It’s not the oddity of there being one there – we remembered a temporary one being set up during this time of year several years ago in the same spot in Piazza Bra.

Ice rink (foreground), L’Arena, the Stella Cometa, and City hall beyond

We happened to be walking by that morning as a crowd was starting to gather, awaiting the official opening of the rink:

Kids waiting for the rink to open

Now, this rink is not very big. Here’s a panorama view, which is distorted, so that it looks like it is curved. It’s not – it’s just a rectangle:

View from the other side of the rink (panorama effect; in reality, the rink is not curved)

I get why the kids are excited to skate – I liked skating on the river when I was a kid. But what I didn’t get was why all the fuss with the big opening. Take another look to the far right in that photo with the little girl above. Do you see the yellow and blue ribbon? Yes, it was a ribbon stretched across  the entrance — there was an official ribbon-cutting ceremony to “open” the open-air ice rink.

Ribbon cutting scissors on a velvet pillow

This is the mystery for today’s post: why does this tiny little temporary rink in Verona rate such a big to-do about it’s opening? I mean, there were a half-dozen dignitaries on hand to address the crowd:

Dignitaries gathered waiting for the mayor to arrive

Actually, those men had to wait for the mayor to arrive before they could get the ceremony underway. Now, look back up at the first photo. City hall is the big building in the background.  As you can see, to get from there to the rink the mayor had to go such a long way across that plaza.

I’m kidding, of course. You can walk across it in under a minute if you just go from point A to point B.  But it took the mayor 10xs that long. Or more. He stopped to shake hands and chat with people he knew all along the way. Then he was stopped by reporters who wanted sound bites for their TV or radio shows. Then he posed for additional photos with parents and children.

Not, though, with the little boy standing near me who had 10 minutes earlier asked his father why they had to wait for the mayor, couldn’t they just get on with it already?

Anyway, the mayor finally got to the rink, only about 15 minutes behind schedule.

Speechifying – the mayor is the one with the microphone

Note that yes, that is Santa Claus who is photo bombing the dignitaries in this photo. He’s standing in the background with the skaters who are behind the wall.  Santa Claus is called Babbo Natale here in Italy; one little girl was just sooo excited to see him while we were waiting for the mayor, she excitedly called out “Babbo Natale!, Babbo Natale!” over and over. Very cute.  Even though we’ve always been told that Santa Lucia is really the bigger deal here in Verona over the holidays, clearly some kids here are still excited at the sight of Babbo Natale.

There were bunch of speeches; most of the men had a turn. I believe I heard the mayor say that this rink was back this year after not being there last year, and maybe that’s why it’s such a big deal? I think he said something about budget cuts, etc. — but it was in Italian, and I was busy taking photos, so I only sort of caught the gist. Like the little boy next to me, I was getting cold and also ready for them to get on with it already.

But finally, there was a scrum around the mayor as he took those fancy scissors and cut the ribbon to open the rink officially. At least, I assume that’s what happened; from my angle I couldn’t actually see it, but the mayor did make people move back to allow the guy on the ice to get a good shot of the ribbon cutting, so it seems likely that it went OK.

Anyway, finally, it was time to skate:

Let the skating begin!

Babbo Natale got in on the action, too.

Babbo Natale on skates

But how he had time to skate on Christmas Eve is another mystery … even if it’s not the main Monday mystery for today.

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…

First, I should say that  a long time ago, shortly after we moved to Bolzano, Italy, I wrote up some notes on Italian coffee.  Click here to read that post.

I’ll wait.

OK, right, now that you’ve read my notes, you’ll have seen that I have been aware for some time that Italians do NOT drink a cappuccino or any other milk-heavy coffee drink after 10am.  It’s considered bad for your health. Tourists are given a bit of a pass on this “prohibition”, but any decent Italian would never think to order or drink a coffee with lots of milk after 10am. It’s just not done.

So it was amusing when Chris was reading the Game for Five book last week and got to a scene where the Italian barista refuses to serve a cappuccino to an Italian man after 10am. The barista comments that serving a drink like that later in the day is something he will NOT do.  He might make an exception for a tourist, he says, but for an Italian – never!

Chris read me the passage, which we both found amusing. I then commented that clearly an Italian who dared to order a cappuccino after mid-morning was so morally suspect that he must be the murderer.

I was joking.

But that actually turned out to be the solution. Too funny.

So, now, I don’t mean to be rude, but — as I also commented in that old blog post — if you are ever roaming around Italy with us, and we go into a bar together to get a coffee, and it’s after 10am and you order a cappuccino …  we’ll just have to pretend we don’t know you.

Nothing personal, you understand.  But if the baristas were ever to find out that we’re former residents of Italy, we wouldn’t want them to think we’re capable of murder.

