We're back in Maine!  I’ve been too busy to write about our trip up Monviso last Sunday, (the mountain in the paramount pictures logo).   It was June 21^st, the summer solstice and opening day for many mountain trekking trails.  Our destination was Quintino Sella, a “hut” in a pass way up near the summit.  We left in the early a.m. and got back in the evening all in one piece.  On the way we saw 4 lakes, progressing from swim-able to still frozen, a bunch of ibex, (the local mountain goats that are practically domestic as they are protected and accustomed to hikers) and a whole hell of a lot of real hikers who left us in the dust.   The first hour going up my lungs were on fire, but eventually I adjusted to the altitude and scampered along like one of the little goats!  At times rock slides had covered the trail so we’d wander off in the wrong direction and add ½ hour onto our trip.  We had to cross a lot of areas still covered in snow but we all had poles with us so I didn’t slide off into any crevasses.  Looking down over some of the precipices nearly made me lose my cookies.  The trip was long and exhausting but worth it.  It was quite chilly especially at the summit.  We left the city at 70 something degrees in the early morning and by the time we reached the top it was maybe 50 with wind chill.  We were above the clouds!  So gorgeous.  Take a look-see.

our destination, Monviso

first lake

Lago Fiorenza

rock slide and wild Azalea

GP and Federico

second lake

intrepid hikers on the trail

Lago Chiaretto

still snow

third lake - no name?

Last lake with moon like scape

ditto

The summit above the clouds

This was a bit discouraging.  3 plaques dedicated to hikers who had died here.  Thankfully I saw it on the way down.

Ibex!

So that is it for Italy this year.  Taking the summer off to garden!  I'll be back in September.  xxoo me

Remember that "drama" thing I mentioned in my blog yesterday?  We'll here are some doozies. 

First, a mystery!  An old, odd guy in our condo complex makes honey and has a dozen or so hives along the side of an orchard up the road.  He stores it in barrels in his garage.  All the neighbors woke up this morning to signs taped on the glass doors to our buildings accusing one of us of having stolen his honey and leaving a sticky mess behind!  (Last year he accused someone of breaking in and making off with a weed whacker.)  It's all the gossip over the garden hedges today.  We are now on the look-out for someone with sticky fingers!  Ha ha?
 
In the news we just heard this one.  Some crooks in Naples have been arrested, after a long investigation, for emptying out rarely visited tombs in a popular cemetery and then reselling them.  It was discovered when a family, who had moved to the US and was back visiting relatives, dropped by the family tomb to find someone else in Grandma's spot. (or plot)  No one knows where Grandma is now residing.

Gp went into the city today, Saturday, to do some errands and came back without having completed any as everywhere he went, businesses were closed.  On a Saturday.  With the Pope and the Shroud and hundreds of thousands of tourists in town.  We are talking about shops here people!  Business sense zero.  Give Italians the choice between money and free time and they'll take the free time any day.  5 cents in their pockets and they'll put it towards their holidays.  There is a huge lack of work ethic which is the basis of so many problems here.  But on the other hand, they are having yet another "communal pizza party" in the garden in front of the condos.  The children squealing and yelling, the loud talking and laughing, will go on til all hours of the night.  Most of the neighbors are there with the probable exception of Mr Schiaccavillani, the victim of the honey heist.

xxoo me

Tomorrow is my birthday, the Pope will be in Torino on Sunday, and we'll be flying home a week from now!  I would love to go see the Pope as I think he's just swell, but GP and I are scaling some damn mountain where there is a glacier and it's frickin' 30 degrees.  I only agreed because he said I always want to go to the sea and never the mountains, poor him.  Don't get me wrong.  I love the mountains.  But I have no desire to freeze my tush off.  As for my birthday which I'm trying my best to ignore, I am doing nothing spectacular.  I have to clean and shop and pack for the trip home.  Yeah!  It has been a long year.  I'm tired of Italy and school and all the drama that comes with both.  A couple more dinners, a few more bottles of wine and I'll wrap up the 3rd year of my Italian adventure.  xxoo me

This is what our neighbor does on holiday.

 http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/17/football/arturo-vidal-crash-chile-football/index.html

He's the one whose groupies party til all hours behind our condo.  Latin American music blasting until 5 am, big, loud sports vehicles racing up and down a very narrow road, and hours of yelling and singing and cheering after a big game.  Of course the cops do nothing because soccer is king here.  I've given heads up to friends who bet on the odds of players coming and going from the team.  If their kids haven't been re-registered for school next year, we know the player has been traded to another team or is retiring (at 35!).  Surely there must be some way for me to make a buck out of this!  Mamma wants a new pair of shoes!  xxoo me

Today my baby turns 17.  Wow.  She is studying for her finals and we've started packing for the summer in Maine.  We are very excited to get home.

