The Orange Clock

The Orange Clock

Hey guys…many of you requested a picture of the famous Orange Clock so here it is.

New Car Day and Lisa's Birthday!

June 1st

So besides a long, sickening day of travel with a subpar entertainment system (compared to the first trip across the pond), today is NEW CAR DAY!

Despite still being sick, Rich and I headed to Ace Car Sales in Dallas to pick up the car we put a down payment on before we left. We bought our first car together, a bright red 2007 Toyota Yaris Hatchback. It was a steal at $7995, and is the perfect car for banging around DC. This means we will soon have an Infinity FX35 on the market if anyone is interested.

The only problem with this little car is the smell. It has the faint trace of what I think is cigarettes…hopefully some open window driving, febreeze, and little air freshener trees will take care of it.

My little RoadRunner (That's her nicknam, her horn goes mmme mmmmmee, like the RoadRunner)

Today is my friend Lisa's Birthday, sorry I didn't call

Happy Birthday Lisa!

Soccer Sunday

May 31st

My wife is nagging me about writing this post, so here goes:

If I had a Bucket List, today I would have been able to cross something off the list. For me, it has been a long time dream to go watch a soccer game in person. And I’m not talking FC Dallas here…a real game with players who are known throughout the world, well at least everywhere but here. Crystal, Luca, and I went to the Stadio Olimpico to watch an Italian League Serie A match of Roma vs. Torino. For those of you not familiar with the Roma squad, it touts the highly regarded Italian National Team players Totti, Panucci, and DeRossi. Also on the squad is Montenegran striker Vucinic. There are a couple of French and Brazilian guys too, but I mentioned the important guys already. Torino, on the otherhand, was in a must-win situation to avoid relegation. They did have one good player on their team though.

We arrived early to the stadium because there was no parking, which is typical for all of Rome. While walking in, we were studying our tickets and noticed that my ticket and Crystal’s ticket had different prices. Apparently, not only do women get free drinks at the bar, they get reduced prices for international soccer games…maybe I should get my old Halloween costume back out?? My uncle explained that because this was the last fixture of the season, with no implication to the final standings for Roma, the reduced price was an incentive to increase attendance for the meaningless game.

When we stepped foot inside, it was smaller than I expected, despite a 70,000 person capacity. The pitch was immaculate, and of course had to be, given that only days before Barcelona triumphed over the Ronaldos, er, Manchester United in the Champions League Final. Now there’s a spectacle that I would have LOVED even more. It was nice, even watching on TV, to see Ronaldo get his arrogant butt beat! But back to the Roma game. As the stadium filled up, there was one upper corner section of tightly packed-in Torino fans, roped in and surrounded by empty chairs and security guards. Whenever the Torino fans would start singing or chanting, the settling in Roma fans would quickly drown them out with jeer and whistles. At kickoff, the stadium was at about 75% capacity, mostly with avid Roma fans cheering, singing, and waving flags and banners. One of the giant banners covered a ten row section of people and Crystal and I wondered what the people underneath who couldn’t see anything were doing.

Section of Torino Fans

Note large banner covering 10 rows

My husband didn't mention the fire in the stands, see above

The game went well, with Roma pulling off a 3-2 victory. Totti and Vucinic both got goals. Here are the highlights if you are still reading this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOWy4wvqk-M

After the game, we went back to Luca’s house to get ready for dinner, and that is when VomFest 2009 began for Crystal. Although the true cause is unknown, legend has it that it was either a bad oyster or sink water that got the party started. Once before dinner, twice at dinner, and a couple more times after dinner. That’s all I have to say about that.

Other than that, dinner was nice. We ate in Castel Gondolfo with Luca, Rosa, Guilia, Carlo, and Maria. We said our goodbyes that night and then had a sleepless night before the long trip home.

Shop, Shop, Shop on Saturn Saturday

May 30th

Today we simply Shopped, Shopped and Shopped some more. Guilia, Rosa, and Luca took us to Euroma 2 the largest shopping mall in Europe…it was insane. So we were able to buy some stylish Italian clothes and shoes for me. Then we stopped for lunch… What an ordeal for a couple of kebab panninni’s. I learned this trip that with a bunch of Italians everything is a bit of an ordeal, it’s just the way they are.

After lunch, we did a little more shopping and headed home for a short rest, before yep you guessed it, MORE shopping.

They took us to the center of a small town on a Saturday, the entire town was there, and more since they were having a flower festival. The children of this town covered one of the streets with murals composed entirely of flower petals and plant materials. It was remarkably beautiful. (The communist party of Italy was also there soliciting support, which was extremely odd, I was unaware they were trying to make a comeback in the country).

