They're all good

A major reason we love the Italian culture is the food.

After traveling quite extensively in Italy, I rarely consult guidebooks for help on choosing restaurants. For one thing, many of our travels in Italy have been by bicycle and a guidebook that covered the small cities we stayed in would be far too heavy to carry on a bike.

  There is also a more important and better reason. Once, we were questioning the guy at the front desk of our hotel in Pavia about good places to eat. He described several places and finally said, "Well, really, they are all good."

 The wonder of Italy is that it's true. In many months of traveling and hundreds of meals, we can recall only one really bad meal. (It was in Venice. One does need to be careful in Venice. There are very few Italians actually living in there because it's so expensive and the restaurants don't depend on regular customers.)

Our method of finding good places to eat in Italy:
1. Avoid any restaurant that has big photos of the food outside, large and prominently displayed tourist menus in English, or has a person encouraging you to go in.
2. Walk a little ways from a popular tourist site. Unless you are inside a tourist site, such as a major museum, which might have a quite decent restaurant which can be a good place to have lunch or a snack so you can see more art without fainting.
3. Look at the general appearance of the place and if people already eating look happy.
4. For a special night out, ask someone local. People working at hotels are excellent sources of info.
5. Don't worry about it too much. With very few exceptions, they are good.

For lunch, search out bars. A bar in Italy is a place not just for drinks and coffee, but for wonderful sandwiches. You can check out a bar by walking in and looking at the sandwiches and desserts in the glass case. If they don't look delicious, just keep walking. In small towns, bars don't always have sandwiches prepared in advance so go to the nicest bar you see, whose vibe attracts you. Or go to the only bar. It will probably be just fine.

Some bars require you to pay for your food first and give the receipt to the person at the counter who gives you the food. Don't worry if your Italian isn't up to the challenge. Bars in Italy tend to be staffed by cheerful people that want to unite you with food and drink. Many bars have someone who will help the bewildered tourist and many will have you pay after you have your food so you can create less confusion. If you want to sit down and eat, rather than at the counter, you will be waited on and pay at the end. If you need to, you can go point out what you want to eat and then go back to your table. If you are a tourist with tired feet, having a good sit down isn't really that expensive. Indulge yourself. If you are your feet don't hurt, stand at the bar and enjoy going native.

Italians are excellent hosts and usually very adaptable. You want to share a pizza even though Italians never do that? You only want a first course and a salad but no second course? You want your salad first instead of at the end of the meal? You want a cappuccino after dinner instead of at breakfast? Most Italian restaurants will accommodate these deeply strange requests without any fuss or comment. Or, as my Italian tutor told me, commentary will occur only in the kitchen.
  There are a couple of points of etiquette that non-Italians may not be aware of.  Meals are served in courses. So if only one person in a large group orders an appetizer all the other diners will probably wait until that person is served and has eaten the appetizer. Secondly, almost all food in Italian kitchens is cooked to order by a small staff. (If any frozen ingredients are used in a dish, it must be indicated on the menu.) Give the kitchen a break and do as the Italians do: if you are in group, order the same thing or at least limit the number of different dishes you order.
   Buon appetito and don't forget the gelato!

Slow travel

Mr. Rududu and I like to explore places in depth. This month we took that idea to its logical conclusion and stayed in Rome for over two weeks.

It was a vacation full of adventures with massive doses of history and art that left us wanting to go back.  I have enough photos to make anyone's eyes glaze over—including mine—and this week's project is to edit them mercilessly. Oddly, it's a lot easier to choose the best few photos of the Colosseum than to decide what to keep of many less famous places and things. I'm working on it...but I certainly need to keep this one.

The weather was ideal. The few days with rain predicted always had their predictions improved by the time they arrived; usually the weather was sunny and warm but not hot.
  That September and October may be the nicest months for visiting Rome is no secret judging by hoards of other tourists. If you are looking at something famous in Rome, you probably won't be alone. Here for example are the crowds approaching the Sistine Chapel. (Being in the chapel was better. Most people don't stay very long.)

We usually managed to find the crowds festive rather than annoying. We kept in mind that they were there out of a mutual interest. We alternated places that are on everyone's wish list with places that are not as well known. Museums and ruins that elsewhere would be on the top of lists are often quite uncrowded and having time to explore them is surely a major advantage of slow travel. Since we were on a more relaxed schedule than tourists with just a few days in Rome, we also found that letting tour groups pass us in museums was a good tactic. Instead of following along in a large noisy group, we often had rooms of fabulous art pieces all to ourselves.
  We rented two different Roman apartments through a site I just read about this summer: airbnb. It's a combination of B & B agency and social networking site. Renters rate the places they stay and owners also rate the guests. Some people rent just a room or even just a sofa and there can be back and forth communication setting up a rental. One pays in advance but the money is kept in escrow until 24 hours after arrival, providing some protection against scams or misrepresentations. We opted for entire apartments and loved both places that we stayed. One was near Trastevere and is owned by David, a very helpful guy that walked us around the neighborhood to orient us and gave us printed instructions for using the public transit system to get to all major tourist areas. The owner of the second place, Luca, was charming and his apartment was centrally located and very spacious. Here is a photo of its living and dining area.

I loved being able to cook and eat at "home" some days. We had a very happy experience renting through airbnb and will do it again. In fact, I find looking at places on the airbnb site and fantasizing about different trips quite addictive. (How about a castle in England for $2000 a night?) As I digest my Roman holiday and get my photos in order I will share a few other highlights of our trip. Arrivederci!

