Ferragosto, Il Palio, The Quiet

Folks, I’m changing from Blogger to WordPress, so bear with me. A few inconsistencies will show up! :) This post was written yesterday.

• Feel like dating yourself? How many of these GUI Desktop evolutions have you used?
• We all need a Captain James Kirk pick-me-up: Star Trek Inspirational Posters – my favorite is probably this one, then these two.
• ::Music:: “Purple” by Skin, from her sophomore album. Lead singer of Skunk Anansie in the 90s, “Post Orgasmic Chill” is a great album.

What a strange summer this has been. It’s mid-August, and it’s raining hard, and almost chilly. It rained at my favorite sweltering hot festival in my hometown at the end of July. Upon our arrival in Milan, we ran into a freak hailstorm that was so thick on the ground that it looked like snow and flooded the streets to the point where people abandoned their floating, useless cars.

Sante and I have a new workout routine that is going pretty good this week. It’s called, Find An Open Restaurant. Our anniversary was only two days before Aug. 15th (Ferragosto), a national holiday, and this week is the time when “4o million” Italians are on vacation. The 13th just happened to fall on a Sunday as well, so finding an open restaurant was like trying to find a sober person at Mardi Gras. We walked a few kilometers before deciding between two open pizzerias. I went with the one with the line and it was pretty good.

Tuesday we decided to go to Lago Maggiore, which Sante had never been to and I had been to almost three years ago to the day. It was one of my solo trips when I first arrived in Italy. No where else to go, it was a great decision. The trains are pretty inexpensive to the lake and you can stay on the shore and lay out or take the ferry around to the different islands and towns. Unfortunately this time the weather wasn’t cooperating and the sun played hide and seek with the clouds for most of the afternoon while we tried to soak up some last-minute sun. And I forgot the camera. Sorry!

It feels like May to me. I put on a shirt, a zip-up hoodie and jeans with closed-toed shoes for my first day back at work.

Today wasn’t so bad, considering my boss and I were the only people in our 200+ person building. Seriously. The company is technically on shutdown this week but that’s not how things went with my vacation planning. Plus, I really like the quiet. My boss and I, in our lulls between answering stacked-up emails and fielding calls from Paris (they do work in August!), we had many philosophical and practical conversations about life, credit cards, and education.

Sounds like a good day of work to me.

Tonight, I arrived home from a miracle supermarket that is open this “dead week” in Milan. As I unloaded the bags into the frigde, I turned on the television for some background noise and there it was, Il Palio di Siena. I never plan to watch it but every time that I’ve been in Italy in August (3), I have always caught it accidentally on television right before the race starts.

This race is raw, physically difficult, and my favorite, quite short. Actually the prep for the race is longer than the race itself with several “trial runs” done first. Two riders ran into each other and flipped over with the ease of NASCAR cars and without all the padding. After the race, people immediately spill into the race path and I saw at least three people hit full-on by the horse and its rider who thought of nothing else after victory.
I love the multicolor banners that are everywhere you look, each one representing a different ward of the city. When I went with my family in 2002, we arrived just days after the race and could instantly tell who had won. The race is so short (4 laps, I think around the central square in Siena, Piazza del Campo) that at the end of the transmission, they showed the replay of the race….twice.

Now, I’m just sitting back in my “big girl/IKEA” kitchen with full-size appliances, enoying the silence of all my neighbors being gone. Check out my refrigerator. Not only is it blue, but it is taller than me!! (A first here in Italy) That’s when I knew I had to move in.