Italy trip continued… 25th to the 27th.
25th
Woke up on Christmas Day and had no work to do, food-preparing-wise! Instead, it would turn out to be an entire day of EATING. I was eating until 11pm that evening. O_O
But first! Me and Tom got to meet some new people who would spend Christmas in the Italian house. I drew place-name-tag things for everyone to have on the table. We started to eat… And kept on eating…
(Best lasagne in the world)
(Capeletti!)
(Two manly men)
(Three girly girls)
Until it was time to open the gifts! Opening presents here is so remarkably different from my home in Sweden that it was a bit of a culture shock. In Sweden the present opening is complete chaos where all the kids RIP their gift wrapping open and throw it over their shoulder. It takes maybe 5 minutes for everyone to see what they got for Christmas.
Here, in this family in Italy, one person at a time opens a gift. You first acknowledge who it is from and read out what the card says. Then you open it while everyone watches. When you have unveiled your gift and commented on it accordingly you go over to the person who gave it to you and give them a kiss on each cheek. :D
Opening all the gifts must’ve taken an hour or so, but I really like it because it was so relaxing and you felt like people took the time to thank you.
Right! After gift opening… MORE FOOD. And it continued all evening. I ate so much I thought I was going to explode. Family members fell asleep on the sofa in between meals, snoring loudly. I found it amusing :D
(Sugar cubes drenched in alcohol)
(Another sugar drenched in HAWT :P)
26th
The day after Christmas was the first day Adriano had off work in several months. His bakery is stupidly busy in November and December. So we decided to take the opportunity to go visit their friends in a house in another set of mountains called, Piu Monte (Near Ovvada). The couple was called Pietro and Sara. They are renovating their house where Sara very recently (at that point, only a few days earlier), had an accident. She had leaned out the second floor window/door with her hands on the railings, when the railings suddenly gave way, making her plummet down to the ground. Apparently the scene was horrid, with her lying in a pool of blood in the snow. It was only by pure luck that a relative happened to be at the house at that time as Pietro was at work. Sara escaped with a broken arm and very bruised face, but if she had landed a few centimeters to the left, she would’ve lost an eye as her face would’ve connected with the railing.
Shocking stuff.
We drove over there to have dinner with them and talk to her to see how she’s doing. Pietro was helping out with the cooking and I was surprised to see him smoking over the stove. It’s something many Italians don’t even bat an eyelid at. I was gasping inside, thinking: ‘how can you smoke over such amazing homemade pasta!?’
We then went to bed fairly early due to an early start the next day… For something special…
27th
… Which meant we had to get up at 6 am and tip toe out of their house to get into the car. We set off when it was still pitch black outside and without any breakfast in our tummies.
What we were going to was about a 3 hour car ride away. We stopped at a roadside service station at one point to have an espresso, and then we continued driving.
A tantalizing glimpse of what was to come was shown to us in the far horizon.
Getting closer…
After passing several villages, we finally arrived at a fantastic Alpine village which has been kept fairly traditional with old houses being restored as they were several hundred years ago. I think it’s better to just show pictures, rather than me explaining. They were absolutely fantastic. I fell in love instantly. I think the scenery around the village also helped a lot.
(Fresh Alpine water. Safe to drink and delicious.)
We had come here to go skiing.
(Me in my sexy borrowed ski-trousers from the early 1980’s! Oh baybeh)
(Map of the slopes with two warning lights, showing the wind-speed and the avalanche risk on the top of the alps)
Anyone who knows me from Sweden will know that I don’t do skiing, but I had promised I’d give it a go. I mean… It’s not everyday you get the offer to go to the bleedin’ Alps! So. After a quick breakfast we went to the ski hire place to check the slopes. All this following information may be old news to lots of people, but I didn’t have a clue.
Apparently the slopes have different colours to show how difficult they are. Blue is the normal slope. Red is hard. Black is the most difficult slope available. Kiddie slopes aren’t graded. They are below blue.
So! Because I don’t really have a clue how to ski, I said I’d want to try standing on skis on a kiddie slope first, then go over to a blue one. We asked the man who was hiring out the skis and found out that the place we were at only had Red and Black slopes (gah) and because of the icy weather, the red slope now had an icy cover over it and thus had been upgraded to a black slope. He said beginners shouldn’t try it.
I think Tom was much more disappointed than I was. Well. It showed. In all honesty, I wanted to try to ski again since I had built myself up for it for days, but I wasn’t willing to do it on a black slope in the Alps.
So, we decided to do the next best thing. We got a pedestrian pass up to the top of the Alps….
What we saw simply cannot be justified with photos. You had to be there, seriously.
(Look at the wind on the top of that peak)
When we reached the top, it was incredibly windy and it felt like a completely different world. A bit like an alien planet.
It was storming so much that you couldn’t walk in the direction of the storm without hurting your eyes. Luckily we managed to get to the top restaurant and hid indoors where we had lasagne and polenta. I also got some liquid hot chocolate. Not the powder variety, but the proper kind.
(Long drop…)
After descending back down to the village, we went to a museum which showed how the people in the area lived about 500 years ago. Sadly you can’t take photos in museums in Italy. :(
A few hours later, we started driving home. It would take us about 3 hours to get home, but we also stopped in a town called Gavi where we ate dinner in a fantastic restaurant. I’ve found wine I actually like. Which is a bit scary. This also meant that I got a tiny bit tipsy and managed to break a glass on the table by simply placing it on the table surface. I maaaay also have talked loudly once about poo. Hrm.
We came back late. I forgot my bra in the bathroom and felt incredibly embarrassed the morning after.
That wine was a killer.