Esther and Tom Visit

I mentioned that Esther and Tom were visiting this weekend, it was a lot of fun. We did a lot of stuff, and took a lot of pictures! Here's a taste of the fun, with Esther and Tom's turns at spinning on the bull at Galleria Vittorio Emanuele.



Tom made it in one push, Esther had to do a little more work!

Giò Pomodoro Again

These three are clustered together in a weird nook in my building. The first is "Hermes con Verga", Hermes with his staff.



These next two are both just titled "Arco". I like these ones, they are pleasantly abstract.

More Gio

There are actually a huge number of these Giò Pomodoro sculptures in my building. I do like a lot of them. This one is one of my favorites.



It's entitled "Folla", which means a crowd, like of people. This next one is "Marat", I think we are talking about Jean-Paul Marat. This is definitely a similar depiction of a person as in the Castor and Pollux sculpture shown before.



My friends Esther and Tom are here visiting this weekend, so you may not hear much from me in the next few days!

Design

My Italian class (and the reconfigurable manufacturing class that I am listening to) are both in the Via Durando half of the campus, as I mentioned, and also in the same building. The building is part of the design center complex. The building is just a huge classrooms complex, no Professors or anything, but classes for a variety of fields in design are taught there. Design incorporates textiles and fashion, architecture, stage design, and mechanical system design. So this means you see different stuff hanging around. For a few weeks the lobby had student designed stage costumes. In the central atrium of the building, there are banners of various famous interior furnishings designers, along with some of their designs. The building itself also has a very defined structure.



Note: that coat-rack in the top was also represented at the Triennale design museum!

More groceries!

Today I had to go shopping to get a few more groceries, as my friends Esther and Tom are coming to visit tomorrow! You never know what you are going to get at Penny Market. There were no cauliflowers, and the eggplants and artichokes looked not so hot, so I didn't end up getting any impressive veggies. I will have to stop by the pricey fruit and veg place in Piazza Bausan to get Italian melons and maybe a cauliflower, asparagus, or artichokes. The little shop has high prices but everything there is really good quality.

What I did end up getting was lots of yogurt (an easy breakfast), mushrooms to saute to put in pasta, green pesto, oranges for OJ, salad greens, and treats that I have been trying not to buy because I just eat them if I bring them around the house...



It's kind of amazing how little food I keep in the house. I would run out of food in less than a week, I think, typically. I certainly demolish any fruits and veggies I bring into the house in a few days, I usually only by two or three yogurts at a time, and even the fresh pasta goes awful fast. I guess I do have that bag of polenta, if I was willing to eat it pretty plain it would last me a few days. Awfully filling, that stuff!

Laurea

Yesterday was graduation laurea at Polimi Bovisa. I am not sure about the graduation schedule, I think this is people who finished up fall classes (which have an exam period ending in January and February) but I don't really now. The cutest part was the laurels that were the unofficial garb. I saw lots of folks with the headbands, mostly leafy, a few with some flowers too. Here's a surreptitious snapshot I took before class last night!

Pay As You Go: The Recharge

So, as I mentioned, I am doing all my phone and internet here pay as you go. I don't put a lot of Euros on at a time, so I have to recharge a lot. For both my phone and my internet, I have finally gone to pay cards.

My phone is with TIM. When I first got the phone, I put five Euros on there. That lasts me over a month! The first time I recharged, I went to a TIM store, where you fill out a form with all your details, and they charge you at the store. OK, that worked, but it meant going to a store and potentially waiting in a line. So the next thing I did was go with the website. You have to create an account, put in all your details, and charge your credit card. Let me say, putting in your credit card details online is fussier here than in the US. In some cases, you can't include a middle initial, even if it is on the card itself, but after some fiddling I got it to work. Still, it was a bit of a pain, and took far longer than I would have expected.

My internet is with 3 (Tre), and at first I was recharging online using my credit card details, running into the same sorts of issues. This month, I couldn't get the online form to submit for me at all.

The solution to my recharge problem in both cases has turned out to be pay code cards. Each company has their own name for it, like "Carta3", but it's all the same. They have the card system at many stores, including my local Penny, where I shop on average twice a week, where you simply grab a tag to show the cashier that says how much you want to recharge on what network. The tag is just for them to bar-code scan, you don't keep it. So they add the cost of the recharge to whatever else you are buying, it shows up on your receipt as any other line item. You can pay with any accepted payment method along with the rest of your stuff. And what they give you then is a 16 digit code in the form xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx printed onto a separate receipt. This receipt has all the pertinent data, along with instructions on how to use that number for recharge.

There are several options to recharge with this card depending on the company and your device. For my internet, one of the links on the company's landing page is to recharge, and you just say you want to recharge with a paid code and type in that number. For the phone, you can text the code to the company's service number (free of charge) or call them free of charge and type it in. You get a text a few minutes later showing your new balance. Easy. So this will be how I recharge my phone in the future.

I don't know if we have an equivalent system in the US. I think for some pay as you go stuff, you can buy cards, but they are physical cards you can take, instead of a simple code on a receipt!

