Category Archives: Living in Turin

Counting my blessings on my birthday

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It was my birthday yesterday and I have become a total sap in my old age (hah!) so here are some things I’m grateful for recently*, in no particular order:

  • I had dinner on Saturday night with friends from church and a small grey cat with long paws and the prettiest face. I mayyyyyy have abandoned talking with fellow humans in order to spend more time with this cat.
    I did eventually manage to move away from the cat and turn to dinner. We had delicious homemade pizza and four different types of dessert, all involving chocolate. (Because I’m sure I’m not the only person who’d read a statement like that and think, yes, but what were those four desserts, you can’t just leave that hanging, they were: profiteroles, a chocolate-walnut slice, pastries, and a nutella pizza.)
    I saw in my birthday somewhere in the outskirts of Torino, a car-ful of us heading home. “Hey, it’s your actual birthday! Now you’re old, Zoe!”
  • We’re still getting lots of sunny days here. I know, I basically talk about the weather every week on this blog, but these sunny days are so helpful in holding off the winter slump that will come once the skies turn dark and grey and I’m trying to not take them for granted. Even if I do whinge a lot about being stuck in an office during most of them.
  • The year since my last birthday has certainly had its moments (and subsequently its weeks of fatigue… ugh) but here I am, in good health, apart from that pesky olfactory nerve! and even that’s getting better. I feel a bit sappy writing a list of things I’m grateful for, and a lot sappy saying, “I’m grateful to make it to another birthday” but it’s actually kinda true.
  • Yes, facebook is terrible and all that, but over the weekend it’s been a great way to hear from friends who are scattered all around the world. My sister told me I need to have my next birthday in Australia, but I think I should go one better and do a world tour and catch up with everyone in person.
  • And my friends who are nearby are also pretty great! I realized the other day that my blog makes me sound like a solitary person, but that’s mostly because I don’t have the writing skills to describe people in a way that gives them personality while allowing them some privacy so I just don’t write about them much. But I am grateful for this badly-written, vague mass of people who are actually very funny and charming and thoughtful and lovely individuals.

* Well, general sappiness, and also I was thinking the other day about the idea that even with things I’ve worked hard for, there’s still so much external good fortune going my way — there’s a line in the Bible that puts it quite well: What do you have that you did not receive?

Cows in central Turin

Notes from my extremely glamorous life: Surprise cows! edition

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Torino remains delightfully odd at times. On Saturday I was walking towards Piazza Castello when I heard a loud clanging at the top of the hill. What on earth…? It was a parade. With cows.

In other news from my extremely glamorous life:

  1. It’s been warm enough recently that gelato still seems like a reasonable idea even without my autumn resolutions. I had some yesterday. I’m pretty sure the serving sizes get bigger as the number of customers drops. At least, I felt like I was eating this cone of gelato for a loooong time (yay!) and was totally sugared-out afterwards (boo!)
  2. A non-grumpy hot beverage review: I can taste lemon & ginger tea!!! Am resisting the urge to stockpile.
  3. Daylight savings ended here yesterday, and I’m trying to make the most of the few days where that means “yay sunshine in the morning again” before the winter darkness sets in properly. Mind you, when I say “make the most of it”, I mean, “lie in bed and think isn’t it nice that it’s light outside, but I still don’t wanna get up.”
  4. On the other hand, the sun setting earlier means I get to watch the sun go down over the Alps every afternoon from my desk. Today my view was of a pale pink-orange sky marbled with clouds, softened by the haze, with a sharp silhouette of the mountains in dark grey beneath.
  5. I was struck by an apple-pie making mood last week, which made me roll my eyes slightly at how ~*seasonally appropriate*~ I was being, but it did lead me to discovering this recipe, which if were better at handling pastry would probably be perfect. As it was, it was only slightly structurally unsound and it only almost collapsed under its own weight and only a little bit of the pie ended up all over the table when it came time to serve it up, so I’ll call it a win overall.

Zoe’s grumpy hot beverage reviews.

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You may remember a few weeks ago I declared I was going to find a good (herbal) tea to get me through the winter, with the requirement that I want to be able to actually smell the tea even with my wacky sense of smell. I remain optimistic! I have learnt all kinds of things about what I can and can’t smell at the moment! I have consumed litres of hot drinks! I am yet to find something that really works for me.

Here’s what I’ve been drinking, all chosen because they were readily available at the supermarket or in Eataly:

Pam Supermarket own-brand instant coffee: Not a tea, but I have been drinking a lot of this recently, since I can’t smell/taste the difference between good and bad coffee. It’s cheap. I can use it to make a mug of coffee, which I realize I’ve kinda missed while living in Italy. I can leave it in the office kitchen and no-one will ever steal it. It gives me a stomach ache if I drink too much and it’s not Fairtrade which gives me middle-class guilt if I drink it at all. Still an overall top pick at the moment.

