Some of our travels...

 This is why we came to Italy...

  I love some of the day trips we've taken. We decided not to take any trips that required an over-night stay until we get out of the hotel. It just doesn't make sense to leave one hotel (that's already paid for) to stay in another so all of our trips have been one day excursions. The nice thing about our location is that we live very near some really nice places. Since I've already posted about our trips into Milan and Pisa I'll talk about our most recent visits.

 I'll start with Verona, not because it was the most recent but because honestly, it was my least favorite so far and I feel like I've already used this blog to complain too much. I'd rather end this one on a high note!  Some will recognize the name as the setting for "Two Gentlemen of Verona" and "Romeo and Juliet". It's possible that at one time it was a very beautiful and romantic place and maybe that's what inspired Shakespeare but honestly, as a modern city I wasn't very impressed. Maybe because they've modernized it a little too much. There were some interesting sites there. Among them a colosseum that is still standing and is still used for performances. The problem is since they use it today, they've converted it into a modern day stadium complete with rows of theater type seats. The only parts that even look ancient are the outside (if you can look past the banners and lights) and the very top. I was completely disappointed.

  There were some areas of the city they've left alone, an ancient wall and some statues but with so many merchants (mostly peddling "Romeo and Juliet" souvenirs) it's hard to see the town square that still has marble streets and an ancient fountain.

 It wasn't all a complete loss. We did visit a church and a duomo that were almost stunning in their beauty. It's funny to walk up to an almost non-descript, plain looking church only to have your breath taken away by the incredible detail of the inside. I've heard that the reason for this is that the Catholic church wanted the poor people in these communities to have a place to worship that gave them a glimpse into Heaven. Most of the interiors of these churches have marble floors and columns and some of the most exquisite paintings I have ever seen! I'm thankful that most of them allow photography so I can revisit them. The churches are what made the trip worth it.

 Then there were the visits to Lake Como...

  Oh my! Talk about beauty! We've actually been twice because there is a lot to do there but I'm sure we will be going back. It's just north of Milan so it's a very close trip for us. During the summer months it's pretty packed with tourists so we've found it best to take the train since there's very little space to park a car. Even with the tourists it's one of the most peaceful, picturesque places I've ever been. The lake itself is glacier fed so it's always cold and fairly clear in the shallow ends. It also doesn't have that fishy, lake smell that I'm so used to.

  The villages surrounding the lake are all quaint and so interesting to walk around. They have been there for centuries and all of them have cobblestone streets and beautiful little churches. They are built into the sides of the mountains so there are a lot of steps and steep hills to climb, reminding me just how out of shape I am! There are a few large villas with lush gardens and views of the mountains and lake. We visited two, Villa Carlotta and Villa Balbianello, both built at the end of the 17th century. Villa Carlotta is a huge estate type home with some of the most incredible gardens I have ever seen. It was so big we didn't even have time to see all of it. Just walking through the flowers with the heat of the sun warming the blossoms makes for an incredible sensation not only for the eyes but for the nose as well! There were trees of just about every type, amazing arbors with grapes and lemons growing overhead and I can't even count the variety of flowers. I may have to go back just to see the rest of the garden.

  Villa Balbianello is more sprawling than Carlotta with it's own chapel and a shaded, flower-laced terrace overlooking the lake. The terrace is where they filmed the wedding scene of Star Wars, Episode 2 and they used the estate and grounds to film Casino Royale. I probably went overboard with the pictures but with all the statues, trees and flowers with the lake and mountains in the background I couldn't help myself.

  Lake Como is so big we still haven't seen all of it and I'm not sure we'll ever have the time to. It's one of those places that you dream about long after you've left and it's one memory I'll cherish forever.

 I'm sure once we get moved into our house we'll be taking a lot more trips. We're planning one to Switzerland in August since Mark has several days off then. I keep hearing how beautiful it is there so expect to see more blogs and pictures in the future.

