Shopping in Italy

I’ve taken advantage of some amazing shopping opportunities in Italy lately. The first was a day trip to the Piazzola Sul Brenta antique market, the second largest antiques market in Italy! A group of 4 of us went and although no one bought anything large, we got to see what kinds of things they sell. It was antique heaven. I love antiques, but also like to mix in new with old. Also, I’m super picky about what I like when it comes to antiques, I prefer a super simple look over the really gaudy, ornate stuff. I did come home with a few items though (below). The red striped linen tea towel was about $12, the wooden bucket about $50 (I’ve wanted one for years and the big ones are great for kids junk and umbrellas), and that little step stool was $12, and is being painted a yellow-y shade of milk paint right now to replace an old Target step stool we had in the kids’ bathroom that Brian broke while testing out a “what happens if I do this” theory. Now that my purchases have settled into their new home, I want to go back for more but I’m pacing myself.

And then of course there are the Bazaars. We were introduced to these in Germany. Basically, the spouses groups on a base will get together a hanger full of vendors from all over Europe, selling everything from furniture to wine to cheese to chocolate to soap to pottery to shoes to jewelry. Basically anything you could want from Europe they have there. It lasts 3 days, a friday to a sunday, and the vendors pay a percentage of their earnings to the spouses group, which then uses the money for scholarships and other great things around base. Our fall bazaar, hosted by the Aviano Officers and Civilian Spouses Club, just happened the first weekend in October. The Enlisted Spouses Club hosts one in the Spring too. Below are some pictures of my haul from this bazaar and past ones. The pine furniture piece I got in the spring and later found out it is called a Panera, which Italian bakers used to keep their bread in. It hinges open at the top to reveal some divided storage and then has 3 drawers at the bottom, which American children keep hordes of crayons and drawings in. The yellow wood bucket that says “DF” on it is a grape basket. The antique pizza board in the back was purchased at the fall bazaar. The metal pumpkin is not from the bazaar. And the green glass demijohn was a $5 winery purchase. The Italians still use demijohns to hold their wine. We know of a few wineries near us where you can fill a demijohn from a giant vat of wine. This little one will hold 5 liters. We have some friends who were recently cracking me up telling me how they filled a 25-liter demijohn with wine and then had a hell of a time pouring a glass of wine from it! The Venetian glass lamp was a Germany bazaar purchase back in 2004, ironic. And the Dutch wooden cookie molds are reproductions and came with a recipe and instructions on how to actually make cookies using them, which I will be trying soon!

Not long after the bazaar ended, I started having the shopping shakes. (It’s genetic, thanks Mom!) The only cure is more shopping and so when my friend Beth asked if I wanted to go to Nove with her, I knew a trip to Italy pottery mecca was just the right prescription. There are many factories in Nove, some little mom and pop shops, and some large producers, like the one below (La Ceramica VBC). VBC makes pottery for Tiffany & Co., Lenox, and Williams-Sonoma, Fiesta ware, and other fancy pants brands I can’t remember. The entire second floor is a factory outlet full of rows and rows of cheap pottery. And I mean cheap. I wish it was also cheap to mail so I could buy it for gifts!

My haul from my trip to Nove below. I picked up a few serving pieces and a small cake plate from VBC (about $70 total for everything in the top two pictures). I just looked up the online price for the small white and cream bowl and the retail price is $72. I paid $12!

 

The personalized pitcher is from Larry’s and was $12. And I also picked up the medium sized Demijohn at Larry’s for about $25, which is not a great price, but the medium-sized ones are hard to find. Happy Early Birthday to me!

Emily’s First Day of Asilo

On September 12th, Emily started her first year of Asilo, Italian preschool in San Leonardo, a small town just down the road from us. She ran into the building, hugged every adult she could find, immediately took over the indoor play gym, and seemed completely uninterested in even saying Arrivaderci to me. Emily overheard her teacher and I discussing if I should stay for a few minutes and she joined in the conversation by saying “You can go now Mommy!” Having been excused, I drove the 8 minutes back home and stood inside the house confused and lonely. Not really, I did the dishes and folded some laundry. A short hour and a half later, I was picking her up. She was clearly excited to see me and ran towards me for an embrace, and then she stopped in her tracks, a moment of clarity crossed her face as she realized I was there to take her away from the land of sweet Italian school teachers, outdoor toys, sand tables, finger painting, and friends. She held her hand up in a stop gesture and said “Mommy, go home!” But I know she really meant “Gee, I missed you so much Mom that I could barely function without you, let’s go home and cuddle!” And we did.  

