02005-10-18 | Uncategorized
Tuesday: A little bit of Nutella on a slice of Banana is damn delicious. Today: Siena by way of Montevarchi (Prada Outlet store).
Found another nice restaurant in Viareggio yesterday and had a nice lunch at Amaro.
Afterwards to Pisa, straight for the leaning tower. The tethers have been removed, the tower is stabilized and the public is allowed to climb it once again.
Last night I realized that the search for purity is related to the desire to find a soul – something, anything that is independent in this complex matrix of dependancy. Both searches are entirely hopeless, of course. Innocence and purity are neither desirable nor real. Ghosts of our ego trying to prove itself.
02005-10-15 | Uncategorized
Saturday: drove to Florence in the morning and had coffee at Moyo, which has free Wi-Fi. Uploaded a bunch of photos to Flickr – I have taken almost 500 at this point – before we went in search of lunch. Drove three times around Florence looking for the railway station. Afterwards to Forte dei Marmi for a walk and a drink.
02005-10-14 | Uncategorized
Friday Morning: Fall has arrived in this part of Tuscany, but the whole week has been pleasantly warm (65-72 degrees F). Yesterday we drove a friend to the Pisa airport and ended up walking through the downtown area for a couple of hours because we were too early. Drank a Becks beer for the first time in a decade.
Sadly Italians dress like Americans now, which means that most of them dress as badly as I do. I saw lots of boots or sneakers, jeans or sweatpants, T-shirts with Nike or Adidas logos or slogans like Just Kill Me or Will work for Beer. Of course tourists now blend in perfectly except Germans, who with their bright and square glasses are easily distinguishable. A friend asked me whether ALL Germans wear bright glasses. I told her that a law in Germany states that everyone has to wear them and that they were all Government-issued… (not true of course)
More change has happened in Italy during the last couple of years than I saw in the seven or eight years before that. Italians are eating processed food – Risotto in a jar, pasta in a can, even Kraft’s Philadelphia Cream Cheese – and are becoming larger.
Will really good pizza become a rarity, only to be found in little towns in the south? Already many bars offer food that they simply re-heat like TV-dinners. Processed foods, MTV-style, a large influx of immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe – I believe we will see a lot of change in Italy over the next decade.
02005-10-13 | Uncategorized
Thursday: yesterday we drove to the Trattoria Da Busse in a little town called Pontremoli. A couple of sisters in their sixties or seventies and their cousin operate this lovely restaurant. None of their children have an interest in continuing the business and so the restaurant will close in a few years. If you have a chance to visit this place, you should jump at it. The local speciality is a flat buckwheat pasta that looks like a thin crepe-pancake and, I believe, is made in a wood burning oven.
It is served cut up into sections with pesto. Amazing. For the second course we asked for a little bit of everything which our waitress/proprietress found very exciting. After serving the second course, she told us that we would get fined for any piece of food left over. We had a couple of pieces of food left over and decided to pile the plates on top of each other and to hide the remnants in between. She busted us immediately, laughing.
02005-10-12 | Uncategorized
I am posting this from a little internet point in a very small town. Internet access is like Gold in these parts – and even though half an hour costs 5 Euro, the connection is very slow… anyway, took over 300 photos since arriving, but will have to wait to post them until later. Saw a cafe in Florence with Wi-Fi and might go there on Saturday. After four days of near constant rain we are enjoying sunshine all of this week. Ah, I checked our ListeningLounge and amazon.com and Winter Rose is available. Got to go now – ciao!
PS: I decided to back-date my entries and to post them as I wrote them. So, do check all of October for posts.
