Seasons Greetings!

Ain't that pretty? We went for a stroll in the center of Torino the other evening to see the Christmas lights. They were few and far between compared to past years. Communities are tightening their belts with the energy prices as high as they are. Street lights come on an hour later and are off an hour earlier. All public building thermostats are kept at a balmy 64 degrees. Public workers tried striking but they were up against national regulations so it was a no-go from day 1. We are all waiting in fear for our monthly electricty bills. Here at home we keep the heat down under 68, only use the washing machine, vacuum and iron after 7pm when costs are down. I'm using the oven very little. But no complaints. No one is shooting missiles at our homes and I'm not sleeping in the basement.

The daughter is here through the holidays. Sunday we visited a lovely town about an hour and a half north of here called Candelo. It sits within spitting distance of the mountains but strangely is on the edge of Italy's rice growing region. It is from here that the best risotto rices come. The town has a walled medieval center with it's original tiny buildings used as studios and shops for artists and crafters, restaurants and bars. Every Christmas they hold a Christmas fair with food stalls and activities for children. It was very pretty but packed. The older I get the less tolerant I am of crowds. Especially crowds of children. Especially crowds of tired, whiny children. Italian children seem to be particularly whiny. div class="separator" style="clear: both;">

Whoa. I just realized I haven't written anything in 9 months and really, there's not much to report. How sad! Anywho. This is a special post as it's directed at my friend D who will shortly be moving to Portugal. I have just returned from a week visit there and told her I'd give her my opinion. So here goes. The Good the Bad and the Ugly. Plus a little more.

The good: The people are lovely. They're friendly and helpful and do they all really speak English? Amazing! UNLIKE Italians who work in shops and restaurants, they seemed pleased to see us and tried their utter best to work with our (GP's) basic Portuguese. The daughter and I stuck to English. In Italy the concept that the customer is always right has never really sunk in. Shopkeepers in Italy treat you with indifference at best and contempt at worst depending on the type of shop. The only place I've encountered worse customer service is in Paris where shopkeepers blatantly glare and snarl. There's also quite a bit of smirking in those French shops. They do like a smirk. Enough of that. The countryside in Northern Portugal, where we traveled, is beautiful. Hill after hill covered by olive or orange groves or piney forest. In fact I don't think there's a square inch in the country that's flat. Even the cities are all up hill and down, mostly up it seems, and we got quite the workout every day. (So is that good or bad?) The city centers have some fabulous architecture and many buildings are sided with the famous, colorful Portuguese tiles. The food was good, the prices for said food were terrific. There is a wonderful bakery on every fricking block! Thank God for the hills.

The bad: I haven't seen that much traffic since Marrakesh and I live in ITALY. Just the number of cars on the roads at all hours is astounding. Consequently the air quality is pretty damned bad in urban areas. Even by the sea. Fortunately though the Portuguese are much more polite than Italian drivers and more flexible than American drivers so there is no road rage or contant honking of horns. Another issue is how rundown it is. The cities looked like Italy in the '80s before the economic boom. Grand buildings are falling in upon themselves. There is so much that needs to be cleaned or painted or repaired. It just looks grubby. Though that is mostly in urban areas. The smaller towns were in better shape. And there was surprisingly little litter compared to here. And this leads me to...

Porto's waterfront is vibrant and colorful. The bridge is a walking (yikes) rail bridge crossing the river.

The UGLY. Man did they do a poor job of urban planning when the cities grew after the war. If it wasn't built over a hundred years ago or in the past 10 (even that's iffy), it's (as they say in Boothbay Harbor parlance) SDU. Some Damn Ugly. The resdential areas outside of the centers are blocks after blocks of big plain BLOCKS. These expanses of apartment buildings have no saving graces. And there are hundreds of them.

