Day 4: Wedding planning adventures in the country

Hi all!
I lied about catching up on blog posts.  But I was exhausted and feeling icky so I just couldn't bring myself to get to it until just now.

We woke up super early to go grab the car and head out to meet with the caterer in Poggibonsi about 40 minutes away and then to meet with the florist in Montalcino which was about another hour and 20 minutes from Poggibonsi.  Out the door we fly and we stop at a bakery just across the street from us and have these beautiful and wonderous smelling pasteries.  Mine had cotto ham, cheese and a squash flower rolled up like a cinammon bun.  Dan had a sweet, sticky bun, both incredible.  We hike our butts down to the public parking lot where my brain suddenly kicks in and remembers that I grabbed pretty much every paper we had at the apartment except the one with the addresses we needed.  Sigh.  So we shell out the 20 euros for one nights parking (yeah, that's right 20 euros which equals about $26 americanos.) and then wind our way around back to the apartment which takes forever because of course I get lost about 5 times.  After I send Dan back multiple times to get the right papers off we go.  I only get lost about 4 times but we eventually get on the right track and are treated to some interesting neighborhoods.  It's hard to keep your eyes on the road because there is such a concentration of things to see but you are also on the verge of a nervous breakdown from driving so, you focus on not dying or killing anyone.

Driving on the highway is as it should be!  People drive fast and in the RIGHT lane unless you need to pass in which case you get over to the left lane, pass and get immediately back into the right lane.  You hear that American drivers?  There are no shoulders and the exits are few and far between so there are police cameras monitoring traffic at intervals.  There cool thing about this is that there is a warning about a quarter mile ahead of time that one is coming up and then there is a giant sign over the box that is set up to catch you.  It took me passing about 2 boxes to realize what was going on so hopefully we don't get any tickets.  The scenery of course was luscious and there were some fun tunnels we drove through.  When we get to Poggibonsi the GPS is giving us great directions and we are hitting all the turns (except for a few spots where GPS first tried to drive us into a wall next to train tracks but, hey, nobody is perfect!).  We see we are getting close and GPS says "Turn left", which we do, onto a very narrow, single lane dirt road into the forest.  Hmmmmm.  Ok, well, GPS seems confident and who knows, this could be right.  It has to be right!  So up, up, up and around and around we go until GPS says, "You have arrived at your destination."  Oh really?  We are in the middle of nowhere GPS!!!  WTF???  I'm about to slide off the side of a steep hillside into a vinyard.  I'm pretty sure we are NOT at our destination.  So we drive up a little further and find a little farm driveway to pull into and I call the caterer who casually tells us that, oh yeah, there are two streets with the same exact name and one is wrong.  While we are sitting in the driveway the old woman who lives there comes out to the gate to stare at us the entire time even though we are waving her away.  We reprogram our GPS and head back into town and finally find the caterer.

They are super nice people who we were assured spoke very good English.  Not so much true but we managed to awkwardly charade our way through what we needed so it should be interesting to see what we end up with!  When we were ready to leave we asked about the best food in town and she sent us out to a place she called Sosta del Papa.  It was out of town in the country and actually called Sosta di Pio VII but MAN was it worth finding!  It is an idyllic little stone farmhouse covered in ivy and flowers and the food was so good I could have cut out my tongue after eating there and not regretted it one bit.  The waiter came out and instantly I liked him.  Cute in a rough way with a smart ass way about him.  He guessed I was from NY!  Probably just a lucky guess though.  They brought out a brown paper bag filled with fresh bread and we had a mixed plate appetizer of meats and sauces to start and then a plate of fresh made ricotta and spinach ravioli in a tomato with boar sauce.  After that we shared a mixed grill plate of chicken, pork ribs, sausage and steak (which was cooked perfectly rare.  They don't ask you how you want it, they just cook it right.) and it was perfect in it's simplicity.  Oh, and of course, wine.  FOOD COMA!!!  But no time for that, time to get to the florist!

Back on the road and this trip was more country roads than highway.  They do not have any shoulders on any of their roads which is probably a good thing to keep tourists like us from pulling over to take pictures every 5 feet but I really wanted to pull over and take pictures every 5 feet!  Oh well, we got some blurry, over exposed pictures you can see on our Flickr feed.  When you pull into Montalcino you are instantly taken back in time.  You can imagine it as it was hundreds of years ago.  It's small and every view is breathtaking.  We had some time so what did we do?  We got gelato of course!  I had lemon and Dan had Creme Caramel.  Both super yum :)  As we sat outside and ate it we watched the town cat come sauntering through on his rounds.  A tough looking little fuzzball.  After gelato we decided we had better check and make sure the florist is where it said it would be since nothing else has been where it's supposed to be.  SIDE NOTE: Dan and I decided that Florence changes itself at will.  You see things one day that you don't the next and vice versa.  Every day!  OK, BACK TO THE STORY - We wander down the street and find the florist - miracle!  So we keep going to check out the town while we have time.  So quaint and full of so many steep hills and stairs. 

