Life here is pretty laid-back. John is leaping out of planes and I am keeping myself entertained. The Flikr account has a couple new pictures of food--John's birthday cake and some meringue animals--but I think that is the extent of our Important New News. We have a long weekend coming up, though, so who knows what adventures lie in store? We could go to Padua or Venice or even Ikea!

Upon request, here are photos from me just riding around Vicenza. If you've ever wanted to ride a bike from the Vicenza postal warehouse to our apartment, then today is your lucky day! You can live the magic as if you were REALLY THERE! Look at the set in order if you want to understand the high-quality photo commentary.

Photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/66518447@N05/sets/72157627515936170/

New pictures!

I am too tired right now to give Spicy and Exciting Prose to accompany any of them, and I give no guarantee that they won't be recycled (with more explanation) in later posts, but my pictures now live at http://www.flickr.com/photos/66518447@N05/sets/ . I think. You may need to create a Flikr account in order to see them, I'm not sure, but it is free! And easy!

In other news, I have full-time Internets now, so I may try video calling all y'all.

But first, sleeping forever.

"Verona: Yes, We Have Stairs with That!"

Last weekend, we decided to embark on a bold adventure to Fair Verona, Land of a Thousand Stairs. I am not being metaphorical; according to the educational pamphlets pressed into our hands three at a time by every tourist attraction we visited, I'm pretty sure that one thousand is a low-end estimate, stair-wise.

We started out on a logistical high note by successfully taking the right bus. Here is John looking disgruntled about having his photo taken at the bus stop:

We eventually made it onto the right train, too, after a trek from the wrong bus stop, and decided to take a break 90% of the way to Verona by getting off a tiny middle-of-nowhere station by accident and getting stranded for an hour. But when we finally made it all the way to Verona, we got to see one of Europe's greatest cultural icons, the Lost Bicycle Graveyard of Verona:

In all seriousness, though, Verona was absolutely gorgeous, and well worth the trip. We got to see the Colosseum, some beautiful old churches, and a traditional open-air market whose historical beauty was marred only somewhat by the fact that all of the vendors were Chinese immigrants selling Chinese-made Romeo and Juliet tourist merchandise.

We climbed to the top of the Torre di Lamberti, which is a great place to get a view of the entire city while your legs fall off your body from exhaustion:

And we visited the Giardino Giusti, which is full of beautiful gardens and another interminable climb up to the (admittedly gorgeous) viewing gazebo:

In addition to these valuable cultural experiences, we got to see some of the weirdest street performers in the history of Earth: Romans and an apparent Xena at the Colosseum, a grown man pretending to be a baby in some sort of carriage setup, a silver-painted Charlie Chaplin impersonator. My favorite, though, were the sarcophagi: men with sarcophagus masks, covered head to toe in gold spandex presumably intended to look like a sarcophagus. In reality, since these guys were not particularly svelte Pharoahs, they looked like really sweaty, oddly bulging gold sausages. Italy: full of Culture and History!

Restaurant Part II: Attack of the Shrimps

We returned to the adorable hole-in-the wall restaurant tonight. I ordered a very disappointing gorgonzola gnocchi dish, and John ordered the random fried seafoods.

Seafood in Italy is always an adventure. The shrimps are the most exciting--and they are always "shrimps", because the same slightly confused translator (probably Google) seems to have gone through all the menus in town. (John likes to read out the menu entries in a Southern drawl.) Italian shrimps are not the pale, emasculated shrimps of the United States. They are served in full spike-covered armor, head still attached, black eyes staring at you accusatorily as you try to eat them. "Why you eat me? WHY?" The shellfish, while less guilt-inducing, have similarly robust personalities--ordering the mussels and scallops is not just a dinner choice, but a flavor commitment for the rest of the evening (and possibly the rest of the week).

But the fried seafoods tonight were delicious, if very Italian. We played Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes with the calamari, all of whose writhing body parts were clearly identifiable under a golden coat of breading. The shrimps were resplendent in their righteous indignation as always. And, despite initial confusion, we're pretty sure we figured out the right way to eat the whole fried anchovies (pop 'em in your mouth, chew, and try not to think too hard!) Although, if I was wrong about that, John says it's my fault if we both die of Mad Anchovy Disease.