So I sat down and was looking at the menu in this place, which was an outlet of the Ruby Tuesday’s restaurant chain.   There was an item listed that read in part:

Classic Cheese Minis Combo: USDA Choice minis with cheese and signature sauce. Served with fries. 

Read it quickly and then answer this question: what’s a classic cheese mini?  Reading it slowly just now I see that there was code in there that any American who was used to reading menus in the U.S. over the last 10 years would probably have understood. I.e., I’m guessing that “USDA Choice” is short-hand for beef. So, someone other than me might have guessed that a Classic Cheese Mini was a mini cheeseburger.  It was a surprise to me, however, when the plate arrived with two little cheese burgers on the plate.

But I hadn’t really thought about what the Classic Cheese Mini was at all before I ordered. You see, my attention was drawn to that item on the menu when I read the complete description:

Classic Cheese Minis Combo: USDA Choice minis with cheese and signature sauce. Served with fries and a fried pickle.

Fried pickle?! Fried Pickle?! What the heck was the deal with a fried pickle? I’d never heard of that, even though I went to plenty of burger places in North Carolina while I was in graduate school in Chapel Hill. Clearly it was my Food on Fridays duty to try a fried pickle.

There was a small glitch, though, when my plate of mini-cheese burgers and fries arrived at the table, it was lacking the  fried pickle!  I asked for the missing item, of course, and the waiter delivered a whole bowl of them to make up for the initial oversight:

Fried Green Pickle, Ruby Tuesdays restaurant, North Carolina

Fried Green Pickle (closeup), Ruby Tuesdays restaurant, North Carolina

It turned out that a fried pickle is a pickle that is sliced, battered-dipped and deep-fried, served hot. Crunchy and warm, it tasted like … a pickle. Not bad, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to try it again.

Of course, the best one is supposed to be in Arkansas, where it was first offered in 1963 by the Fatman:

Fried dill pickles were popularized by Bernell “Fatman” Austin in 1963 at the Duchess Drive In located in Atkins, Arkansas.^[1][2] The Fatman’s Recipe is only known to his family and used once each year at the annual Picklefest in Atkins, held each May.^[3] The recipe for Fried pickle at Wikibooks is a general one. — from the Fried Pickle Wikipedia entry

A. There is a Picklefest. B.  Somebody named the Fatman invented the Fried Pickle. B. The Fatman’s recipe is top-secret. C. You can only get the Fatman family’s one true fried pickle in Arkansas once a year.

I love it!

But while you might not easily be able to sample the Fatman’s dish, you can get a reasonable facsimile at Ruby Tuesday’s all year round. Well, you at least you can at one of their branches in North Carolina. I looked up their menu online to get the exact wording of that dish and  saw to my surprise that while their general menu lists the Classic Cheese Mini Combo, there’s no mention of the fried pickle. Hmm. When a Food on Friday almost qualifies as a Monday Mystery, I guess.

Many years ago when I was a teaching assistant in graduate school, I thought I’d figured out when it was used.  At the time, I taught Linguistics 101 to undergraduates at the University of North Carolina. Most of the students were from North Carolina or other southern states, and at the end of every class, I would explain their homework assignment, saying something like “You need to turn it in on Monday.”

One day, a student in class came up after class, all upset. She asked why I was always picking on her when I gave out the homework assignment. Apparently, when I said “”You need to turn it in on Monday,” my eyes always fell on her and so she thought I was talking only to her. It turned out that you, for her,  was necessarily singular.  I explained that I meant it to refer to everyone. But, she asked, if I meant everyone, why didn’t I use y’all. Y’all, she explained was what one used to mean you-plural  “you” was only singular.

That was very different from my use of you in the North. What I concluded at the time was that in a Southern U.S. English Dialect circa 1985 in North Carolina, you always meant “you-singular”, and y’all always meant you-plural.

Fast forward 30 years. Chris and I stopped in a restaurant in North Carolina for lunch on our recent road trip from Florida to Maryland. Chris went in first while I parked the car, so we  entered the restaurant and encountered the host separately.  In a clear southern accent, the host said to each of us individually something like “Can I help y’all”. Y’all as a singular?!

Language change in action – or just my mis-analysis of the student’s use of y’all 30 years ago

Linguists, southerners, anyone want to comment on this? Y’all just let me know.

——-

P.S.  San Sebastian in Spain has a pretty extensive set of shopping streets, populated with high-end clothing stores and boutiques. One night when we were there in June a store was having a special celebration (either grand-opening or anniversary). There was a local “folk, country and blues” band (according to the poster) playing. This was Spain, and the local band was playing American folk and country; well, of course they were, the name of the band was “Howdy”, after all. Anyway, after looking them on the web, we discovered that they play only American songs, on banjo, ukelele, guitars (2), bass, violin and trombone. Here’s a clip on YouTube.; FWIW, here’s a link to their Facebook page. The banter in between songs was all in Spanish, though. It was a bit surreal to to be standing around a store in Spain hearing a group play “Oh, Suzanna” with the crowd clapping along.