Clipper Zen Again Infusion: This lemongrass, eucalyptus and ginkgo infusion made me angry. It started with the packaging. Pink flowers. It was a good thing I’m not a man, because apparently lemongrass and eucalyptus has a gender. “For that moment of peace”, printed on the front. I picked it up. On the back: “A … spa-inspired blend … Perfect for those moments of reflection.” This was the women laughing alone with salad of herbal tea packaging. Well, for the price it was being sold at, I was going to need a moment of peace. Several hours of peace, probably. I gritted my teeth and decided to take a risk and give it a shot.

Image from

Image from Clipper Teas.

Turns out I can’t smell eucalyptus. Or lemongrass. At least I can taste the nettle they’ve added to fill out the bags.

Clipper Orange and Coconut Infusion: The box is orange and says “tropical”. It probably would be, if I could smell the coconut. I can taste the orange, at least, but without the coconut it’s awfully reminiscent of the orange oil we used to use as a cleaning product when I volunteered in an Oxfam shop as a student. Despite this, it’s not unpleasant and I will definitely finish the packet.

Overpriced organic Rooibos: (I can’t tell you the brand-name because I accidentally left it at my desk at work.) Comes in dinky foil-wrapped teabags which don’t sit well with me as someone who watched a lot of Captain Planet as a small child. I can’t smell the rooibos, but I’ll be optimistic and say it’s a subtle smell. The taste is adequate, but, well, it’s also quite subtle. (“Subtle” is my new favourite euphemism.) The next rooibos I buy will probably be the cheaper non-organic stuff.

Pam Supermarket own brand black tea: This smells of tea. It tastes of tea. It doesn’t smell or taste of anything more sophisticated than that, which doesn’t bother me at all, since I doubt anyone can smell or taste anything much in this 1.19 Euro for 25 bags packet of tea. I used to think of myself as a bit of a tea snob so I hate that I like this tea, but ehh, life’s an amaing journey and all that.

A perfect Perth winter day, in Torino

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Winter barefoot walks FTW!
Photo credit: “Winter barefoot walks FTW!” by Simon Wright, via Flickr

Today was one of those Torino autumn days that felt like a perfect Perth winter day — blue skies, chilly in the morning, but warm enough under the midday sun eat lunch outside and not need a jacket. In Perth, I’d have gone for a walk on the beach on a day like today, and come away with wild hair from the buffeting wind. Here, I caught glimpses of the sun setting behind the mountains as I walked through the meadows in Parco Colletta, and got grass seeds stuck in my socks.

It occurs to me I haven’t been in Perth in winter for 5 years now, and on days like today that feels like a long time. I miss Perth. Not just the people, who I miss frequently (and do a terrible job of keeping in touch with!) But the geography, too. The open space and wide empty streets, single-storey houses on quater-acre blocks. The way the city is flat, until you notice the undulations of the sand dunes it’s built upon. The route from my old place to work, cycling through bushland just a couple of kilometres from the city centre. The Swan River, or rather, just “the river”, as if you needed any other rivers in the world.

And other days I miss Glasgow, and other days I miss the tiny wheat and sheep farming town I lived in as a kid, and other days I miss the months I spent in Florence. Probably one day I’ll be living somewhere else again, and missing Torino.

We were talking over dinner the other night about the idea of being “from” somewhere. Like, can you be from somewhere if your parents weren’t from there? In Australia, yes, but that’s not universal. And I was thinking afterwards about how I’d never thought about being from somewhere until I lived in Glasgow for a year and realized that Britishness was something I recognized if I squinted and held my head at a funny angle, but it wasn’t my culture, and the city was lively and Scotland was beautiful, but it wasn’t my place.

Because my culture is Australian, and my place is Perth.
“Nice to meet you, I’m Zoe, from Australia.”
“Oh? Where in Australia are you from?”
“Perth, it’s on the west coast.”
(That last statement delivered almost as a question, because I will never completely lose my Australian habit of upward inflection.)

Canal near Chivasso, Italy

Autumn resolutions list

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Last week was blessed with plenty of perfect late summer/early autumn weather, with warm-but-not-hot days and brisk nights, and long afternoons with melancholy light. I had to travel to Milan for work twice, and both days I couldn’t stop staring at the view from the train window across the fields of eastern Piemonte and to the alps, which are still bare of snow this early in the year. These are the sorts of days I think of when you say autumn, which feels a bit silly because autumn here is mostly overcast days and drizzle. But even if my ideas of autumn are more often ideals than reality, I do love the season, especially in these early days before the winter darkness gets too close.

