Bits and Pieces

A couple of weeks ago, my internet key broke. After all the tears and frustration of getting one that worked in my apparently aging computer and figuring out how not to get ripped off by Alice Mobile, it just broke. I took it out of my bag one day, plugged it into the computer and the little green light just didn't come on. The bit that plugs in feel too loose, so I figure it was probably all my own fault because I didn't look after it properly. There's no way of replacing it that would be worthwhile for the six weeks or so before I move to France, so at the moment I am internetless and scrounging friends, school and the internet cafe in a bid to stay in touch with the world, because it couldn't have happened at a worse time. I need to book flights, arrange to ship my stuff to Paris and plan a holiday for me and my mum, and this has really brought home to me how dependent I am on the internet for information and communication. I'm sure all of these things can be done in other ways, but it's just so much more difficult. (The best places I've found for internet here are the major bookshops. Although Mondadori is closer for me, I tend to use FNAC because although the internet cafe is open all day at Mondadori, they only sell credit at certain times, and never at weekends. Trust Italy to make even the internet inconvenient!)


Anyway, apart from finding myself temporarily on the wrong side of the digital divide, here are a few of the things that have been happening in the past two weeks.

Summer has definitely come. The school year has ended, it's 30 degrees outside, and the comune (town hall) is shutting for it's 3 month long holiday. It's only open for 5 hours a day at the best of times, so I guess 3 months of being completely closed won't make much difference.

With the end of the school year have come lots of goodbyes and farewell parties. Two of my favourites have been at the bar of the Mondadori bookshop, which has a terrace which is open to the public all the time and another one for private parties, and at La Toscana, a bar and restaurant on the Corso Porta Ticinese. I also attended a Partyamo event for the first time. Partyamo is a social group organised by a Scottish guy called Steve who has been living in Italy for 15 years and that lets foreigners and Italians meet and speak in different languages.

On Friday, my friend and I went shopping in Nadine, which is one of my favourite shops in Milan. She was exchanging a skirt and I actually didn't let myself even try anything on because I was scared I would want to buy everything! Italian fashion, I will miss you...

The highlight of Saturday was quite definitely a visit to the car wash. Mr A needed his car repaired before driving it back to the UK this week, and we were actually looking for a garage but ended up in the car wash by mistake. 4 euros bought us a good half our of fun with the high pressure hoses, the foam brush and a special machine for washing the floor mats, and weirdly enough the place, which had room for about 30 cars, was full of other people doing the exact same thing. It was great. Then we actually did find the Fiat garage (on Via Corsico) and met a very friendly mechanic who, despite the fact that he was closing up, came out into the street to look at the car and listened very patiently to my attempt to explain the problem without any technical vocabulary and then offered to let us skip the queue for repairs first thing on Monday morning.

And now there are just a few days of packing, cleaning and paperwork before Mr A goes back to the UK for a few weeks and I get ready to entertain my mum, who's arriving for a week's holiday on Tuesday, and enjoy Italy like a tourist again!

La Settimana Bianca: Après-Ski

On our first day in Pila, we only bought half-day ski passes. Our lessons finished at 12.30 and we figured that we could easily fit in an extra bit of practice before the passes ran out at 2 o'clock if we wanted to. By Tuesday, however, we had realised that we were unlikely to want to do anything other than collapse in the sun with lunch after a 3 hour skiing lesson and that the view from the chalet terraces alone was worth paying an extra ten euros to stay an extra couple of hours and look at. As I said before, the centre of Aosta was pretty, but not quite pretty enough to compete with a stunning panorama of Mont Blanc, Monte Rosa and the Cervino mountains.



As well as me and Mr A, several of our friends from Milan were up, so most days we met for lunch and caught up with each other's adventures (being hit by a kamkaze skier in freefall (me), falling on the ice in the street before I even got to the cable car (me) and being dragged along a conveyor belt while appearing to embrace a chairlift (oops, me again!)). After lunch, I usually skied down a couple of the easier slopes by myself before meeting up with Mr A for some more sitting around in the sunshine then getting the cable car back down to Aosta.

One of the consequences of all this snow and sunshine was that I ended up with very obvious panda eyes from my sunglasses. Nobody else got them, which I found most unfair.


After a shower and a nap at the hotel, we went into Aosta for dinner. On Monday, we had pizza in La Grotta Azzura, which was nice and not at all expensive, although my 4 seasons pizza did appear to be missing a season, as it only had 3 toppings. On Tuesday we went to a place that I think was called something like Ristorante Moderno. It was in a state of chaos when we arrived and appeared to have been feeding school parties all evening, but they were gone by the time we got there and the restaurant did an incredible 3-course set menu for 13.50. I was unfortunately too full to eat it, but my friend had a delicious-looking bubbling lasagne, two enormous pork medallions with vegetables, a plate of chips and a sorbet. Inspired by him, I ordered something similar the next night in Le Carillon, but it was more expensive, the lasagne was less bubbly and there was no sorbet. There were, however, sculptures of naked women all over the walls, so that might be to somebody's taste.


Mr A and I were alone on Thursday night and we had the meal that we had been waiting for all week: cheese fondue. We went to Ulisse, a restaurant recommended by our hotel. In a town filled with tourists, this restaurant appeared to be frequented only by older Italians. The waiter explained exactly what was in the fondue, told us how to eat it and gently suggested white wine when we tried to order red. The fondue arrived in a plain old saucepan over a simple burner, served only with a basket of bread, and for the next half hour or so, we were in melty, gloopy, cheesy heaven. We left the restaurant reminding ourselves that Aosta was only a 2 hour drive from Milan and we could come back whenever we wanted, but we might just buy a fondue set instead.