 

Nearly two weeks has passed since her first day and not all of her school days have gone this well. Last week there may have been an incident where she threw a hissy fit and stuck her tongue out at her teacher. And this morning at drop off, she clung to my leg like a spider monkey, shrieking hysterically. She is always happy and excited about her school day when I pick her up so I think she is having fun and she just needs time to adjust to being in school 5 mornings a week. Actually Asilo is full-time, from 9am to 4pm, but right now I’m picking Emily up just after lunch, and we will work our way up to a full day. Although I will probably only send her a full day twice a week or so. We are lucky in that her two teachers speak a little English, so while they mostly speak Italian to her, they can translate for her until she understands more Italian. And it’s wonderful to be able to hear about her day and behavior from the teachers.

Bier Rafting

“You should know that this is the strangest thing I’ve ever done!” ~Flynn Rider (sword fighting with Maximus the Horse using a frying pan in Tangled)

 

This quote was in my head the entire time we bier rafted over Labor Day weekend. But let me back up. Our squadron gets together once a year in Munich for bier rafting. Bier rafting is exactly what you think it is. You dress up in your tratchen wear (Dirndls for the Damen, Lederhosen for the Herren), board a wooden raft with an Oompa band, and drink bier for about a 6-hour-long ride down the river. This is obviously not a kid-friendly activity (the thought of having Emily on this raft makes me shudder) so the kids stayed home in Italy with our sitter friend Bea and Steve and I spent 2 glorious nights away together in Munich. The first night was spent in full tratchen wear at the Munich Augustiner Bier Garden. The following day was beer rafting day, starting bright and early with a 745 am bus push and a 10 am launch on the river Isar. For the most part, we could stand up and wander around the raft. The exceptions were when there were some rapids or tight spots where the rafts guys needed us seated so they could signal to each other between the front and the back. Also, we went down several slides. Yes, slides. One of the pictures below shows us going down one. It was surprising fast and splashy. Kinda reminded me of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney, only much longer and wetter because the water came up over the floor boards and soaked anything you weren’t holding up. The Oompa band played their traditional German songs and we ate a snack of mystery meat and mustard sandwiches with a sweet and sour girchen (pickle) on the side. Then we ate a lunch of roasted chicken and kartoffelsalat (German potato salad, nothing like American potato salad and a favorite of mine). And of course there was plenty of all-you-can-drink bier (3 kegs to be exact) and some water or lemonade for us non-bier drinkers.

 

Besides the Oompa band, the entertainment came in the form of the guys (and some ladies too!) jumping into the river, swimming to shore, running to an upcoming bridge, and then jumping in just before the raft to get back on. Man code in this situation says that if one man goes in, they all go in. Steve prepared by changing into swim trunks so he didn’t get his leather Lederhosen wet. One minute he’s sitting behind me and the next he is climbing back onto the side of the raft. He got too close to the edge and someone decided to introduce him to the cold water of the Isar river.

 

We finally reached the end of our rafting tour and disembarked. We watched for a few minutes as the employees disassembled the rafts and a crane lifted the raft pieces onto the truck to take it back upriver and start all over again the next day. This was truly a strange and unique experience! I’d had never heard of such a thing before we joined the Nickel. Our squadron sure knows how to have fun, with a little help from the Germans of course!

The Triple Nickel Bier Rafting Crew, September 2013

Nickel Air Refueling

In August, Steve had a flight where they “hit the tanker” to refuel in the air. Without refueling from the tanker, they can only fly for 1-1.5 hours per flight and then they need to land to refuel. Refueling in the air of course extends length of the flight. They don’t do this often for just regular everyday training missions. But when they are flying in combat, then they do this often to be able to stay in the air for long sorties, 8-10 hours. Hitting the tanker is a skill that needs to be practiced occasionally because it’s hard to do and dangerous, so whenever they can get a tanker in the area, they practice. Not sure what day this was, but the squadron’s flight doctor was able to go up in the tanker and took these pictures. He didn’t keep track of who was who but Steve was in this flight and could be the pilot in one of these jets. Back when we were stationed in Germany, I got to go up in a tanker and actually watched Steve refuel! It was by far the coolest Air Force related thing I’ve ever gotten to do, better even than the two taxi rides I took in the F-16.

