What Fills My Plate

Greetings, and Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays to you! Another short blog posting! We visited Vienna a weekend ago, took in the Christmas market, and walked to find some interesting sites.  I wanted to show you something that many people miss, as they either do not follow classical music or know that in the Vienna cemetery the people of Vienna have placed the burial sites of all of their famous composers,  Beethoven to Brahms to the Strauss family and more , they are all there together in once place.  What I did notice and want to mention is that when you are in Vienna you will find that the tourist industry and the city really push Mozart's  name.  You can buy t shirts, mugs, pens, napkins, chocolates, etc., all with Mozart's  name on them.  Mozart's house is a big item to see.  Beethoven lived in several different places in Vienna, but you won't see much about this.  What I did see was a big difference in people's actions towards the two composers.  You will se

Sad news for Starbucks fans!  Another year will pass before the lines grow outside of the new Starbucks in Milano.   The latest information is that it will open in 2018.   If my calculations are correct, this will be a total of two years of renovating a building and furnishing it with the usual Starbucks furniture.   Devotees must be getting very uptight about the delay.   Collectors of those countrified coffee cups have dusted their shelf in anticipation.   Do you know that those cups grow in value and are traded on Ebay?   This whole trading thing began with baseball cards decades ago.   A minor exageration. When we were in Spain we noticed that they used toilets which are the same in America.   Nothing like making things look “corporate style”.   How can it take so long to refurbish an old building?  I think it was previously the post office in Milano.   Whoever owns the franchise to that Starbucks must be beating his/her head on the wall in frustration.   Wheelbarrows of e

Buon Giorno! It has been awhile since the last posting.   I have been very busy painting watercolors almost every day, as I am planning an exhibition   in a few months. This will be a short read for you.   There are two things on my mind.   I want to mention a dish served in Venezia, which is common to the people who live in the Veneto.   When I was a kid, my mother served this dish about once a month, and I hated it so much that I put a mountain of ketchup on it to survive the meal.   She didn’t really know how to cook it like the people here do.   That dish is liver and onions, commonly know here as fegato alla Veneziana. featured with soft polenta When we have guests from abroad, I always encourage them to try it.   I tell them if they don’t like it they can have what I have ordered, that way they won’t miss a chance to taste a regional dish.   This weekend I ordered it in a restaurant in the hills called Colli Euganei, south of Padova.   One can find many good places

You Ever Wonder Who Made These And Where Did They Come From? Those Romantic Chianti Bottles Italy is filled with amazing mini adventures.  This weekend we left the Veneto, entered the Province of Ferrara and drove south towards Ravenna.   We would stay overnight at an agritourismo and do some minor bird watching.   The area around the Po River is known for such.   We were also going to take in a Goya exhibition in a nearby village.   While there t he owner of the agritourismo told us about an herb museum in the nearby village of Villanova di Bagnacavallo and we decided to check it out.  This was the tip of the day! Hats, etc! It was not an herb museum but a straw ….. a bit of everything made out of straw museum.   Walking room to room through the past, viewing baskets, shoes, hats, implements, rugs, made me stop to consider how plastic has replaced this old method.   We should have rejected plastic.   Soon to come, I hope.   Harvesting Items Brooms

Perhaps you know Karl Pilkington, a worldly maladjusted man on tv, who was forced to visit famous places all over the world.   I have had my own frustrating Pilkinton experiences, discouraging me to be disheartened and frustrated.   There have been many incidences where I wanted to throw up my hands and raise a white flag in desperation.   One of the first of these episodes occured when I was first in Padova, completely lost, and in need of directions to an internet shop.   This became a fishing expedition to find someone who could give me exact directions.   My immediate plan was to seek someone on the street who looked like he or she would know where to find   internet shop.   All the people I asked   seemed to know a place, and after speaking to each one, I followed their directions.   Back and forth I walked through Padova, but each time finding that the previous person’s directions led me on a wild goose chase.   After never finding what I was seekiing,   I began to perceiv

