I stumbled outside, bleary-eyed and half-asleep where Tiziano was waiting in his car. It was precisely 5:15am and my first question to my neighbor was, "Why do we have to leave so early to look for mushrooms?" "To beat everyone else looking for mushrooms," he said. Satisfied with that logic, I
12 CommentsSo you have your papers in order, your plane ticket in hand and you're gung-ho to make the jump across the ocean and start a life over here. Not so fast! I received two emails this week both asking the same question: "Is there anything from the US I should bring that I can't find over there?"
12 CommentsI have so many unfinished draft posts, I'm going to start pounding these out -- punctuation and coherence be damned! It's been four years since I sold all and moved to Italy and there is a semi-famous festival nearby that I have managed to consistently miss every year for one reason or another. Th
8 CommentsThis is a four day weekend in Italy in celebration of la Festa della Repubblica, comparable to our 4th of July. Since my original plans for Saturday didn't quite pan out, I jumped online and searched to see what festivals were in the area. Being such a major holiday I was surprised to find that my
11 CommentsThe emails I get from other American expats here in Italy almost always focus on the same topic -- how am I coping with the falling Dollar? Everytime the Dollar falls another cent or two, I grumble and groan and tell myself, "It can't fall anymore than that!" I've been saying that since the Dollar
7 CommentsIf I were to think of a single word to describe me, "scholar" wouldn't be it. Throughout my school years, studying mathematics or writing a long thesis would require a level of focus that, at the time, I never believed I possessed. Lectures would waff in through one ear and rocket out of the ot
8 CommentsGood to see that politicians are smarmy the world 'round, and not just limited to any geographical area. I saw this news report from Austin today about how Texas legislators vote in the House. I also learned that Italian politicians do the same thing, except here they have a name: "pianists."
4 CommentsMy last post about my banking situation got a little press. At the bottom of a Wall Street Journal article about ATM crime, there were a set of links to two blogs that they thought referred to that article -- mine and someone else's. Yikes! That post ended up getting a lot of visitors from gove
9 CommentsI've been thinking a lot lately about banking. In fact, my current bedtime reading is an excellent book called Medici Money, a really fascinating and hilarious look at the history of Italy and the Church during the Renaissance when the Medici were at their peak of banking power. It's a very ente
10 CommentsBack near the beginning of August, I made the starting discovery that while ADSL still wasn't available for me personally, it's available for my landlords downstairs. You see, in Telecom Italia logic, it's completely normal to say that one person living on the bottom two floors of a house are withi
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