Recently I have been up to everything.

A brief overview:

Last weekend I went to Florence. It was a fantastic trip: excellent to get out of the rain into some sunshine, met some fun people, saw some of the most beautiful (and famous) art on earth. Did some sketching and thinking and overall it was very refreshing. Envigorating, even.

(Recently I’ve had several conversations about the merits of creating new words or spellings to better suit the meaning. Can you find the “error” in the last paragraph?)

Getting to and from Florence was a bit of an adventure, but that story will have to wait for another day.

The next day my sister arrived from London to visit me. Hooray! Of course, on that day there was a TRANSPORTATION STRIKE (sciopero) all over Italy. Karen arrived at the Central Train Station at 11, and I finally arrived three hours later (after walking, biking, bussing, and hitchhiking to get there!) at two, even though I left my house at 9:30. Then we had to walk halfway across the city to get to a working Metro station to take us home. So our first day was cut a little short.

Nevertheless! The next day the transportation was back on line, and we were off to Torino for a day of Food Tourism (thanks Mom and Dad!).

A Slow Food feast, a day of sightseeing, and an authentic apperativo later, we were back on the train to Rho.

The next day we saw Milan. I was excited about getting up to the top of Il Duomo, where we went together as girls, but it was raining too hard to make the 10 Euro investment worth it. Bummer. Instead we wandered past La Scala opera house and to Castello Sforzesco. A Florentine man gave us his museum tickets, so we checked out the gallery of antique instruments. And also we went to the Aquarium.

I assume there are pictures, but all on Karen’s camera, because the batteries I bought at the euro store (yes, just like a dollar store) didn’t work even for one minute.

Today I am off to Modena and then on to Bologna for some more food tourism.