Oh, Glorious Birthday Cake

On June 15 I turned 23. Birthdays at my house are always special occasions, mostly because my parents and sister are good sports about letting the birthday girl be queen for a day. One of the best characteristics of Gilmore-Valenze birthdays is that we get to request our birthday cakes. This year, inspired by frequent Magnolia Bakery stops during my week in NYC, I requested red velvet cake. My mother, a general perfectionist and all-around doobie (translation: person who does everything - this term was coined by her friend to describe her), rose to the occasion. Magnificently.

The recipe was taken from the New York Times, which published a red velvet cake article a few months ago. It just happens to be Magnolia's recipe. The frosting is vanilla buttercream, and we disregarded the article's suggestion to make it with cream cheese and mascarpone. That would've been insane.

My mother embarked on the journey with a search for red food coloring. Red velvet cakes are made with cocoa - that's where the flavor comes from - but they are colored with dye. I don't know why the overall effect is so amazing, but it's pretty shocking to realize how much food coloring a famous recipe requires. Here's the idea: if we had followed the recipe perfectly, which we didn't, the batter would have included THREE bottles of red food coloring. As it was, we used one bottle.

What a surprise when the three layers emerged from the oven and they were IMMENSE! This birthday cake rose to new heights. It may have been almost a foot tall. It was truly a sight to behold.



We could barely believe it as my mother put the layers in place.



Through its stickiness, the frosting prevented it from toppling. Making a cake this big is an adventure. Rosa and I acted as assistants, to the best of our abilities.



What a star!



No one cheated and sampled the glorious birthday cake before the ceremony. Instead, we all went out to dinner. The cake was to come afterwards. The stoic Gilmore Valenze family rejected all of the fancy restaurant desserts: the red velvet cake was waiting at home!

Upon our return, we were stunned, once again, to see the mighty cake. To make matters worse, there were 24 candles to light. (The 24th for good luck, of course.) Three of us worked hard while Rosa did camera duty.



Then it was time to cut the cake. This turned out to be very difficult. A cake that tall presents the imminent danger of collapse. And there was no way that any of the pieces were going to stand up straight.



But they were so beautiful anyway!



And the cake tasted great. It was one of the best birthday cakes ever (at least, for me!), and certainly reason enough to fly home from Bologna! These photos will have to sustain me, as there's only one piece left as I write this, two days later. I love my birthday cake. Thanks, mom!

Almost in Africa

I definitely did not come to Lampedusa to go to the beach. I planned to go so that I could finally, finally finish the photography part of my project for my Gallatin Senior’s Grant (months late, I should add). I’ve wanted to come to Lampedusa for years, probably since I first read The Leopard, before going to Sicily in 2002. But it’s not very easy to arrive. First I flew to Sicily, then to Lampedusa in a prop plane so small that we could watch our bags as they were loaded on: the luggage storage was in a compartment in front of the rows of seats. Somehow the airline still managed to lose some people’s bags. Not mine, luckily.

Lampedusa itself is a little scrubby island less than a dozen miles long. It’s part of a trio of islands called the Pelagie Islands – only two are inhabited. The third has just a lighthouse. Lampedusa is about 200 km from Sicily and 100 km from the north coast of Africa. So I was closer to Africa than Italy! (I read that technically the islands are part of the African continent because of the shallowness of the ocean between Lampedusa and Africa. But somehow Italy ended up owning them anyway.) The island itself is covered with bushes and rocks. My map describes it as “arid and wild”. It’s also a wildlife preserve protected by the Italian government. Apparently there are lots of dolphins, and sea turtles mate here.



Lampedusa’s other claim to fame is its detention center. Because of its proximity to the coast of Africa, it’s become a sort of landing pad for boats of people hoping to use it as a gateway to the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, though, a lot of those trips have ended in shipwrecks, and Lampedusa is the site of a famous detention center through which Italy tries to send refugees back to Africa (from what I’ve read, this backfires, because many of the boats that take off from Libya are not carrying Libyan citizens, but people who traveled through Libya to get a boat passage. The Libyan government, which is on bad terms with Italy anyway, isn’t interested in acting as a refuge for non-citizens). So I came to Lampedusa to take photos. Not of the detention center itself, which is a big forbidding building perched on a cliff, but the island. To get a sense of it in the photos.
I still have no idea if the photos themselves were successful. I spent some time in this weird boat cemetery-ish spot, at night, with my tripod. It was scary because I kept imagining that someone was going to pop out of one of the boats and yell at me (or haunt me). The boats were very dark inside.