However, the oddest moment was when one guy sitting in on the gig that night turned out to be an American. He triggered a somewhat spirited debate between the band members on the proper pronunciaation of the first word in the refrain of their final song,  Y’all Come.

I guess  you — er, y’all — just never know what you’ll run into when you travel.

In Italian, for example,  the “rules” are generally summarized as:

— when talking to a friend or relative your own age or younger, use the “you-familiar” form,  tu.
— when talking to a person in a position of authority, e.g. your boss, or to an older relative or neighbor, use Lei, the “you-polite” form.

In German, you distinguish when you use Du (you-familiar) vs. using Sie (you-polite) along similar lines.

It actually became more complicated for me to understand this  when learning German, though, because in my German class we used Du all the time, even with the teachers (i.e. people in position of authority), and regardless of the age of the people we were talking to.   But in the real world, you see,  it’s considered very impolite to use Du with someone randomly like that, particularly if they are older than you are.  Even if you are on a first name basis with someone, you still have to negotiate using Du with them: it’s not automatic after a certain amount of time. But because we rarely practiced the polite forms in class, I was inadvertently insulting people left and right when I left class and talked with people in town.

I have to tell you, that was frustrating as all get out, as using Du all of the time isn’t at all correct, but I never practiced the verb forms that go along with the Sie pronoun. In general, I found that the expectation is that you start using Sie when you meet someone. If and when you  switch to using  Du is  something you negotiate after you get to know someone for at least a little while, regardless of age,  regardless of their relative position in life to you, and regardless of whether or not you are on a first name basis with them.  Maybe you eventually move to Du with that person, but maybe you don’t ever do that.

However,  once you’ve moved to Du (or tu in Italian) with someone, it’s an insult to use the formal one again with them later on. So, you have to keep track of who you Du with, and who you don’t.

To recap, it’s an insult to use Du (tu) to early, but then an insult to use Sie (lei) too long.

Confused? I certainly was. I always put my confusion about this topic down to being a native speaker of English, a language where we don’t have the distinction between “you-familiar” and “you-polite”. You is just you. I figured that native speakers of languages that have these different you forms must develop an  instinct to know how and when to use them.

But then Chris ran across a news piece recently about  a native Spanish-speaking reporter in Spain who was interviewing the King of Spain.  If ever there was a place to use the you-polite, this was it.  The reporter got all flustered during the interview, though, and accidentally used the Spanish equivalent of  tu  with the King,  instead of the culturally appropriate you-polite form.

Hah, you see that?!  Even the natives get it wrong sometimes.  Somehow, that makes me feel better about having accidentally insulted so many people over the years by using the incorrect form.  I mean, I got it wrong all the time, but at least I never gave the tu to the King.

Now I should first explain that for whatever reason, Chris and I fell into a rather relaxed — read lazy — pattern that whole week in Trieste. We didn’t go to any museums, but rather spent most of our days trying different cafes, in the morning for coffee, in the evening for aperitivos. In between the cafes our main adventure each day was to wander around, see the city, and above all else find a restaurant in which to have lunch.

One day we decided to try to find a restaurant that one of Chris’ former colleagues had recommended. Before we left the apartment that morning, we opened the website page for the restaurant in the Internet browser on our iPad, so we’d have the address and a map to find it as we walked through town. We then stopped — as usual — at a coffee bar for a morning coffee, and we took out the iPad to check the address as we were sipping our coffee.

But … we couldn’t get view the page we’d left open on the iPad back int he apartment, because the iPad insists on reloading it, even if it’s already been loaded, and even if you’re not connected to the Internet. Which means that the page just displays as an error page, since it can’t reload, since you’re not connected to the internet.  That’s a most maddening design flaw, IMHO.

However, all was not lost. The barista at the coffee bar was friendly, so we asked her if she’d heard of the restaurant and knew where it was, since it was (we thought) fairly close by, we just didn’t remember the address exactly. And what do you know, she did indeed know exactly where it was,  and she kindly gave us directions to it.

But then, as we were leaving, she slipped us a business card for another place, saying that if the one we’d asked her about didn’t work out , we could try her friend’s place, as it was very good (she said). Hmm, do you trust a recommendation like that? It’s always hard to know if you’re just being lured into a “friend’s” place that will turn out to be touristy and not very good.

But we thanked her in any case and set off on our way. Following her directions to our original target, we easily found the restaurant — which turned out to be closed on Sundays.

Did I mention this was a Sunday? Right. Argh.

