Cinque Terre and Week 2: 9/6-9/11

Oops. I’ve been meaning to write all week but just haven’t had the time. I had some computer issues Wednesday night that unfortunately cost me a solid draft of this post, but so is life.

Saturday night we had a fantastic dinner at La Menagere, a hip new restaurant in the San Lorenzo area. Up until about a decade ago, it was a high end home store, dating back to 1896, when it served as a part of a royal house of sorts. The main dining room is huge, with one massive table (I believe 18m long) and is in the “garage” quarters of sorts. It’s a beautiful space that nearly everyone who walks by takes pictures of (see my pix below).

We started with a “gift from the chef,” which we soon noticed every guest received. It was a delicious tomato gazpacho with “cucumber tartare.” By tartare, they meant finely chopped. I’m not sure if that fits the traditional American definition of tartare (ie salmon tartare), but it was nonetheless delicious. This first antipasti was served in a huge bowl with an incredibly tiny portion. Initially we joked about it, but found it to be a perfectly acceptable serving size. The rest of the dishes were equally tiny but equally delicious, and equally filling. Most dishes we split — so we could each get a primi and secondi piatti — and they were all fantastic. For primi piatti, we had a honey glazed salmon, gourmet mac and cheese, a “gnocchi” of fried potato, and other things that I can’t remember now a week later. For piatti secondi, we had some delicious cod with onions grilled in port wine, a nice steak, and other things I still can’t remember. The meal was delicious and we had an excellent bottle of Chianti for the table. At 19 Euros for the bottle, it was by far the most expensive wine we’ve had so far. But also with 10 people at dinner, we each only got a small glass.

Afterwards we went to the basement of the restaurant which now serves as a super cool jazz venue. Called “The Jazz Experience,” the Saturday-through-Monday night shows are set to continue again this weekend, albeit with new musicians. Last weekend we were graced by the wonderful drummer Marvin Bugalu Smith. His energy and skill were unparalleled. We went back Monday night just to see him. Sadly, a miscommunication between the restaurant and the jazz club led to us being asked to buy (more) drinks, even after we spent an enormous amount on dinner for the 10 of us. We decided to call it for the night, as we had to be up super early the next morning for our trek to Cinque Terre.

With a 6:45am call time for departure, we left the apartment at about 6:20am to head to the train station. As soon as we boarded the busses (we went with a student travel group called Bus2Alps), we quickly fell asleep and woke up nearly two hours later at the train station in La Spezia. Once on board the train, we were a quick 20 minutes from Cinque Terre. We got off at Town #2: Manarola. We walked around for a few minutes and took lots of pictures (see below). While it was absolutely beautiful, it looks nothing like the pictures. The colors are more pastel than vivid, and it was different than we all expected.

We made it back to the Manarola train station to take the 11:22 train to Town #4: Vernazza. Being a Sunday in late summer, the whole area was packed with tourists. We weren’t even close to fitting on the train and were stuck with a nearly hour-long wait on the very hot platform in the sun for the next one. Vernazza was similar to Manarola — a beautiful little town with one main “road” that leads out to the water, and a bunch of touristy restaurants along the way. Vernazza is the town that most would recognize from pictures. What you wouldn’t know however, is that to get that view (and those pictures) requires an intense uphill hike to the 5th town. Due to time constraints, we didn’t make the hike. Instead, we spent nearly an hour in line for a Seafood Cone — quite literally, a cone filled with french fries and “fritto misto.” It was delicious and absolutely worth the wait and the 12-Euros for a large.

Before we could even start eating our seafood cones, we sprinted back to the train station to catch the 1:40pm train. We made it by literally seconds. We hopped off at Town #5: Monterosso. Monterosso is the one with the big beaches and cute umbrellas, though be warned, they run from 10-25 Euros to get a chair and umbrella. We opted to spend our money on cold drinks and combined our bags into a huge pile on a few towels on the fiercely populated free beach. As beautiful as it was, the sand was full of little rocks that aren’t so pleasant to step on when the waves knock you over; the sea was pretty choppy that day so we didn’t get to rent a small paddle boat as planned. The water was warmer than back home and I actually went out pretty far on multiple occasions. The trip MVP was definitely all of the GoPros capturing some great pictures from the day.

The trip back wasn’t as pleasant as the way there — due to train issues all morning, Bus2Alps pushed back the return trip about 30 minutes. Once on the busses though, Bus #2 was billowing out smoke, requiring us all to pull over at a gas station literally 10 minutes into the trip. After taking on some of Bus #2, literally sitting in our aisles, we were off. We decided the better plan was not to sleep, as we wanted to actually sleep when we got home. We briefly stopped along the way to drop off the extra passengers at a new bus that was waiting for them. Some girls that were squeezed in next to us decided to get on the new bus — a huge mistake, as that bus then turned around to pick up the rest of Bus #2 (apparently Bus #1’s driver wasn’t comfortable driving with people sitting in the aisle, thus keeping them immobile for nearly three hours). We got back to Florence at about 9:30pm and walked home and went to bed almost immediately.

Monday night was a really neat local festival called Rificolona, a paper lantern festival. It dates back hundreds of years to when farmers would bring their harvest into nearby villages solely by the light of these paper lanterns that they would carry. Now it’s become a huge parade with children decorating and carrying lanterns along with a marching band and hundreds of people (myself included) following along. We followed along for about 30 minutes and I found a very cute girl with a really cool lantern and was able to snap an adorable picture of her (see below). Afterwards, we went over to my favorite gelato place, My Sugar. We’re now good friends with the owners and follow each other on personal and professional Instagrams and Facebooks — more on this later in the week.

