Egyptian statue (copy), Turin, Italy

Yes, that’s an Egyptian statue on the right-hand side of this street.  Why? Well, you might think that it’s outside the Egyptian museum — but it’s not. It’s several blocks away from the museum, and there’s no sign on the statue to tell you that or to even indicate that there is a big Egyptian museum in town. Odd.

There’s also little bit of a mystery to share about the following photo from Turin as well:

Mole Antonelliana Tower with “UFO”, Turin

I say it’s a UFO, Chris claims it was just an unusual lens flare. You can decide. Here’s another photo, without the “UFO”:

Mole Antonelliana Tower, Turin

There’s nothing mysterious about that building, though. Built in the 1800s, that building was originally intended to be a synagogue. However, the architect/developer kept running up the costs, and after the estimate had more than doubled, the Jewish congregation said enough. They built a different synagogue in a different part of town instead:

Synagogue, Turin, Italy

The city of Turin took over the construction of the Mole, and today it houses a film museum, as well as an elevator to the top. The elevator has windows on all sides, so you can see that you’re approaching the dome as you go up in the elevator, which is a little bit odd, even though you know that there is an opening that the elevator can go through.  It’s kind of like the scene at the end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate factory where the elevator goes up and out through the roof of the factory. At least that’s what I thought of as our elevator approached the inside of the Mole’s dome; I’m happy to report that although we didn’t fly over the town, we also didn’t actually crash through the glass like in the movie.

But I digress.  When you get to the top on a sunny day like last Monday, you are afforded with a view of the surrounding mountains:

Mountains near Turin Italy

No mystery, just truly spectacular.

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P.S. Also not really a mystery, but the scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where the kids step into the chocolate garden — where everything is edible! — is magical. Here’ s the clip, with the wonderful Gene Wilder singing Pure Imagination.

Trivia point: I have tagged this post as one containing a Broadway song. However, technically, the clip is from the version of the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory made in the 1970s which was not on Broadway prior to the movie being made.  However, it is coming to Broadway in 2017. So, technically, this is now about to be a Broadway song).

Well, at least we look at a pizza tradition that Chris and I have had over most of the last 14 years.

Now, in Italy, and particularly in Verona, people eat late. So, if you arrive rather late, e.g. 8pm, it’s actually rather early for dinner. I mean, Italians will often go out to eat around 9pm. So, even if you arrive in Verona at 8pm there are still going to be plenty of restaurants open after that for dinner.

But early on in our visiting here, we didn’t necessarily understand that. At least early on we always wound up arriving late in the day, and were in those days worried that we wouldn’t be able to find dinner if we got in late.

However,  we did know that pizza places are always open very late, unlike other restaurants. So, having been to a pizza place on our very first visit, San Matteo Church, we knew that it was a decent pizza place that was sure to be open late when we arrived in Verona.

Now, over the years, we have learned that it’s actually possible to go to other places on the days we arrive in Verona late.   But our little tradition is still to choose to go to San Matteo on our first night. It’s quick and easy, and the pizza — while not as good as 14 years ago, due to a change in the management — is still predictably pretty good.

So, last Wednesday, when we arrived in Verona late in the day (by train from Tübingen), and even though we knew we could have done something different, we headed over to San Matteo for a pizza after checking in at the hotel.

Now, we don’t always have the same kind of pizza; their menu has 50-70 different possible combinations.  Here are the two we selected last Wednesday:

Pizza with spicy salami, black olives, and onions

Pizza with prosciutto and mushrooms

Each pizza is served to be eaten as a “personal pan pizza” concept; it’s a very thin crust, and you eat it with a knife and fork.

BTW, the San Matteo Church is a pizzeria, but the name is accurate, as it is in a building that was a former Catholic church (called San Matteo). Not often you eat pizza in church, eh? (In the interest of full disclosure, though, San Matteo is not the only pizza place in a former church here in Verona, either; we’ve eaten in at least one other one, but I don’t recall the name right off.)

Anway, while we lived in Europe we used to go to San Matteo several times a year, and even before that on average more than once a year since 2002. But this is our first trip back to Verona in the last 20 months. So, it was fun that the maitre d’ — who used to be a waiter many years ago — still remembered us!  He’s always pleasant, and always seems to get a kick out our telling him that it’s our tradition to go there for our first meal on every visit to Verona.

So, that’s it for today’s Food on Fridays post. Doing these posts is another tradition that I’m happy to get back to, particularly when I get a chance to introduce you to a traditional pizza — er, rather, a pizza tradition — in Verona.