When we finally meet with the florist she speaks absolutely NO English but has brought her 30-something years old son who is obviously a video gamer to sort of translate.  Again, we manage to work out what we want via hand gestures and pictures and our limited Italian vocabulary.  So, we'll see what I end up with for flowers!  I'm not even sure what I asked for at this point...hahahaha!  It's at this point that I speak on the phone with my wedding planner and she tells me that we should plan on my dress not arriving for real.  I want to cry but all I can do is laugh and shrug my shoulders and ask the florist if she can make me a dress out of flowers.  She actually considers it for a moment.  We decide to take advantage of the sunlight we have left to explore the town some more and we are glad we did.  When we finally go to get back on the road Dan decides to give driving a try.  Bravo Dan!  It was a fairly uneventful drive back except for some ridiculous traffic getting back into the city and Dan did great driving the whole way.  We were very boring that night and came home, cooked up some eggs, salami and cheese with bread for dinner, did some blogging and uploaded some photos.  Oh yeah!  I took what I thought was a melatonin but actually turned out to be an Ambien which suddenly punched out my brain...zzzzzzzzzz.
All day 4 pics here http://www.flickr.com/photos/65343163@N05/sets/72157629890275150/
Tomorrow, the Ufizzi y'all!

Day 3: 1 step closer to official

Have you ever woken up hung over from a night full of beer, wine, tequila, whiskey, gin and stuff you don't remember drinking for about another 8 hours?  That is what we woke up feeling like today.  We only had a bit of wine with dinner and it was crappy but I think that jet lag caught up with us AND we are both having wicked allergies.  Anyway, we had to be up early to head to the American consulate to get another certification on our wedding paperwork.  We jump out of bed, manage not to barf, stop at that same little caffe as the day before and run to the appointment, which of course is not really where the map says it is.  When we get there, there is a small line out front and there are military guards who take their job VERY seriously.  Which is odd becasue we just walked into the Italian consulate in Houston without even a hello.  Anyway, I have to go in first but I'm told to wait at a particular spot outside the door for a bit.  Then I'm allowed in and there is another guard inside who points to another particular spot for me to stand.  Then I have to take off my sunglasses and belt and put those along with my camera and turned off phone into a box and run my purse and jacket through an x-ray machine and walk through a metal detector with yet another guard.  I can not take in the phone or the camera.  I walk back to where I'm supposed to be and I realize when I am called that Dan has all of the money and I will need to pay for the certification...DUH!  So I tell them and they end up going out to get him even though we were supposed to be in there seprately.  While we are waiting a very peculiar gentleman comes in to tell his story about how apparently he is stuck in Italy and he wants someone to fly him out but he has a job that starts in October so he'll need to be back and he's been trying to make flight arrangements and call all sorts of people but he's apparently never been able to make a phone or computer work...ever from anywhere in his life...omg.  On top of that he was talking at the top of his lungs unncessarily and insulting the guy who he needed to help him.  The story is much longer than that but this is only the start of the day and this blog is already longer than I intended.  So, long story short, we got our next tier of certification and smooched about it.

When we got outside it was so sunny and beautiful and I wanted to chronicle the event so we took some pictures.  One of them was of the consulate.  Big tip: taking a picture of the American Consulate in Italy is a NO-NO!  One of the military guards came over to us and demanded we delete the pictures and looked though my photos to make sure there were none left.  I had no idea!  On we went.  The wedding planner had to take our paperwork to the prefecture office for yet another certification and we were to meet her by the Duomo. 

I GOT TO GO INTO THE ROBERTO CAVALLI SHOP AND TOUCH THE CLOTHES!!!!

This area by the Duomo is FULL of every major and minor and in between designer you could ever think of and I wanted to go into every store and touch everything they had in them.  I did end up buying something in the stores down there...nailclippers.  Exciting right?  They are sweet, don't be jealous.

Oh right!  Dan sold some art before we left to someone in Italy!  Strange right?  So we brought it with us and went on a mission to find a place to ship it.  Not as easy as you would think.  Turns out, as we were looking for some wifi to find the address of a DHL on my phone email we stopped right outside a Mailboxes Etc place.  Oh fate, you are sweet!  So, off to the Duomo we go, again and I get to redeem myself by taking pictures that are a little better with the right camera settings this time!

