Monday and Tuesday, Florence and Siena

So, I'm back to 55+ hours per week and have no time to post. Coupled with the fact that you are probably not as amused by my vacation photos as I am, I have selected a few from each day of the rest of the trip :)

Church in Florence that I forget the name of. We caught the sun coming up behind it at just the right time!

Our little 'jaunt' on Monday morning turned into a cardio workout. Adam bounded to the top like a puppy while the rest of us huffed and puffed our way up the stairs.

I like Florence better from up here :) (Adam not such a fan of heights...)

It was so peaceful up on the hill above Florence. No tourists, just us and the smell of Cyprus (?) trees.

Ha.

Our next stop on the trip was the walled city of Siena, about an hour's drive from Florence (this is not our car). Siena was clean, less crowded, and in some places looked like it hadn't changed since Medieval times...we had finally wandered into the Old World...

Fantastic! We wanted to buy and cook everything we saw.

Amazing gelato with the fam

Hangin' with dad

We kept seeing these masks everywhere and never figured out why

Every street in Siena had character

Adam and I spent about half an hour just looking out at the hills. I fancy a career as an olive picker. I bet I could wear overalls everyday if I wanted.

This dinner at Osteria di Nonna Gina ties for the best meal I have ever had (other best meal was in Paris at Moissonier or whatever it's called). The menus were all handwritten and all in Italian. We were able to decipher most of it! Pam and I had gnocchi with secret sauce (we think it was a walnut pesto of some sort). I scraped my plate clean.

Sunday in Florence

We woke to a sunny morning in Florence today and were nearly late meeting my parents for breakfast. The 'rents were bleary eyed and sleep deprived while Adam and I felt refreshed and ready to meet the day. There appears to be a difference in noise level based on whether your room is in the front or back of the hotel. Ours is in the back and we slept with a light breeze and the soothing sounds of the iPad Dream machine. Theirs is in the front and they enjoyed late night sounds of not only drunken British stag do's but also of an angry florentine woman who, in attempt to restore peace, threw bottles out her front window at the younguns. Did I mention she did this sans clothing? Our hotel owner attributes this, er, interesting behaviour to the fact that said woman is unmarried. Ha.

Once outside the hotel we explored a small flea Market before heading to a tiny cafe for panini and yogurt. Adam was very hungover and I casually mentioned to my dad that Ads wasn't raised in a family that encouraged alcoholism the way that ours does...he agreed to take it easy on ordering so many litres of wine. We strolled through Florence window shopping and tried to guess the sites. My family was so eager to learn and yet we had no guide or guidebook, so I felt obliged to make things up as we walk. They eventually realised I am full of shit but it didn't stop me pontificating on why I think the church bells all go off at 10:30 am or how we've just stumbled upon Julius caesar's secret meditation bunker.

Could the Scudieri's here be long lost relatives? We have a few cousins with the same name in Cleveland...

Eventually the parents left for a real tour - the academia - and Adam and I were left to fend for ourselves. We were feeling parched in the 90-degree heat so we headed into a local grocery store so that I could do a quick store check and Adam could get some iced tea. It was all just too exhausting, so we headed back to the hotel to nap for an hour before lunch. I felt slightly guilty about this. We are in Florence and we're taking a nap? Shouldn't we be exploring ancient bricks, poking our heads into churches, something? I've been here before but Adam hasn't. He's not much of a tour person and I realise I'm just not interested in standing in large crowds of people, led by some over excited person who's carrying a stick with a ribbon on it, to learn about where DaVinci took a crap. I'm also slightly disturbed to find that Florence is almost as touristy as Barcelona. There are less signs for full English breakfasts here and you can still get a good meal (not the case in Bartha) but I've read that for every florentine in this city, there are fourteen tourists. Fourteen! And that figure is old so I'm sure it's a lot more now. Was it this crazy the first time I was here or was I just a lot more naive?

David's penis was EVERYWHERE. Tourists love David's penis.

