Rattle Those Pots

December 9, 2004

Ciao, tutti!

Yes, I’ve gone missing, but we’ve been swamped, promise. By now everybody (hopefully) has word that we’re changing to Cordon Bleu in Canada this coming March. In a nutshell: we’ll still have a culinary arts certificate from this current program in Florence, but we’ll be adding to it at CB with a cuisine diploma (made up of 3 individual certificates). We’re really excited about the school part of the move, but are of course blue about leaving Italy. Even though the folks at school were incredibly nice, class sizes were way too big and there’s just not enough focus on the kitchen fundamentals that we’re going to need to be able to work in a professional kitchen. (The school being consistently short on cooking supplies—including, most recently, to our chagrin, hot water—didn’t help.) Several other folks are having to leave early for the same reasons, so there’s at least a strange comfort in numbers, I guess.

We did score some great recipes and a lot more info about Italian wines, though, so that should come in handy at some point. And we’ve met so many great people and at least somewhat improved our language, so we do plan to return at some point. If anybody’s interested in checking out the CB site, just go to www.cordonbleu.edu, and click on the Ottawa tab up top.

We’ve been keeping pretty busy, not only with finals and class excursions, but trips on our own. Here are a few highlights from some of the trips; hope you enjoy!

Biciclette a Lucca (Bicycles in Lucca)
Last month we made a pretty memorable trip to Lucca, a small town about an hour’s train ride from Florence. Puccini (Madame Butterfly, La Bohème), we learned, is a native of Lucca, and the city had a “singing school” way back in A.D. 787! It’s so interesting, trying to picture how things were then, and then realizing that parts of the city haven’t changed much at all when you see some of the dates on buildings and carvings, etc.

Before we made the trip, we had read that in Lucca, “cars truly are few and far between. Everyone from rebellious teens to fruit-shopping grandmothers tools around this town atop bicycles,” and we were so pleased to find that really was the case. The town (like many in Italy) is surrounded by a tall stone wall. After learning that we could ride on top of the wall on a bike path all around the city, we rented two bikes, and had an absolutely wonderful time exploring.

We didn’t plan it this way, but the sun was setting when we were up riding on the wall, so we could look down on our left to see the city streets and rooftops, and up on our right to see gorgeous, violet-colored, snow-capped mountains. It was really just amazing—very nice memory. Part of the fun was seeing people linked arm in arm for their evening stroll in different piazze, and passing tables full of elderly gentlemen playing complicated-looking card games, occasionally hollering “Va bene!” and “Dio mio!” And, of course, it didn’t hurt that when we wanted to stop at an enoteca every now and then for vino, we could just hop on and off our bikes, and chat with locals who were incredibly patient with our hesitant Italian.

At lunchtime, we wound up chatting for a couple of hours with an older fellow from the area. We’re discovering that once we get into longer conversations and are less nervous about making mistakes, we remember vocab and conjugations that we didn’t really realize we knew. It’s sort of odd how that works. And even when we make mistakes, when people correct and explain why, those are the times that what you learn really seems to stick (meaning, much more firmly than just memorizing lists in grammar books). Plus, this way we learn fun slang and pretty entertaining cuss phrases (”porca miseria!” - “pig misery!” being one of them). Older people in the smaller towns, in particular, seem keen to chat with the yanks, maybe just because we’re something of an oddity.

Abbiamo mangiato troppo cioccolato a Perugia!
(We ate too much chocolate in Perugia)
We also took the train down to Perugia a few weeks ago for the city’s annual Cioccolato Festa (Chocolate Festival). Mamma mia! Waaaay too much chocolate consumed. At one point, Thom was eating (get this) cotton candy that had been brushed with dark chocolate, and an Italian gent who was strolling by and had caught sight of the confection proceeded to reach out and pat Thom’s belly, with a hearty “Ah, la pancia!!” Thom didn’t quite seem to know what to make of that, but we still laugh about it and say “La pancia!” whenever we have too much at dinner.

The festival included a chocolate-carving contest, hundreds of booths of chocolates from all over the world, demonstrations by chocolate chefs, many, many samples, and all sorts of street performers. We did get more than one confused glance from locals when we climbed on the merry-go-round with their kiddies, but va tutto bene. They just seemed to dismiss us as quelli stranieri matti (those crazy foreigners). Yes, we are forever making spectacles of ourselves…

Venezia, finalmente! (Venice, finally)
This past weekend, we took the train up to Venice for a few days (about a three-hour train ride on EuroStar). We had been forewarned by so many people that the city is pretty much overrun with tourists year-round now, but it was actually pretty comfortable. I’m sure it’s a madhouse during peak travel months, but travel late in the year definitely has its advantages. The longest we had to wait for a table anywhere was 20 minutes, but since we were trying new wines and gabbing with locals, we didn’t notice.

I think we amuse people when they realize we can speak just a bit, and it seems to be free entertainment for the folks chatting by the bar and on the sidewalks. Can’t tell if this is good or bad, though! We have busted a few people we’ve caught talking about us in Italian by waving a finger and giving them a friendly “Ti capisco!” (”I understand you.”) The surprised looks we earn when this happens make us chuckle.