After we meet the planner and get our paperwork back we head out to find a plaza that we had come across earlier that had a bunch of food vendors set up with some killer looking food and sat on the grass in the sun having an impromptu little picnic.  It was really nice considering we had to go right after that to pick up the rental car which I somehow booked to return to the wrong place and prepaid so they gave me all sorts of messages about how it is UNCHANGABLE when I booked it.  We were going to walk but we decided to take the tram.  Why not!  It's exactly like the "trains" in Austin except they run every 5 minutes or so and are in public places where it's easy to get to which makes them useful (city of Austin, please take note).  On the way to the tram we had to take a little underground tunnel to get across the street.  Down in this tunnel was a very overweight man sitting in a cardboard box up to his chest begging very loudly and lamentful out to everyone as they walked by for money.  Here is where you judge me...I couldn't help but laugh a bit to myself becasue it was such a ridiculous site!!!  I know, horrible but, you had to see the extent of it yourself to understand.  I really wanted to take some video to share with you but now that would be REAL disgusting of me, wouldn't it?  Anywho, we get on the tram, get to the rental car place (still feeling like total crap at this point) and I'm ready to do battle.  Not only can I return it where I need without even a raised eyebrow but we get upgraded to a Fiat :)

Have any of you ever driven in Italy?  I'm not talking about the countryside (which is an adventure of it's own) but in the city?  If you have, MAJOR PROPS to you.  It is a new type of craziness that I love!  I think genetically I get my driving skills from Italy.  There seem to a be very few loose rules yet everyone works together to get where they are going and it completely works!  Scooters (which by the way, we have only seen one Vespa out of hundreds of scooters) go anywhere!  Between cars, on the other side of the road, I mean everywhere!  Cars drive so close to you that you can't see headlights but you can see the details of the persons face.  And everyone drives down these super narrow cobblestone streets about a million miles per hour.  It's exhilerating.  I'm so lost most of the time but it's all good.  I drove through a large public square filled with families where cars aren't allowed!  And nobody seemed to care one bit!  If you've got balls, I highly suggest you drive in an Italian city.

After that we got back to the apartment and hung out for a while to recover a bit before going back out to see if we could buy tickets to some museums and art galleries.  No such luck, they were closed by then but it was a gorgeous night and we took our time getting back, stopped at Grom for the daily dose of Gelato (I had pink grapefruit and Dan had stratchiatella and some other delicious flavor that they lady made him get) and picked a restaurant for dinner.  First loser of the trip, food sucked but even sucky food in Italy is pretty good so...

OH, we came across a tiny little electronics store at some point right before dinner with a puny little fan in the window so we swung in to see if we could get a fan and some speakers.  The speakers were tiny computer speakers that probably could barely squeak and BINGO, up on the packed to the gills shelf a fan!  I should explain that we are both used to a fan on at night for sleeping and this apartment is dead quiet.  Anyway, we asked her about it and she said, "oh, that's just the box.  There is no fan."  Um...ok.  Bye~
All photos from this day here http://flic.kr/s/aHsjzALbtN

Tomorrow...more adventures in driving!

Day 2: Piede é piede é piede...

After a good night's sleep (we thought we beat jet lag but...more on that next post) we woke up and were excited to hit the town.  The day's agenda was based simply off of finding some necessities.  On a national holidy in Italy, of course ;)  The goal was to find a supermarket rumored to be just up the street.  One of the interesting things about Italy is that there is not a supermarket as we know them on every corner.  There are little markets all around town but they typically specialise in either veggies or fruit or meat or bread and such.  There are a few slightly bigger markets that have a mixed selection of a few of these things but not really pharmacy needs.  You have to go to a seprate farmacia to get things like allergy medicine, body lotion, vitamins and all.  While I can certainly appreciate they way they operate, I still missed having my mega-mart where I can buy anything I could possibly want/need in one store.  However, not having that luxury led us on a wonderful sightseeing tour of Florence!

First thing in the morning we found a cute little caffe on the back streets near our apartment.  Not much English spoken here so we knew it was going to be good!  The cappuchino...TO DIE FOR!!!  Then off to the market...or so we thought.  Essentially we zigged and we zagged and kept trying to find Wifi to look on a map, which is fairly useless.  Along the way we barely found what we needed but we bought me an Italian leather jacket, an authentic, for real print of a painting someone completely not famous did...which is a story in itself.  The guy selling them was a street vendor and I made the mistake of saying "Oooh, pretty" and it was on.  50 euros - no thank you.  2 for 80 - no thank you.  First one 40/second one 35 - no thanks.  2 for 60 - no, really.  Ok, you are special (rolls up two and puts into our bag with the leather jacket.  I'll let you just have them.  For 35 - no, no, no, thank you though.  1 for 15 - oh for christ's sake fine.  SOLD!!!  And I'm pretty sure I left out a few negotiations.  Those guys are talented though, could make a fortune selling something of real value.