For her birthday dinner Grace is deciding between sushi and Mexican.  When I first came to Italy, 30 or so years ago, the only "foreign" cuisine was very bad Chinese food.  Now the city and even small towns offer a selection of eats from all over the world.  There are approximately 5 million immigrants accounted for in Italy.  Those are the people who are in some way registered, residents or new citizens.  That doesn't include the thousands that arrive weekly on the southern shores and islands.  In a country with fewer than 60 million people, that number is huge and rising exponentially.  Italy, and to a lesser degree Greece and Spain are carrying the brunt of an epic exodus from Africa and the Middle East.  I can't speak for other European nations, but Italy is losing it's Italian-ness.  I suppose it's the nature of progress, but I find it a little sad.  Italians are having fewer and fewer children, with most families in the north having only one child.  Many of the babies born here now are to Romanian or African parents.  Torino has the largest population of Romanians outside of Bucharest!  There is an entire area of the city where you hear only Romanian spoken.  Beautiful little tradition wooden churches (Eastern Orthodox) are popping up in vacant lots between old brick and stone buildings.  The large park outside the city where GP and I have taken to walking is where the Romanians congregate to picnic on weekends, hold weddings and other celebrations.  They gather by the hundreds.  The old market area where once the workers from Southern Italy lived is now mostly Africans, Middle Easterns and Asians.  The pizza places have been replaced by kebab shops and Chinese restaurants.  The market sells all sorts of spices and food products from far and away.  As immigrants moved in, Italians moved out and the vacuum was filled by more immigrants.  There are old women from Syria making and selling their yummy flat bread still hot from the griddle and Nigerians selling gigantic bunches of good smelling herbs I can't identify.  It's become quite exotic and interesting but has lost it's old Italian charm.  As happens, the immigrants are doing all the jobs the Italians no longer want to do.  They are the domestic workers and street cleaners.  Unfortunately the numbers are so large and so frequent, there has been no time to absorb them all.  The country is saturated and is throwing it's hands up.  I wonder what the European landscape will be in another 20 years.  For dinner we've decided on Mexican.  Have to make a reservation. xxoo me

It's been in the nineties the past week.  We missed the heat when we were at the sea but the last few days at school have been treacherous.   The air conditioning, when on, doesn't really work so we have been one large sticky, smelly crew.  Today it maxed at about 98 degrees.  Holy cow.  GP, Grace and I are hiding in our bedroom as it's the only room with air.  I'll venture out to water my poor plants once the sun is a little lower.

Anywho.  Last Thursday GP and I took the day off and went to see the World Expo in Milan.  Check out the site:  www.expo2015.org  It was fabulous.  The Expo is so large we will need at least another day to see it all.  We were there 9 hours and saw less than half.  We plan on going back with Grace is September.  The theme is supposed to be "feeding a growing world".  Some "stands", (fantastic abstract or imitation classic buildings mostly), stuck to the theme and were very informative about food production innovations or water desalinization or conservation.  The US stand was so informative it was boring as Hell.  Other stands were basically tourist information offices.  Still others were all about the typical food and recipes from their country.  There was a lot of food.  GP and I ate a kebab in Turkey, a beer and hot pretzel in Germany, more beer and tacos de los poblanos in Mexico then dinner in Algeria, (vegetarian buffet).  Dessert was gelato.  Sadly I wasn't even full...... 

Yummy kebab

"Italy" where the lines were so long we couldn't get in

"Spain" had flying suitcases

"UK" was my favorite with a huge metal buzzing beehive hooked up to a real beehive somewhere in Oxford.

I have too many photos to share but I'll add some more later.  Off to water my little garden with it's lolling tongue.  xxoo me

On our way home from the sea we stopped in Portofino, the most exclusive seaside town on the Italian Riviera.  It's where all the rich and famous take their yachts, dock and eat at outrageous prices in restaurants where they and people like them are "seen".  Suffice it to say we didn't eat there.  We just wandered and took photos and wondered who the owners of the various "boats" were. 

How I spent Tuesday

View from our bedroom window.

 Here are a couple pics from the weekend.  xxoo me

Sunset over Sestri Levante

Sometimes she still likes me.

Portofino

Bizarre hanging Rhino?

Oh it's been so long!  And I have so many exciting things to recount!  Well not so exciting and only a couple things to recount, but here goes.  This past week we had a 4 day weekend for a national holiday on Tuesday.  We thought we'd try a new area to go to the sea so we headed to the area around the town of Sestri Levante south-east of Genova.   We decided to stay up in the hills behind the coast as would be quieter and less expensive.  We stayed outside of Torza, a tiny enclave of about 50 people, at an agriturismo.  (Aside:  Agriturismi started popping up 10 or 15 years ago. They are b&bs or rented rooms or apartments in country houses or old farms.  Some are basic, others are extravagant and spa-like, but the majority are decent, simple and clean places in bucolic settings.)  As this was a long weekend equal to the 4^th of July in the States, (May 2^nd is the “Day of the Republic”), we knew the coast would be crazy busy so we went all the Hell over there, 3 plus hours compared to our normal 1, because we thought, (silly us), that maybe it wouldn't be as crowded.  We were wrong.  The sea and the towns in that area of the coast don't impress me much to be honest, but we stayed in this idyllic converted farmhouse ½ hour up into the Apennines mountains and man, was it nice.  The owners made 4 small apartments out of the old farm buildings and they did a beautiful job with restoration. We were surrounded by high wooded hills and a small orchard of fruit trees. The only sounds were birds and insects and a river in the valley below us. It was heavenly.  On our first day, having never been in the area before, we wanted to find a good place for sun and surf so we drove along the coast through three or four towns, checking out the beach fronts.  At one point we came to a series of tunnels cut through the mountains that come right down to the shore, (the mountains not the tunnels).   The tunnels were built, by hand, ages ago, well before cars.  Consequently they are only 1 lane wide, not much higher than a bus and the one-way traffic is controlled by lights at either end!  When we came to the first tunnel the light was red so the guy in front of us stopped.   The guy behind us started honking and then passed us to go into the tunnel.  Then the car in front of us followed him so, so did we.  20 minutes and 5 tunnels later we came out on the other side, still alive, with a line of cars waiting to go through, stopped at a red light.  I have no idea how one line knew to go through and the other to wait when the lights were red at either end, but they did.  Scared the crap outta me.  We ended up just spending one day at the beach as there were so many people we were literally cheek by jowl.  It was noisy and hectic and very over-priced.  So we escaped back to our hilly hide-away and had a very relaxing time.  Pics and follow up tomorrow.  xxoo me