Spiaggia dei Conigli!


To get a better sense of the island, I rented a bike (for which I paid 4 euros and 40 cents – it was supposed to be 5 euros, but I didn’t have the right change, so the owner let me go anyway) and rode around the whole island. I went to the most famous beach, Spiaggia dei Conigli, which closes at 8 pm so that sea turtles can climb onshore and lay their eggs. It’s a stunningly beautiful beach, and has the most amazing water I’ve ever been able to swim in. It was perfectly clear and I could see all the silver little fish darting around my feet. And I brought a pretty awesome picnic and ate melty cannoli on the beach.




This was also the first time I’ve taken real sun precaution, which sort of disturbed me and makes me think I’m inheriting some bizarre grownup characteristics. The problem is that I bought an issue of Vogue in the airport that, instead of teaching me about fashion, freaked me out about skin care. So I actually used 50 spf for the first time before going into the sun. And I bought the dorkiest hat of my life. It reminded me of Rosa, because I know she would never be seen with me if I wore it at home.



Despite the abovementioned diligent skin care, my stay on Lampedusa was not free from danger. A pack of wild dogs terrorized – and almost cleared out – the beach before disappearing up the cliff. A bee stung me on my butt (it was the bee’s fault for relaxing on my beach towel under the shade of my leg – thank God I’m not allergic). On my first night I ordered fish at a restaurant, feeling as if that was the right thing to do, being on an island. I received an entire fish on my plate. And this is not New York – no one is going to de-bone it for you. I felt like a failure, but I did manage to get the head and tail off and the spine out before I ate it. And my hotel, which was incredibly cheap because it’s off season, and very beautiful (that nighttime photo is the view from the TERRACE I had in my room), was totally empty except for me. It was like living in The Shining. I was actually given a front door key because there was no one working at reception. I came to breakfast on the first morning to find the owner on her knees on the bar, polishing liquor bottles and singing. She made me a really good coffee.



So, Lampedusa was beautiful. And it was very satisfying to travel alone. I’ve taken what feels like a million trips by myself, but this was the first time that I didn’t feel lonely and I didn’t want to leave. But now it’s back to Bologna to work until Thursday. On Friday I go back to Cambridge for a few weeks! I can’t wait! I’m downgrading: now I live with an asthmatic vomiting cat and a one-eyed vomiting cat – at home, there’s just a single one-eyed vomiting cat. Hello Dinkie!

Also, I should note that I shouldn’t have compared Andrea to a Belmont Hill boy on my last post. He read it and had a reaction that I feel sort of guilty about: he looked it up and found this. Also my fault, because I showed him the Urban Dictionary in the first place. He thinks I called him gay because he has pink on his shoes. (He’s not.)

Getting About

Last weekend my choir had a concert in a town called Argenta. We had a very raucous bus ride (which reminded me a little bit of elementary school, but worse) and then we had about three hours to kill before the concert. We drank coffee, then rehearsed. Then we were hungry. And what do you do if you're hungry and don't have time to go to a restaurant for a real dinner? Aperitivo!

That meant multiple glasses of spritz (which is prosecco, a bit of water, and a bitter alcohol, like Campari), and healthy foods like potato and corn chips, popcorn, and bizarre little sandwiches made with prosciutto and spicy ketchup. I don't know how everyone else managed it, because when we left (5 minutes before the start of the concert) I felt both tipsy and nauseous. And after we had listened to the children's choir and all-male choir, we got onstage. By that time - after about an hour and a half sitting in a darkened auditorium - I was tipsy, nauseous, and sleepy. But somehow the concert turned out really well. (Well, not according to our maestro, who hears every mistake. But I thought it was great.) We looked very snazzy in our all-black outfits and colorful scarves.
Speaking of which, you can find the choir here.
If you want to see the current photo and listen to some songs, you have to enter the site in Italian. After the intro, click the Italian flag, then the "media" bar, to listen to songs we recorded in March - I sang only a couple of them because I didn't know the words yet (though I do now!).



Not much else has been going on here. We had no hot water for week and I woke up every morning to the sound of my roommate yelling in pain in the shower (yet he wasn't very quick about fixing it). I finished my English teaching on Thursday, after giving Andrea his final exam. He was happy to finish because it's the beginning of summer - I was sort of sad. And I felt guilty, because he had trouble with the exam (which I didn't write, but still).