And now the other stuff. We played tourists and visited Sintra with it's castle and palace. We braved a ferocious rain and wind storm off the atlantic to see the "World's Biggest Waves". We went to Obidos, a charming little walled town where we ate the best dinner of our trip. We went to Tomar for it's history of the Knight's Templar. We saw the Sanctuary of Bon Jesus in Braga and walked up it's gabillion steps. We started in Lisbon and ended in Porto. It was a quick spin through, apart from Lisbon, an area we'd never visited. A good time was had by all!

xx me

This is the Marble Arch Mound. Or was. It's in the process of being dismantled. It was erected in 2021 as a tourist attraction to try to entice people downtown again during/after the pandemic. It was supposed to be an artificial hill with a scenic platform on top for looking out over central London. It was a massive and expensive failure. At first they tried charging people to go up but the view was actually blocked by tall trees across the road and the turf covering the mound dried up and shrank. Anywho. So they stopped charging but people still didn't go up and it ended up being a huge target of jokes and finger pointing. Oh well.

This is a most beautiful bookshop. All bookshops are wonderful and London is packed with them but THIS is something else. It's the first Daunt Bookshop, a chain of stores specializing in travel books but they carry every genre. I could spend much too much time and money in there. I behaved very well and only bought 2 books.

I took a tour of Westminster Abbey today. It was very good. Our guide was hilarious and knew all sorts of wonderful and scandalous stories, none of which I can remember, but I thoroughly enjoyed. I knew it would be a good tour when I saw the above at the entrance to the Abbey. Some priest has a sense of humor. I am soon off to the pub on the corner. Grace has been in this apartment for 3 years but as that coincided with Covid and closures and such I have yet had the chance to try the place out. I love British pubs. xxoo me

Day 1 in London I got up early to hit the bakeries(scone, whole grain breads) and the bookstores(english books!). Always my first stops. Before heading out I checked the news which made me cry. It's a blustery sunny coooold day and somehow the sun here is so much brighter than elsewhere, probably because it's so rare. I got back and checked the news again which made me soil my pants so I think I need to stop. Last night we went to the theater to see Come From Away, the musical about the 7000 airline passengers stuck in Newfoundland after 9/11. It was a fabulous show but felt a little too close to home with what is happening in Europe. This morning the news is only worse so I made a donation to CARE and we went for a long walk in Richmond, an area in southern London where Ted Lasso takes place. We're back now and again watching the news. It's not getting better. xxoo me

It's been a cold winter. And dry. Yesterday we hiked in the mountains with our "snowshoe" group. No snowshoeing to do this year as it hasn't significantly rained or snowed in well over 2 months. Very worrisome. The trails are covered in 2 feet of dried leaves that should be nicely rotting and instead are setting up the mountains for some terrible summer fires. We walked up and down for about twelve miles in glorious sunshine. In the more protected and full sun areas the heather, forsythia, primrose and daffodils were in bloom. I can't wait for spring! MIL has given up going to the church rectory to record the week's deaths. But as she must keep up on this vital information, we've had to come up with new outlets. Every Thursday is market day so we make a weekly stop to see the notices on the town's bulletin board but often times, as she always points out, the boards have not been updated. They will still show the same ole dead people from the weeks before. Consequently, GP has begun to check the town's website daily and calls MIL with the names of the newly deceased. She needs to know the name, the age and their origin. She'll then tell us if she knew them and how or if they were not originally from town in which case these poor dead folk were unimportant "outsiders". Good gad. I hope I don't go before her! I sure as Hell don't want her writing my obit. The stories she tells us are hilarious and sad as they show the most unkind sides of humanity including hers! The hugely aging population here has led to an influx of eastern european women to act as care-givers as Italians either can't or won't do it. No longer do extended families live communally. The old bachelor uncle is visited twice a year by relatives waiting for the farm to be handed down. Then he hires a gal from Slovakia who cares for him for years visiting her own 2 children only on Christmas and Easter. When the old guy dies and leaves everything to his carer, everyone here is outraged. I said good for her. She earned it. That opinion didn't go down well. Then there is the Sicilian family, (the older generation is still living a civil war here and sicilians are lesser beings), who found a place in a low income nursing home for their ancient mother even though those are very difficult to get into. But those Sicilians have their wily ways having taken all of the jobs in the civil service where they get decent pay for little work and have "connections". Hmmm. Note MIL would have been thrilled had GP chosen a career in the postal service or city offices instead of something she neither understands nor wants to. On another depressing aging note, with warm weather approaching here, I'm on the look out for a bathingsuit that will not make me LOOK like a 60+ year old woman, tankini's and skirted suits are practically taboo here, but at the same time will not send children off screaming while their parents yell "shield your eyes, shield your eyes!!". Women of all ages and body types wear bikinis to the beach. I am struggling to find one that reaches to my bellybutton thereby holding in that wrinkly flap left over from pregnancy AND that has enough structure up top to keep the boobs from drooping to my knees as gravity intends. I'm having no luck. Leaving for a week in London on Thursday. Yippee! xxoo me

