Weekend Number Two

It was another beautiful weekend here in Torino. The weather is still in the forties. It has been clear the past week and the views of the Alps still amaze me. There really is nothing like seeing the white mountain tops whenever you look west (it is important to know that the Alps are to your west as the first week I didn't know that and it made things VERY confusing!). Saturday Rafaella, a coworker, picked me up to go shopping on the southern end of Torino where Eataly (which I walked to last Sunday) is located. It was nice to go shopping with someone who could tell me about the products in the store. Although I have to say the names of meats and cheeses do not translate very well so it is bit difficult. Raffaella does an amazing job of describing the flavor so that was helpful. There are five or so restaurnts in the store and we sat down to lunch at the counter of the pizza and pasta restaurant. In the middle of our meal a mother and her two young children (I would guess five and two) sat down next to us. As the pizza came the mother was cutting the young boys pizza and the older daughter was waiting patiently. I could tell that they were speaking Spanish and I asked the daughter if she would like help. She of course said yes and the mother told her (in English) to thank me. She must have known I was not Italian nor Spanish! I asked the little girl where she was from and she said the United States. I asked where and she said Michigan. I told her I was from Chicago and her eyes lit up...I think she too was happy to have someone else from America around! I finished helping her with her pizza and Raffaella and I finished our meal so that the mother could sit down with her children. She was very thankful for the help and thank me profusely...in Spanish! It is amazing how much Spanish has come back to me from being here!

http://www.eataly.it/

We went across the street to a shopping mall which was built from an old FIAT plant. In the middle is beautiful atrium and there are offices and a hotel on the floors above the mall (the mall occupies the first two floors). There is a very cool ramp that connects the first two floors that used to be part of a track for FIAT cars. There is also a grocery store that is similar to a Dominicks where I was able to purchase some laundry detergent...actually doing laundry will be a different story! Oh and of course the cap wasn't on the detergent tightly and it leaked all over my coat as I was carrying it! Oh well at least it smells good!

I will point out that bottled water here in Italy is very cheap...it costs around 40 euro cents for 1.5 liters (about three times the size of a normal bottle of water in the US) in a grocery store.

I walked around the city on Saturday afternoon to observe the "free day" they were having. There were lots of performances (musical, art, dancing, etc.) in many of the piazzas which were fun to watch. I met Silvia, another coworker, for a traditional Piemontese dinner. The food from the region of Piemonte is different then what we think in Chicago as Italian food. They do not use much red sauce here, they eat many filled pastas like "agnolotti" which is a pasta made with eggs stuffed with beef, pork or rabbit and flavored with sausage, parmesan cheese, eggs and herbs. We actually went to a restaurant on Saturday called Agnolotti and Friends and of course I had agnolotti. Silvia spent twelve years in Brussels so she speaks English very well and also Italian, French and Dutch.

Sunday was a day filled with relaxing, reading and working on my Italian!