Here are some things I would like to do this year (this list is short partly to keep things achievable and partly because a good chunk of the weekend time I’d usually spend on planning/writing a blog post was spent on working on items 1 and 2 — at least I’m getting started on my resolutions early!):

  1. Continue eating gelato regularly until it gets too cold to reasonably stand around outside with a cup of frozen stuff in my hands. Once it stops being so hot I need gelato, I have a terrible tendency to forget about it, which is daft.
  2. Find a tea and/or tisane I like. More to the point: find a tea I can smell well enough that it doesn’t feel like drinking hot water. Experiments so far suggest fruity tisanes work, but I would love to find a more traditional tea.
  3. Get out of Torino at least on a day trip at some point. Maybe go for a walk somewhere? Go to Liguria and enjoy the beach without the crowds?
  4. Collect and press some leaves.
  5. Work on my stew/casserole skills. I don’t have a good go-to stew recipe, and it will be a challenge to find one without onions, but there must be something out there!

(I’m impressed with myself: only 60% of my ideas about autumn revolve around food, if you take this list as representative. I would have imagined more like 90%.)

Turin by night from Monte dei Cappuccini

Notes from my extremely glamorous life: way too much food edition

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Late summer through autumn is when Piemonte goes into full-on food mode and I love it. I spent this afternoon with friends at Festival delle Sagre, a food festival in Asti, a town about an hour from Torino. It had been a cool and rainy morning and text messages flew back and forth about whether it would still be on, whether we should go. We couldn’t not go! It had been so much fun last year and if we didn’t go today, K. wouldn’t get a chance to go. We got word there would still be food stalls, and decided to go whatever the weather.

Around lunch time, as we were bundling into cars with our rain jackets and umbrellas, the sun came out, and stayed out all afternoon. (It’s raining again now.) It ended up being a warm late summer afternoon in Asti, filled with food and wine and conversation and laughter and a spin round on a ferris wheel. Me afterwards: “I’m glad A. and M. brought their kids, they gave us an excuse to go on the ferris wheel. Wait. We probably would have done it anyway, wouldn’t we.”

Things I have learned recently:

  1. Lugging home my work laptop on the weekend is truly useless. No matter how much I fully intend no really for reals to get some work done on Saturday morning, I will inevitably find something else to do. Like clean a kitchen.
  2. I say “a” kitchen because my procrastination is at a level where I will clean pretty much anyone’s kitchen rather than do work.
  3. Cleaning kitchens is more immediately satisfying than doing physics research.
  4. Having gelato in the afternoon is no barrier to going for granita at night. I’m about 80% certain at this point that I will eventually leave Italy with type II diabetes.
  5. Most alcohol makes my stomach churn unless I have unsociably tiny quantities. However, preliminary research suggests this is not true of sake. Further experimentation is required. Funding agencies: I’ll gladly take grants to study this. Call me.
  6. You will never go wrong by bringing a batch of cookies to a get-together. (cf my comments above about type II diabetes.)
  7. Turin is really pretty at night.

 

Remember how I was asking the other week for onion/garlic-free recipes? One suggestion (thanks CatherineRose!) was quiche, which I love in principle… but in practice I’m too lazy to make pastry for a base. Fortunately, this is a good cheat-y pseudo-quiche recipe, one of those ones where you basically throw flour and egg and some tasty things in a pie dish and pull out something reasonably quiche-like from the oven 40 minutes later.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a pie dish.

Fortunately, I do have several spring-form cake tins that are about the right size for the recipe.

Unfortunately, spring-form cake tins do not hold raw egg at all, as I discovered as I got raw egg all over my table cloth. No worries, I thought. I’ll just put this spring-form cake tin inside a larger spring-form cake tin and that will catch the drips. I put the pair of tins in the oven, and 30 seconds later was yelling something along the lines of “No f&#$ you, quiche!” as I watched the egg drip through the outer cake tin and onto the oven floor.

Fortunately it was at this point I finally realized I could scoop everything into a muffin tin that would hold the mixture perfectly to make a dozen mini-quiches. You know that “I meant to do that!” look that cats give when they know they’ve done something ridiculous? That was exactly my face at that moment.

Gran Madre and Superga at night

The other four seasons of the year.

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It is currently pouring with rain and I’m wearing jeans and a cardigan, and I’m starting to lose faith in the traditional weather-based seasons here in Turin. (At least we had a summer here this year, unlike last year!) So I want to propse a new set of seasons, that aren’t about the weather. They’re the Living Abroad Seasons. There’s four of them, so that’s nice and traditional, although up-front disclaimer: they’re not equal in length, which jars against my need for symmetry, but oh well.

