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

the art of doing nothing

after an insane week at both our jobs, adam and i decided the weekend would best be spent practicing the art of doing nothing. however, we didn't want to just spend the day on the couch watching the idiot box, as my grandmother used to call it, so we piled into the truck and drove 20 minutes through kent to a little village called chipstead.

chipstead was like walking into a holiday brochure for something very quaint and very english. little semi-detached houses lined the streets, with sweet front gardens packed with flowers, and ceramic tiles to mark the house number/name. nestled in the middle of this adorable village was a neighborhood pub called the bricklayer's arms.



the pub was small but offered two leather sofas for us to lounge on (i know, we traded sitting on adam's sofa to go sit on this one) and even better was the fact that bricklayer's is a harvey's pub. i have never had any harvey's beers so i was eager to try something new. everything on draft appeared to be bitter, which i'm not a fan of, but i found a nice light-tasting-but-dark-coloured armada ale. adam ordered a shandy since he was driving and we both settled onto one of the comfy little couches, where we curled up with the saturday telegraph.

yes friends. i actually left the ipad at home and spent the afternoon reading...a printed newspaper. what a delightful experience this is. the smell of the paper, the impossibility of folding any of the pages up the right way again, never finding the section you were originally looking for but discovering something new instead, black fingers. reading the paper is something i rarely have time for, unless i manage to snag a copy of the financial times on a BA flight (BA gives you a nice selection of free newspapers). perhaps this an indulgence i should consider more frequently given that it is such a cheap thrill...

anything is art

last month when i was home in the states, i went to pittsburgh to visit with my grandparents. i've been taking trips to pittsburgh since i was born, but with the exception of a few drunken outings on carson street, had never actually spent much time getting to know the city.

since i had adam with me on this trip, i tried to find fun and interesting things for him to do besides sit around with more of my relatives (he met about 60 of them). one thing i had always wanted to do was go to the warhol museum, and my mom was kind enough to shuttle us downtown since i don't drive anymore (no insurance = no go).

wow. what an amazing place. i kind of knew this but warhol did WAY more than the pop art that he seems to be most famous for. we spent seven floors wandering, gawking, and being inspired by the idea that anything can be art. i loved every minute but one of my favourites was the silver cloud room, which featured big, silver, cloud-shaped balloons that floated continuously thanks to a carefully crafted flow of air. i felt like a big kid playing in there. i also liked how he filmed EVERYTHING. people sleeping, people getting haircuts, people putting on makeup. more interesting than you would think and a good reminder of how human we all are.

adam and i vowed to start doing more creative things when we got home, which of course has fallen by the wayside because this thing called life keeps getting in the way of our fun, but i thought about it again tonight when i was running along the thames. two things i'm aspiring to do right now:

1) start a blog of "shit that happens at my apartment building". like the potato that has rotted and solidified to the garbage shoot. or the three mattresses that found themselves piled up in front of our outside bin room. maybe even the notice from southwark council announcing that said bin rooms are a massive hazard because people like to set fire to them. if this isn't art, i don't know what is.

2) get my scavenging license (or whatever it's called) so that i can go pick through the stuff that floats up from the thames. yes, you do have to have a license to do this, but there are some wicked treasures along the banks of this mighty river. old tiles, parts of ships, and loads of things from years gone by. good things for me to make a collage out of!

in the meantime, i'll be here, thinking of more ways to try and find thrills in things that "would ordinarily bore you"...(and hoping my bins don't get set on fire)

skyline time

i returned tonight from a very long, basically 24-hour trip to switzerland, and was too tired to remember what day it was. i found myself in a very barren kitchen (with a broken dishwasher to boot) and was losing the will to live, when suddenly i remembered i have a can of skyline squirreled away somewhere for such emergencies. a bit of digging, ah, yes! there it is under the five cans of tinned tomatoes. have i got any spaghetti? hmm, a handful, enough for a 3-way, so i just need...cheese! drat, only have english cheddar (real cheese). this will have to do!

8 minutes on the stove and i had myself a 3-way. two hours later and i have...indigestion. never mind. the blissful time spent eating was like a hug for my insides. i shall try to remember this special time as i hunt for the tums.



(er, no, i am NOT wearing a bathrobe in this picture. why on earth do you ask?)