Street art in Turin, Italy

Things I have witnessed since moving to Turin.

5 Replies

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.

    Continue reading →

The Alps from a plane window

Missing a flight isn’t always so bad.

4 Replies

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 →

Funny "narrow street" warning sign

13 remarkably specific superlatives about Turin

7 Replies

Stay in Turin for a day or two and you’re bound to hear the following: “Apparently, the Egyptian Museum has the biggest collection of Egyptian artefacts outside the Louvre.” (Or possibly, “outside Egypt”. I’ve heard both.)

Stay a bit longer and you’ll probably also hear, “Apparently, Porta Palazzo is the largest outdoor vegetable market in Italy,” and, “Apparently, via Garibaldi is the longest pedestrian street in Europe.”

I have no idea if these factoids come from a guidebook somewhere, or if they’re just part of the local folklore, but I’ve always loved how specific they are. The largest outdoor vegetable market; the biggest collection except for the Louvre. I feel like someone’s had to really look for the superlative.

In that spirit, here are some more… Continue reading →

Torino Jazz Festival in Piazza San Carlo

Notes from my extremely glamorous life: it’s summer (and it’s still not Christmas)

Leave a reply

A long lunch today. 19 of us including the kids, crammed round two tables put together to make one long one, talking and laughing and passing the wine around. A hot day; humid and still. We shift around, trying to position ourselves as best we can to get airflow from the fan. Then I realise why this scene feels familiar. It’s just like Christmas in Australia.

As J. pointed out, we even had cherries. Definitely Christmas. Continue reading →

Cup of espresso

How I quit coffee… and why I’m un-quitting it

4 Replies

It’s a very First World Problem, isn’t it? “I love coffee so much… but I’m sure it’s not healthy to drink as much as I do… oh, but the coffee from the place near my work, it’s so good, how can I say no?” Or, “how can I do anything this morning until I’ve had my coffee?” she says, as she pours herself a double-shot from the coffee maker at work. (She says, she pours? Haha who am I kidding, I mean “I say, I pour”.) Continue reading →

Avigliana, near Turin

Visiting small town Italy: Avigliana

3 Replies

I suspect my whole personality can be captured by this statement: on Friday night, I left the party early making vague excuses about being too old to go dancing at the newly re-opened club “Giancarlo”, then on Saturday I went for a quiet stroll around Avigliana.

Continue reading →

Ivrea, Italy

Visiting Italian small towns: Ivrea and Chiesa di San Nicola

Leave a reply

I’ve lived in Turin for 3 years now, and the more I get to know Italy the more I feel like I’ve hardly seen it at all. I’ve “done” the tourist trifecta of Rome, Florence and Venice, and I’ve made the odd weekend trip to slightly less common destinations like Bologna, Genova and Naples, but almost all my travel has focused on the big cities. I’ve barely been to the mountains, I’ve never found a beach that wasn’t crowded (well, I did once… in February), my knowledge of the smaller towns around here is limited to being able to say, “yup, this looks like a northern town, alright” as I stand in a stereotypical piazza with a church and some cafes.

And the thing is, when I do finally get out of the city, I love it. Continue reading →

Valley in Slovenia

How to get to Lake Bled, Slovenia, from Italy, by train.

3 Replies

The long version of the title of this post ends with “if you are cheap and/or stubborn and/or enjoy travelling by train.”

I own up to being a bit of all 3, so last summer when I read on the inimitable seat61.com that there are train options from Trieste/Venice to Lake Bled despite there being no direct trains from Italy to Slovenia, I knew I had to give it a try on my summer vacation. Seat61 calls the route “cunning, cheap and scenic” which I’m pretty sure is just a more eloquent way of saying “budget/stubborn/train-y”. I’m also pretty sure there are simpler options that involve buses, but I don’t care. Here is my experience: Continue reading →

Adventures in bureaucracy: health insurance edition

6 Replies

One of the… fun… things about living in Italy is the regular adventures in bureaucracy. This week, it was my health insurance. Or rather, my tessera sanitaria, the card you carry around to prove that you have health insurance.

Tessera sanitaria.png

This one’s not mine, obviously! (“Tessera sanitaria” by Domenico – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.)

Now, I’m sure that technically you don’t need the card. Certainly you don’t in an emergency. I spent half a week in hospital under the wrong name because they didn’t check my ID until I’d been there 5 days and had done multiple xrays, an ultrasound and received most of a course of antibiotics. I’d have conversations with nurses where they’d look at the name on my notes and ask “Oh, are you Albanian?”
“Uh, no…?”
“Your surname, it looks Albanian.”
“Oh, no, it’s just mis-spelt.”
And apparently this wasn’t any sort of problem.

Continue reading →