Then we returned home for dinner, Scuie Scuie with Peas, followed by MORE OYSTERS (are you kidding me?). Then we took a family outing to Castel Grandolfo (the Pope’s summer Palace), for gelato. We basically ate gelato on the Pope’s porch, it was severely cold for gelato, but super tasty. While we were eating our gelato their was an astronomy lesson going on in the Piazza, which of course we couldn’t understand. They had some telescopes set up though where we were able to see the moon in detail, and then a tiny Saturn with its spec of a moon, which was pretty amazing. Another day done, one more before we head home.

The Pope's Door

Our Nuraghe Quest

May 29th

Today was our last day in Sardenga and we were pretty wiped out from the last few days. We decided to enjoy another morning at the beach, despite the remnants of Wednesday’s sunburn. So we spent the morning on the beach, and then headed back to town for some pizza and Gelato (in the small amount of time we spent in Stintino we visited this Gellateria 5 times).

After lunch, it was time to find a Nuraghe. The Nuraghi are the remnants of an ancient island civilization and are scattered all over the island. They are small bee-hive/igloo resembling huts constructed from stone that served as shelter. The problems with these little huts are that there are no roads to many of them, many are on private property, and they are just hard to find. We spent an hour or so trying to track down a Nuraghe and we were only able to see it from a distance (it was on private property with vicious signs posted about ravenous german shepards and no access allowed). This time our quest to find a Nuraghe was pretty much a failure, next time we will stop when there are signs present and not try to find them based on the map.
The tiny igloo shaped bump in the background is the Nuraghe

Sella and Mosca Vineyard outside Alghero

After our failed quest we were running extremely early for our flight and decided to stop at a vineyard of a local wine we had enjoyed while in Stintino, unfortunately we found it to be slightly fortresslike and were unable to gain access. We continued heading for the airport, where we ran upon a Necropolis from 3300 B.C., Anghelu Ruju, which was pretty interesting.

Then off to the airport to return the car and head back to Rome. We arrived earlier than planned due to our failed attempt at discovering a Nuraghe, which ended up making for a long wait in the airport because boarding was delayed 1 hour. I feel delays are to be expected at some point in the travels, hopefully this was our delay and all our flights home will be on time since we both have to work on Tuesday.

Rich filling up the Lancia

Once back in Rome we waited for Luca to get home to eat dinner, which ended up being after ten, so famished and exhausted we enjoyed an enormous feast of mussels and oysters. By the way if you love raw oysters, don’t ever tell an Italian that! I love oysters but I have my special way I like to eat them (i.d. ketchup, salt, lemon, and a cracker). Here it is just sucking down a slimy raw oyster, the taste is very good, but I don’t so much care for the texture without the cracker.

Costa Smeralda

May 28th

View from our Hotel in Palau

This morning we planned on visiting the famous Costa Smeraldo, we just didn’t know how we were going to see it. So we started out driving to Porto Cervo, which was a very rich town (like Beverly hills), with immaculately kept streets and much newer buildings than the rest of Italy, and a beautiful harbor filled with massive yachts and an exclusive yacht club. We quickly determined we were in an area we could not afford, snapped some pictures and moved on.

We ended up in Capriciolli near the Cala di Volpe. We were driving down the main road into Capriciolli and saw a small sign that said boat rental pointing down a small dirt road in some bushes, so we chanced it and turned down. Where we discovered a beautiful shallow cove filled with small boats and a tent advertising rentals. We ended up renting a small inflatable boat for half a day for 100euro, it was very reasonable since it was low season. So we loaded up, and spent the next four hours exploring the Costa Smeralda by boat. The beauty of the water and coast and beaches is unexplainable, you just have to look at the pictures.

After the boat ride is where the day’s adventure really began. We ate snacks (pistachios, quadratini, and dried bread and jam) on the boat, so we were not immediately hungry for lunch, so we kept driving (big mistake). The only time Richard and I fight are when we are hungary, hot, or giving directions, or any combination of the aforementioned scenarios. So finally we decided to stop for Pizza, but you can’t get pizza in Sardenga on a Thursday (both pizzerias that we stopped at in some tiny town were closed), so we kept driving. We ended up taking several detours through tiny towns looking for food, getting in a huge fight, and finally eating a subpar pannini, chips, and cardboard icecream at a bar in Berchidda (still better than yesterday’s lunch).

