When Nina and I travel together, I walk around a lot by myself. Today I decided to get out to la campagna. This is no easy matter when you start in the heart of Arezzo. Like many old European cities, Arezzo has expanded well beyond its walls and is surrounded on most sides by apartment blocks.

When Nina and I were up on the walls of the old fortress at the “top” of town (not far from the cathedral) yesterday or the day before, I could see that on that side of the city, the fields didn’t seem so far away, just beyond the large cemetery on a hill below the walls, so I decided to head out in that direction today. Today was a good day to tackle it because it was relatively cool.

I went out through the gate below the cathedral and immediately made two or three wrong choices, following roads that dead-ended or ended with private roads. I had to double back and stick to an unpleasant and busy road longer than I wanted to. Eventually I discovered a beautiful country road that followed a valley among hills covered in olive trees and grape vines. I didn’t manage the trifecta: I didn’t see any sunflower fields, although I saw lots of wildflowers growing around the olive trees. As I looked back I could see the walls of the fortress and the cathedral and nothing else of Arezzo. The rest of the city slopes down the other side. I walked out some distance and thought I should stop, rest, and get ready to head back. I read my book, The Dark Heart of Italy (which I’ll talk about another time), for a while at the base of a little Madonna shrine at the junction of two narrow roads on the top of a hill. At one point I saw a truck go by me and disappear down the hill only to reappear a little while later traveling in reverse. The driver had encountered a truck traveling in the other direction and the two trucks could not maneuver by each other except in this little intersection.

When I turned back, I found a way to avoid the unpleasant road I had taken by walking to the back of a large public park onto a road that led me to the back end of the cemetery I had noticed from the fortress walls. That road “ended” in a roadblock, but I found a footpath around the roadblock. (I have this in common with many Italians: I’m reluctant to let a sign or a rule stand in my way.) I managed to get all the way to the base of the fortress walls only to discover that there was no way up from there, so had to walk a long way around.

Another way I manage is to have Nina tell me what to say.  Kind of works for both of us.  She won’t speak Italian unless she can do so correctly.  She has to be able to use the verb in the correct tense, use the right preposition, have her adjectives and nouns agree in count and in gender — all that crap — before she’ll utter a word.  Even when she has it all lined up in her head, she’d rather not say anything to any actual Italian person.  

It is my belief that talking to Italians is a good idea for two reasons.  1)  It helps you get better at Italian 2) Italians actually can actually tell you useful things such as whether a particular loaf of bread you might want to buy has salt in it (it almost never does).  I want to talk to Italians, but as I said my Italian is bad, while Nina’s is good despite the fact that she doesn’t practice by speaking with Italians.  Earlier in her life she learned to speak excellent French without talking to the people she met in France and excellent Russian without talking to the people she met in the Soviet Union.   So when we’re out together I just ask her to tell me how to say it in Italian.   She works it out, then relays it to me.  I then repeat it to the actual Italian person, perhaps dropping a few sounds and changing a few others, but I get the point across.  Unfortunately, I rarely understand the response.  Often I think I understand, only to find out I completely misunderstood it.  This poses no problem because Nina understands everything the person says.  

I’m not sure why Arezzo isn’t more of a tourist destination, but I’m not complaining. It’s a very nice city. Although its population is about 90,000, the old city is compact and walkable, if you don’t mind some steep climbs.

If you enter on the side of town where the rail station is, then you walk mostly uphill, first gradually then not so gradually, probably via Corso Italia until you reach the cathedral on the upper end of town. In the neighborhood of the cathedral, there is a beautiful park that looks over the “back” walls, a fortress (we haven’t visited yet), ancient churches, Petrarch’s house, some old municipal buildings, and, of course, your palazzi e piazze.