Ah well. All was still not lost. We pulled the business card from the barista’s friend’s place, since maybe that needed to be an option after all. However,  when we tried to find the street for the friend’s place on on our little tourist map of Trieste, the street wasn’t on the map. And we hadn’t gotten directions to that place from the barista.

Double-argh.

So our only option at that point was just  wandering  around a bit, hoping to chance upon another restaurant that was open on a Sunday. We walked for a few minutes before spying sign sign for a restaurant “near the oldest Roman arch in Trieste.” Sounds interesting, eh?  The sign’s map wasn’t exactly accurate, so we wandered around some backstreets for about 10 more minutes before finally finding that Roman arch (shown in yesterday’s post); the restaurant was to the right of the arch. The restaurant door was open, but when we went in it turned out that they weren’t serving lunch that day.

However, we had another plan. During that 10 minutes of wandering we’d noticed that a restaurant called “Osteria No” was open, so we decided to go back to find it.  However, with all the twists and turns we’d taken, we wound up taking a slightly wrong turn. But, once we realized that, we decided to  keep going, figuring we could intersect the “No” street we wanted another way, rather than having to retrace all of our steps.

As we approached where we needed to take a right turn to go to No, we passed the back entrance for what was clearly a cafe. We decided to take a left (instead of the right) to check  out the cafe, as we were building up quite an appetite what with all the wandering around.

On the downside, turning left brought us to the front of the cafe, and showed us that it was really just a glorified coffee bar and not an option for lunch.

On the upside, though, turning left brought us another street. We read the street sign and, lo and behold, we had just stumbled onto the street that the barrista friend’s restaurant was on! The street that hadn’t been on our map! Amazing. Although we still had reservations about the way we’d gotten the recommendation, we decided to take a chance on it and went in for lunch.

And…. it was by far the best meal we had in Trieste! The owners were wonderful and very friendly. The woman gave us the menu “a voce” (i.e., verbally, not written down), and as Chris commented to me later, we actually were fairly Italian, in that we listened to the menu and immediately made our choices; that’s not something we usually do that quickly, even though it was what we saw Italians do all the time.

For the wine, the guy came over and explained some options, then brought us 3 different ones to taste, so we could try them before we settled on a bottle to buy.

wine from the Serendipitous meal in Triest

Our complete meal:

– Orecchiette pasta (from Puglia) with a sauce of orata (sea bream) and calamari (squid). Outstanding!
– Orata (sea bream) baked in a shredded potato crust. The flavor of the fish under the potato crust was outstanding: juicy and flavorful.
– Wine
– 2 local digestivo drinks to finish

Consider the the high quality and large quantity of the food, it wasn’t even that expensive. We were so full we had no room for dessert. But on the way back to the hotel we did manage to stop at yet another coffee bar and happened to have one of the best espressos of the trip. A marvelous end to our accidental afternoon adventure on a Sunday in Trieste.

BTW, I meant what I said above. It really was the “mother” of all serendipity, as it wasn’t just any Sunday. It was Mother’s Day.

Chris and I passed by this thing almost every day in August, since it’s situated between where we were staying in a vacation apartment and our relatives’ house. We are seeing it again daily now that we’ve moved back to the vacation apartment on US 1, so I decided it’s about time I wrote about it here on the blog. At the beginning  I called it the “giant peach”, influenced by the name of Roald Dahl’s book James and the Giant Peach I read as a kid, and also because I think it looks like the color of a peach.

But as Chris keeps pointing out, we’re not in Georgia, we’re in Florida. So of course, the fruit in question is supposed to be a giant orange:

Giant Orange, U.S. Highway 1, Melbourne. Florida

Giant Orange, U.S. Highway 1, Melbourne. Florida

One thing I find particularly odd about it — as if the sight of a giant orange looming on the side of the road isn’t odd enough, that is. — is that there’s no obvious marking on it as you zoom by.  Nothing. There’s also never been sign of activity happening near it. You’d think a giant orange would get a bit more attention, somehow.

We finally stopped by it one day (that’s our car to the right of it in the photo above). We wanted to see if there were any signs on it. And sure enough, there is a small one sign on the front that is not easy to read from the road:

Sign on the Giant Orange, U.S. Highway 1, Melbourne. Florida

Hmm, personally, I don’t find that info  too helpful in understanding how this giant orange came to be.

In searching on the web for more info, I didn’t find much more about it. But here’s what one  website has to say about what that site calls the “Eau Galle Orange”:

The giant orange is made of concrete and steel and was built in 1967. It is 15 feet in diameter. For a few years, it was used as an orange juice stand for tourists and manned by the Eau Gallie Chamber of Commerce. It is located at the Disabled American Veterans facility and was recently restored by the Melbourne Rotary Club. It’s a well known landmark for anyone who regularly drives this part of the Dixie Highway.  From  http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM44A0

Ok, so that explains at least what it is: it is definitely an orange. But unfortunately that still leaves unanswered other questions such as who built it back in 1967, or why it was built or when it fell into disrepair and disuse, or how the Disabled American Veterans came to have it now.

