Pasta of the Week #1

PLEASE

try and contain your total and uncontrollable excitement at the title of this post!

Since I moved to Italy I have lived out the very real stereotype of Italians eating pasta every day. In fact, they eat pasta here as a starter, before their main course of meat or fish. And with a kilo of it costing just 80cents in the supermarket, you can't really argue against it. But I feel that I have therefore eaten my yearly limit of pasta in just two short months. Perhaps even my two yearly limit? Either way, I've had rather a lot.

And thats also because they have around 100 different types of pasta here (though I haven't spied any wholewheat yet), each with a different name. I found 5 different types of spaghetti the other day, and consequently had a mini meltdown in the store trying to decide which one I should buy - I eventually went with number four, by the way. It's a bit more square-ish than your regular spaghetti shape, and takes a little longer to cook. Don't even try and pretend that my spaghetti lessons don't fill your whole being with excitement and joy.

stockpiling

Anyway, everytime I go to carrefour, I try a new shape. And now I am going to share my weekly adventure into new shapes of Italian durum wheat flour with you, you lucky, lucky people!

So this weeks pasta is number 86: Pipette Rigate

I bought this one to try and make some maccaroni and cheese (couldnt find actual maccaroni, this was the next best thing on the shelf) but it didn't work anyway because Sicily is seriously lacking a good cheddar/cheese with any sort of flavour at all.

p.s. A quick wikipedia search led me to this: "Pasta is a staple food of traditional Italian cuisine, with the first reference dating to 1154 in Sicily."

SICILY! So, really, it's only right that I continue to feast on the cheap, reliable, staple food of this strange and wonderful island everyday! When in Rome... or Sicily in fact... You know what I mean.

A late night trip to hell

Last week I got cystitis. It's annoyingly common in women but I haven't had it in about 3 years. So of course my body waits until I'm on this tiny Sicilian island, late in the afternoon on a Sunday to decide to develop it again. Any girl who has had it will know how painful and uncomfortable it can be, and this case was definitely the worst I've ever had. I spent last Saturday evening watching TV in bed, trying to flush it out with lots of water, as this is what I normally do in the UK, and by the next morning I was feeling a lot better. Convincing myself all was ok, I drank coffee (big no no), tea (another big no no) and ate chilli (the biggest no no) for lunch. And later that night all hell broke loose.

Caffeine and chilli were probably the two worst things I could have consumed as they aggravate the bladder, and by 9pm the pain was so unbearable that I googled late night pharmacies in Palermo, and found the nearest one to be right by the central station. Anyone who knows Palermo will know that this isn't a particuarly nice area of the city during the day, nevermind at night. So I decided as I left the house to get a taxi, only they seem to be rare sights in Palermo. I couldn't deal with a confusing Italian phone call and waiting around for one to get to mine at that point, so instead I just set off walking at a rather brisk pace towards the station.

I had translated some sentences to use, and saved them in a note on my phone, but when I got there there was a queue of 5 Italians waiting to speak through a little hole in the wall to the pharmacist (who didn't speak a word of English) behind it. When I got to the front of the line, I stumbled across the words I'd translated, trying to give it my best Italian accent, whilst all the time extremely conscious of the two people behind me listening to every word of this rather personal problem of mine, and then almost burst into tears when the pharmacist told me he couldn't do anything for me without a prescription. I told him that I was English and studying here for a few months and so didn't have a doctor, and that the pain was pretty unbearable right now, and he went away and came back with an address written on a piece of paper. He told me that there was a clinic open now that I could go to to get a prescription... at the complete opposite end of the city. So I jumped in a taxi by the station and 15 euros later arrived at the creepiest place I've been in my life.

Now anyone that knows me will know that I fully expect an axe-weilding, mad man to be waiting for me around every single corner I come across in my life. I am the biggest scaredy cat you will ever, ever meet. I scare myself into sleepless nights just watching the trailers for horror films or reading about their plots on wikipedia. I was convinced for a good ten years that the mad axe-man from the AWFUL film 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' was after me because I watched it at a sleepover when I was 10 (biggest mistake of my whole life).

So walking into this old, abandoned-looking building, with all white walls and not a soul in sight, a large creaky metal door that slammed and locked behind me, in the dead of night, in a foregin country, on my own...well that was just about my worst nightmare. Everyone knows hospitals make a great setting for a horror film, and I genuinly felt like i had just walked straight into one.

The taxi driver, after taking me down a serious maze of back streets in the dark, had asked me if I wanted him to hang around for me as I was getting out of the car, to which I replied "Yes please!". He then asked how long I would be, and, unaware that I was going to be the only person there, I told him 15 minutes, repressing the urge to ask him to come in and find me if I hadn't emerged by then.

