It’s a crazy busy couple of weeks right now so no “real” blog post from me, but here’s a photo from the calm in the eye of the storm, when I spent the weekend on the Ligurian coast with a friend from highschool. Great times catching up and a lovely morning walk in Cinque Terre, with this view down past the vineyards to Vernazza.
PS: See more postcards from…
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:
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.
Subtitle: on the cheap.
Subtitle 2: assuming it’s sunny. If it’s rainy/cold/snowy, you’re on your own.
Postscript: I never did see inside the cathedral — the middle of summer is wedding season, obviously! If you’re less interested in sitting in the sun and people watching than I am, you could always hop on the city ferry to Suomenlinna (5 euro each way) as a substitute for some of my sitting around. Also, that architecture walk I linked in point 4 looks good, even if I never got around to doing it because sitting in the sun was too nice.
July was a busy month for me, with a week-long work conference to kick the month off, then 3 separate friends visiting over the course of two weeks, before jumping on a plane for some more work travel. It was an exciting month, seeing people I hadn’t seen for months or even years, spending time in the south of Italy, being a tourist at home in Turin, trying to wrap my head around some new (to me) physics, lots of meals in restaurants and relatively few nights at home.
In contrast to all that, Finland has been trees and rocks and water and evening light. I’ve been here for two weeks now, for work, and every day I’ve had to remind myself that I’m not on holidays, and I really do need to go to the office. Partly it’s the feeling of quiet here that’s (paradoxically) distracting me — if you’re going to be productive, isn’t that synonymous with being busy?
I’m staying just outside of Helsinki proper, on the shores of an inlet surrounded by reeds. In the evenings I sometimes go for a walk on the gravel path through the birch trees, following the edge of the water. A couple of weeks ago on a grey Sunday afternoon, I followed the path all the way to the top of the inlet, where a herd of cows graze near the water. The trees muffled the sound of the nearby motorway and I felt like I’d left the city entirely.
Sometimes I walk in the other direction, down to the edge of the open sea, which is protected by islands and calm like a lake. There are always midges, and sometimes when the water is very still I can hear fishes jumping up to catch a midge that has ventured too close to the surface. I’ve never seen the fishes, only the ripples as they dive back down.
PS: If you think I have become a person at one with nature, I should also say I have spent many evenings using the fast internet in my accommodation to frantically skim-read blogs and news sites and videos. My latest game is “how cheap can I get a flight to Perth for Christmas, plus an interesting stopover on the way?” Question for readers — is it possible to have a nice time in Bali if you aren’t interested in drinking or surfing???
One of the first things H. said to me when I arrived in Oslo yesterday was “This is a perfect summer day, the kind we’re lucky to have here.” Oslo’s been having a mild, wet summer this year, but there was no sign of that when I got there yesterday morning. Blue skies, 20 degrees C (about 70 Fahrenheit), a slight breeze off the harbour. After a grey week in Helsinki, it was a welcome change. Continue reading
True confessions time: when people ask me if I’m travelling with someone else, I always say something vague and polite about “Oh I don’t know anyone on the same schedule as me” but what I really mean is, “I love travelling alone and I’ve sort of forgotten how to travel with other people anyway.”
But travelling to Lecce and the surrounding region with B. was great fun. It helped that we had a logical division of labour — she has the history knowledge to make sense of the places we saw, I have enough Italian to translate informational plaques about them. Or this sign at an altar in the basilica at Gallipoli, clearly posted by someone who’s Had It With These Tourists:
IT IS ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN TO MOVE THE CANDLES, ESPECIALLY FOR TAKING PHOTOS
An overnight train ride to Lecce, down in the heel of the boot of Italy, the diagonally opposite corner of Italy to Turin. Going to sleep in the south of Piemonte after watching the sun set over cornfields and rolling hills, waking up in Puglia. Red dirt, dry grass, ancient olive trees. “The light really is different here, isn’t it?” says the Pugliese woman we’re sharing a couchette with. She’s right. The sky is blue, blue like it is in Australia, and the light is clear.
Her husband, also in the couchette, is a gentleman, not letting me put my bag up in the rack myself even when I insist it’s not heavy. He tells us about how his whole family has been up in Turin for his son’s wedding. His nephew and the nephew’s wife are in the next carriage and they pop in for a chat. “What’s going on?” asks the conductor as he walks past this little gathering hanging around the door of the couchette. The nephew grins. “Oh, just a family reunion!”
As we roll through Puglia in the morning, we chat about the usual Italian things — food (we should definitely eat orecchiette), and history. The gentleman has studied archeology, and he tells us about all the influences that have gone into this corner of the world, not just the Romans and the Greeks but also the Carthaginians and the Normans and even some Germans. Later that week we’ll see in a museum some of the artifacts found from these powers but for now I can feel the sense of history rolling as invaders come and go.
At last we can see the sea, deep blue behind the rows of olives. We’re getting close to Lecce. “The sea so close makes the weather much nicer here than in Torino,” says the woman.
“Ugh, yes, it always stays hot in Torino, even at night…” I reply. “We’re from the coast, too, in Australia.”
“Australia! That’s a long way to travel.”
“I’d love to go to Australia,” adds her husband.
“Yes dear,” she says to him. She adds to us, laughing, “Listen to him, he wants to go to Australia. He won’t even take me to Venice!”
PS: It’s almost exactly a year ago I wrote a little blurb about cyclists in Turin and decided to stick it on a blog since it was a bit long for facebook. A post (roughly) per week later, and now my friends introduce me as, “This is Zoe, she has a blog” (?!) Thanks for reading, commenting, and generally encouraging this little project!
PPS: I love the guys in the photo for this post, clearly if the piazza doesn’t have enough seating the correct solution is to byo plastic chairs!
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 corresponded to at street level
It is hotttttt in most of Europe right now, and northern Italy is no exception. I spent the past week in Como, at a fantastic conference, but based on the following I think I need to up my hot weather game…
I’m posting a day early because tomorrow I’m off to the south of Italy with a friend from Australia. And if the weather forecast on google is to be believed, I will actually be escaping the heat, at least by a couple of degrees. Thank goodness.
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
Where's Zoe now? 