Many questions, making it still somewhat of a mystery on this Monday.

Pumpkin is a traditional food found in autumn in the U.S. Jack-o-lanterns, which are typical decorations for Halloween, are made from pumpkins.  Pumpkin pie is traditional dessert for the fall festival and holiday of Thanksgiving, but it’s definitely not a dessert you typically find in Europe although they do grow pumpkins there. But growing up as a kid, pumpkin pie is about the only food I remember eating that had anything to do with pumpkin.

But at the moment, everywhere you turn around here,  restaurants and chains seem to offer “pumpkin” anything, and not necessarily in a way you’d expect.

For example, you can get a pumpkin doughnut at most doughnut places. We tried one at the local Ladybug Bakery chain a few weeks ago. It was pretty good as a doughnut, but it didn’t taste like pumpkin. So today we tried one from Dunkin’ Donuts, a national chain. It didn’t taste like pumpkin either. And it wasn’t made better by the fact that it was a rather not-quite-pumpkin orangey color:

Pumpkin Dunkin’ Donut

Color comparison (pumpkin donut on the right)

Another big trend that in the U.S. is to have favored coffee drinks, so I guess it makes sense that if you’re offering pumpkin anything that pumpkin coffee is now available.  Dunkin’ Donuts offers so many different kinds of pumpkin coffee drinks that it takes two signs to advertise them all:

Pumpkin Coffee Drinks, Dunkin’ Donuts

Sign for Pumpkin Macchiato, Dunkin’ Donuts

I decided I needed to try one for the blog, and so I chose the latter; I mean, how could I pass on trying  “handcrafted perfection”,  right? Particularly since, according to this other sign, a macchiato at Dunkin’ Donuts actually has espresso in it. Well, theoretically, at least:

Espresso Coffee drinks at Dunkin’ Donuts

Of course, in Italy, a macchiato drink has no steamed milk and no double-shot of espresso – it’s just espresso with a little dollup of steamed milk.  So, I knew going in that this wasn’t going to be anything like a real Italian macchiato.  However, in the interest of research, I did actually try a Pumpkin Macchiato today.

Pumpkin Macchiato, Dunkin’ Donuts

Where to begin to describe it? As I commented to Chris, having me review this type drink actually isn’t fair to the concept, because I don’t really like flavored coffees in general. But I would say that this one tasted like neither coffee nor pumpkin. Also, although the sign says the drink comes pre-sweetened, it wasn’t very sweet, either. A failure on all levels, IMHO. I didn’t finish it.

But now I can add this to the wacky pumpkin foods I’ve tried over the years. Of course, while not all the ones at the  the big zucca (pumpkin/squash) festival in Bolzano years ago were all that great, this was the first time I’ve tried something that is nominally “pumpkin” that I couldn’t finish.  Of course, while that festival did offer an odd pumpkin prosecco (sparkling wine) drink, even they weren’t crazy enough to mess with the coffee.  

I think I’ve mentioned at least in passing that our Plan G travel has often involved renting a vacation apartments. (This is separate from staying with relatives – thanks, Stan and Judie! and house sitting – thanks Jean and Chattie!  A vacation apartment means contracting with either a private person or a property manager to rent a furnished place that has basic kitchen appliances like a stove/cooktop and refrigerator, plus a place to sleep. In addition, it may have one or more — or none — of the following:

• dishwasher
• washing machine
• iron
• microwave
• hair dryer
• TV
• DVD
• WiFi (Internet)
• land-line telephone

Of all those “extras” the one I would trade everything except the WiFi  for is a washing machine, hands down. I’m a pro (if I do say so myself) of washing stuff out in a bathroom sink in a hotel, and can figure out ways to hang stuff up over a tub to drip-dry.

Hangers. It’s all about the hangers.

But when you have a washing machine right there in your apartment, with its spin-cycle – well, that cuts your washing time down substantially. Glorious. There’s no need for a dryer, IMHO, as long as there are hangers.

Again, doing laundry is all about the hangers.

Anyway, it’s been interesting to note that in places in our price range in Europe, a washing machine seems to be standard. However, here in the U.S., the vacation rentals that I’ve scoped out online have at best a coin-operated washing machine (and dryer) in a room somewhere in the building.  Not must you have quarters, you need to get there when no one else is doing their laundry.  Not nearly as convenient. I find that I’m still washing out a few things on and off here in the apartment, so I don’t have to rely as much on the availability of the washers.

And yes, I have lots of hangers. I bought a 10-pack at a store soon after we arrived, just to supplement anything provided in the apartments here. It really is all about the hangers.

