Parrano - Olive Prepping!

We are in the midst working towards the olive harvest.  As it rains off and on, we are able to get out and cut the grass, and clean the equipment for the new olive oil.  We made tentative plans with the person who will crush the olives and make the oil for Saturday as Giovannas daughter will be here with her husband and 2 girls.  Here is what the olives we picked for doing pickled recipes look like. 








Map of where we are:
http://goo.gl/maps/YvpvB


It's been nice to start to be able to build habits again.  Here is a picture of our lovley pizza that we make with our host ieri sera( last night).

Buona Notte

Ricetta per i Biscotti

For all our friends who are cooks/bakers back home, here is a recipe you must try! We arrived yesterday afternoon in Parrano, a small Italian town perched on a hill. Giovanna, our wonderful WWOOFing host for the next three weeks, made this fabulous and tasy (tasty = "molto buono" in Italian) Biscotti recipe for us.

Last winter was very unusual in Parrano - the snow was a meter and a half thick! Almost 4'! Giovanna ran out of eggs, and as she lives outside of Parrano (20 minutes walking), she wasn't able to get to the village for supplies. A nearby friend taught her this minimal biscuit recipe (recipe = "ricetta" in Italian), which requires only a few ingredients: flour, white wine, olive oil, and sugar.

Biscotti con olio et vino Ricetta
"Biscotti with olive oil and wine Recipe"

1. Use equal proportions of flour, olive oil, white wine, and sugar. For this recipe, use about 1/2 cup of each, and mix together. 
2. Add flour to the wet mix until saturated - the dough should not feel sticky, and you should be able to roll a small piece into a ball without pieces sticking to your hand.
3. Take a ping-pong ball sized piece, roll it into a short snake, roughly 4" long
4. Shape the piece as desired - we shaped them into little ribbons, and pressed the tail of one end over the other. Then place on a plate dusted in white sugar.
5. Bake at roughly 350 degrees for 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Please note that I don't know the correct oven temperature - this is my best guess. :) 

Optional ingredients & changes:

• Use brown sugar instead of white in the main recipe
• Substitute whole wheat flours or other flours, in equal proportions with the white
• Giovanna added chopped ginger (pretty large-sized cubes of ginger) to the recipe, which added a fantastic flavor.
• Use other spices as desired - cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, etc

Flexible@Padova,Rovigo,Florence...

What is the number one thing they tell you when packing for traveling? Number one, anyone know? Common ones include "have a good time", or "stay safe".

Nobody tells you to be flexible.

Being flexible will save your life more often than knowing everything there is to know about traveling. In the last week alone, we've gotten out of amazingly crazy situations where being able to be flexible and cool headed saved us.

Today's Example: We were in the train station needing to buy a ticket to Florence. We went to the ticket counter after looking at the express tickets to ask some questions. We found tickets that were 13€ that was a 4.8hr train, or 20€ for 2.1hr train. Which did we pick? the faster more expensive one b/c it was leaving in 10 minutes and would get us there 2 hours faster. What did we forget? Which train station in Florence was it heading to? As it turned out, the one we chose was not the one we needed for our hotel... :( So we stop in Firenze Rifredi just north of the main station. I look up from my movie on my tablet at Tamara, as it's close to the time we were supposed to get off. She looked back and said it was not this one, we needed the central station, and it should be a couple minutes. Half an hour later I look up from my movie, and we are in the country heading towards Rome. Uh oh!

Being flexible when things don't go as "planned," or when there is no plan, will save your life.

We stopped in Padova for 2 nights, one at a hotel, and one with our first couch surfer! She was awesome. She was a Polish woman with really good english who shared our love of the crappy world and it's going on's. I learned a great deal about how the relationship/Italian culture works.

We trained to Rovigo for a night and stayed with another CSer. He was really nice and we all went out for dinner and got some regional foods. Here is Tamara having some coconut hot chocolate - yum!

We wanted to get closer to Fabro (the town closest by train to Parrano, our next stop) so we headed south to Florence today so we could split the travel time up and get to our bus out of Fabro on time the next day (there are only two buses to Parrano each day, one at 5:30am, and the other at 3:30pm. We will be arriving in Parrano tomorrow and should be there for a couple weeks.

We are both really looking forward to a consistent place for a while. It will be the longest we will have stayed anywhere since October 1st. Olive harvest here we come!

Venice! by GPS

If there was only one thing you could take with you when you depart from a known location, to an unknown location, it's offline GPS!  I can't tell you how many people are wandering around, looking at paper maps, as we whiz on by with our phone towards our location.   We can find almost everything even with slightly outdated POIs (points of interest).  Turn by turn navigation by foot is the ultimate in finding ones' way and discovering new locations.

There are so many small streets to nowhere, or dead ends that it's like a maze of streets so intertwined that if you get off the beaten track you could be looking at the waters edge.













What does it take?
-android smart phone with an internal gps radio (most have them)
-Sygic gps navigation software downloaded and installed
-Download the maps before you leave for the countries you are to visit.

Venice is a busy place, but fun to see for a day or two.  So many people make walking around a chore, but the scenery is wonderful.

We are leaving Venice today for Padova( a small town 25 minutes by train towards Parrano.

Moved to New Blog Site

Hey,

We have moved to a new blogging site, so the looks will be a little different but now comments work, and our google analytics is working in the background so we can watch you watch us! :)

Skittles & Bavaria

We've had a wonderful time in Passau this week - we learned to play Skittles, which is bowling (not the American candy), and we ate wonderful Bavarian food. All the people we met were awesome and very nice. :) Here's what we ate last night! We went out to a local brewery (there are at least 4 big ones in Passau - the monks are apparently very good at brewing), and we tried at least five different types of beer.

The food we ate was fantastisch - there was a huge dish which had two types of pork, bread dumplings, potato dumplings, and cabbage. There was also a delicious sauerkraut made of pale radish, sprinkled with paprika - very mild and somewhat sweet, and gravy for the top.

Skittles has lots of games within its basic structure.  We played several types, and even made up a game of our own.  The ball has either 0 or 2 holes for your fingers and is much smaller.  Our Team consisted of us, Andreas, Isabelle, and Nicole.  We had a blast. 

Work went really well.  Devlin was happy to meet everyone here and got lots of good work done.

We are off to Milan tomorrow!  Bye Passau, we will miss you... :)

Hit Passu!

After 23 hours of straight travel, we have arrived safely in Passau, Germany!

Along the way we hit up a McDonalds for the first time in years! (I know, I know, but they are "better here").  Here is the receipt to prove it.

We arrived at the train station in Passau at 9:40 pm, groggy and disoriented, and after a bit of shivering outside in the cold, we hailed a taxi cab who took us to our hotel. It will be lovely to be in one spot for four days, to have a horizontal place to lie down, and a shower! And, we have free wifi here too - all the comforts of civilization!