  Once again I'm reminded of just how blessed I am to be able to have and share this opportunity. I hope that people don't get sick of hearing that from me but I'm convinced that God lead us here. I have had my frustrations with this place but I'm doing my best to focus on the positive things. I'm here with my best friend, every day we find something new to laugh about, and we've met some really great people, most of whom are happy to talk to us (even with our broken Italian and their broken English). I am being cared for, clothed, fed and sheltered so really, what is there to complain about? I'm thankful for each new experience, even the ones that don't seem positive at the time.

 Speaking of new experiences...we're supposed to be moving into our house in about a week and a half. I'm getting quite anxious about it and will post a new blog and pictures when it happens. In the mean time I covet your prayers for the process to go smoothly. Thank you again to everyone who takes the time to read the thoughts that come out of my mostly-functioning brain! I miss all my family and friends so much but knowing I can share my experiences brings me a lot of comfort!

Love to you all,
Ciao!

                                                        The top of the colosseum in
                                                        Verona.

                                         
                                          One of the many beautiful ceilings in the church.

                                            A beautiful piece of art in the ceiling in the duomo.

                                                                     Villa Carlotta

                                                  one small section of the garden.

                                              One of the lovely views from the house.

                                                         The terrace at Villa Balbianello.

                                                      More of the terrace...and Mark!

                             Varenna, (not to be confused with Verona) a small fishing village
                                                            on Lake Como.

                                                         Just another gorgeous view!

My Love/Hate Relationship with Italy...

  It's funny how living someplace gives you a whole different perspective than just visiting does. It's pretty easy to love someplace when you're only visiting but when you live there it can be a whole other experience. I tried to keep this in mind while preparing to move here but there are just some realities that have to hit you in the face. It's kinda like trying to prepare yourself for marriage or having kids when you've never done either. You sort of know it's not going to be easy but you still envision unending dreamy, romantic evenings with your spouse and perfect, smiling, cooing "Gerber babies." At some point reality sets in and you realize just how silly those ideas were. It's not that you never experience good things but you become acutely aware that the real world has very little in common with the fantasy.

 Just to be clear I am definitely having some wonderful experiences here. The traveling has for the most part been amazing and we still have a lot more to see and do. I'll write more about that in my next blog. What I want to focus on for now is the reality of really living here. In conveying my feelings about these things I am aware that my perspective is that of an outsider. The way things are done here are probably perfectly sensible to someone who's native born. But as an American I can tell you that to me, NOTHING here makes any logical sense! Let me try to give you the best examples of this...

 Speed Limits: Trying to merge onto a freeway you would think it best to increase your speed to match the speed of other cars. Not here. The merging speed limit is 40 km. per hour (approximately 25 mph)! If you're traveling on the highway in the right lane and someone is merging you'd better move over or slow down! It's odd because this is the only place I have seen Italians actually going the speed limit.

  Drivers Licenses: The Italian government has made it impossible for immigrants to get a local driver's license.  We do have our international licenses but they are only good for 1 year. After that you are expected to get an Italian license. Here's the problem: You have to apply for a driver's permit. Sounds easy enough. The permits cost approximately $250 (of course that's in Euros) and from the moment you obtain your permit you have 6 months to learn the rules of the road and then take the test for your license. Plus you  have to put a large letter "P" on the front and back of your car, you can't drive on the freeways and you must drive ONLY with a licensed driver who is under the age of 60 and has had a valid license for at least 10 years. Now if someone can tell me where to find an Italian who's willing to drive with us to work, the grocery store, church and every other place we have to go I'll do my best to get a license. Oh by the way if you fail the test which is 40 questions (you can only miss 4) your permit is torn up and you start the whole process all over again... And the test is no longer offered in English. Brilliant.

  Parking lots: I talked about this briefly in my last blog but I still can't seem to grasp this concept. It should be a simple enough thing. You drive to a store and you park your car, right?  Here that's only if you can get through the maze of barriers, one way arrows and "Do Not Enter" signs to FIND the parking lot! I have never seen anyplace more bent on keeping people out!! And it doesn't seem to matter where you're going. Grocery, hardware and furniture stores, government offices, malls...Oh, let's talk about shopping malls. 

