Exploring

                        

 It took four trains to get to Nice. Having left a somewhat dreary and rainy day in Lucca my arrival into the station at Nice-Ville was all the better for the late afternoon sun, warmer temperatures, and, of course, hearing all of the French. I’d felt a similar relaxation, warmth, and good cheer on our trip to Briançon back in July. An academic year in Caen in college and teaching the language ever since perhaps had something to do with it. It was good to be back in France. It felt familiar. When you’re living in a new country for an extended period of time, sometimes that’s just what you need.

        

          Having less than twenty-four hours in the city, I set about exploring as the sun set. The moon rose over Place Masséna, an enormous square decked out in giant arrangements of Christmas trees, a large ferris wheel, a maze of trees frosted to look snowy despite temperatures around 50F, an artificially chilled outdoor skating rink, dozens of wooden stands housing vendors selling arts and crafts or specialty foods, lighting displays, statues changing colors on top of tall columns, holiday music playing, quiet trams passing by now and then. The kids would’ve loved it. When I crossed down into the old town it was quickly apparent that business that night (Monday) was very slow as the host of every restaurant I passed tried to stop me and convince me why theirs was the best choice for dinner.

           

          The next morning I headed to the sea and the Promenade des Anglais. I was rather surprised to see a guy in a speedo and swimcap down by the water, it being December and all. He put hands to his hips to survey the surf and strode confidently in, seconds later beginning a relaxed crawl parallel to the beach, with no shivering or hyperventilating apparent from my vantage point. I decided to take a chance on my bad knee and climb up several staircases to the Colline du Château to take in the views of sea, city, and, as I found out as the sun just struck them, the snowy mountains in the distance. After heading down (and lucking out with the knee) and buying a fresh pastry and fruit at the marché on the Cours Saleya I began checking out bookstores. This is always a dangerous proposition due to realities of both time and finances.

            I was late to check out of the motel and late for my appointment to pick up our leased car at the airport and had another sizable debit on the credit card but also a healthy stack of books that would make a great addition to my resources for teaching French. They didn’t have the Peugeot 207 available so they gave us the 207SW at no extra cost, a model just roomier enough to fit my skis! And it came with GPS! I’ve never had GPS but was quite glad for it on that day since the detailed map of southeastern Provence I’d bought for this trip was still sitting on a table back in Lucca. I decided to test out the GPS with a side trip to Monte Carlo, Monaco before making my way through the eighty-some coastal tunnels on the return trip. I walked right into the main Casino past some entry guards but to access the actual gambling hall it looked like I would actually have to spend some serious euros so I instead toured the bathroom (free!) which featured the most high-tech self-cleaning toilets I’d ever seen. 

            So now we have wheels, motorized wheels. It changes the dynamic a bit for us. We’d gone five months with no car, felt pretty good about it, but also were feeling a bit limited beyond just inconvenienced. It turns out the Italian love affair for the automobile is just as great as the American’s (only the average vehicle here is quite a bit smaller and more fuel efficient), so maybe our relenting and acquiring a vehicle wasn’t so much our “American-ness” showing through as our becoming more Italian. Maybe. I’ll let you know in six months.

            In any event, we now don’t have to buy groceries every day, can buy heavy items, can drive kids to and from school when it’s pouring rain, and can explore. One day Lauren and I drove around south of here for a little while, eventually turning around after the road got quite steep and almost too narrow for even one car and the GPS showed it eventually petering out. There was the birthday party Ingrid attended in Nozzano Castello. Another day we took Niko twenty minutes out of town to a dentist who wasn’t there (another one of those “pre-holiday” days off) but then were able to get him to the emergency room where the dentist available had another twenty minutes before vacation and thus enough time to drill off the top half of the nerve and fill the tooth with cement, removing the agony of Niko’s previous twenty-four hours. And then there was the sunny day Thursday when we just wanted to find some park, some nature preserve, something away from the city and the cars. We found it! Lake Massacucioli, best known for Puccini’s home at Torre del Lago, where a summer festival is held every year. On the opposite side of Torre Del Lago we found a small Nature Preserve with museum (closed), but boardwalks open. We ventured out into the marsh and went into the small wooden structures along the way that hid us as we looked out at the lake and the birds. Very peaceful. And then at the turn around point we heard the inevitable children’s plea “I have to go now, really bad!” The return walk was significantly faster than the first half of our journey.