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As I’ve just explained,  I know why piazza at San Matteo Church is our tradition. By contrast, Tevye doesn’t know why certain things are a tradition in the opening number from Fiddler on the Roof. However,  I’m including links to clips of that song below anyway. After all, including a Broadway show tune in a post on this blog is another tradition.

• Tradition (song) from Fiddler on the Roof – movie version
• Tradition (song) from Fiddler on the Roof  – Broadway soundtrack version performed by Zero Mostel.  I saw him perform in a revival of this show in Philadelphia many years ago; thanks, Mom, for getting those tickets for us!

McKinleyville is a town a few miles north of Arcata, CA, where we’re currently staying. For a town that’s not very big, it has a very tall totem pole at one edge of a Safeway parking lot.

I know, that doesn’t make sense. But that’s what it is: a very tall totem pole in a Safeway parking lot.

Totem Pole, Safeway Lot, McKinleyville, CA

The sign on the base doesn’t tell you much more than that, except to claim it is the world’s largest totem pole:

Sign on Totem Pole, McKinleyville, CA

Note it does not claim to be the world’s tallest totem pole, however.

Oddly, the totem pole has its own Facebook page, as it turns out, but I didn’t find it that useful in figuring out what the heck this totem pole is doing in an urban parking lot.

However, if you click here you can read an article that explains that it was originally erected to garner publicity for the small strip-mall connected to the Safeway – the idea was that if they put the world’s largest totem pole there, people would come to shop at the stores there.

Or something.

That article has more information about the carvers, and a video of them re-carving a “new” one when the old one started to fall apart. However, there’s no explanation of how they came to carve a totem pole for something in this part of the country.  I mean, I don’t believe there is any tradition of totem poles among the Native American groups in this area; the main totem pole building people are in Northern Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska. But since I haven’t looked that up, I might not be right about that.

But if there is a tradition of Native American totem poles in this area, you’d think a mention of that would have made it on to the sign.  Of course, the sign is busy giving you the size information about the pole: note that it’s the largest in the world. Not the tallest, just the largest.

Ah well. Today’s Monday Mystery has some loose ends that need to be solved, but I’ll leave our tall totem tale here, with the knowledge that there is really big totem pole in a Safeway parking lot in McKinleyville, CA.

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BTW, the people interviewed in the article make a big deal about how “biggest” is — well,  if not “better”, at least as good as “tallest”.  But size doesn’t matter — at least not to this 5′ tall-when-I-round-up blog poster.

Nor does it matter in the following related-to-Broadway songs…

First, from the musical Barnum, we have Tom Thumb singing Bigger isn’t Better:

Next, watch as the 4’11” Kristen Chenoweth celebrates how size doesn’t matter to the Drama Desk awards:

Enjoy.

A great unforseen side-benefit of that is that we have the ability to get a library card in many places. All the towns we’ve temporarily lived-in have had methods for getting library cards that involve getting mail at a local address.  Santa Barbara has a great service to facilitate this: they provide you with a postage-paid postcard that you fill out and give back to them. They mail you the card, which you then you bring back to the library to get your card. Very easy – no waiting or messing around with getting official mail from other sources. Nice.

In Seattle they took any kind of mail that was sent in your name to your address, so there we brought a large shipping box that had my name and address on it. Definitely not as convenient as the Santa Barbara postcard.

In Vancouver, you didn’t to show any mail – you just had to pay $30 for 3 months. Not as convenient. But at least we were able to do it.

BTW, after having been away from the U.S. for so long, it’s been fun to realize that the libraries now have ways to request books via their websites. I did that a lot in Seattle, getting books that were housed in community branches all over the city, and having them delivered to my local branch which was just two blocks away. A very nice feature of modern libraries, IMHO, and something that changed over the 11 years Chris and lived outside the U.S.

Anyway, to end this brief homage to libraries and library cards, I’ll offer a few appropriate Broadway show tunes.  But of course – I mean, some things never change.