  Italy likes to play a little game called "Hide the Mall". Here's what I mean: 

   Last week we were trying to find a mall that we had been told had an Apple store.    Like a lot of men, my husband is an electronics maniac and loves electronics stores so we looked online to find out what the mall was called and a map to the place. Following the directions on our GPS we ended up at a shopping center that had 3 large stores, Italy's versions of The Home Depot, Academy Sports and Garden Ridge. At the opposite end of the parking lot were some industrial looking buildings with almost no cars parked at that end of the lot.  We decided since we were there to park and go check out the stores even though it wasn't the mall we had hoped to find. We found an underground parking lot (a good deal of parking here is underground) and realized that it went on a lot further back than we realized. We drove to an area where there were a lot of cars, got out, rode up a motorized ramp and... VIOLA! We were in a huge shopping mall! Those strange, industrial looking buildings with almost no cars in the upper lot WAS the mall!

 Now this might seem like an isolated incident but we came upon another mall a few days ago the same way. By parking in an underground lot and walking into a set of non-descript doors. We've also been to a few outlet malls where all of the stores face in and the back of the stores are what face the maze.., uh, I mean parking lot! Oh and by the way, every store in this particular mall was closed...on a Monday. The only things that were open were the restaurants and pizzarias. And that leads us to the subject of business closures...

 A lot of businesses, particularly the smaller ones still follow the siesta schedule. From about 1pm to around 3:30 or 4:00 they close up shop. That's really okay with me, as a matter of fact I kind of like it, but it's not something I expect from a large store. I found out the hard way the other day that some of the bigger places do it too. Also, there are hundreds of small towns and villages and each one has a patron saint. If any of these towns happens to be celebrating their individual saint on any given day the businesses will be closed. No way of knowing unless you're a local what day that will be, but whatever! You learn pretty quickly that if you want to go someplace it's probably a good idea to find out if it's going to be open when you get there!

    In the interest of keeping this blog entry shorter than your average novel I won't go into all the other things that seem completely illogical here. There are plenty of them I assure you. In joking about it the other day while we were searching every "logical" place to find a shower rod for our new house and not finding one Mark said, "maybe we should check a shoe store!" 

 ... And that is how we're handling all this! God gave us both a unique and quirky sense of humor and using it has kept us both (somewhat) sane! We do get angry and frustrated from time to time but we're at least trying to see the humor in our new situations. It also helps to have other Americans who are in the same boat to talk to. Once again, as stated in my previous blogs, I'm thankful for the people God has put in place for our journey here. Especially the church we have become a part of. I'm still not clear on the purpose for our being here, and I'm aware I may not ever really know. But knowing that God has put us here is what I keep relying on. Frustrations aside this has been and will continue to be an interesting adventure!

As always, thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings. I will focus more on the positive things in my next blog, I promise!

Arrivederci!

  

Some everyday stuff...

Just your average trip to the eye doctor...well, maybe not!

 I was kinda hoping our first trip to a doctor would happen later, when we were in a house and settled. Well, if I'm being honest what I was hoping is that we'd both make it through the next two years not having to go to any doctors here and just maintaining our medical visits on our trips home. So much for that idea!

 Some of you may know that Mark only wears one contact lens. He had lasik in his left eye several years ago and unfortunately it didn't go as well as planned. He was so near-sighted and the surgeon had to remove so much corneal tissue that when the "flap" was replaced it didn't smooth out as hoped. The result is that his outer corneal flap has "wrinkles" for lack of a better description. In certain light and up close he actually sees fairly well out of that eye but if it's darker he sees "ghost" images. After hearing him describe these ghost images to one of our regular optomitrist's assistants her response was, "You see dead people??"...Anyway, he wears a contact in his right eye and about once a year give or take, that eye gets an infection. Well wouldn't you know it waited until we got to Italy to act up?