            So having a car will be nice. We’re almost to the halfway point of our stay and we’re looking forward to exploring some more areas off the beaten track. Next up, at the end of the children’s vacation, we will head up for a few days to the Dolomites, hopefully getting in some skiing if there is enough snow. Things are getting a little stir crazy around here after so many days without school. Being home is nice, but sometimes the best antidote to too much time together is not being away from each other necessarily but rather a break in the routine. And for us, with the help of our Peugeot, we hope to break up that routine when we can and go exploring. 

A Christmas Walk

(Many of these blog posts have been a bit long and too time-consuming for many to read during a busy day. So this will be a short post! )

Crumbs were left, some salt remained, appreciative note for foodstuffs sat near them.  Babbo Natale and his reindeer were not fooled by our relocation and the letters to the North Pole had obviously been received. After a long, enjoyable morning at home we finally got dressed and headed out into the sunshine for a walk. So high were his spirits Nikolai actually walked, too, and didn't complain once! Temperatures must have been close to 50F as we walked down a twisty path through a large field of grass still green. 

Into the walls we went and out the other side before climbing a staircase up onto the path encircling the town.

                         From there the mountains showed a fresh coat of snow in the distance 

and before we joined all of the townsfolk for a passegiata sulle mura we stopped to admire the view,                      
                                               
                                                                   the weather,

                                                   and just spending time together.

Sounds, Smells and Soapsuds

         When I started this blog I didn’t have a clear idea of its audience. Would it be directed towards family? Family and Friends? Any cyber-surfer who happened upon it? As it took shape I opted for all of the above. I would put in photos of us and details to make it worthwhile for family and friends but also include something in each post that anyone might be able to relate to such as, for instance, what we all encounter at times dealing with our home.

         We found a house with a giardino just outside Lucca’s walls whose rent closely approximated what our tenants would be paying back in New Hampshire. Already we felt lucky since most housing around here is in the form of small apartments and rare is the yard for the kids to play in. Another factor going for this house was its location: close to the walls and historic center but also in a residential neighborhood with a pizzeria, bar/gelateria, bakery, butcher’s and bike shop all within a five minute walk and, in tourist season, safely removed from the crowds.

          Built roughly one hundred years ago and, like most dwellings around here constructed primarily of concrete blocks and plastered walls with rounded orange tiles on the roof, the house fits in with the neighboring apartment complexes and houses. From the outside you’ll notice narrow, tall windows with functioning green shutters to close when you’re away, when it’s storming, or in the summer during most of the day to keep the sun from roasting everyone inside. The double wooden doors at each entrance also reach quite high and, when both are open, provide a berth wide enough for even the largest friend or piece of furniture to enter or exit the premises.

         The first thing we noticed upon entering the house were the tall ceilings, two of which featured paintings of flowered borders framing an idyllic country girl carrying a bundle of grapes or a literal cornucopia from the harvest. The floors were all tiled or some sort of stone, lending a sonorous reverberation to our speech. There were the enormous bookshelves with glass doors, some antique desks, the tiny kitchen. It was all a bit disorienting coming from a low-ceilinged smaller house made mostly of wood. It seemed very different but also exciting, new, foreign. A home that would surely work splendidly for our family for the year.

        After some time in a place you begin to see its drawbacks though, no matter how great it may appear at first. We heard our every footstep on the hard floors. The reverberations of our voices became loud echoes and, while making the harmonica sound less like a toy and more like an instrument, turned the kids’ fights into World War III. Our location also happened to be one hundred meters from a train track and fifty meters from a busy roundabout connecting the main route to the highway and the city’s periphery road. Getting accustomed to the cars passing and honking took a couple of months while getting used to the daily stream of busses and semis changing their gears, braking, rumbling and shaking the house, that took about four or five.

         Then there was the sewer gas. Mainly it came from the upstairs bathroom on the floor where our bedrooms are located. The stench ranged from tolerable as long as you weren’t there too long to nauseating. Its source was hard to pinpoint, but the time it started all of a sudden while I was cleaning up after a workout the answer was clear. The shower drain. Pleads around town for help and advice were mostly answered by, “it’s like that here” or “I have the same problem”. I believed them at first, wondering how they could possibly live like that. Surely Italians had at least as capable an olfactory sense as did I, if not much, much more acute given their acumen and acclaim for gustatory pleasures. I went ahead and bought all of the chemicals they advised me to dump down the drains, dumped diligently and hoped for the best. But no lemon-scented ammonia, no liquid plumber, no WC NET Professional Scarichi Domestici con agenti biologici (mint scented!) would finish off the stench so easily.