Our apartment, on piazza San Gemignano, is spacious and overlooks the mountains in the distance. It’s up a couple flights of steep stairs and is 4 rooms plus the bath. The bigger bedroom is inside a old tower. The kitchen isn’t as well stocked as some because, we speculate, the apartment has only recently been made available for weekly rentals. What often happens at these rental apartments is that the kitchen benefits from the parade of renters, each leaving behind some of what they purchased for la cucina e la tavola. At any rate, after two days of making frustratingly small amounts of bad coffee in a tiny, leaky stove-top espresso maker with a dried out gasket and a half melted-off handle, we bought a bigger espresso maker from a sweet old couple who have a stall in an open-air market that operates in a nearby piazza. It was a real bargain at sei euro and the man threw in 4 extra gaskets.

We were going to visit Cortona by rail and bus today, but didn’t muster up the energy so we’ll do so tomorrow.

While there were times, especially when we seemed to be touring the Toronto airport by bus shuttle, that the laptop was a heavy and fragile burden, I’m very happy I took it along.

The logistics were easy. The iBook, along with many other laptops, easily deals with the voltage difference (electricity runs hotter in Europe). It’s just a matter of attaching a plug adaptor to the end of the while power block. In Lucca, I found a wireless hotspot by using the Jiwire hotspot locator, which listed the Bar Astra, about a 7 minute walk from our apartment. The Bar Astra charged 2.5 euros for 2 hours. Later, I found that the school across the street from our apartment had wide-open wireless, so I saved my Euros and my legs by sitting on the front stoop of our apartment. I wouldn’t sit there long: long enough to collect new email, send any email I’d written, post any blog entries I’d prepared, and check in on the White Sox (and the Bulls, who made a slew of trades).

In the apartment, we listened to my iTunes collection, which is basically our music library. I brought by tiny iPod Shuffle along. Those things are recharged by plugging into a USB port and sucking electricity out of a computer, so they need the mother ship. Also, they don’t hold much music (mine, the smallest one, holds about 125 songs), so it’s nice to be able to reshuffle them by reloading them off the laptop.

The iBook also holds our photo library (iPhoto), giving us the opportunity to bore new friends with pictures of our family and other trips to Italy (that happened once). More importantly, I didn’t have to worry about filling up my camera’s digital card. I brought along a tiny card reader that weighs a few ounces. This allowed me to transfer photos almost as soon as I took them.

What about the danger of letting work interfere with your vacation? Could you be too connected? Sure, that’s a danger, but I can’t say it was a problem…. this time.

Technorati tags: LaptopInst,LaptopInst06

Powered by Qumana

My Dutch friend Wim, sitting in our classroom in Lucca.

For good or bad, English is the common language for this motley collection. I guess it is good. I nearly have the hang of, um — how we say in the country where I abide — the language of the people of the island nation of England. At 11 each morning, nearly the whole school, teachers and students, meets during la pausa (break) at the bar near the school for caffe. The conversation is lively. Also, we’ve had some school outings during the afternoons when we’ve had a chance to get to know each other.

Maybe it’s not so surprising that a bunch of people whose idea of a good time is studying a foreign language while on vacation might get along, but, again, I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much fun it has been to hang out with school mates. I’ve got to remember to bring my camera to school tomorrow or Friday (our last day in class!) and take pictures.

Powered by Qumana

Powered by Qumana

Originally uploaded by MrWoodleigh.

We made it all the way around the walls yesterday and snapped this photo of the Gardens of Palazzo Pfanner. Turns out the part of the walls near us is the nicest (shadiest and prettiest).

The water is shallow, maybe a foot deep. The water in the ditch has a current. When you look down in the water the first thing you notice is long strands of seaweed stretched out and waving in the current. After that, depending on where you are looking, you might notice some trash caught in the current or you might notice the fish. There are lots of fish swimming in the shallow water, They all look pretty similar, varying mostly in size. Some look pretty big; I don’t know, as a vegetarian, I don’t often find myself nose to nose with a fish. Here’s the thing is about these fish: they are all swimming upstream and none of them is making any progress. What are they thinking? Also, if I were a bird, I’d be making my living along Via Del Fosso. Even I could catch these fish. Maybe they taste just awful, even to a bird. Italy is a great mystery.

Powered by Qumana