But I digress – sort of.  Because I really didn’t want to get bogged down talking about laundry today. The main theme today is really that  vacation apartments are great if you’re staying in a place for longer than a few days.  They really let you get into a different rhythm, that isn’t quite being at home, but isn’t quite being on vacation, either. In Venice, we tended to eat a regular meal at lunch when we could, and then go out for an aperitivo (an alcoholic or not drink, usually served with small munchies) in the late afternoon, and then head back for a simple meal in the apartment of cheese, bread and wine that we would have picked up at a local deli earlier in the day. Nice.   On other occasions I could even make our main meal (fish or pasta, for example) right in the apartment. You can’t do that kind of thing in a hotel.

Venice is one of the places on our Plan G wanderings in Italy where we had a chance to stay in a vacation apartment. Actually, in Venice we stayed in two different ones, owing to some last-minute changes to our travel plans.  The two apartments weren’t that far away from each other, so they were both in great locations to allow us to just go out for a gelato and catch a great sunset on the nights when it wasn’t raining.

The first one, called “Venice Castello Studio” (VCS) was a studio-sized apartment – small, but  more than big enough for us and our (at that time) very small set of stuff.  Here’s a photo from the Trip Advisor listing for this place (click on the photo to go to the Trip Advisor website to see more views):

Venice Castello Studio (click on photo to see more photos in Trip Advisor listing)

The location of the VCS to other things in Venice really attracted me to this place: not only was it not far from the Lagoon, it was also near the big art exhibition that we wanted to visit in Venice. We discovered when we got there that it was a converted butcher shop, so the bathroom was in the converted meat locker.  Funky does not begin to describe it. However, the main quirky aspect to the VCS was that it was right on a canal and on the ground floor of the building to boot. If you look carefully through the middle window you should be able to spot the steps of that bridge from yesterday’s photo, so you can see how close the street was.

At times, that was either good, funny, or bad.

– Good for views of the canal from the windows – and since it was on the corner of the building, there were a lot of windows.

– Funny for the fact that the windows were tinted as one-way mirrors so people couldn’t see into the apartment.  Since the windows were mirrors, though, people walking down the street would stop and fix their hair, clothing, check for things between their teeth, take selfies of themselves with that bridge, never knowing anyone  could see them as they did it.  Truly funny at times.

– Bad because ground floor apartments in Venice can flood in the winter. It didn’t rain enough to  flood while we were there in May, but it was kind of damp and musty the entire time. That dampness really got old after a few days. Staying there just a couple of days would have been OK, but after 7 days we were more than ready to leave the VCS.

Then we switched to a place called  the Casa Serena, which was a completely different experience.

Casa Serena (click to see more photos on Trip Advisor)

It was really new,  on the second floor of the building by Italian terms, (which in the U.S. would be called the 3rd floor). To get to it you had to walk  down a really, really narrow alley away from the canal, so it had no water view.  However,  it did offer a nice vantage point of the hail (!) storm pounding on the rooftops across the way on the day we moved in there.

Bird in a hail storm, Venice

Hail storm, Venice

A drop of hail, Venice

The lack of the regular water view aside, the Casa Serena was really an otherwise pretty-perfect place: kitchen, bedroom, large bathroom, living room/dining area, WiFi.  And, of course, a washing machine.  It was so big, in fact, that I think it was bigger than some of the regular apartments Chris and I have rented to live in over the years.  I definitely could have stayed at the Casa Serena a lot longer.  Ah well — maybe next time we’re on vacation in Venice.

First, I finally got a photo of one to show you what I looked like, even though it took a couple of weeks for one to show up again on the back deck:

Grasshopper on the deck

But once they started showing up again, there was usually at least one every day. Once there were even two that seemed to be locked in a fight to the death.  One leaped onto the back of the other and the two of them wrestled around on the boards for a minute or more.  It was like watching a nature show where they show you the two animals battling for supremacy of the pack. Or something. Anyway, the tournament ended when the one on top walked away in triumph, as the other one remained behind, motionless.   Chris and I both though it was dead, but a while later when we looked to see if the coast was clear to go out and clear away the “body”, it was gone. So maybe it was just playing dead until the other one left. So unexpected to see a life and death struggle played out among bright yellow grasshoppers in the sunlight on the back deck.

On a less lethal note, though, I most often saw just one at a time.  In fact, almost every morning  last week I saw one while  I was cleaning up in the kitchen after breakfast.

Hmm, I should hasten to add that the grasshopper was outside and I was inside at the time; the glass doors to the patio lead off the kitchen.

Anyway, what I kept seeing was a grasshopper stopping in front of the glass doors and proceeding to do a little morning routine. It struck me as part exercise, part dance. The slide show viewer below will  automatically flip though a series of photos showing off the grasshopper’s fancy footwork; if you hover over the viewer,  you will be able to get buttons that will allow you to pause and move forward and backward at your own pace.