No Movies Here, We Must Drive to Padova We went into Padova to see the new movie Dunkirk.  They have a few times when they have a bargain showing and we take advantage of that.  We also use the free parking under the theatre, but it takes some expert driving as whomever planned the parking never considered the turns one has to make to get in and out.  They are really tight.   American sized cars would get stuck, probably resulting in a for sale sign and keys left in the ignition The outside of the theatre looks a bit messy as the cement job never received a finishing touch.  Inside it is also total cement.   Darkened by time and all the rain in the winter, it looks like a slum building.   This kind of fits in here as Padova has a lot of  structures built in the 1400's.  People like Galileo and da Vinci were here, for instance. They have a counter that sells popcorn and the usual drinks and snacks.  I have seen only a few people buying this kind of thing.  It is not Italian

Lots of Langos Choices This past August, while travelling from the bottom of Poland to the bottom of Turkey I came across interesting things that added a little fun into the trip.   I would like to show you a few of them. Walking along the Danube River in Budapest we had intentions of eating breakfast in the big market.  We were informed that there we could find the   Hungarian breakfast specialty called Langos, which is a large piece of fried bread (like Navajo fried bread)  with various toppings.  We were told that Hungarians like Langos, served with sour cream, garlic and cheese.    Other various toppings included mushrooms, hot spiced tomato sauce, and cheese.  This is very different from our Italian breakfast or even American.   You cannot eat it all. On the main floor of the market people shop for vegetables and meats.  This market has some of the best looking vegetables in Europe.  Tomatoes, perfectly ripe, cabbages, corn,  broccoli and cucumbers.  We found th

Look closely  Out with the old doesn’t quite work sometimes.   As in Olympics, for instance.   The citizens pay for great stadiums, dormitories, and all the structures that it takes to present the olympics.   Lately is has been found that the events did not make enough income to pay for building them.   When the olympics finish,   the area is deserted.   You probably were not born yet, so you have to rely on an old person like me to tell you the story.   Italy hosted the Winter Olympics back in 1956 in Cortina. Participating were Thirty-two nations which competed in the four sports and twenty-four events.   The  Soviet Union made its first appearance in the Winter Olympics and   won more medals than any nation.   Since television in places like Germany and Scandinavia did not have the technology to show the events live, people there had to rely on Communist television sources, a big plus for the Soviets. I was a kid then and had no clue of this.   Pretty much all I reme

The first time I saw Venice I arrived by canal and I could not believe all those people   walking back and forth, up and down the bridges along the waterfront   The appearance was of an ant colony.   I had never thought to see Disneyland size crowds, a silly naive idea of what I expected.   When the cruise boats unload, it is greatly overwhelming.    (In fact, the townspeople of Venice have protested against the cruise boats, even going to the lengths of swimming and boating in their path to stop them in protest.)   St. Mark's  From the boat dock you walk   towards St. Mark’s Square bulging with   lines of people waiting to get into the many famous structures.   You will see people who have brought bread and seeds to feed the pigeons.   The result of this is   that those flocks of pigeons get excited and in retaliation show their respect by relieving their little digestive systems on tourists as they fly over.    (Beware!) You stop and   just gaze at the beauty of the

  Liver and   onions!   My mother made this dish at least once a month, always remarking that it is “good” for us.   Basically I rated it   as bad as eating dog food, so I buried it in a pile of ketchup.   Things change, my taste for food changed and I was challenged   to see liver and onions on menus in Venice.   Not like mom’s!   I had to find out more, and discovered that this is a dish featured in Venice, a favorite among Venetians.   It is now frequently what I order when we do a day visit to Venice.   You should give it a try. Bigoli is a larger type of spaghetti, usually home made by restaurants in the Veneto.   You can find it in Venice, usually with wild boar (chingiale), or in the hills south of Venice with donkey (Musso) .   If you order biggoli, expect it to be filling.   You may not need a second course.   Give a hard look in the markets and you might find bigoli to take home as a souvenir.   Our guests always get a package of this from us.   Nothing like taking the