Graffiti was also everywhere. Some of it I liked. At any rate, we eventually finished visiting the museum of napping and met Dad and Pam outside the Duomo amidst a crowd of starry eyed, Popsicle toting children and parents. I've noticed that when people eat ice cream, they tend to lose all sense of direction, wandering aimlessly and inadvertently swiping innocent passersby with streaky bits of soft serve. We hightailed it out of there and went back to the grocery store to get fixins for a picnic! We hadn't brought a guidebook with us but our hotel had a list of suggested activities, and Boboli Gardens was one of the places recommended for a visit between 1-4 pm. Perfect for dining al fresco. We loaded up on foccacia, mozzarella, prosciutto, tomatoes, and olive oil and began the twenty minute walk towards the gardens. We stopped to take pictures of the David replica, the Ponte Vecchio bridge (this bridge reminds me more of The Chong in cincinnati than something that should be in a beautiful old city such as Florence), and finally the Palazzo Piti. The map said the gardens should be close by, so we kept walking, and walking, and walking. There was no break in the wall around the gardens, I was getting progressively hungrier, and the prosciutto package was filling up with condensation. Ew. We finally found the entrance to the gardens, which had a huge gate, a bulldog-like security guard, and two sad-faced backpackers walking away from it all. Apparently there is a €9 charge just to enter. Are you kidding? The only green space in this city has an entrance fee?!

Needless to say, we didn't go in, and we ended up having our picnic next to the stone wall by Palazzo Piti. There was a stone ledge for us to use as a 'counter' where we sliced up tomatoes, cheese, and bread for the sandwiches. It seemed a really strange place for a picnic but it was good people watching and we attracted a few other weary walkers to come sit in our shady little patch.

Every good lunch deserves a gelato, so we all grabbed cones before dropping Dad and Pam off at the Uffizi for the next tour. Adam and I made grand plans to drop our backpack off at the room, grab a quick beer, then climb Giotto's Tower. When we got to the room Adam decided to have just a quick sleep before heading back out. This visit to the museum of napping lasted three hours and I finally had to wait the poor guy up to go to dinner! My little Britishman is not used to the heat and/or trips abroad with so many Ives...

We headed back out around 8 to a restaurant right around the corner - Zio Gigi. It was a nice mix of Florentines and tourists, the menu offered choice but still felt decisive (it's never a good sign when the menu is more than 2 pages), and the owner was walking around singing and handing out free shots of something that smelled like uzo. Nice. We had bruschetta and beef carpaccio to start, and plenty of house wine. I decided to break away from the pasta train and ordered entrecôte al gorgonzola for the main, which was a tasty bit of steak topped with a thick piece of gorgonzola cheese and a lovely cream sauce. I was very grateful for the free shot of whatever it was after dinner. It burned but it felt like it was cutting through all the naughty stuff I had just eaten!

 We were too full and too tired for dessert, so we crashed around 10:30. Adam fell asleep straight away so I read a Bill Bryson book that I found in the hallway until the mosquitoes grew too annoying and I turned out the light.

Holiday road, Italy

Our family always jokes about being National Lampoons on vacation and we always have fun, despite our, let's call them adventures.  :)

To recap a few of my favourite 'holiday road' moments over the years:

Camping trip to Myrtle beach, 1995
Five of us (four Ives + one brave guest) piled into our Wally Wagon (giant blue station wagon). Wally towed the camper, had three bicycles on a rack affixed to the rear window, a cooler bungee corded to the back of the camper, and our luggage + four lawn chairs - in garbage bags - strapped to the roof. People were slowing down on the expressway to see who was driving this car, which wasn't mortifying AT ALL to my 16 year old self

Train trip to St. Ives, 2010
Five of us (four Ives + Adam) embarked on a 36-hour excursion to Cornwall. (12 of these hours were spent on the train :). My brother, at aged 29, still tends to get fussy after long periods of travel and began to whine about 3 hours into the journey back to London. Pam tried to appease him with whatever she had in her bag:

Pam: 'Timmy, what do you like to read to read?'
Tim: 'Apart from porn? Nothing.'

It was a loud conversation on a quiet train, and Ed Miliband, the leader of our Labour party was sitting two rows in front of us, so I'm sure he enjoyed every minute of family time with the Ives.

Nevermind. :)

So we knew the big Italy trip that we've been planning for months would be yet another Holiday Road for three Ives + Adam (hard to believe he keeps coming back for more). We all flew to Milan together on a plane packed with very excited Italian teenagers, who applauded when the plane landed. (Adam, who hates flying, asked me 'Do they know something we don't? Did we almost crash?')