Bird biking

Our friend Dave Fallow expertly guides people to see birds in Madison. Due to concerns about climate change, he now only guides people that show up by bus or bicycle. It's a valid point: if one loves nature, it's a little strange to use a lot of fossil fuels to go appreciate it. He's not alone in this idea. I found an interesting site about it here. Many bird watchers are avid list makers and so that site's idea is to only count the birds spotted while self propelled.
   The other day we struggled out of bed at what is our idea of early and biked across town to meet Dave at 9 am. It was a glorious day and we saw lots of birds that were migrating south, mostly beautiful small warblers. We also saw what looked like an offering to the wood spirits.

 Enormous prairie flowers towered over us.

 There were beautiful reflections in a marshy area.

  We're not serious about making lists and have no idea how many species of birds we've seen. A lot of cool ones. In the interests of full disclosure: we do carefully keep lists of what we have seen in the vicinity of our house in Wisconsin, in our yard in Costa Rica and in Costa Rica as a whole.  Somewhere we have lists of other trips that we've never bothered to combine into what is called a Life List. 
   It's very good to know there are so many interesting things to see close to home. Thanks Dave, for again showing us the wonders of Picnic Point.

Still green

Autumn is suddenly just around the corner. Nights are cooler and the air is crisper. The corn fields are turning brown and all to soon only conifers will be green. We were out in the country the last couple of days; I feel a need to take advantage of the weather while it's nice. We rode our bikes on Short Cut road. It's a quicker way to get from the middle of nowhere to a different middle of nowhere.

We saw a rare green barn. (In Wisconsin they are usually red or white.)

Hiking in the woods, where a few trees are already changing colors, we hunted for wild hickory nuts but the squirrels had already found most of them.

 Summers always seem to go too fast but at least we have good knitting weather to look forward to.

Easy pieces

Way back when, when I was working crazy hours, I realized that time after time I got home too tired and too hungry to even decide what to cook. That's when I made my list of "5 Easy Pieces": dishes that took very little time to put together, yet we like to eat. (One of them was frozen pizza. This might give an idea of how little brain power I had left when I got home since I actually had to have this written on a reminder list. I just don't think well when I'm hungry. Another easy and fast dish was tempeh in coconut milk. The exoticism of that was balanced by macaroni and cheese out of the box which is one of Mr. Rududu's favorite foods in the entire world. )
  I don't know where that list is anymore. Happily, I'm no longer so pressed for time. But I often throw dinner together at the last minute on busy days. In the late summer with wonderful tomatoes available, a great option is Insalata Caprese.

 Get a really ripe and flavorful tomato. Slice it up and lay it on a plate with slices of fresh mozzarella cheese. Sprinkle on some basil leaves, salt, and pepper. Dress with olive oil and vinegar. Savor.

I stand proud in my underpants

The commemorative edition of Elizabeth Zimmermann's Knitter's Almanac has just been published to celebrate the centenary of her birth. On page 94 is a color photo of my Nether Garment—my knitting in a book by my knitting hero!!

On the left is my treasured original copy vintage 1981 and on the right is the new edition with color photos. I am so proud to be included that words can't express it. Although I never met her, Elizabeth Zimmermann continues to be an inspiration to me in knitting and in life. One important thing I learned from her was that you can make any project truly your own and not be what she called a Blind Follower.

  I knit my nether garment quite some time ago—I think it was the 90s or it might have been the tail end of the 80s. (Below are all the notes I have about how I did it. ) Until this year it had never been out of the house but it has now journeyed out and back in a box to be photographed for the book. I wear it often while sitting around on cold winter nights. Much as many people have advised me to wear it with boots and a skirt, I just don't do skirts in the winter, no matter what nether garment I have on. It gets really cold in Wisconsin!

 I never showed it to many people, but I noticed right away that when I did, they tended to giggle. It just seems to strike people's funny bones even though it was (ahem) a Serious Study of Fair Isle Colors and Patterns. Okay, it was actually more of a result of ordering scads of different colors of Shetland yarn from Schoolhouse Press and wanting to play with as many of them as possible. I sometimes consult it when thinking about what color combination to use for a new garment as it functions well as a sampler. And if I'm feeling a bit down, a quick frolic around the house in it is good for my mood.

When I posted it as one of my projects on Ravelry I was taken aback by it's popularity there and all the nice things people said to me. (One of the messages had the subject line "Your Underpants!" which I found charming once I realized it was from a non-native speaker of English.) It won a Bobby award for Most Colorful Project the first year of Ravelry. So far, over 23,000 people have looked at my version of the Nether Garment on Ravelry and now the book is out so I'm sure many others will see it. It makes me very happy and immensely proud to be part of the book. Knit on.

Curing sock boredom

I had a plan— to knit several pairs of just plain socks with the pretty yarn I had accumulated for the purpose.

I was going to knit while watching TV. How very relaxing...mmm, how very boring. I started to think how I could easily be replaced by a sock knitting machine. Knitting projects need to fit sometimes unpredictable moods and this one was suddenly feeling like work.
   So I plunged into the project set aside for when I could really concentrate. It turned out to be a lot easier than I had thought and way more interesting for me at the moment than plain socks.

I'm in love with the X-O-X cable up the back of the sock. And I still have my just plain sock project on the needles for when it will be just what I feel like doing.
Details: my plain socks will be in various colorways of Soxx Appeal yarn. My cabled socks are following the Milo pattern in Sock Innovation by Cookie A.

They are knit in Classic Elite Summer Sox yarn. My first attempt, on size 0 (2mm) is too small so I am now trying a larger needle. Those traveling cables really pull the sock in as it gets longer, making it much smaller than it seems at the beginning.