 This has happened often enough that he knows not to put his contact in and to get in touch with the eye doctor as soon as possible. First things first, where do you go to find an English speaking eye doctor in Italy? Fortunately there is a woman here working with all the LM people as a liaison to help with their needs. She called and scheduled an appointment with an "occulist" for this past Wednesday at 7:45...PM. Yes, PM.

 Mark went to Google maps and found the place and it's fairly close to the Airport. (Fairly close in this area of Italy means about 20-25 minutes) We put the address in our GPS and actually got there pretty easily. We found a parking lot in the back of the building and proceeded to walk to the entrance. Keep in mind that this in no way resembled what we've come to know as a "medical building". It was a 3 story building with brown siding that has a small grocery store attached at the back. There was a locking mechanism on the door, the kind where someone has to buzz you in. There was someone coming out as we were entering so we didn't need to push the button. Once inside we noticed the building was very dimly lit. There was a tiny, and I mean 2 person maximum tiny, elevator in the middle of the building and doors with doormats and no signs all around the perimeter. We decided to go up and see if we could find the place. On the second floor, more doors. No signs. We went up another floor, more doors. No signs. Dead calm. Dim building. Not a sound. Beginning to feel like lambs lead to a slaughter we nervously got back in the elevator and went down to where we had come in. There was a man coming out of one of the doors heading for the exit. In our best Italian, which isn't great and with the help of my phone's translator we asked him where to find the occulist. His face lit up (I guess we asked correctly) and he waved his hand and said, "Vieni" or "come"! The three of us got back on the two person elevator and he took us back up to the 3rd floor, got off the elevator and walked around to the back where there was a door with a sign! We thanked him and went inside.

 There was a woman, I guess the receptionist leaving as we came in and the doctor was behind the counter eating a sandwich. He got up, went in the back and from his office yelled, "Mark Porter?" We said yes and he came out and guided us to the examination room. First time in my life I was ever in an eye doctor's office that had a window! (For those of you not lucky enough to have vision problems, eye doctors need exam rooms without windows so they can turn out the lights and see through their equipment properly.) He was speaking Italian and Mark said, "Parli inglesi?" His response? "Little." (Oh, this should be fun.) Mark explained as slowly and clearly as possible what the problem was and while the doctor's English wasn't perfect, it really wasn't that bad. He did his exam and said, "I prescribe drop, anti-biotic, cortizone, yes?" We said yes and he wrote the prescription out and asked if we could come back on the 12th at the same time. We agreed and left, at least knowing what to expect when we come back.

 I went to the airport pharmacy the next day to try to get the prescription filled and was told, "non ce l'ho" or I don't have. I called Mark and he arranged to come pick me up so we could find a pharmacy to fill it. (The good thing there was I got to leave the hotel and have lunch with my husband!) After lunch we found the nearest pharmacy on my GPS and drove there. Only problem was we forgot most places close up in the early afternoon for their "siesta" time. We drove back to the airport to drop me off and Mark went back to work and gave the prescription to the liaison so she could call around to find a pharmacy that had the drops in stock. She found one (around the corner from the one we had tried to go to after lunch) and told Mark to go pick it up after 6:30. After work he came back to the hotel and picked me up and we went to the pharmacy. Just a side note here, I've never seen a country so bent on keeping people from parking near their businesses! It's like they purposefully make access to street parking and parking lots impossible to find! We drove around the pharmacy and back again and finally found a place to park. When we went inside the girl at the counter of course spoke almost no English! I think we must look like chimps to these poor people who are trying to figure out our broken Italian and best charades moves! Once again with the help of my translator we finally got our point across. She went in back and came out with a few boxes of the drops and said, "Open one and no more use". These are basically single use containers so we understood what she meant. What's odd is that there was no prescription bottle, no prescription label, just the boxes with drops in them. They do things so differently here but we've had our first medical incident and survived!

 As strange as this whole thing seemed, once again I'm pleasantly surprised at how nice (and patient) people are. We have learned that our at least attempting to speak their language softens them immediately. They are so willing to try and help when they can. 

