hence me being so homesick last week. I am so glad that this week has gone less stressfully, between being around other people more and having less trouble with my classes. I like alone time, but also need good conversations and regular interaction with other people, as being here is making polished and shiningly clear. Affection and more hugs would be preferable, but you can't have everything all the time, can you? More social interaction, though, should become a higher priority.

Geography class feels like a joke sometimes, so I'm thinking of finding another class that starts in the second half of the term and doing that instead. We'll see. On the good side, I can understand almost everything that the professor says, despite a lot of words I've never heard before (they're similar enough to things I have heard or to English). On the not so good side, the extended-storytime style of giving examples without going into much depth means that we take a very long time to cover relatively simple material, the reasons for some examples or points aren't clearly delineated from the examples (admittedly, this could be partly due to my language level, but I don't think it is completely), and the concepts we are going over are mainly common sense and many of which we actually talked about in middle school or in high school history side-notes - which is highly uncool in my view. The teacher is friendly, and often pretty funny, and it's nice to have one class in which I can understand most things and just enjoy learning new words and noticing cultural differences. Maybe the increased ease for me when I eventually can find the textbook and have to study for the exam, which would therefore facilitate studying for the other 4 exams, would be worth not getting as much out of this one class? What do you guys think? I had been looking forward to getting to do a geography class this fall, but this is the only one in the Faculta' di Lettere (where we are encouraged to take our classes), and so it's not like I even have another choice of a geography class. It's sometimes interesting, but conceptually so easy it feels bizarre, actually... Any opinions?

Also, there might be a 28 year old doctor coming to live in the room connected to mine, a fact about which I am not so happy. He hasn't confirmed yet, and so I'm hoping he will decide it's too expensive to come here 3 days a week while having another apartment in Bologna. It's the whole man-potentially-having-access-to-my-room and sharing my spaces thing that makes me uncomfortable - and there are some uneasy things one has to get over when in another country, like certain customs or food or whatever, but this is something that I think falls into the make-Emmons-uncomfortable category for common sense and intuition reasons that would apply in any country. Yes, I should be able to lock the door between our rooms, and yes, he's a doctor, so he probably won't be here much. But. But.

When Gardenia asked me yesterday morning if it was ok to show him the other room, I had unfortunately just gotten back from 3 hours of traveling from the early morning (I had stayed with Gina in Sacile for the night, since after dinner in Venice it was too late to come back to Ferrara), and hadn't had much sleep the night before - and was not very good at thinking about what she was saying or responding. So I didn't decide to talk to her until late last night, at which point I was also not very good at expressing myself. However, I wouldn't know how to explain quite why this makes me uncomfortable in English, in a polite way to someone who is my landlady first and my host second.

I guess, in some ways I have some common sense reasons for it (or at least I think I do). If someone I trusted completely could emotionally hurt me and betray my trust more deeply than I imagined possible (at least from that person), as happened this summer, why should I trust a strange man to not be a creep? Also, one of the things Gardenia said, amid assurances that he seems trustworthy and nice and that she wouldn't put me in harm's way, was that he is from a respectable family, is well-educated, knows her son, has a girlfriend in Bologna, and would have his reputation as a doctor (in the hospital across the street) at stake if he did anything inappropriate.

La Signora Gardenia has obviously never seen Law and Order.

I, on the other hand, have seen waaay too many, in addition to hearing real life stories, to believe that those qualities would ensure him being actually respectable. She didn't want me to be uncomfortable, but thought she couldn't just be rude and call him up and say "sorry, I told you that the signorina was ok with this, but she isn't actually, so you can't have the room," but said that if there was anything wrong, that I should come to talk to her immediately. I understand this, and I was hesitant to talk to her in the first place about it, because they're an old couple living on a fixed income in this worsening economy, and it would be some extra money for them. But I don't have a good feeling about this, and am glad that I at least said something. Maybe I'm just over paranoid and have become more distrusting recently. But I'm still really hoping that he will decide to not live here.

So... as it is very late, I have an early class tomorrow morning and this is already another long post, I will be ending here for the evening. I need to get around to posting about my various daytrips, as well as responding to my backlog of emails, sometime soon. And doing that little thing called laundry. And writing an essay for the Scrittura/Ferrarese Literature class. Sooooo... lots to do in the near future, but that's ok. It's not like I have been able to even find my assigned textbooks to be able to start reading them, but for one. But it'll all get done somehow or other, preferabily sometime soon.

Well, I guess I'd say that in general I'm doing well, but of course unforeseen problems come up all the time, and the only one of those that is currently bothering me is this mystery man. Oh, and just so people know where I'm going, I'm going to be in Florence tomorrow afternoon through Saturday night, with the relatives again on the last leg of their trip in Italy, will have my Italian cell phone with me, and will be staying here:

Hostel: Plus Florence Address: Via S Caterina D'Alessandria15 ,Florence 50129, Italy Telephone: +390554628934 Email: reservations@plusflorence.com Website: http://www.hostelbookers.com/hostels/italy/florence/30145/

Ok, to bed with me. Be well, all. I know some of you are finishing up midterms before heading back home for fall break, or have already done so: thus, friends, good night and good luck. And have safe travels and enjoyable days.

Rain! Temperatures below 85! Less humidity! Rejoicing!

Today was pretty mellow. It rained for much of it, including some torrents for a while, which were fun to wake up to. Not being able to fall asleep until around 4 and sleeping till noon was not so cool, though. My sleep cycle is still way out of wack, which is not helped at all by the noisy cars and scooters and ambulances going by here at night. I'm used to relatively sound-proof - or at least just plain quiet - sleeping environs, and my body is somewhat shocked by the change in audio-scenery, along with many other things. I can sleep through loud noise, as long as it's relatively consistent. Which this road at night is not. Even exhausting myself out hasn't really helped much, it just makes me sleep for a bloody long time once I finally make it. Grrr. Hopefully the start of classes will force my body to get back into a better pattern.

Beyond waking up super late, I spent the afternoon reading various things - an interesting book on the history of the Egyptian city of Alexandria my mom lent me, a guidebook on Ferrarese history (in Italian, of course), and some review of Arabic and Japanese. I need to find some way to be living in Italian without losing my Arabic and Japanese, and preferably gaining enough to pass out of the fall term in one or the other of the two, which is a rather daunting task.

This afternoon, I did try to go out to go food shopping, but found that almost everything was closed several hours earlier than normal, and ending up walking all the way to the castle before finding a restaurant that was actually open for dinner and didn't serve just pastries or icecream. None of the bars (which serve real food here), cafes or food stores near me were available, which was very odd. Maybe due to a Catholic Saturday evening service? At least I got good food out of it, by going to the same restaurant Leah and I went to last night, for the same price as much lower quality food (although still decent) from the nearest bar. Giant tortellini filled with mashed pumpkin with a thin meat sauce. Subtle flavors, and quite delicious. (Cappellacci con zucca al ragu' I think it was called). Leah told me it's a speciality of the area, apparently, too. Oh well - I will attempt to go food shopping tomorrow or Monday. Oo, and Orientation starts on Monday! I'm glad to have had this time to just settle in and become a bit aware of the area before anything regulated, but am also looking forward to learning what life in an Italian univeristy is like (since I am trained down to the core to be a student, after all), as well as having expectations and a routine again. Or at least as much as I can have a routine for anything in Italy.

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.