The current season is August, aka, Nothing Is Happening Here, Get Out of Town Season. Turin’s one of those Italian cities where everyone clears off to the mountains and/or the seaside for as much of August as possible. Shops close, there’s no traffic even in peak hour, the mailboxes in my apartment are piling up with uncollected letters. Normally I’d also be out of town for mid-August, but this year I somehow managed to arrange things so I arrived back in Turin on the 15th. Ghost town. It’s peaceful, in a way.

And August is a good break to psych up for People Arriving Season in September/October. People come back from holidays, either tanned (if they’re Italian) or sunburnt (if they’re like me). The university year starts, as do many fixed-term jobs, and new people arrive in town. I am every stereotype of an introvert, but I love meeting new people. (I just need a lie down in a dark room afterwards.) Finding out where people are from, why they’re here, noticing shared interests, it’s all great. People Arriving Season is my favourite Living Abroad Season.

The next season is the Long Season. Work. Socialize, in a more normal way now that not everyone is a new face. Slog through winter. Daydream of summer holidays. Christmas, New Years. Maybe travel somewhere fun over the Easter weekend. Become closer friends with people. Drift apart from others. Once the novelty of living away from where you grew up wears off, this is the season that looks like “real life”.

And then we get to Goodbye Season, in June-July. The university year ends, and so do those fixed-contract jobs, and over the course of a few weeks easily half of the new friends you made in September will have moved on to new things. It’s an exciting time, because people are going to do all sorts of interesting things and you get to be happy for them. But because I sort of snuck out of Perth when I left, I never really did the goodbye thing there (sorry everyone!) and I was in no way prepared for how exhausting Goodbye Season would be until I experienced it for myself. Constantly thinking, “will I ever see them again, I wonder?” is a bit of a downer, it turns out.

Sometimes I daydream of moving everyone I know and love to the same city — or inventing teleportation — so that I can keep all my friends nearby. And of course I could settle down somewhere and have a stable group of friends that I see every week for years and years. I know people who have based their lives around stability and it’s suiting them splendidly. But I suspect life isn’t as stable as it sometimes looks, and for now I’ll choose the highs and lows of instability.

Pietro Micca: tunnels and heroes

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According to TripAdvisor, the Museo Pietro Micca is the #11 thing to do in Turin. I saw that and thought, “Oh yeah, so what are things number 1 through 10?” but it turns out that #8 is “Spas” so I think we can safely ignore TripAdvisor’s rankings. At any rate, I think I’ve found my new favourite museum in town.

The entrance is a bland-looking 1960s building you’d easily walk past, and the museum dedicated to the French seige of Turin in 1706, which sounds like a fairly specialized local history topic. But this seige involved clever engineering of underground tunnels, which were lost until building works in the 1950s uncovered them. Most of the network of tunnels is now uncovered, and a visit to the museum includes a tour of part of it.

Towards the end of the tour -- of course, as soon as we got out of the museum we had to go look for where this was at street level

Towards the end of the tour — of course, as soon as we got out of the museum we had to go look for where this corresponded to at street level

Continue reading →

Street art in Turin, Italy

Things I have witnessed since moving to Turin.

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This afternoon, I’m leaving on a work trip to Lake Como (sometimes you have to make sacrifices for your career, you know?) so just a quick listicle type post for today.

Some of the more notable things I’ve seen in Turin:

  • The other day, 4 people in period costume were leaving Porta Nuova metro station the same time as me. One of the women was wearing a skirt with a bustle and she had to turn sideways to get through the fare gate. As I got to street level, I discovered they were part of a parade.
    Those skirts weren't designed with metro turnstiles in mind.

    Those skirts weren’t designed with metro turnstiles in mind.

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The Alps from a plane window

Missing a flight isn’t always so bad.

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I once read somewhere, “If you’ve never missed a flight, you’ve wasted too much of your life in airports.”

I wish I could live by that logic, but I’m the sort of person who starts getting tense as soon as she realizes she’s only going to get to the airport 2 hours ahead of her flight, rather than 2.5. I don’t even know why — I mean, it’s nice to be able to buy a magazine and read it while sipping a coffee in a departure lounge, but it’s not that nice. The coffee, magazine and view would be better outside the airport, after all.

And the worst of it is, my obsessive earliness for flights hasn’t stopped me from missing planes, so my approach doesn’t even work. And when I have missed a flight, everything has been somewhere between “fine” and “unexpected fun” on a scale of disaster-to-fantastic, so my approach doesn’t even need to work.

Here are some True Stories of Travel Disasters. Maybe they will inspire you to waste less of your life in airports. Continue reading →