Translating has been fine. Tourism texts have lots of words like "crystalline", "splendid", "excursion", and "tranquility". I actually wrote an email yesterday describing a night out as a "grand excursion", and then felt very ashamed. This website is infiltrating my brain. (It's not in English yet, but it will be when I'm done.) But I do like the office and the people I work with. This week I taught Andrea (who's sort of like the Italian version of a Belmont Hill boy) the myriad meanings of "get". When he asked me the difference between saying that something "rocks" or something "rules", I was totally stumped. Any ideas? It's all very educational. But we agree on who is the hottest female Grey's Anatomy character, so he gets bonus points. (It's Addison.)

What other English phrases are worth passing on?

Edelweiss

Switzerland! Country of chocolate, cheese, mountains, and lots of other great things. That’s where I was last weekend. I spent three days in Bern, with my mom’s best friend from college, Kim, and her family (her husband, Peter, is Swiss, which is how she ended up in Bern). The entire family proved to be terrific tour guides, including their 14 year old son Tommy, who is amazingly bilingual. A (bilingual) friend at NYU once told me that there’s a certain kind of conversation that bilingual people can have, referred to as “code-switching”, when they go back and forth between their two fluent languages without missing a beat. It’s pretty cool to watch.



Kim, Tommy, and Peter took me to a beautiful waterfall that was inside a mountain. They also took me to see two (or was it three?) castles, an adorable medieval city named Murten, a modern art museum, and toured me around Bern.





Plus, I ate my first pork roast. But one of the most momentous meals (alliteration!) I had was rosti, which is characteristic of the German-speaking part of Switzerland. This was basically a bunch of clogged arteries sitting on a plate. That is, shredded potatoes, bacon, and onions, cooked and topped with an egg and about twenty pounds of Swiss cheese. I left some bits of cheese on my plate to make myself feel better about the fact that I ate the whole thing. Notice that it’s plate-sized, and it’s also about two inches high. I’m actually surprised that I managed to get up from the table. (But notice that there are two small slices of pickle sitting on top of my rosti! My first dill pickle since January. It was terrific!)



When I told my Swiss friend Felix about this meal, he reminded me that he’s always said that Swiss food is barbaric. It’s true: he’s repeated this to me many times. In his words, after eating it, “you stink, you sweat, you can’t move, and all you can do is smoke”. Note that he’s giving up his beautiful skylight-filled Bolognese apartment so that he can complete his final semester of university at home, from Switzerland.



After Bern I went to Geneva to spend the night with my friend Talya, who’s working there. We grew up about five blocks from each other, and it was the first time we’ve ever explored a different country together. Actually, we’ve only seen each other one time out of Massachusetts, and that was in New York City for coffee. So a Geneva excursion was a big step for us! Talya was also a great guide, and, after pirating wireless internet at her apartment, I was sad to leave.

However, I really did have to leave, because this week I started a new job. Until the end of May I’ll be translating the website of a tourism marketing firm in Bologna. Despite the fact that it can be incredibly frustrating, I really enjoy the challenges of translating. So the work has been pretty interesting so far (after translating 12+ pages on Sardinia, you can ask me anything about the whole island – I can practically recite all of its main attractions from memory).

I did make the mistake of giving my boss this blog address, which he passed to the person (Andrea) whom I work with most directly. So I can’t reveal everything about them. But it is nice to work with young people – at Coop I was the youngest person by far in the entire building. So far so good.

Dog Days

It’s gotten suddenly very hot and sunny here. Considering that only a month ago I was comfortably wearing my winter coat, this weather change is kind of disturbing. But after the damp, foggy Bologna winter, it’s nice to see flowers blooming and people spending time outside. Starting in late afternoon, I can’t even ride my bike down the streets near the University. They’re absolutely packed with people. (It helps that it’s legal to drink on the street.)

Last Saturday I went to an outdoor concert in the main piazza. We didn’t realize that there had been an open-air pillow fight earlier in the day (also sponsored by the city). In order to listen to the music, we literally had to trudge through piles of discarded stuffing and torn pillows. Sometimes it seems as if Bologna is owned by students.


My friend Celestine playing his drum at one of our choir concerts.


This is a photo I took at an outdoor concert we had last week. Not the best photo, but you get the idea. The bright spot that looks like a fire is one of the citronella candles. Actually, it was more like a bowl of burning oil.