It was deadly silent inside and so I stood in the hallway debating in my head whether the cystitis was actually as bad as I was making it out to myself, or if I could just run back out of here and never look back. But unfortunately it was that bad, and so I walked through the next set of doors into a long, white, empty corridor. There I had my second internal debate/meltdown. There was a ticket machine, and despite the fact I was the only person there, I couldnt, in my moment of fear-induced madness, decide whether I still needed to take a ticket or not. So I kind of stood awkwardly by the machine, half holding the next ticket hanging out, for a good minute or so, until I heard someone say something in Italian, and a few seconds later a head popped out from one of the doors and the doctor beckoned me in.

(I left the ticket)

And then the fun conversations began. He asked me what the problem was, then waited a little impatiently as I whipped out my translated notes and began to read through them once again. Then he said, "So, have you already started therapy."

No doctor, but I think I'm going to need to after this experience.

I said no, and he asked me things such as when it started, how long I was in Italy for, and then he said "Ok, so what drugs do you want?"

Being a bit rusty on all the different antibiotics available in the world right now and what they are good for, I just kept saying "non so" (I dont know) until he took out a notepad and began to scribble something down on it. When I say notepad, I genuinely mean a small book of blank, white pages that WHSmiths will (over)charge you £4.99 for. This pad had no official logos, nor stamps, nor anything to suggest that it was a doctors prescription pad at all. But alas, it was. He then asked me my name. Emma he could deal with, Dunderdale he could not. So I asked him if I could write it for him. He didnt look happy about letting someone with no medical degree at all handle this extremely professional and important piece of medical equipent, but he handed it over anyway, along with a spare pen he found in his drawer (trusting me with his "prescription pad" was one thing, his own, personal pen was something else!) However, it seems Dunderdale is too long a name for him, and halfway through writing it out he got bored and began to slide the paper back away from me and towards him, allowing the prescription in question to be written out for a one Emma Dunderduuuu.

He finished writing up the prescription, handed it to me and I walked as quickly as I could out of there, back into the kind taxi man's taxi, and asked him to take me all the way back to the station. Another 15 euros later, he dropped me outside the pharmacy and I paid yet another 15 euros for two boxes of antibiotics that are apparently used to treat anthrax exposure, and can cause my tendons to snap suddenly.

The kind taxi man had asked again if I would like him to wait around and take me further on my way, but I felt that 30 euros on taxis was more than enough spent for one nights adventure round the city. So I instead thanked him, told him I lived close by and walked briskly once again back home.

Thankfully, the antibiotics helped a lot, but I definitely don't want another experience like that for a while. I have stocked up on water and herbal tea which is supposed to help prevent cystitis, and should the problem return whilst I'm still here I'm pretty sure I can just source some white paper and write myself the next prescription out.

Oh Sicily.

Va Piano Paris | A tasty end to a long day

My mum is working in Paris this week, and so I have decided to take full advantage of this and tag along with her to cram in some more sightseeing of Europe before carrying on my way to Sicily, ready to start the second half of my year abroad.

We have had a pretty long day, starting at around 3 this morning for me. The journey to Manchester airport took us a shocking 3 hours due to a car on fire closing parts of the motorway we were on, which eventually just led to a complete and utter standstill. When we finally got to the airport we actually had to run all the way from the carpark like madwomen to the bag drop desk, dragging 4 rather heavy cases behind us, and we just managed to make our first flight by the skin of our teeth.

After a 35 minute flight down to London, we had a couple hours wait in Heathrow before carrying on to Paris (where I was randomly upgraded to business class for free - cheers BA!) 

We arrived into Paris around 3pm local time and took a taxi straight from the airport to our hotel in La Defense, where I managed to cram in an hours power nap before getting ready to go out for dinner at a place across the square, called Va Piano. 

Va Piano is a fun little Italian chain, where your food is prepared fresh in front of you by the chefs. When you enter the restaurant you are given a small card, like a credit card, which is then used to keep a tally of everything you order.

There are three separate stations: Salads & Antipasti, Pizza and Pasta, each one with a different menu to choose from. You decide what you want at each station, place your order with the chef and then scan your card on a little machine and your order is added to your tab. At the end of your meal you simply take your card to the till by the door and settle the bill there. It saves time paying at the table and gives you way more freedom in ordering your food.

Me and my mum started off at the Salad and Antipasti bar - me with some bruschetta and her with a small caesars salad.