After our delicious gelato, I had chocolate pear (chocolate with cinnamon covered pear chunks — delicious) and te latte (milk tea — also delicious) we walked down the street to La Menagere for another fantastic night of jazz and red wine. We stayed for about an hour but unfortunately had to head back because we had class Tuesday.

Class is progressively getting harder each day. We’re finally learning useful things and I’m proudly a part of the group that actually makes an effort to speak it outside of class. Each day I learn a new word or two just by speaking with someone at the grocery store or wherever. It’s not particularly difficult and I really enjoy speaking it. Most of the Italians are very nice and appreciative and offer to help. I’ve gotten great at making phone reservations in Italian too. The only problem is when they say something long and very fast after I mention there will be 12 of us. Then I’m stuck with “non capisco” and they instantly resort to English. But I do make the effort as much as I can, and usually it pays off.

Tuesday was a long and not very exciting day. After 3 hours of Italian, we had just over an hour to grab lunch before my first art history class. The professor is a nice Italian woman in her 50s named Cecilia (Che-chee-lee-yah). The best part of the class is that over the course of the next 15 weeks, we have exactly 1 lecture. Every other single class (besides midterm and review days) are on site around town. Next week’s class meeting point? Santa Croce Church. Approximately 200 feet maybe from our apartment. Needless to say, I’m excited for this class.

Tuesday night was our only plan-less night of the week, thus, the uneventful day. Wednesday night we had a school sponsored aperitivo at a beautiful garden on the hills of Oltrarno (the neighborhood South of the Arno river, literally meaning “on the other side of the Arno”). Due to it being school sponsored, there was no wine, which is pretty much the point of an aperitivo. While the views were gorgeous, the snacks weren’t so great and there was only one or two staff members, no professors or people who we actually would’ve liked to share a snack and converse with. Ultimately it was a disappointing event. On the way back home we briefly tried a Mexican place down the street. It was awful as expected.

Thursday night was the opening of the Creative Collective, a permanent gallery space for a group I’ve joined called “Creative People in Florence.” The event was pretty crowded and we met a lot of really neat people — many of whom were former study abroad students who fell in love with Florence and couldn’t stay away for long. I could absolutely see that happening to me in a few years, returning to Florence for a year (or more).

After a few glasses of wine and lots of schmoozing with strangers, we trekked over to My Sugar. This time we sat on the stools outside and talked with the owners (Julia and Alberto) while we ate. We learned of their cat, Leopold, a frequent feature of Alberto’s Instagram page. After finishing my cup of Loacker (wafer cookies) and Caffe (Thursday was the first day of their new coffee recipe, which was absolutely delicious), I noticed a few other flavors I had yet to try. Julia told me to “try everything!” and Alberto walked out from the back with three little cups and said “a gift to you!” and proceeded to give us all extra scoops for free. They’re both such nice people and it’s so cute how they look at each other and try to figure out how to respond in English to some of our questions.

We asked if they ever needed help around the store, as we’d love to help out. It turns out, on September 23rd, The Florentine, an English newspaper here, is hosting a tasting event with free scoops. They asked us to help out as translators (and scoopers). We happily obliged and I’m excited to report that in just a few weeks I will be behind the counter with a very cool My Sugar t-shirt on, explaining to a bunch of Americans just how good this gelato is.

Friday morning I woke up at about 4:30am with a horrible pain in my left upper jaw/ear. I wasn’t able to get back to sleep and by the time my alarm went off at 7:20am I was feeling horrible. I ended up taking an Advil, but at that point had emailed my teacher that I wouldn’t be in class and had already made an appointment with a local dentist. The final consensus? I had slept funny; it was an off night. All symptoms were gone pretty quick and the dentist even complimented my Italian skills. I ended up returning my new pillow — I didn’t love it anyways, and it potentially has been bothering my neck and face.

Friday night we had a reservation for 12 at 4 Leoni — a reservation I proudly made (in person) solely speaking Italian. This was my absolute favorite meal of our 2010 Italy trip and I’ve been dreaming of it for the past five years. I set the bar for our expectations incredibly high, and they were all met. Between the 12 of us, there were 7 orders of pear ravioli (I can’t stress how incredible this was), 1 bruschetta pomodoro, 1 insalata, 1 spada alla griglia (grilled sword fish), multiple orders of calamari, some delicious chicken, some fantastic potato-filled ravioli with a meat sauce (mine), and a few liters of the house red. We nearly broke 300-Euros. We’ve figured out that we’re great at finding really delicious expensive restaurants. So we need to work on finding some cheaper places. 4 Leoni was easily the best meal we’ve had here so far (a very close second is last Saturday’s La Menagere) but it’s unlikely we’ll return more than once with such a high price tag — though we all agreed we could eat that pear ravioli every single day. Our 8pm reservation led us outside right at 9:30pm in Piazza della Passera (a tiny, beautiful little piazza) where there were about 300 people gathered to watch some jazz.

We’ve gotten very into live jazz lately and it’s been incredible to watch and enjoy it in this beautiful city. There have been some fascinating events the past two weeks and it’s great to actually be apart of the local culture here. Friday night’s music concluded the Settembre in Piazza della Passera festivities (an annual week-long celebration with live music, poetry readings, and art) and I’m proud to say that we were in the minority there as Americans. It was a wonderful end to a delicious night.

We haven’t even been here two weeks but it’s amazing how much we’ve gotten involved in the local community, between meeting and befriending locals (helloooo Christian — our wine guy — and Francesco — the world famous master barista at a fantastic cafe down the street), attending gallery openings, participating in centuries-old traditions, or just being able to get around the city without a map and finding our way around. I’m absolutely in love with this city and don’t think I’ll be leaving any time soon.

(As always, you can click on the pictures to view them larger)