Yesterday (Wednesday) was a holiday. I went with some friends from my choir to the Festa della Zuppa. Basically this is a soup-tasting free-for-all. It doesn’t cost anything, and after trying some (or all) of the 50+ soups, we could place votes for our favorites. The soup-makers stood behind tables with big metal pots, ladling their creations into plastic cups and bowls. I liked the pepper soup (from Cameroon) best. It was extremely spicy. The most unusual soup I tried was an almond milk soup from Spain. It was so heavy that no one could finish it. The only real disappointment was the borscht. New York does it better!

The soup festival itself, which was laid out along a closed-off street, was full of dancers, singers, and performers. Perhaps the only downside of the free soup extravaganza was that it was very, very homemade. We each found at least one hair in our various soups. But there’s always a price to pay for good food!


(Blood orange juice. Usually it's even redder than this. Or purple.)

Now that I’m not occupied for full days as I was before, my copious amounts of free time are starting to drive me crazy. I never thought I’d actually wish I had something to do – like a job – most of all in late spring, the best time of year to be outside, but I do. I continue to look for a new job or occupation here, but I find that I’m thwarted by the fact that I still can’t wrap my head around the way that Italian professionals operate. Few people make appointments in advance, the definition of “afternoon” seems to run up until 7 pm, and there’s no forum in which people can’t answer their cell phones – this especially shocks me. This is definitely the land of cell phones.

Aside from my disappointment about the way this experience has ended, work-wise, I’m finding that Bologna is a much more cheerful place to be in springtime. And the strawberries are really good.

Sandra's Eating Tour of Italy

This (past) weekend I had the great pleasure of playing hostess to the first friend I made at NYU, Sandra. She spent five days in Bologna, where I tried to be the best tour guide possible, considering that there's still so much I don't know.

Luckily, Sandra is adventurous, easygoing, and a good eater. These are very important characteristics for all Italy travelers.



We explored Bologna, which was especially nice considering that the temperatures were in the 70s for five days straight, without a cloud in the sky. We embarked on our own eating tour, sampling characteristic Bolognese food. By her second day here, Sandra and I had tried ragu at three different restaurants - and she'd also eaten her new favorite gelato, ricotta with caramelized fig, at two different spots. I'll give you her contact info if you'd like a detailed report.

We climbed Bologna's famous tower, from which you can see all the red roofs of the city. Other than being red, Bologna is known for being "fat" (due to the heavy cuisine) and "learned", because of the University.



Later, we took a day trip to Venice. (I love the fact that I can take day trips to Venice!)


(The requisite tourist photo.)



It was Sandra's first time there, and I loved seeing the city through her eyes. Because she studied art history, she was super informed and knew a lot more about the art we were seeing than I did. And Venice was so beautiful on the second weekend in April - cheerful, sunny, and bursting with flowers.



We also went to Modena, the home of balsamic vinegar, where we found a Sicilian food fair. Along with massive loaves of bread, cookies, sausages, and cheese, there was an entire section of marzipan fruit. Every bakery in Sicily is full of marzipan, molded in a million different shapes. It's pretty to look at - though it can be overwhelmingly sweet.



Sandra headed home with a suitcase full of cheese, sausage, chocolate, pasta, and marinated vegetables. (Let's not talk about her encounter with US Customs.) I wish I could attend the dinner party she's going to have in Brooklyn.

Kimchi Tasting, Part II

Now I'm going backwards in time: these photos are from my weekend in Milan with Anthony at the end of the March. It was rainy and gray, but there was Korean food! I can now say, from experience, that the Korean food in Madrid was better and less expensive. But it was good to get another shot of kimchi for my addiction. I've gone from a few times a month to once every three months, but I'm still alive, and I'm proud to say that I don't even whine that much (anymore).

Milan is a beautiful city. I wasn't expecting much, since I've heard from so many Italians that it's gray and ugly, but I liked it a lot! The Duomo is as interesting and spiky as it's supposed to be.



Also, you can walk on its roof, which is pretty cool.


We also took a short trip north into the lakes region, to a small town called Stresa. Despite the gray skies it was clear that the area was beautiful, especially in summer. There was a gelateria on every corner, and all around the lake the hills were dotted with summer houses.


Of course, nothing else in Milan could compare to the well-dressed people and the fancy clothing stores. Really, they were never-ending.

