Today was a day to recover and catch up from the previous busy days. After sleeping in, I caught up writing these blog posts, sorting through pictures, and working on my grad school application essays while Lisa went to the bank and did other such errands, and Ma tagged along with her. They also went to visit some goats.
We met up with Miriam, Lisa’s boss, at Osteria El Gato, a small restaurant near their school. We ate more delicious food, in the many-hours-long multi-course-with-wine Italian lunch tradition. Miriam is wonderful, warm and intelligent and high-spirited: I wished we could have lunched for even longer to enjoy her company more. Some of our truly lively topics of conversation over the meal included her family’s history (fascinating romantic saga), the effect of facism and WWII on Italy, goats, the insulating techniques of potato barns, and her parent’s pellet furnace. (If you know me, you can see why I liked her.)
After lunch we went with Lisa to her office, where she did some work and arranged for our onward train tickets, I did more photo editing, Ma read a book on the history of the city, and we were able to chat online with Petra in Haiti. On our way home we wandered into some of the kitschy tourist shops, featuring wares such as silk scarves with the neighborhood crests, painted ceramic plates, painted ceramic everything-under-the-sun, highly decorative paper goods, and various tacky crap. We fortified ourselves with an appetizer of pizza slices, then went grocery shopping, trudged back to the apartment for dinner (gnocchi with amazing mystery sauce and sautéed brussel sprouts with pistachio pudding for dessert), and an early night to bed.
Photos from this day are by my mother: you can see where I get some of my photographic habits from! :)