Brian’s First Day of First Grade

Well, it’s been almost a month, but Brian started first grade on August 23rd at Aviano Elementary. He was excited to head off to the “big building,” since Kindergarten was in its own building separate from the rest of the school. One advantage of the “big building,” he tells me, is that there are 4 huge playgrounds, a fact he is very excited about. His teacher is Mr. Wilson and his class is a Multi-age First/Second grade. I wasn’t sure what to think of this at first but it seems to be going well. Brian is a mature 6-year-old and never gets in trouble at school (home is a different story) so I think he is a good fit for a class with students both his age and older. He is already bringing home what looks to me like second grade math homework and he never needs my help with it. Reading is another story. I think he is about right on track for first grade reading but he loathes it. I’ve tried everything: bribery, yelling, Harry Potter. Nothing works yet. He has to do 20 minutes a day of reading at home and for now it’s just going to be a struggle to get him to do it. Fun. He loves loves loves drawing and will go through 10-15 sheets of paper a day drawing everything from rockets to jets to houses. He even recently started writing his own children’s book called “What Will I Be?” complete with illustrations. And he answered his own question by stating that he will be a book writer when he grows up. Not a book reader, just a writer.

Little sister was so excited for Brian’s first day of school. She was excited for him and was practically jumping for joy as we were getting ready that morning. Well, we assumed she was happy for him to go off and see his friends and learn but after we dropped Brian at school and were walking back to our car, she lets out a huge sigh and says “well, I guess Brian is not part of our family anymore!” So she was really just happy to get rid of him!

Our Neighbor Gina

Meet Gina.

 

Gina lives in the yard of the house that backs up to our landlady’s orchard. We have to walk to the back corner of the lot constantly to throw our food waste in the compost pit. Usually Gina is out there chillin in her yard, sometimes she comes over to see what I’m doing, sometimes she just flicks an ear at me and goes back to eating her grass. The kids and I took to calling her “Dominic the Donkey” after that super annoying Christmas song. Then we discovered “Dominic” was in fact a she. Oh and also, that she’s not a Donkey, but a Mule (half donkey, half horse). So then we took to calling her “Monica the Mule.” One day recently Claudio’s daughter, Sylvia, came to stay in his house for holiday and she brought the kids and I over to the neighbors to meet Gina. Not Dominic. Not Monica. Gina. We fed Gina some bread, took some pictures, and then Gina’s sweet adoptive human parents showed us around their little farm which includes a dozen chickens, 7 or 8 hunting dogs, and a huge room full of mounted antlers. Gina’s Daddy is a hunter and uses Gina to haul his kills out of the mountains. When we left to walk back home, my hands were full with fresh eggs, homemade pasta sauce, tomatoes, basil, and garlic from their garden!

Cliff Diving

One sweltering August day, we joined our friends, the R Family at a little watering hole they had discovered on a nearby river. This particular hole has the perfect set up for cliff diving: an easily climbable rock with sheer cliffs and decently deep (but cold) water below. When we first arrived, we all commented on how we wouldn’t be doing any cliff jumping into water that cold. We had lunch, the kids splashed in the shallow water and took turns pushing each other around in a raft. We were enjoying watching reckless teenagers jumping to impress their friends. Then Steve broke out the liquid courage (Cranberry and Vodka) for him and Casey. A few swigs later, Steve was jumping and cannonballing off the cliff. And even though he was training for a triathlon and didn’t want to risk an injury, Casey was the next one to hurtle himself off a perfectly good cliff into frigid, rock infested waters below (man code dictates that if a man friend jumps off a cliff and lives, you must now jump off the same cliff or forever be remembered as a “wuss”). Next thing I know, Darla is climbing the cliff (sober too!) and jumps. I’m the only one left, so after Steve tackles me into the cold water, I really have no more excuses. So Darla climbed back up with me and we jumped together. Glad to have that checked off my “didn’t really want to do this in the first place but peer pressure is a b#%*@” bucket list.

Top left: Steve. Top right: Steve and Casey. Bottom left, Darla and I. Bottom Right, proof that we lived to swim back to our children.