Aside from the trips I've been taking, life in Bologna has been pretty stressful lately. Due to contract and visa issues, my job ended 6 weeks early, which has given me some unwanted free time. I have the next month or so to try to figure out what I'm doing next, and I feel as if I've traveled back in time one year. Ready to graduate from college, not knowing what the next step is.

Unfortunately, Italy's economy is not very strong right now and it's not easy to find a job here - much less as a foreigner, which saddles an employer with a whole bunch of extra paperwork issues. Every day I learn something new about the job/visa-search process, and it's usually bad news. One of my supervisors at work told me I was in danger of being deported after April 13 (this conversation took place on April 10). Luckily, that's not actually true (I called the embassy). But I can now say for sure that the threat of deportation is pretty scary, especially when it comes from someone you trust!

Advice for future Italy travelers: trust the American Embassy instead. Even when the phone is answered by a British woman.

Adventures in Poolia

I just got back to Bologna after spending the Easter holiday in Bari, which is one of the biggest cities in Puglia. That's the incredibly gorgeous region that makes up the heel of the boot, if you think of Italy like that.

I left for the trip hoping to take photos of the port area, for my Gallatin Senior's grant. Bari is the site of a famous detention center for immigrants and the coast is a major destination for undercover, overloaded boats full of people trying to enter Italy. This is partly because of its location - close to lots of different places (as you can see from this photo), accessible by boat, and monitored by pretty much no one.

Taking photos was interesting, especially because ports, as I learned, are very bizarre places. Full of strange people.

However, I was lucky enough to have lots of other adventures, because a friend of a friend, Antonino (a terrific name, I think) is from right outside Bari. Southerners are so hospitable and excited to show off their region. He took very good care of me! First we went to a procession in Bari's old town, which was constructed to look like a maze to protect the inhabitants from invaders. It's supposed to be one of the easiest places to get lost in the entire country. Also, Anto told me that it's usually guarded by the Mafia and difficult to enter. That is, if you try to walk around freely in some of the tiny narrow streets, the residents will do their best to make you feel unwelcome. That didn't happen to us, though because it was Easter weekend!
This is what happens on Good Friday.

The statues were pretty amazing. Every little town has its own particular statues, which must leave the church in a procession. The streets were absolutely packed.


Puglia is just beautiful. The water, the flowers, the wildlife, everything. Lots of the buildings are made out of white stone, which makes a striking contrast with the blue water and cloudless sky.




Too bad it wasn't quite warm enough to swim.


One of the best - of not THE best - aspects of the trip was the food. Anto's best friends from childhood are in the process of opening up a wine bar in a pretty seaside town named Polignano. Through them, he knows quite a bit about food, and good places to get it. On my first night in Bari we went to a little restaurant in Polignano where we ate ragu. Made from donkey. I thought it was a joke, and I know it's terrible, but it was actually good! How could I not try it? I was actually more scandalized by the appetizer we were given, which was a bunch of massive mozzarella balls filled with liquid cream. When you stick your fork into the mozzarella ball, it bursts. It was a little bit too much, I think.

The seafood in Puglia is yummy, too. But the best meal I had was with Anto's friends, at their house in the country. They're still developing the menu for their wine bar, so we were very kind and we helped them taste-test about 7 different cheeses. My favorite was the goat cheese, which was super rich and sort of like butter. In addition we had oranges and lemons - picked from the trees in the garden. And olive oil made from, of course, olives from the garden. It was amazing. Alessandra, one of our hosts, taught me a cool trick with tomatoes - in summer she grows lots of cherry tomatoes, which she hangs from a string in the kitchen throughout the winter. They slowly dry out and turn, almost, into sun-dried tomatoes. We ate them in pasta and they were great. So was a calzone her grandmother makes for Easter, which is made from onions, raisins, and anchovies. It sounds crazy but all the flavors actually go well together, when you're eating it. I would've been happy to stay there for a looong time.



Finally, on Easter morning, when everything was closed and I was starving, I found a Sicilian bakery that was open and completely crowded. Where I ate a huge pastry and cannoli, too, which were so good. Mikey, I did it for you. I felt kind of sick afterwards but it was worth it. The bakery was full of all kinds of Sicilian specialties, like cardamom flavored chocolate and rose liqueur. Hooray Sicily!



Now it's back to city life. Speaking of which, I'm all out of order with my blogging, but Milan is coming next.