1. A Trip to the Library, from the musical She Loves Me. I’ve posted this song before, but today’s clip is performed by Jane Krakowski, who is up for a Tony Award on Sunday for her performance in this year’s revival of She Loves Me.  (Tony Awards are on Sunday, June 12th). BTW, the clip in that link is just a small snippet of her performing the song.  Here’s a link to the whole song performed by Sally Mayes, a woman who was nominated for a Tony award for the same role years ago in an earlier revival.
2. Marian, The Librarian: a classic song and scene from the musical The Music Man.  I think that Marian might have appreciated the idea that people nowadays can access the library books online, instead of causing so much ruckus dancing around her library.
3. Belle, from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. In the song, Belle doesn’t have a library in her little middle ages European town, but she always has her “nose stuck in a book.” I bring this up in part to forestall any questions about whether or not we visited the libraries when we lived in Italy and Germany.  Here’s the scoop: in Italy, the library was intimidating: no open stacks, plus I didn’t read Italian very well.  In Germany, it worked more like the North American libraries I was used to, with open stacks and a library card you could get with an ID – and proof of a mailing address. So while we lived in Tübingen, Chris and I both had library cards. As proof, I offer this old post I wrote about it all back then. Enjoy reading that,  as you’re listing to all the musical trips to the library…

In any case, the main reason for the post is a photo from Volunteer Park. From a particular vantage point there you get a nice view of the Space Needle off in the distance. In fact, there is an iconic shot that you get from there that frames the Space Needle in the center of the modern art sculpture that is placed in front of the Asian Art Museum in the park. Technically, the name of the sculpture is Black Sun.

But the sculpture is referred to by locals as “The Doughnut”:

Black Sun (“The Doughnut”) sculpture

Yup, it does resemble a doughnut.

In fact, it looks just like a real doughnut that Chris and I sampled last week. Except, of course, the real doughnut didn’t provide a view of the Space Needle inside the middle like the sculpture did:

Chocolate Doughnut from “The Mighty O” in Seattle

As I said, this post was intended to be a Travel Tuesday post from Seattle. But I guess it just proves that no matter where we go or what the topic is, and despite my best intentions,  the discussion must necessarily always come back around to doughnuts.

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For whatever reason, this song kept running through my head when I thought about writing up this post: But the World Goes ‘Round.  Not a song about doughnuts, and not quite a crazy Broadway show tune – but it was at least written by Broadway composers, and doughnuts are at least round.  

First, the photo:

Coffee at the Cat Cafe

Now, we could think of it as representing a Monday Mystery, since it’s odd to see a cat face in a cup of coffee.

Or, we could think of it as Travel Tuesday — since it is Tuesday, after all, and the photo was taken at a Seattle coffee shop called Meowtropolitan. As you can guess from the cafe’s name it’s a special “themed” cafe all about cats. Everything at the place is either named for cats or things having to do with cats. Their other feature –  er, gimmick? — is that for a not-so-small fee you can go into the “cat lounge” and hang out with some cats. Real cats from the local shelter. You can go in and play with them, and then if you want to adopt them, they are available for that, too.

Chris and I didn’t take that option, though. They charge  $10 per 50 minute session with the cats  (although that does include the price of one coffee drink). But Chris and I get enough free chances to play with our landlady’s cat if we want to.  Paying for coffee and a cat — as it were — seems a little odd to me. But while we were there, the other 8 people in the place were all waiting for their turn to go into to play with the cats. So, I guess there are enough feline fanciers to keep the cats content.

Anyway, I’ll just stop here and leave you with this song that celebrates cats. It’s from the Broadway musical Cats. It is, after all, the the purr-fect song for today’s post…

Now, I had heard of the First Folio, but wasn’t really sure exactly what it was until we went to see it. It’s the first collected publication of 36 of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623 a few years after his death. Crucially, it includes some plays that were performed but not published during his lifetime, which means that had they not been published, some of his more famous works (nowadays) might have been lost. Plays like Macbeth, As You Like It, and The Tempest.  Crazy to think now that they might have been lost, eh?

Anyway, it was interesting to see the big format of the book, with the typeface that emphasized different parts (in the page that was open, the first letters in the lines of a soliloquy almost could have formed an acrostic; in the Third Folio pages, the boxes in the layout for the different scenes gave an entirely different feel to the page.

After we saw it, I then read an article in a British newspaper about how Shakespeare’s last set of plays were done under a different monarch (he first wrote while Elizabeth I was on the throne, and then continued while James I reigned). It didn’t say it in the exhibit (at least, not that I noticed), but I having read that article, I now wonder if those plays weren’t published by Shakespeare because he was too busy being a “King’s Man” (a royal appointment), which meant he was constantly at the monarch’s beck and call to arrange for his troupe to give performances at the palace.

In other words, it was hard to be the bard. As it were. Right, well, that’s a song from the musical Something Rotten!, a fanciful and not at all historically based musical which posits that Shakespeare was a famous rock-star of a playwright during his lifetime.