A lot of the peeps reading this have probably already gone to Venice, but this was prima volta per me (first time for me). Absolutely loved it. We did a little “research” before we left to find out where Venetians eat and gather, and were so pleased with each place we tried. We were told repeatedly that it would be unavoidable to get lost, but people who say it’s a fun city to get lost in are right on the money, I’d say. We managed to keep from getting anxious each time it happened by realizing, “Duh, we’re on an island. How far from home base can we get?”

On Friday and Saturday nights, we did a fun enoteca crawl, and tried several new wines we’d read about but hadn’t had yet. A jazz band was playing American jazz standards at a café covered in glittering Christmas lights by the water, so we even danced in St. Mark’s Square when they played “As Time Goes By.” Troppo romantico.

We did do a few touristy things, and of course visited St. Mark’s Cathedral and the Peggy Guggenheim museum (Peggy was quite the nymph, apparently, by the way), but other than that, tried to stay off the beaten path.

St. Mark’s, so far anyway, is the most beautiful church I’ve ever visited. The original church burned down in 976, and the church standing today was begun in 1063. Here’s some info about Mark from one of our tour books that I thought was pretty interesting: “Seven centuries after his death, Mark’s holy body was in Muslim-occupied Alexandria, Egypt. In 828, two visiting merchants of Venice ‘rescued’ the body from the ‘infidels,’ hid it in a pork barrel (which was unclean to Muslims), and spirited it away to Venice.”

And this St. Mark’s tidbit made me laugh out loud; I couldn’t help it!: “It’s 1094, the church is nearly complete, and they’re all set to re-inter Mark’s bones under the new altar. There’s just one problem: During the decades of construction, they forgot where they’d stored the body.” The absent bones were found before long, however, inside a hollow column in the church. I can just see people: “Of course, the hollow column! Now why didn’t I think of that?” What made me laugh so hard was picturing the poor fellow who couldn’t for the life of him remember where he’d stuck those darn bones to keep them safe, but didn’t want to admit to anybody that he’d been the one to “misplace” them. Dio mio.

It was a little eerie, I thought, to be standing three feet away from the remains of a Gospel writer (his remains are above ground). I felt like he’d be able to tell anything I’d done wrong that week, and would pop on out to tell me so. Yikes. Since Italians, we’ve learned, are so big on saving (and displaying) various body parts of deceased saints, we also saw a fair share of arms and fingers in the museum parts of the church. (Sidenote: Did I ever write about coming face-to-face, so to speak, with the face of St. Catherine in the Siena cathedral? It just about scared me to death. I wasn’t expecting it to look basically like a larger-than-average sugar cookie, so I genuinely wasn’t aware, at first, that that’s what I was looking at. Ragazza stupida. Gave me quite a turn.)

Anyway, during the Venice visit, we stayed in a three-room B&B on the third floor of a 15th-century palace whose owner, Riccardo, seemed to become our guardian. He kept hooking us up with his buddies in local trattorie and businesses, and one afternoon, with great ceremony, introduced his girlfriend, Stefania, to us. (He was meeting “the parents of the girlfriend” for the first time while we were there, and he seemed very nervous about it. It was great.) He wants us to come back before we leave for Canada so that we can go out with him and Stefania since, we’re informed, by then, “the parents will have accepted me. They must accept me, for I am a happy person.” Ci piace Riccardo; he was a trip.

Cinque Terre, Mia Gita Favorita (Cinque Terre, My Favorite Trip)
Yesterday (Wednesday), we took the 6:00 am train up to Cinque Terre (Five Lands). If you don’t already know this, Cinque Terre is a group of villages on the Northwest coast of Italy in the region of Liguria. And by coast, I mean the village houses and buildings all look like they’re literally clinging to the rocks and cliffs above the sea. When you couple that with the beautiful color used on the houses and the deep blue-green color of the Mediterranean by the shore, it was just breathtaking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so perfectly situated.

Visitors can take the train to each village, or hike on a gorgeous trail from town to town. We hiked and got some great pictures, but only had time to visit three of the five villages (Vernazza, Corniglia and Manarola). We want to go back before we leave, at least once. The villages use each scrap of land on the steep, steep hills, so olive tree groves were planted in large blocks, and the nets were down to catch the olives as they fell. Since the nets were colored and the trees are a silver-green color—and all of this is situated on lush greenery and clover—it really was lovely. We felt like we were standing in a beautiful painting.

I did finally succeed in lobbying efforts for a January trip to Ireland, so that one should be fun, too. (We were originally supposed to honeymoon in Ireland, but the “bonehead travel agent,” as Thom calls him, booked everything during a black-out period.) Can you tell we’re trying to get in as many trips as possible before we leave? We both love it, and wish we’d traveled more years ago.

Feria Buona (Good Holiday)
Italians don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, obviously, but we invited a few of the “Older People” from school over for dinner. Thought you’d get a kick out of our Thanksgiving menu this year: onion soup, porcini risotto with caramelized garlic, and veal saltimbocca with a side of orange broccoli (did you know that “saltimbocca” translates as “hop in your mouth”? I’m still not clear how, but it does, apparently. Go figure). For dessert (Mom, you Multiple Pie Goddess, get ready to hold your head), we just had pastry and biscotti with vin santo. Final guest left at 6 am (??), so looks like the strange Turkey Day menu didn’t make folks flee, at least.

That’s about it for now. Hope everybody’s peachy.

Ciao, amici!

Jen