The Winter 08 Travelogue, Parte Due

Ciao, my pretties! I’m taking a break from living la vita here in Spoleto to update you on the last few days.
Monday morning, still in New York, I woke up bright and early, so we walked around the corner to EuroPan, had some French toast, and watched the neighborhood wake up.

Then we went back to the hotel for a shower, which was, frankly, a disaster. I had been enjoying walking into the (dry) shower and waving to my parents in the bedroom through the big window that made up the outside wall of the shower, and I’ve taken many a shower on the road in the past. But stepping into the running shower that day just freaked me out, even after Daddy got in with me and held me. It just took all of the fun out of shower windows.


We had lunch at Vegetarian Paradise 2, where I enjoyed broccoli and rice and not much else, then we picked up our takeout order from Red Bamboo for the plane. We also went shoe shopping, which was completely boring, because there were zero kids’ shoes, plus my parents each tried on about a hundred pairs of shoes and bought none of them. The only saving grace was the store cat, who didn’t seem to mind me yelling and waving at it.

I got to ride another train, this time back to the airport, and I was feeling pretty excited when we boarded the plane. A man stopped Mommy in the aisle, laughed, and asked her if she had given me any codeine. He turned out to be sitting right in front of me, so I got him back for that little comment by rasping the soles of my pajama feet on the tray table on the back of his seat, all night long.

I didn’t sleep so well on the plane, so I was glad to get off and take a couple of trains, first from the airport to the central train station, on which I got dressed for the day, and then on the second train, to Spoleto, on which I finally slept peacefully for an hour and a half.

When I woke up, I was in a parking lot looking at a man named Laurie, who took us in his car to the apartment that is our home for a week. I have a cozy room of my own, with a play yard nearly identical to the one I have at home, and a long, wide hallway in which I can run back and forth to my heart’s content. At the end of the hallway is the living room, which has a little table the perfect height for me to play at, a TV that has a channel of nothing but Teletubbies and Pingu and assorted other shows that only a kid my age could love, and big glass doors leading to a big terrace; when it’s nice, I can run around and around the terrace, and when it’s bleak, I can still see outside.


When we arrived Tuesday, we all took long naps, but when we woke up, we took a walk all around the town, and I climbed almost the whole way from our apartment (at the lower end of the upper town) to nearly the top.


Then we ate at a restaurant across the street from us, Osteria del Trivio, where I refused to eat anything but bread but my parents ate tiny savory tartlets, big slabs of creamy cheese, olive oil-soaked pieces of toast topped with creamy, lemony spinach and vinegary tomatoes, and little cups of melted cheese drizzled with balsamic syrup, with the rind of the cheese folded over the top so that they looked like little oysters. They also ate tagliatelle with porcini and tomatoes and spinach ravioli, but I was still exclusively interested in the bread basket. Since I wasn’t crazy about the food, the host picked me up and took me back to the kitchen for a tour, and then he gave me a wooden Santa ornament, which was pretty cool.


Yesterday, we all slept in, and then we walked out into the sunshine and had lunch at a bar in the Piazza Garibaldi. My parents ate a spinach and cabbage dish with olive oil and salt, and an eggplant parmesan baked into a toast cup, but I was still only feeling the bread, plus a few peanut butter crackers my parents offered me in desperation. After lunch, we walked all over the upper (old) town, peered down at the ancient Roman Theater from Piazza Liberta, and shopped at the grocery store.

At one intersection in town, there were two elevators, by themselves, that went somewhere underground, and we were feeling adventurous, so we went down, to find ourself in a long tunnel with many escalator ramps. We went all the way to one end, where there were elevators up to the street across from a hotel. Then we went all the way down to the other end - and found a parking garage. It was sort of strange.


Back up at street level, we found a slightly muddy playground, and I got out of the stroller and went nuts. I went down all the slides, and took a ride on the swings, and see-sawed, and climbed all over and through a play train, and gave my parents heart attacks when I ran right off the edge of one of the many terraces on the playground. I was fine, if a bit muddy, but my parents were all freaked out, so they dusted me off and put me back in the stroller and started the hike back home. Mommy made a frittata with broccoli and cauliflower in it for dinner, thinking I would be happy to eat my favorite foods, but I wasn’t interested, although I did finally eat something not made of bread: almost a whole, huge apple.


This morning, my parents tried to tempt me with croissants stuffed with jam and a panini stuffed with goat cheese and arugula from the bakery at the bottom of our street, but I wasn’t fooled - I knew it wasn’t just bread, and I wouldn’t touch the stuff. We decided to have a lazy day today, since it’s kind of bleak out and we're still not quite on the local schedule, and I’ve enjoyed just running around in my pajamas and reading books and eating apples and drinking milk - lots and lots of milk. I was finally tempted this afternoon by the pizza my Mommy made, and I didn’t even pick off the cheese or the tomatoes, like I usually do. Maybe tonight, I’ll branch out even further - we’re headed out for gelato now, so it seems like as good a time as any to eat something besides bread.


Ciao for now!