 This is just one more reason I'm glad I came along for the ride! Until next time...

Arrivederci!

The First Month

One month...

 I can't believe we've been here one month. In some ways it seems longer, maybe because trying to pass the time while living in a hotel is so hard to do. I find that I'm living for the weekends because we always find something to do outside these walls. Not that I'm without a routine here. Every week day I get up, get dressed, go have breakfast, go for my morning walk around the airport (really the only place to walk), read, check facebook, read, check e-mail, read, play candy crush, read...honestly it's getting a little old, but I'll survive.

 Things are progressing however. We're only a month (give or take a day or two) away from moving into our house. It's funny how you can get so tired of doing the mundane things of life. Laundry, cooking, cleaning...I haven't had to do these things for a while now but I actually miss them! Not only to have something useful to do but maybe to feel like I have some say in what I do and when I do it. If the hotel would let me do my own laundry I'd be happy to do it!

 We have also found a church, or should I say God led us to a church. This is a non-denominational English speaking group who do their best to follow the Bible as closely as possible. They have a few traditions I'm not used to but traditions don't matter when you need people to worship and fellowship with. One of my biggest concerns in moving here was to find a group of believers who treated each other like family, and we've found it. I can't imagine the isolation we would feel if we hadn't found people who already care about us simply because we are Christ followers. God is good!

 As for our adventures, we have been to the town center of Milan to see the Duomo and the Galleria and we've been to Sforza Castle. We have a good friend coming in August and we're going to see da Vinci's "Last Supper". I'm really looking forward to it but I doubt seriously that they'll let me photograph it.

 This past weekend we went to Pisa. The drive (about 3 hours on a good day, 4 because of the traffic) was beautiful. Pisa is in Tuscany so we did see a little of the rolling hills and trees you've seen in photographs but it was so interesting to see palm trees and tropical flowers on one side if the road and snow topped mountains on the other. I wanted to take a lot of pictures but unfortunately on the autostrada (the highway) there's very few places to stop and my camera needs time to focus. I got a few good pictures of the mountains from the car but that's about it. Maybe next time we go to Tuscany we'll take some back roads so we can stop for pictures.

 The leaning tower and the cathedral were amazing but the town itself isn't much. As a matter of fact it's pretty filthy! There are merchants set up all over the place selling "souvenirs" if you want to call them that. Mostly cheap tourist crap if you ask me. Some of these people are "in your face" types that try to stick stuff in front of you so you'll buy it. Now don't get the wrong idea, these merchants are not just in Pisa. They are everywhere tourists might be, there just seemed to be more of them in Pisa. I'm getting pretty good and holding my hand up and saying "NO!" You have to be pretty firm and sometimes downright rude. But as dirty and crowded as it was, I'm glad we went. 

 Climbing the tower is an incredible experience. The steps (256 of them) are very worn from centuries of use and as you're going up and especially down you're very aware of gravity throwing you off just a bit. It's kind of a surreal experience. Also, I knew that the top was a bell tower but I didn't know there were 7 bells of varying sizes. Standing at the top gazing over rooftops and mountains is wonderful. We were blessed by great weather too! I'm really glad I got to experience climbing the tower. It's something I wouldn't have wanted to miss out on.

 The great thing about living here will be all the excursions we get to go on. Everything is in such close proximity it would be crazy not to take advantage of it. One thing I'm looking forward to is the overnight trips we can take once we've gotten into our house. We're planning to go to Switzerland for a few days in August and I can't wait!

Thank you again to everyone who's sharing in our adventure by reading this blog. I miss my family and friends terribly and being able to share this means so much to me!

For now, 
Arrivederci!

                                      Some snow dusted mountains
                                   on the drive from Milan to Pisa

                                                           The Leaning Tower of Pisa (obviously!)

                                                       View from the bottom of the tower
                                                        looking up...

                                          Just on of the well worn steps...

 
                                           One of the 7 bells in the bell tower...

                                                      Over looking the city from the top!