They are changing rules and regulations so quickly here it makes your head spin. Nobody knows what's going on. After SECOND positive test a week after 1st, they've told me to come back in 4 days. According to my pharmacist neighbor I should have to wait another week. I just wanna get out of here! I'm going stir crazy. How much yoga and netflix can 1 person take?! Italy is in the midst of an election for President. The President is chosen by parliament The President ISN"T the head of State. THAT is the Prime Minister, who is chosen by the President. The PM needs to be approved by the Parliament. How the members of Parliament are elected confuses the heck out of me. Some are directly elected, some are installed by parties, some are voted in by non-resident Italians, some are "senators for life". All I know is that there are A LOT of them representing A LOT of parties. In the States we have 441 representatives and 100 senators who make up our congress for a population of just over 334 million. In Italy the parliament is made up of over 1000 people for a population of a bit over 60 million. Think maybe we are a little government heavy here? Just maybe? Anywho. I watch it with a passive eye. No matter how long I live here it still feels like someone else's problem. As though I don't have a stake in the outcome. The hubby has said I live like a tourist. I wish he were right! If I were a tourist I'd be traveling and eating out and enjoying the heck outta this place! Oh well. Back to yoga and netflix. ooxx me

Covid here! Covid there! Covid everywhere! Sweeping through like wildfire. 2 weeks ago, first MIL then the hubby, came down with flu-like symptoms. They tested and retested but came up negative for Covid. I carried on with my lessons as I assumed they simply had seasonal flu. Then last Sunday I got a message from a student saying that she had tested positive along with her classmates. I booked a test for Monday and VOILA! Positive. I had, and still have, minor cold symptoms. In Italy if you have Covid you are given a 6 month reprieve on vaccines so no booster for me. GP should have gone in for his booster today but on a whim he went for yet another test last night. Positive. He feels fine. He has completely recovered from his "flu". Huh. Our nextdoor neighbors had their boosters the other day and were sick as dogs. THEN their kids tested positive. NOW THEY ARE POSITIVE AND STILL ILL FROM BOOSTER! Nuts. We can't get a straight answer on quarantining either. The pharmacist where I had my test gave me an appointment for 5 days later (tomorrow) to have a second test. She said if it's negative I'm good to go. BUT various government sites say 7 to 10 days depending (on who the Hell knows what) and 21 days if I continue to test positive after all symptoms are gone! Our neighbor, 3 vaccines, positive, sick as a dog, is a pharmacist and she says 10 days of quarantine for us as it's been 6 months since our 2nd vaccines. This is complete madness. I am bored silly AND dieting so can't even cook and drink! I have binge watched the last season of After Life and the latest of Queer Eye and bawled through all of it. I've read so many books the past 2 years I can't keep them apart in me wee brain. AHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHHHH! Well that feels better. Be well. xxoo, me

My hubby's paranoid fears of a totalitarian government are being realized! The state of emergency that was (anti-constitutionally) extended means that no elections will be held this year. The government has now made vaccines obligatory for all citizens over 50 BUT one has to sign a waiver releasing the authorities from responsibilty should there be any side effects. What's THAT about? I'm certainly no anti-vaxer but I do believe in individual choice. There is a fine for those who do not comply of 100 euros and a big fat fine of 1000 - 1600 if you try to enter any establishment. What's more, the business is fined for not having checked the green pass. But all of this doesn't mean people are actually complying. This IS Italy mind you.

Last Sunday we spent the day with our neighbors who have a charming little apartment in the mountains. For a big lunch of course. There were 9 of us around a long rustic table covered in local cheeses, sausages cooks in a spicy tomato sauce, polenta, risotto and of course wine. It was a fabulous way to see out the holidays. The above photo is the view from their balcony. Not too shabby. Monday the diet starts. Every year we do this. "Vaccare" (to pig-out though literally translates into "To Cow") for weeks and then repent for a month or so. Let's see how long it will last this time. Happy 2022! xxoo me