It was still raining when we woke up. We headed out to see what we could fit in despite the rain. We started out with a trip to the grocery. Of course, I was in heaven with this. It was truly a super market, about the size of a nicer HEB (like the one in West Houston on Westheimer/Kirkwood).
They have to pay money to get shopping carts and then if you return the carts to where they belong, you receive your 2 EUR back.
Other interesting facts during the Mercato visit:
1. Don't throw away your receipt when you buy coffee at the coffee bar, you need it to get your order. I dug in the trash to try and find ours, but instead they just decided to trust us after I pulled out three receipts that were not ours.
2. Italians do not trust each other (see point 1 above). This was the first day I was catching wind of this notion. We couldn't figure out where to get out of the actual grocery section to get back to a bathroom because they force you to go through the checkout lines to leave for security reasons. We finally convinced someone to let us out another way.
3. They make you wear gloves to pick out your produce. See pic of Luey for this. I accidentally grabbed my sticker for the produce with the glove...that is not advisible.
4. You can load your credit card onto a wand and then scan all of your items as you put them in the cart. However, they still check all of the contents of your cart at the end to make sure you're not stealing anything...so i'm not quite sure where the efficiencies are here. We had scanned one item twice and forgot one item...so i guess it was a wash?
5. They have an entire row dedicated to pasta. Both sides are filled with every sort of pasta you can imagine. It was maybe like our chip aisle or cereal aisle....but both sides filled.
6. They had great options for freshly prepared food items - pastas, cheeses, meats, dough, etc.
After the visit to the market, we went to a castle. It was pouring outside so we toured the inside. The rooms had great frescos on the ceilings, including my favorite one by DaVinci that looked like a forest inside the room. Very pretty.
We headed back to the house because the rain was too much to have the kids out in. Once we got back, Noemi prepared Spaghetti Carbonara for us at the house. It was cool to see how easily she threw something like that together. We had the huge spread of meats and cheeses again along with the lunch. While we were eating, the sun came out and the weather turned gorgeous.
Noemi's mom came over to keep the kids so we could go back out for more site seeing. We finally made it to the top of the Duomo. It was so pretty because it was later in the day with the pretty colors coming through in the sky. It was really an awesome site of architecture with the gothic spires and engravings on the doors. You could see forever from up there. I'm pretty sure I disgraced the church by doing a few little shimmies for some photo ops up there, but hey...we're friends like that, right?
That might have been why I stepped backwards while on the roof and nearly fell...only to disrupt my back more when I did catch myself. The back had been giving me some problems since the hydro-planing the night before on the wet sidewalks.
We had to get back to the house after that so her mom could head off to church that evening. Luey and I stayed up a little later than the others and knocked back a 6 pack of Italian beer while uploading pictures.
Off to Slovenia tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment