Wait, don't go away - this isn't the wrong blog. The blogger people updated, so I gave my blog a new template - do you like it?
So, well, buon anno and hello there. Long time, no blog. Why you ask? It started out with me deciding I was not spending enough time learning Italian, then morphed into the busyness and business of Christmas, then a vacation in London and doing a week’s worth of laundry with no dryer, followed by 6 days of 3 kids not returned yet to school and lack of sleep because Isabelle decided that the only way she could really sleep was by having her head on my pillow and all 40+ pounds of herself wrapped around me, followed by the emotional black-hole of my beloved grandma dying and not being in Detroit to grieve with my mother and large extended family to finally be capped off with catching an influenza bug providing me with fevers, coughs, stuffed nose, dizziness, etc. Today, I am starting to crawl out of the fog and continue to tell my tales . . .
Chapter 4 of our southern Italy trip - I never finished our story about going to the Pompeii area. We also visited another city buried and recovered by the Pliny Vesuvio eruption – Herculaneum (in Italian, Ercolano). While Pompeii was buried by the ash the fell for days afterward, Ercolano was buried immediately by the lava/mud slides that accompanied the eruption. It is a much smaller and better preserved version of Pompeii. Ercolano was a seaside resort and much smaller than Pompeii. It is located in the gritty outskirts of Naples where everyone’s laundry is hanging out on buildings everywhere – there is so much, it borders on being decorative. Again, we had lots of fun exploring and climbing around all over everything. Apparently, Ercolano was “discovered” before Pompeii and thus has been being excavated much longer. Because lava was less destructive than the ash, the buildings/mosaics/tiles/etc have been preserved quite well (comparatively). We had a lot of fun in Ercolano, just like Pompeii.
Thanksgiving – Thanksgiving was just another day, the kids went to school and I baked a turkey breast and some potatoes. Later that evening we went and had dessert with the family of a boy in Nick’s class. The father was born and raised in Baltimore by Italian parents who returned to Italy when he was a teenager. He eventually moved back to the U.S. for college and stayed in New York to work. His wife is Italian but lived in the U.S. for almost 20 years. They had the opportunity to come and work for a few years in Italy and live now in Padova. The Italians would never think of making a dolce (dessert) with pumpkin, so there is no pumpkin to bake pies or bakeries that sell them, but they got a frozen one from the local army base through some connection. Although, the pumpkin pie was kind of terrible and the cake that Gabriella baked herself was much better! It was nice to give a nod to the holiday and make some new friends.
That gets me through the end of November and I will blog all about Christmas and our fantastic vacation to London. They speak English in London! Mia boca e’ funzione in Londra! Tutte’ bene!