At least that song is actually related to today’s post…

In any case, seeing the exhibit on our trip to the library was a little bit of serendipity on Saturday. It’s a traveling exhibit and I don’t know where it goes next, but if you should ever stumble onto a chance to see a Shakespeare Folio in person, I’d highly recommend it.

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Bonus clips from Something Rotten!

• Nostradamus’ nephew predicts that the next big thing in the theatre will be A Musical. (Here’s  a more complete version with all the lyrics: A Musical- with lyrics).
• The song Hard to be the Bard done in full costume, in a special performance at the White House
• Welcome to the Renaissance – the opening number from Something Rotten!

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Yes, I know. Seattle is not known for its sunny weather.  But oddly enough, we’re not only having sunny weather, we’re having a heat-wave, Seattle-style.  Today is the 3rd day that the temperature has been over 80ºF (27ºC), which is a record for April in Seattle.

To celebrate, and because I can’t figure out another way to work these in, below you’ll find a couple more photos from our trip to Discovery Park on Sunday, the first day of the heat wave.

Forest plants in the sun, Seattle

Olympic Mountains viewed from Discovery Park

The following panorama is odd – the camera was confused by the sun, or something, and so the automatic “sticking” makes it look like it’s been folded. It’s all digital, so those are only virtual folds below:

Panorama of Olympic Mountains (Mt. Rainer is hidden, off to the left)

BTW, on Saturday, before the heat wave started, Chris and I went downtown to the central library so that I could look at some reference materials that can’t be checked-out. Which means we made a trip to the library, which happens to be the name of a fun song from a Broadway musical called called She Loves Me. The movie is based on the same source material as the movie You’ve Got Mail, a movie that starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, the same two actors who starred in the movie Sleepless in Seattle. And, of course, the title of that movie gave me the idea for the title of today’s post.

But I know, I know. That’s a bit of a stretch as a way to work in a song from a Broadway musical, since there is but a very tenuous thread that connects the musical to anything to do with the Sleepless in Seattle movie.

Never mind. Instead I’ll just have to end this post with a wink and a smile … which is the name of a song from that movie.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been here 3 weeks already. It’s also hard to believe that I’m still trying to finish getting my computer back in shape – it’s been a little more than 3 weeks since the hard drive died, and I am almost back in business, as it were.

Unfortunately, most of the time my computer is up and running I am using it for doing that not-so-fun annual ritual: taxes. You’d think it would be easy to do tax returns for  2 people with little income, no jobs and no property. But, not actually. A worksheet that we have to work through  for just one item on the basic tax return required 35 steps/decision points before coming up with what amount to enter on that one line. 35 steps.

And here I though things were complicated when we lived abroad. Well, they were, but in a different way, I guess.

Ah well.  So, while that fun is in progress, plus with my computer still needing some extra love and attention, I can’t promise regular blog posts this week. But that’s my goal by the end of the week.

In the meantime, though, here’s a glimpse of some of the area around where we’re staying.  You can’t see it from our windows, but if you go down the street and look to the south, you can actually see most of the Seattle skyline. In the following photo, if you look carefully to the right of that big evergreen tree in the middle, you can spot the Space Needle off in the distance:

Downtown Skyline, seen from Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle

Now, it’s been pretty raining and gray much the time, so it was a surprise on a clear day the other day to discover there are mountains visible both to the east and to the west.  I believe the following photo is of the Olympic Mountains to our west. (Again, this is visible if you walk down the street a little bit from where we’re staying):

Mountains near Seattle

The photo of the Cascades to the east didn’t come out with my little  cell phone camera – we’re not that close to the mountains, and the cell photo works better with unobstructed views of things in the distance. I’ll try again with my other camera when we get another clear day.

We’re staying in a cute residential neighborhood, and there are a lots of flowering trees at the moment, including some that I think are cherry trees:

Trees in bloom, Seattle, March 2016

Blossoms, Seattle, 2016

But of course the best part of the place is our location: we’re staying at the corner of Woodlawn and 42nd street:

42nd Street and Woodlawn Avenue North

That’s the best part because that’s a song cue if I ever heard one.  Here’s a link to the 42nd Street song and dance from the Broadway show by that name. In that same clip the performers  eventually go into the song We’re in the Money. The jury’s out if that will apply to us or not with the taxes this week … but we are at least staying on 42nd Street.

Anyway, I hope to be back with regular posts soon. Thanks for staying tuned until then!