Let's see, what else...we found an awesome square with gigantic arches and a carousel that had a very cool bookstore where Dan scored some sweet graphic novels!  Then we were sure we were onto an actual supermarket but no.  However we did reach a mega highway and then had to go back through a seedy side of town where we found another cute little place to eat lunch.  A salad with super soft yummy cheese, tomatos, olives and cucumber and a plate of  bruschetta with fantastic white beans and tomatoes.  Then we ran into Dante and boy did he look pissed.

I accidently peeked into a military zone hatch and then found the sign saying what it was with a picture of a guy pointing a gun at you...hahahaha!  And then we found our way back to the Duomo where I managed to take a bunch of photos that turn out like shit becasue the settings on my camera were all wrong.  Go me.  Interesting fact, at the Duomo you can buy 16 different kinds of condoms from an outside vending machine.

We found ourselves back by the train station and we had realized the night before that we were about a block away from this gigantic fort the day before so we decided to check it out.  It was really pretty down there with a park and a pond and you could walk all around it on a path lined with big old green trees.  We wanted to go in but there was some special event going on with a long line.  If we could read Italian we would know what it was but, we don't.  We did however find some graffiti and poster art that was very cool today!  You don't need to know Italian to appreciate that.

More wandering and getting completely lost and we came across a restaurant where we had some delicious pizza, decent carbonara and some crappy wine that made me feel gross.  OH, and profiteroles.  Then home to bed where we both laid awake feeling like shit aaaallllllll night.  And of course we had to be up bright and early the next day for phase 2482 of our paperwork to get married....

I almost forgot, somewhere in there we had our mandatory gelato, well, I did.  Dark chocolate yum.  Dan had a waffle slathered in messy, melty, drippy Nutella.  Are you salivating yet?  Also, you should note that for the first day's gelato I had mango and Dan had mint chocolate chip with zuppa inglese.  Also, we did find a small grocery store where we knocked a few things off the list and we found a red pepper the size of Dan's head.
All photos from this day here http://flic.kr/s/aHsjzAaNzd

Day 1: Travel semi-hell and OMG

It's technically day 2 but we are behind a day due to having the wrong adapter for the laptop.  But. to catch you up in a nutshell - 1st flight, excited, 2nd flight, full of Elsa (the only child on the flight who just happened to be sitting behind us) and her blabbermouth mother for 9+ hours.  3rd flight, major turbulance and bright green barf.
When we got in it was raining - make that POURING.  We recovered from the rollercoaster from hell ride with an amazing panini of salumi and rip the top of your mouth open bread and were rejuvinated.  We caught a taxi to the train station where we dropped off our bags and continued to get lost randomly in Florence until we "could check into" our apartment.  Right off the bat we found a vintage store where you could buy cowboy boots...funny.. and there was classic American Elvis music playing.  As we were wandering around blindly we turned a corner and BLAM, Duomo.  OMG people, it's amazing in pictures but in person, incredible.  Unimiganible.  Breathtaking.  It was amaing to hear everyone have the same reaction as us turning the corner.  We had our first pizza here next to the Swatch shop. 
Our apartment is great.  Very modern and decorated unusually, which is cool.  We have a tiny fridge and a teeny tiny oven/stove.  There is a little deck which overlooks a classic Italian courtyard with shuttered windows and clotheslines out every window.  There are bidets in the bathrooms which Dan came and asked me how they should be used.  Basically you aim it at your bum and goodies and let the water flow!  He was shocked that you need to use your hands to wash yourself and then dry everything with the towel above but...there you go folks, the down and dirty bidet.
After not getting any sleep Saturday night when the bachelor party was and then still no sleep the night before taking off, getting up at 4am Monday morning and then about 18 hours of flying with STILL no sleep, we hit the bed in the apartment thankfully at 2pm and slept until 6:30pm.  We got up and headed out to the narrow streets and explored our part of town.  We managed to stumble upon the Piazza della Signora where the Ufffizi is among other amazing museums and statues and stores are.  We found a gelato shop where we got gobs of incredibly light, flavorful Italian ice cream and then wandered up a street full of designer shops in the rain.  Afterwards we crossed the bridge back to our part of town and found a little restaurant called Osteria de Chingale Bianco and ate some of the most flavorfull pasta dishes of stotzaprelli de lamb (I forget the Italian word for it but it should translate to explosion of intense delicious flavor) and papardelli di chingale (wild boar). 
If you think you have ever had good coffee in the US then you are wrong because it's shit compared to the coffee here.  I don't even have the words to describe the coffee here but needless to say, we are ruined for life.  If you never travel to Italy for more than anything but the coffee you will feel most fortunate. 
OH, also, on our way back we are positive that we passed some mafioso.  These dudes looked serious!  I wanted a picture with them but figured i was safer keeping my mouth shut and just winking at Dan. 
It was a chilly night and we snuggled in for the night smiling and dreaming of what the next day had in store for us.
OMG...we are IN ITALY!!!
All Florence Day 1 photos at http://flic.kr/ps/ZK1sF