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Published: July 11th 2007
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Last Saturday was the day I had been dreading for a week. Tim and Ethan had to leave to go home, which was the primary reason I had been dreading it. The other reason was because I had to drive from the Malpensa airport in Milan back to Lake Garda. Their plane left at 6:00, which meant they had to be there at 4:00 to check in for an international flight, and there just aren't any trains and busses at that time. We had looked into getting a room in Milan, but nothing worked as well as renting a car for the week and driving them to the airport. (Plus, it only seemed right to drop them off at the curb since I was letting them take one of my suitcases full of dirty clothes home.)
So after a teary farewell at the airport, I faced my fears and started the drive back. It was not nearly as bad as I feared. I even began to wonder why I had worried over it at all. And yet I cannot believe I did that-- I drove an unfamiliar car with a manual transmission on a road with a very high
speed limit and road signs in a language I just barely recognize. I would not have done it for anyone except Tim and Ethan! When people here learn that I did that (or found out I was planning to) they comment about how brave or courageous I am. Which is just futher proof that ignorance is bliss-- I thought I was the only person scared of driving in Italy. If I had known other people found the roads intimidating I would have never been crazy enough to do such a thing. (BTW-- the rental car was returned on Saturday and I have no plans to drive here again, so you can stop worrying about me.)
I'll take this time to share some of Ethan's Italian observations.
When he first made it to the apartment bathroom, he noticed we had two toilets-- one normal and one funny one. We explained that the funny one is a bidet and Ethan thought that was really something special. Of course, as a 6 year old boy, bathroom humor is as good as it gets, so what could be better than another fixture to deal with bathroom stuff. Everytime anyone came out of
the bathroom he would ask "Did you use the bidet?" It was a little embarassing as he would love to talk about it as we walked down the street. Most people did not understand english and had no idea what he was saying, but when he would use that word, heads would turn. The bathroom in Rome had a bidet as well. When we were in our room in Rome, Ethan asked if he could take some pictures of the room and we agreed. He went straight to the bathroom to take pictures of the bidet to show Junior (Tim's Dad.) I think those are the only pictures he took of the room.
Ethan proved that pizza, spaghetti, apples and gelatto are all you really need to eat to survive. At one restaurant he asked if they had Cocopuffs on the menu, but we convinced him there were no cocopuffs so he settled for pizza margherita (cheese pizza) again. (He did ask every waiter if they had root beer, and he never found one, but Tim promised they would get some the next time they went grocery shopping at home.) By the end of the trip, he was even ordering pizza margherita himself.
Tim discovered that Italian pizza is nothing like the mazzio's pizza Ethan and I are constantly asking him to eat. He even volunteered to eat pizza a few times while he was here.
This was the first trip we have taken with Ethan as a reader. So the shops with English names really jumped out at him and we were amazed at some of the things he could read. Many of them he read before Tim and I even noticed them. All week he kept refering to lots of shops as crazy. He referred to the cafe below our apartment as the Crazy Bar. Tim thought we were calling it that since they were open early for coffee and very late for pizza (like the time we named the neighbor's dog "Barky"). On the very last day there we discovered the sign really does say crazy bar, and the clothing shop up the street is named crazy style, and the kid's store is named crazy frog. Ethan had apparently concluded crazy is the adjective of choice in Italy and was using it frequently.
I'll post some general photos from Italy and call it a night. I'll try to bring you up to speed on this week soon.
Julie
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Hey, Julie, according to Ethan, the gelatto was the best thing in Italy.