Finally, with full bellies but still recovering from the fight, we tried to leave Berchidda and a Police officer refused our entry to the highway… Now what? Crystal decided that it would be best to get on the road anyway, so we illegally headed up an onramp. Once driving the cars on the other side of the road started flashing their headlights at us, we weren’t sure what was going on, and proceeded with caution until finding Sardegna’s largest traffic jam. So we turned around and headed for the detour (the same place we were 20 minutes earlier), and headed for Sassari (Sardegna’s second largest city), which we bypassed and headed to Argentiera, where we planned on staying the night.
Richard in front of Argentiera's mine

I had read about Argentiera being an old mining town, and it having this old mine right on the beach, yadda yadda very picturesque….Would have been great for a day at the beach, unfortunately as a place to stay the night for a tourist in the off season it was a GHOST Town. So we were getting hungry and didn’t want a repeat of this afternoon, so we decided to head back to Stintino where we knew a hotel and had already scoped out all the restaurants. So we basically ended up where we began, with lots of adventures and driving in between. We ended our day with a great meal at a marina front restaurant. We sampled some local cheeses, I had Zuppetta di Cozze (mussel soup), and Rich enjoyed the linguine con vongole, followed by veal Milanese and salad, and another trip to the Gellateria.

Our Sardegna Cheeses

CapoFREAKIN Testa

May 27

We started off the morning with a trip to La Pelosa beach. We were on the beach by 0900. This was a beautiful white sand beach with crystal blue and turquoise waters, it was only a five minute drive from the center of town. The only downside was that the beach was littered with golf-ball to tennis-ball sized jellyfish. However, based on the reaction of the other beachgoers they were relatively harmless. Our neighbor picked one up and enjoyed tormenting his wife and taking photos, and none of the parents seemed concerned that their kiddos were playing in the jelly infested waters. I was not willing to investigate further by potential self sacrifice.

After three hours on the beach we decided it was time to move along, so we packed up our little Lancia and headed down the road along the northern coast. We travelled through Porto Torres, and ate lunch at a roadside restaurant (by far the worst lunch we have eaten thus far). Oh well, on to the beach, we stopped at a beach called San Pietro where we sat and watched some impressive kite surfers. Then back to the car and headed toward Castelsardo, a beautiful town situated up on a hill with an ancient castle at the center, unfortunately the streets are ancient as well, making it very difficult to get around. We drove down a seriously narrow dead end street with no signage and Rich did some heroic reversing narrowly missing some very steep steps resembling a street. Once we got off this street we drove around in a circle for 15 minutes trying to find the way out of town. Finally we got out, and continued along the coast to the Costa Paradiso, another 2 star attraction. Basically it was a coast of jagged red (grand canyonesque) rocks, with a thrashing turquoise sea at the base. Also, well worth the two stars, we enjoyed sitting and watching the giant waves crash against the cliffs. Then some more driving…
The elephant rock (got 1 star), not quite worth a detour, but kinda cool if its on your way

This time we were headed for Capo Testa another 2 star location, at the northeastern tip of the coast. On our way we stopped in the nearby town, Santa Theresa di Gallura looking for Capo Testa. Unfortunately, when we got back to the car we could not turn the key. After repeatedly trying and unsuccessfully attempting to read the Italian manual we went to a nearby hotel where we were directed to Avis. Luckily the town was small enough we walked to Avis, but the employee was the only person there and there was a serious language barrier, but he told us to come back at 1900 when he could close the shop. So slightly defeated we headed back to the car to do some more reading, but while Rich read I decided this would be a good time to call Dad…he knows it all, and he speaks the same language, but my cell phone was dead. So I went back to the hotel and asked to charge my phone, and the women (knowing my distress) kindly helped out. It took 15 minutes of charging before I could make a call, but finally I was able to call my dad. He told me what to do, I went back to the car and we tried again with some new suggestions, and within minutes we were headed to Capo Testa. Thanks Dad!!! So we were only detoured for about an hour.

Once we arrived in Capo Testa we didn’t have a lot of time or tennis shoes, so we definitely were not able to enjoy it to its fullest. It is basically a giant rock playground (when I say playground I don’t mean it literally, it is a natural rock formation), that you can climb all over.
After Capo Testa we headed to Palau, a city near the top of the Costa Smeralda, by the Capo d’Orso. We stayed at the Vanna Excelsior hotel, outside the city center situated on a hill overlooking the harbor and the archipelago. We paid 80 euro for a room with a beautiful terrace with a panoramic view, breakfast included. Once we got situated we headed into town to find some dinner, and after some failed attempts we landed in Zio Nicola’s. This restaurant was facing the harbor, had the second best food of our trip, including extremely fresh (caught this morning) seafood, and we received a 15% discount, and enjoyed 1.5 liters of local white wine for 14euro.

Capo Testa

My most delicious fish dish