Upon landing, our first order of business was to rent a car. Dad finally found the Dollar rental counter after we trawled most of the parking garage looking for it, and they were all out of cars! The helpful gentleman offered my dad a nine-passenger van. Perfect for navigating and parking on the narrow streets of small Italian towns! Augh. Luckily we were able to break the contract and negotiate a deal with Avis, who rented us a respectable little four-door for 300 euro cheaper. :)

Driving in Italy is...interesting. I applaud my dad for even being brave enough to attempt this. We had brought Anita with us (we named our GPS device). Anita was confused at first but then realised she wasn't in West Chester, OH. However, listening to her voice was like hearing a first year Italian student (on the first day of class) pronounce things. She just never got the hang of the accent.

Milan was FLAT and we saw field after field of pear trees. Just before dark, the terrain got hillier and hillier (sort of like West Virginia between Ohio and Pennsylvania) and then we just started going through tunnels. Anita's pink line of where we needed to go next looked spaghetti.

I looked in the backseat and Adam and Pam were hanging on for dear life, occasionally suggesting that we might slow down, to which Dad would reply 'I'm just keeping up with traffic!' And he was! People were whizzing past us! Italians are mad drivers.

We finally made it to Hotel Dali in Florence after about four hours, ditched our bags, and made a beeline for wine.

summer so far

i'm afraid that i've fallen back into not posting very often, which i can only apologise for! i'm working 60 hours per week on average and barely finding time to run/eat/sleep let alone write. but, i have been taking pictures for y'all loyal readers with the hopes that i'll have time to post them someday. :-)

first of all, thank you for your warm wishes in response to my last post. london went through a scary few days but the fact that we are pretty much back to normal shows how resilient and good-hearted most of the people in this city really are. the stories of neighbors coming together to reconstruct (and in some cases, thward off rioters by themselves) are just incredible. hopefully we won't see anymore craziness for a while...and that's all i have to say about that.

in other news, i have found time to do a few things this summer in my odd spare moments:



went and saw 'chinatown' at the somerset house outdoor movie theatre - amazing movie (jack nicholson was so young!) and it was wicked to lay on a picnic blanket under the stars and watch a cool flick on the big screen. as a side note, my friend and i got there so late that they were out of food, so my dinner consisted of: a bottle of merlot, banoffee/toffee-flavoured popcorn (mixed) and a brownie. sugar overload? sure, why not.



been learnin' to play the banjo! i can play an alternating thumb roll in the open G chord, working to try and play any other chords at the moment. it's hard to pick with three fingers and fret with two or three fingers on the other hand at the same time but i really enjoy the challenge (i'm sure my neighbors are enjoying as well)



speaking of my neighbors, here's a new, er, sculptural piece that spent the better part of the week in front of my building. i do enjoy a good bit of modern art!



went for burgers at the king's arms, finally! this is our 'local' and we love the atmosphere in the place - worn sofas, hideous wallpaper, mismatched chairs...and no yucky carpets. we've heard the burgers at king's arms are legendary and i'm pleased to say it's not just a legend. i've had a beef burger and a veggie burger and both were hand-made and awesome!



saw a little bit of home walking to a client meeting on fleet street...



spatchcocked my first chicken! my best friend jenifer is living here for six months and has been inspiring me with stories of her cooking classes. this was way easier than i thought, we'll see how it tastes (in the oven now...)



on the feathered friend note, i had a good laugh at this pub's name (yes, i have the sense of humour of a 12 year old boy)

and that's about it! this week i'm off to france and possibly switzerland for meetings, then my dad and pam arrive friday and we fly to italy on saturday morning for vacation. woo hoo! more pics to come i'm sure. xx

Dear Family and Friends...

...I know you’re all wondering about the riots. They’re all over London but the fires/looting haven’t come close to me. The city just issued a ‘blackwatch’ list of Tube stations for tonight and luckily the nearest ‘black’ station is across the river from me (tower hill).

I live in a council estate, which is the type of housing most of the rioters live in (from what I’ve seen on the news) – hence I’m hoping they won’t decide to sh!t where they eat, so to speak. I’m in a building with secure entry (and I have four locks on my own front door)! If it gets really bad, my office is nearby and has security guards, so I can always come to work if I have to. It will be allright. Pray for London.

Love,
Jen