Poppies

The spring flowers in the grass patch near my building are a great variety of weeds. But one flower that has turned up along the edges of the pavement is poppies. These blazing red ones.



The long exposure makes the red perhaps too vivid, but it's still much closer in color than the washed out from flash version below. They are a strong red shade.

Sunday

I haven't left the house today, and to be honest, I don't think I will. I've got a busy few weekends ahead of me so cleaning up the house and relaxing at home seems to be the right plan. I vacuumed today, it's amazing how dirty this place gets so quickly. Seriously, Milan is a sooty city. Fine black dust can appear anywhere. The weirdest is that my door frame on my front door gets dust around the edges. The other thing that I was cleaning up seems to be mostly lint. Because there are no clothes driers, lint just falls off the clothes when they dry. The lint color tends toward blue, since I have blue blankets, one set of blue towels, and perhaps even from my jeans. I've made the joke in my head that Milan is "The City of Lint".

Yesterday I did leave the house, to go to school and work. I got one major task done, so I am pleased enough about it. And I went grocery shopping on my way home from school. I have started to buy fresh milk, I needed it for an ingredient, and really the fresh stuff tastes fine, with no trace of that tetra-pak milk that I was afraid of. The spinach tortellini in the big package are actually the best ones I have had from the closest grocery store, which worked out well. My "adventure" purchase this week is those pre-cooked beets. I haven't seen any fresh ones yet, including in the farmer's market, so I don't know if this is just the way to expect them or what. I will update you all on how they are. I picked a pack with three small ones instead of two medium or even one big one, so I hope they are tender and sweet...

Finally! An Access Card

This week I finally got an access card to my building. Before, they were giving out the RFID key tags, and they seemed to be in short supply. I was able to do without pretty well, but in the last few weeks, they have started to lock the doors to my section of the building even during working hours, so it was becoming a little more necessary. I ended up asking the secretary in my group, which I should have done from the outset, she is very helpful. She filled out a form, sent me to a funny office, and they gave me this card.



Well, that was Wednesday, and it still hasn't gotten registered in the system... The guy said up to ten days for it to work, and I am well within that window, but I hope it works on Monday!

Fava

Wednesday was market day, as usual! I took my new bag, and got quite a haul! Four eggplants, two bundles of asparagus, two yellow apples, a kilogram of fava beans, and a melon.



I've never made fresh fava beans, and I have to say they are a lot of work! A kilo of pods works out to a cup or maybe two of beans. You have to shell them, like peas, but the pods take a little more ripping. They're sort of foamy and spongy on the inside.



A lot of the recipes said to blanch the beans after you shell them, slip the skins off, and then saute. The skins are much thicker than other beans. As mine were on the whole small, I found the skins actually OK to eat, so I just sauteed everything with a little paprika!

The Other Half

My Italian class is on the other side of the Bovisa campus of Polimi. The half where I work is right next to the train station, while the "Durando" half is about at 10 minute walk off on the other side of the train station. Basically, a 10 minute walk from my house.

The "Durando" campus has a lot more bright-colored buildings. It looks more like an undergrad campus than my half, which looks a lot more like offices and labs. The sculptures are more silly, too.



There is this odd structure I can't figure out near the building I have class in. It looks like a functional structure in some ways, but I can't figure out its purpose at all. It's in a recessed area, with a bit of underground building. It looks a little like the base of the ever-present cranes, but the cranes don't have so much mesh work or permanent bases. It's so strange. I'm going to have to investigate closer some time I'm not in a rush.

Shopping Bag

While I was in Boston, I made myself a ridiculous bag to take as my shopping bag. I usually stuff plastic bags in my backpack to have in the case that I go shopping, so I figured I would stuff this in instead.



It's a little ridiculous, I admit, but I blame my sister for encouraging me to make such a big tassel. Everyone knows how much I like tassels, so she was just fanning the flames.

To be fair, this bag looks a little silly but I was able to fit all the food groceries here in there on my first expedition. I mean, they are all in there in that first picture. The straps felt a little stretchy, but the bag looked pretty good!



Anyway, this is my first round of groceries on my return, gotten last weekend. I will have to go again soon!

Return Gifts!!!

When I got back to Italy, I got awesome gifts! Rydia sent me this insane card, and got a lot of people to sign it, too! When I say insane, I mean it came in its own box with a slide-out drawer, that had a drawer pull knob. Sweet!



And my friend Ali brought me back candy and fruit from Tehran! I haven't opened the candies yet... I want to enjoy them, not just eat them in shame at my desk! The fruit is dried barberries. These are used in fruit-seasoned rice in Iranian cooking, which they serve at Darcin and I love it. They taste a lot like cranberries but are a little smaller, so I think I could eat these plain as crasins. I will be trying that, but I am going to come up with other ways to cook them.



Yum!

Polizia

I find these Italian police cars to be a little on the "toy car" side compared to what we have in the US. Does that thing have a hatch? The lights are a little on the unimpressive side, too...