         We called the plumber. He took a look and said it would be too hard to fix, that it was simply like that (at least according to my comprehension level of Italian in August). Were we just spoiled Americans to want to be able to breathe freely in our home? Maybe it was just something we’d have to grow accustomed to if we didn’t want to cut our sabbatical short and leave the country. We resigned ourselves to the maliferous odor. The days and weeks went by, we tried not to spend too much time upstairs (besides those rather important hours spent in bed every night), we tried to ignore it.

         It became more and more apparent to me, however, as another month or two passed and my frustration level grew that this was not just a simple “bad smell” problem, but that there had to be something fundamentally wrong with the system. This had occurred to me back in July, of course, but after the plumber had said there was no fix and everyone else had admitted that that was just how it was I’d backed off and tried to accept it. After awhile though, that just wasn’t going to be good enough. I had to do something.

         Three months had gone by since his first visit before we finally got the plumber to come back. I showed him some diagrams on how a plumbing system should work. He agreed that that would be the best system, ideally. He and his partner were joined by two others who set up a scaffolding two stories high outside and set about chipping into the wall. Soon they had exposed the piping and drain of the shower, (which, surprise surprise, had no trap). After another jaunt up into the attic the plumbers confirmed that there was in fact no vent stack for the house either. So my suspicions were confirmed: we’d been inhaling noxious gasses for four months. Having said that, it is true that we probably wouldn’t have so appreciated having normal air to breathe in the house had we not had foul air first (okay, perhaps I'm trying a little too hard with that attempt at looking at the bright side...). You’d think that here in Italy, birthplace to the concept and implementation of plumbing, houses would all be equipped with such technical innovations as the vent stack and the ‘S’ bend (trap) in drains. Apparently not. Over the next few days the teams worked together drilling a hole through the ceiling and roof, setting up the vent and installing a trap. The next day—finally! finally!—the stench had been staunched and set free to travel up through the sky, never to return again.

         Then there were the suds. In a future post I’ll write about the wonder of bicycles here in Lucca but in the meantime I will tell you that after five months we’d finally had it, not so much with having to bike everywhere as with not having a car. It just so happened that on Sunday night I was doing the dishes, thinking about what to pack for my train ride to Nice the next day where I would be leasing a Peugeot for the next 175 days (our plan had been to buy a used car here in Italy but we later found out we don’t have the right to do that as non European Union citizens and as temporary residents here in Italy). The owner of the house stopped by to pick up a few possessions from the basement and my wife took the opportunity to point out where a leak had sprung from the washing machine. The owner took the machine apart and started trying to fix it when I heard the loudest and most terrified screams from our son I’d ever heard before. The kid can be loud when he wants to and we’ve heard uncountable cries and rages in his nearly five years, but I swear, this one topped them all. Oh, and I should probably confess where we’d left him while we were in the basement working on the washing machine leak. Yes parents, you guessed it. The bathtub.

        

          The day before Niko had discovered how to make the bubble bath infinitely more bubbly and so much did he revel in his bubbly, soapy world that we didn’t think twice about letting him run the jets to give him his suds. On the night in question, though, after Niko had tired of the jets apparently he ventured to turn them off himself (a button easily reachable from inside the tub). We pieced together later that upon doing so the jets did stop but with a terrible crash, something instantly burst and the water and bubbles rushed immediately out from both somewhere underneath the tub and over the top onto the bathroom floor and out into the hallway, bringing with it a purging of the contents of the drain (not pretty). Niko was terrified and scampered out of the tub and into the hallway, which is where I found him, naked with soap suds all over, screaming for his life, and when I’d wrapped a towel around him and picked him up all he could say amidst his sobs was, “I wanna go back to New Hampshire, let’s go back to New Hampshire, I don’t like it here! Let’s go home!” We later set about opening the tub. The owner called the plumber to come take a look and see if he can fix the tub (he’ll be here after Christmas).

One minute before leaving home in New Hampshire for home in Lucca

     We are very fortunate to have this home and it will do just fine for us during our year in Lucca. There’s no denying that we do look forward to the day we’ll be back in New Hampshire in our cozy home near the woods and lake. In many ways, however, life at home in Tuscany really isn’t quite so different as back in New England. No matter where you go, the roof may spring a leak, the lights may go out, but eventually routines settle back in and life goes on. In the meantime, until the plumber comes to save us again, the kids will be taking showers.