We've become restaurant buddies with a guy that John has known since basic training and his wife, who happened to be sent to Italy at the same time we were. Tonight we found a new Italian restaurant--a tiny, hole-in-the-wall place where the entire seating area is in a tent outside the storefront. It was the first time we'd ventured beyond our tiny block-wide foraging radius near the base. Almost all of the hotel staff and most of the nearby restaurants reply in embarrassingly good English whenever I try to use my three words of Italian, so we hadn't needed to resort to elaborate mime techniques often.

It turns out that the distribution curve of "number of English words known by the average restaurant worker" drops off very steeply! The waitress at this place helpfully dug out two "inglese" menus for us, but that apparently exhausted their supply, so we also got two in Italian. Looking through, the menus were completely different. Not just the menu offerings, although the Italian menu did have more potentially American-unfriendly choices (think "spaghetti alla puttanesca" versus "spaghetti with ragu or tomato sauce"). The prices on a few of the identically-titled dishes were off by a few euros, for no apparent reason--not consistently higher prices for foolish Americans, but just random microvarations. (If I could get a job in Italy, I would make fat stacks of cash editing poorly-translated restaurant menus...)

After unsuccessfully trying to help our dinner companion convey her desire for plain pasta with olive oil and garlic (the waitress eventually gave up on our limited language skills and indicated that she should order off the freaking menu already), we all managed to order food. When a different waiter came back halfway through the meal, I explained that we wanted more water by flailing around saying "errrr, aqua?" and making the international gesture for "one about this big, please". He very politely said "Half a liter of water? Ok," while carefully not looking like he thought I was a total idiot. New goal: learn enough Italian to order food in complete sentences!

Dinner was great, though. And dessert was a tasty drink I'd never seen before, apparently a house specialty: a ball of lemon sorbet, drizzled with a melon-flavored creamy liqueur and served in a shotglass. We will be returning.

Also, next to a couple vending machines full of toys, there was an inexplicable underwear vending machine, lovingly installed at just the right height for any toddler who wanted to buy a sparkly rainbow thong after dinner. Italy: apparently it is secretly Japan Lite.

Edit: John just found out about this blog and is whining about the fact that I promised to describe him in a post more than a year ago and actually never got around to it. Now he is whining because I have threatened to describe him on the Internet. I CANNOT WIN.

Maybe next year?

A new semester, a new chance to fully intend to blog more! As a start, let's list my classes.

7.23 Immunology
11.003 Methods of Policy Analysis
17.01 Justice
17.021 Philosophy of Law

I'm generally enjoying my classes--a lot more reading and a lot fewer problem sets than most terms! I am, however, having to put up with my classmates who strongly wish to share their Strong Opinions on a Variety of Important Issues. Some of them actually have useful things to say, of course, but there are two main breeds of conversationalist who are driving me up the wall. They are:
- The Stream-of-Consciousness Free Associator. This student knows that she is very intelligent, and therefore believes that thinking out loud is interesting to the rest of the class. Her comments go along the lines of "Well, the word justice reminds me of this one time I saw a newspaper article on a thing that didn't seem fair to me, and that was really unjust, so I think that justice is very important and we should care about it deeply..." She glanced over the words in the reading, but got too distracted by her thoughts on those words to bother figuring out what the author was trying to say.
- The Alternate Professor. This guy has been thinking extremely hard about these issues for years and years and years and has a comprehensive theory of things that he plans on sharing with the class in the 10-minute lecture he has prepared for his portion of the discussion. He will expound at great length on his theories of political philosophy. They will have very little to do with the discussion at hand, but it is clear that he cares deeply and will become extremely upset if interrupted for any reason.

Those of you who have ever met me may at this point be thinking that I have no grounds to criticize those who have Strong Opinions about a Variety of Important Issues. To this, I can only assert that I have in fact learned how to play well with others in conversation...

In other news, I have a man. He is delightful. He will be described more thoroughly in a future post.