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Making
our new home in Ravenna Most
of you know by this time. Doug and his firm SYDE got a contract with
the Italian campaign +39 (piu-trentanove) Challenge for the America's
Cup in 2007. We can't go into more detail than this, but I will let
you know that Doug is enjoying the work a lot and at the moment we are
willing to overlook all the personal challenges we face for this opportunity! At the end of July we packed a few things, including the dog, and flew to Ravenna. Well, actually, it was a direct flight to Treviso and then we got a rental car to drive down here. Lina didn't like the flight much in the belly of the airplane. She was quite shaken up when we received her in Italy. Poor thing!
Ravenna is a beautiful little town an hour east of Bologna and 15min from the mare adriatico. Ravenna is known for its Byzantine churches and mosaics. Here a few snapshots but there is plenty more to see:
We finally moved
into our new home on the first of October. It is right in the center
of town, not far from the public garden and the Basilica DI Santa Maria.
The apartment is in the back house of a Palazzo. It has space for a
beautiful garden in the back and in the front of the house. Lina loves
it and I need to learn about gardening before too long. The Palazzo
was completely gutted and divided into apartments; same with the rear
house of the Palazzo. Come and visit us, we have an extra room!
My parents were the first visitors at our new home. In fact they were helping us move in! With all the work inside the house we still had the time for visiting our new town and surroundings. We went for walks in Ravenna, also shopping for shoes, we showed them the beaches only 15 minutes away, went to Classe to see one of the extraordinary basilicas around here and visited surrounding towns Russi and Forli. They love Italy anyway and were really happy that we moved down here. I think they might become regular visitors to Ravenna. We will post some pictures to encourage others to come by.
Our furniture
arrived from Amsterdam in the 3rd week of September 2004. Since our
apartment was not ready yet we had to temporarily put the furniture
into a friends garage. Finally on the first of October we could move
everything from the garage to our new home, this time by ourselves with
the help of a dear friend. Hey, we have done that many times before,
although it does seem to get more stuff every time we do this. We are
living on the ground floor, so there weren't any weird contraptions
for moving in. Like we had in Amsterdam, which made for fun pictures
last time. This time there are no pictures of the move itself, we also
did it at night. For the fun pictures on our move in Amsterdam visit
our Amsterdam website. The most difficult
aspect of the whole move to Italy is doing business with the Italians.
We would have never guessed that it would be so bad. It doesn't matter
what it is, it could be simple things, like a telephone line, which
only needs to be connected. Well, here there is a problem with it and
it will take until the end of November to fix. We ordered the connection
at the beginning of October. 2 month wait ... Same with our apartment,
we saw it and loved it on the 19th of August, but due to some plumbing
problem we were not able to move in until the 1st of October. That
is 42 days of waiting ... Now that we are moved in, we are waiting
for the kitchen to arrive, delayed due to some broken piece. It was
supposed to arrive at the beginning of October, now it is almost the
end of October and we have no kitchen yet! 20 days of waiting and
still counting ... August was beautiful
and very hot, but not as hot as we feared. If you stick to the unwritten
rules of not leaving the house between 13:00 and 16:00, you will survive.
We also went one weekend day to the mountains nearby (about an hour
south west from here) to cool down. It was a complete different weather
system there and about 10 degrees cooler. We also have high hopes for
these mountains in the winter to go cross country skiing. Last year
we could only use the skis once in Belgium and we almost passed out
on the way back of a 12 km loop due to lack of training. We are taking
a language course two nights a week after work at the Scuola Palazzo
Malvisi. It is great fun, but it will take some time. When we walk with
the dog through town, people always talk first to the dog and then to
us. We quickly had to catch up on the basics of dog talk. How old, if
she is still a puppy, whether she is feminine, if she is a good dog
and what kind of dog. They all love her and we get to practice our freshly
learned Italian. We have been eating
out since the day we arrived at the end of July. We love the Italian
food and wine, but can one have too much of it? Well, yes, we have been
desperately searching for Chinese, Mexican, Japanese or Indian food.
Except for the latter we found one of each and it is not bad. I have
been craving Schnitzel and potatoes for the last month and Doug is always
on the look out for Weissbier. I guess you always want what you can't
have! We did find a great bakery in town that has awesome biscotti and wheat bread with sunflower or sesame seeds. Nothing like the dark and seedy breads you get in Germany, but nonetheless good.
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National
Park of the Casetine Forest, between 1000m to 1657m 