The grasshopper did that sequence of “step, kick, kick, kick, kick, touch back” over and over before ultimately taking a bow and walking away.

OK, well, he didn’t actually take a bow. But he did really do that same sequence at least 4 times each morning before moving on. As I watched him, it occurred to me that all he needed to do was replace one of the kicks for a leap and he’d be ready for Broadway:

Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch…Again!
Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch…Again!
Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch…Again!
Step, kick, kick, leap, kick, touch…Right!
… lyrics from I Hope I Get It, from A Chorus Line

I know, I know.  To get from talking about grasshopper to a Broadway show tune is a enough of leap all on its own.  But that’s the way it sometimes goes with one of these Monday Mysteries…

*****

P.S. Since I don’t have any more information about the grasshopper to offer, I’ll instead offer a link to a YouTube clip of that dance number from A Chorus Line (the dance begins around 0:30 in the clip).

 Enjoy. 

We’ve been meaning to go check it out ever since we’ve been here, but of course we hadn’t gotten around to it yet.  But, as we move out of the house tomorrow and will be a little further away for the rest of this month, yesterday afternoon we decided that we should  at least take a peak at it.

So we drove over to Lake Washington, which is just down the road. From the small parking lot area you could see a shelter that was on the edge of the lake; in the photo below, the lake is just beyond the trees and shelter structure. If you click on the photo to open it in a larger in a new window, you can see the water of the lake:

Looking toward Lake Washington

We started down the path toward the lake to get a better vantage point. But, we hadn’t gotten very far when we reached a point where there was a nice puddle — and also a caution sign:

Lake Washington Sign

The sign isn’t very legible in my photo, so here’s the text:

Caution
Snakes and alligators
may be present. 
Do not feed the alligators.

Hmm.  Well, then. That’s an unexpected development. Chris and I looked at each other. Wasn’t it was really too hot to be walking around near the lake, anyway? Yes, I think so. Who needs photos of the lake close up, anyway? We went back to the car.

Now, I’m sure there was nothing really to worry about. But as a city-bred Yankee, I don’t know much about alligator behavior. And since it isn’t allowed, I didn’t want to feed the alligators accidentally … if you know what I mean.

Consider the following photo; note in particular the tree and its reflection:

Tree reflection in pond

But look at the reflection carefully – did you spot the building that’s in the reflection that’s not visible in real life? Here’s a look at that photo with arrows point out the building the reflection on the bottom, and where the building should have been — but isn’t! — on top:

Phantom Building with arrows

In other words,  there’s a  building that shows up in the reflection, but you can’t see it at all when looking at the “real” scene. Please note that this is the way it really looks when seen through the living room window; I haven’t done any trick photography or manipulation to get the building that “isn’t there”  so clearly “reflected” in the pond.   I mean, I didn’t do any trick photography to get this photo; while looking out the living room the scene reflected in the pond is not the same as the scene in the backyard.

Usually I only see these hidden worlds in puddles when I flip the photo upside down, but that isn’t necessary here. However, if we flip that photo upside down there are a couple of additional oddities:

1. The upside-down ducks are part of the reality in the scene, but not the reflection … and they are not real ducks (but they are really there in the yard).

2. The tree at the top that has no grass around it is a complete reflection of the tree at the bottom which is in reality is surrounded by the grass that goes up to the edge of the pond.

Lake Reflected – Flipped

Fun, eh?

But of course it’s really the magically reflected building that provides us with today’s Monday Mystery here in Melbourne.

1. Bolzano supermarket shopping in general

2. Where to find things in a supermarket in Bolzano

When we got to Germany, I also did all the grocery shopping.  The German stores are a bit bigger than their counterparts in Italy, but not by a lot. My shopping trips there, though, were a lot less eventful than in Bolzano; perhaps the “natural classes” of things were similar (see post #2 above for the ones in Italy).  But there was still stuff to learn about supermarket shopping in Germany, of course, including how to buy sparkling water bottles.

But you might think that now we’re back in the U.S. that supermarket shopping wouldn’t be any problem at all.  But in fact, I think that supermarkets here have so far been the biggest culture shock for both of us.  Why? Well, back in 2011 I wrote about the culture-shock of going to a grocery store in Florida, when the number of choices in a Florida store that was 10x the size of the one in Bolzano left me quite taken aback at the time.

That experience was after only 2.5 years living in Europe.  But maybe the fact that we had that reaction after only 2.5 years in Europe should have prepared us for the shock of arriving in the U.S. after 7 years and walking into a huge American grocery store again.  On our first supermarket buying trip back in June we ventured — on our own! — into a store the size of at least one football field, and probably more. Well, at least that’s how it seemed.  Things just went on forever, from the length of the aisles to the sheer number of them. I mean,  where do you begin trying to find anything?  How do you figure out all different brands? The pricing differences? Special Offers? Different size packages of the same thing? Different varieties of the same thing?