The police officers themselves look pretty bad-ass at least, they wear more soldier-looking clothes, like dark-colored fatigues, sometimes with helmets.

Rainy Italy

So it's rained a little bit every day or night since I returned to Italy. Not a lot. Not enough that I regret not having an umbrella. Just a little bit each day. This has the plus side effect that everything is exploding in green. In walking to school and around my neighborhood, I haven't been exposed to many manicured gardens, but there are lots of trees and grassy patches. The trees at my building look the lushest they ever have. The big guys here are birches.



Anyplace that was grassy has exploded in green weeds, particularly dandelion puff-balls... I am sure at some point they will get mowed, but the groundswork here happens pretty slowly!



Coming in to town on the airplane I was pretty entranced by the green scenery. I want to get out to the countryside soon while things are still so lovely!

Esther and Tom's Wedding

I have a few photos from my time in the U.S. that I wanted to share. Part of my trip was to go to Esther and Tom's wedding on St. Patrick's Day at West Point. The wedding was at the Catholic Chapel at West Point, which is small but cheerful.



I really liked the stained glass.



Here's the bride and groom after the sword ceremony, on their way to take photos after the wedding ceremony.



And here's me and Ross in our wedding clothes. I am wearing Ross's grandma's mink!

JFK

I've got a lot of photos from my break in America... Most of which aren't really relevant to this blog, but I will share some of them. Here's a pair from my flight home. For flights between Milan and Boston, there's always a stop. Alitalia used to have a direct, but it was cut a year or two when they rebalanced their hubs. Basically, they used to have two hubs, Milan and Rome, and they've cut it down to just Rome as the real hub. Bummer for the Milanese.

The choices for single stops tend to be New York JFK, Heathrow, Madrid, and Frankfurt, in the rough order they seem to fall in pricing and frequency. Lately it's been all JFK for me. Which is actually pretty OK, as the transatlantic segments are typically the red-eyes, and connecting in Europe usually means arriving at noon or 2pm instead of my (currently) favored early arrival. (I woke up decently today and think I will have jet lag completely shaken tomorrow. My patented system is working!) JFK is hilarious. If you are flying on the commuter jets between Boston and New York, then you often have to do the outdoor boarding. This Delta connection had what looked like a human-sized hamster habitrail connecting five or six tiny planes to one gate.



Also, the Delta terminal has pigeons! I have seen small birds in other airports, like sparrows... This is the first time I have seen pigeons. And these pigeons are actually very casual. They just walk around, they rarely fly!



Of course, the American Airlines terminal is less decrepit. And the JetBlue terminal is practically slick!

I Made it to Milano

My flights went smoothly, and I was surprisingly un-exhausted when I got off the plane at Malpensa at 8:00 AM. I managed to sleep just a little bit on the plane. Getting the train and walking to my apartment didn't feel awful either. I contemplated just cleaning up and going to the office, but I figured that would set me up for a crash. Instead, I followed my patented red-eye-to-Europe system! If my flight is an early arrival flight, I go home (typically getting in my apartment by 10 AM-ish), have a nice shower, and then sleep for four hours. That seems to be enough sleep that I am able to spend the afternoon and early evening not feeling terrible, but not so long that I can't fall asleep at a good time that evening. This works surprisingly well! I am usually on my regular schedule by that next day.

Return (Triumphant?)

Today is my flight back to Milano. I have to connect in New York, which should be OK, and I chose flights that go through Malpensa. There are two airports that are good for Milan, Malpensa and Linate. Malpensa is an express train ride to a stop near my house, while Linate requires a bus ride to the subway. The traffic at both tends to be very reasonable, so it's really a choice based on the convenience of getting home from the airport!

At this point I am all packed up, with hours to go. Ross had meetings at work this morning so I am all alone at home!

Pay As You Go

Some friends (a couple) just switched their cell phones to pay-as-you-go to cut back on their bills. It makes a lot of sense for some people, especially if you have a landline home phone.

In Italy, it seems like most people go pay-as-you-go for cell phones. I know a few people who have really cheap cell phone monthly packages, but you can stack these with pay-as-you-go packages. For example, there's a "young" package that includes 1000 texts and 1GB data a month for 6 Euros, but you have to pay-as-you-go for voice minutes. There are some people I know who carry more than one cell phone from different brands, with different uses for each. One might have cheaper international rates, one might have cheaper texts.

There's also a thing in Italy (and I think in most of Europe), that you only pay for outbound calls and texts, not receiving. So you basically are paying for only half your messages and calls. For calls, you only pay if you get connected (also true in the US, I think?), so between that and the pay-as-you-go part, there's a whole "missed call" phenomenon. Like, if you are waiting for someone, they give you a missed call when they arrive, as a signal.

Clothes for Italy

I've been doing some spring/summer shopping for Italy! Last weekend Mary and I went shopping, and she got me this awesome dress!

I plan on wearing it with leggings for the spring. Same with this dress I got at Macy's!

I have my great tall boots, but I may need to get ankle boots for these looks, too...