Sheesh, we had it easy in Florida back in 2011:  there were only 4 types of potato salad.  But nowadays, it seems like there are at least 10 different types of any one thing – and usually much, much more. The aisle with the choice of boxed cereal alone is mind-boggling. Seriously.

Then there was the additional issue of figuring out how to get the loyalty card key chain tag that unlocks lower prices in many stores. It’s not hard, but first you have to figure out the price gap that exists, then you have to organize where in this endless store the desk is to get the card.  I guarantee you it is always at the opposite end of the store from where you are.

Actually, that’s a truism about anything in the store: no matter where you are, whatever you’re looking for next is bound to be at the other end of the store.  Which takes you about 5 minutes to walk across.

Well, that’s what it felt like in that first store, at least.  Between getting the loyalty card,  hunting for stuff and sorting out which of whatever it was we wanted to buy, we were in that first store for 2 hours.  2 hours?! Since we didn’t know where anything was and the store directories on the shopping carts were there to lead you on a wild goose chase we wound up having to walk up and down every single aisle in that store to find stuff.  When we finally got out of the store we felt like we had been through the wringer; we were completely exhausted!

Supermarket shopping is not for the faint-of-heart here in the U.S., IMHO.

Well, at least not in the Northeast.  But here in Florida, the supermarket that caused all that trouble for us in 2011, Publix, actually has several branches that are not nearly as big as the supermarket in CT (we haven’t actually been back to the larger branch that I blogged about in 2011).  So, somehow the supermarket here, after the early experiences in CT, seem a little more manageable.

It’s also the case that Publix has no loyalty card program: “All our customers get the same low prices” is what the store clerk said to me when I asked about it. So, that makes things a little easier.  Plus, Publix describes itself as the only supermarket around that still offers a service that I refer to as “southern hospitality, supermarket style.”   The other day I went to the store by myself. It was early on a Sunday morning, when the store was mostly empty.  When I got to the check-out line, the baggers were all standing around with nothing to do. So, one of them zoomed over and insisted on helping me unload the cart onto the belt.  Then, my groceries got bagged in record time by a couple more people, and a man older than me insisted on schlepping the cart with the bags out to my car with me.  (BTW, all these “helpers”  wear name badges that also say they are not allowed to accept tips.) Anyway, on the way to the car I commented on how you don’t find this kind of service many places these days, and he said that Publix really prides themselves on still offering it.  You definitely don’t find that kind of service in Europe, at least not in the places we shopped:  you bought it, you bag it — you take care of it yourself. So this is definitely a nice perk to find here in Florida.

Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t like going to the supermarket. But every little thing helps. 

As I mentioned, at the beginning of the month we transferred from the vacation apartment we were renting to a beautiful house where we house & cat-sitting for the month while the owner, Jean,  and her daughter are off on adventures in Dubai and South America. They have been having close encounters with big, wild cats (at game preserves, by design).  We have been interacting with a very different type of cat here in the house:  Chattie, the beautiful, fluffy and very mellow cat we’re cat-sitting for/with:

Chattie posing briefly for Chris

The only other creatures we’re encountering regularly here while house-sitting are a variety of insects:  e.g.,  little ants, little spiders, regular-sized mosquitoes, etc.   The latter two came into play simultaneously the other day when I got two mosquito bites trying (and failing!) to get a good photo with my cell phone camera of a giant spider web on the front lawn.

But those are hardly remarkable bugs — certainly not like the remarkably huge bug that sashayed  across the patio the other day. It looked like a giant orange-yellow grasshopper, which — according to a quick Google search — may have been exactly what it was. It was about 4 inches long and strikingly unlike anything I’d ever seen before.  Quite astonishing to watch.  I’m not afraid of insects, but there was one thing that bugged me about this critter: before I could get to my camera,  it had ambled out of view! Hmph. This, despite the fact that a site about “Florida’s giant orange grasshoppers” claims that they move relatively slowly. Not slowly enough, IMHO.

Of course, the photo of the insect on that website is a bit more orange than the one I saw, which was yellow. But otherwise it looks like it must be the same thin.  Maybe the yellow ones move faster than the orange ones? That will have to be an ongoing mystery, I guess.  I haven’t spotted another one of any color since last week. However, I noticed last night that one of the animal statues that Jean has in the living room here is a metal sculpture of a similiar-looking creature:

Big Bug (statue)

The sculpture is perhaps a couple of inches  longer than the real-life one I saw. But it’s close.  The pencil is there for reference to show you just how large that type of insect is — and also to remind you that the real-life one was yellow.