We ate and chatted, and the beauty in being able to take your little card up to the station and order what you want there is that you don't feel rushed into ordering anything by a waiter who is juggling another 10 tables of hungry/indecisive customers. Not being able to decide what I want and ordering the wrong thing are regular occurrences in my dining-out-life, and so the ordering system at Va Piano suited me perfectly! You decide what you want to eat, when you want to eat, and can see it being prepared from scratch in front of you. You can also talk to the chef about making adjustments to your dish, and on the table there is olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper and various herbs to add to your meal. You also take your card up to the separate bar whenever you like for drinks and it is all settled at the end when you go to leave.

For our mains, me and my mum shared a ham & mushroom pizza and a bowl of tagliatelle with pesto and pine nuts. Both were delicious, though I think the pizza was the winner hands down as it somehow managed to be sloppy but still quite fresh and light - perfection!

To be honest I'm in love with the concept and all the food we had was delicious. The atmosphere was very relaxed and you felt like you could really take your time with your meal, there was no rush to leave once you had finished eating, or move onto the next course immediately. I'm told they have restaurants in London and Manchester, and will definitely be keeping an eye out for them next year!

Segovia

So it's my last week here in Madrid. I'm not sure how I got here so fast, but it has certainly been a roller coaster of a term. When I arrived I made a list of things I wanted to do and see whilst here and have been slowly ticking them off ever since. On Monday night I went for a few drinks and some tapas to say goodbye to my friend who left Madrid yesterday and, whilst chatting about our time here, we both said the exact same thing - that when we arrived we thought we had all the time in the world, but it went by so fast.

If there was one thing I could say to every student who is lucky enough to study abroad, it's to do the things that you want to do, don't put them off. Yes it feels like you have all the time in the world to do them, but you really don't. Get them in, don't wait. I'm not saying you need to be booking coaches and trains straight off the plane, but if there is something you really want to do, see or experience, make sure you actually go and do it, even if that means doing it alone. Sometimes life unexpectedly gets in the way, the year may not count but the workload and exams will stress you out and when you think about it properly, twelve weeks to fully immerse yourself into a new culture and learn everything about it is nowhere near enough time.

Life and its strange turns kind of got in the way of things a bit for me this term, and so when I came back to Madrid for my exams, I vowed to make the most of what little time I had left here. There were a few "to-dos" and some places to see left on my Madrid bucket list, so Monday evening, before I went for drinks, I booked a coach to Segovia and yesterday morning I went on my way.

Segovia is a city to the north-west of Madrid, in the autonomous region of Castilla y León. It is probably most known for its impressive aquaduct (el acueducto de Segovia).

 

I walked up to the top level of the acueducto and then made my way through the little streets in search of the alcazar, which I had read online was part of the inspiration for Walt Disney's Cinderella Castle - cue embarrassing levels of excitement, and me eventually convincing myself that Cinderella (the fictional disney character) had actually lived there. (I definitely found myself thinking things like, "Wow I can't believe I'm actually in Cinderellas house" as I walked around...)

 

 

Something I really love about Spain is how you can be walking through tiny cobbled streets, and out of nowhere something as magnificent and grand as this just pops up:

This is the Segovia Cathedral, also known as 'la dama de las catedrales', and it sits overlooking the Plaza Mayor. It is apparently the last gothic cathedral to be built in Spain, and was completed in 1768. It's pretty amazing to look at, and it can be seen peeping out from various different points in the city (and is therefore quite handy for finding your way around, allowing you to understand where you are in relation to the Plaza Mayor)

I carried on walking past the cathedral, down some more cobbled streets, and eventually I arrived at the gate of the alcazar.

I'd read online that students get in for 3euros, but when I asked the man at the ticket desk he told me that if I had an EU passport or English driving license I could get in free!

The walk round the alcazar doesn't take long, but its quite beautiful inside. 

 

All along the castle are these big arched windows, which let in lots of natural light and give you an incredible view over Segovia

they're not entirely sure who laid the foundations of this place, and they're not ashamed to admit it...

After leaving the alcazar I wanted to get a photo of the castle from below, as it sort of sticks out of the hillside like the bow of a ship. To do this I had to go on a trek and a half, round the city walls and down the hillside, and it all started by going down these steps of certain death...

(I can hear my mum gasping all the way from Spain)

and then I walked, and I walked, and I walked. I felt safe at all times on the journey down...

Once past the scary, makeshift pathway carved into the city wall and onto a wider, and more stable, path the walk was actually really enjoyable. It was extremely quiet, pretty much silent at times, and very peaceful. The whole route was surrounded by trees and it was raining lightly, giving the area that amazing earthy smell.

 

And then I finally made it to the bottom, to see the castle sitting on the hillside in all its glory. Excuse the rain on my lens, the battery sign had just flashed up warning me my camera was to die at any moment, and I hadn't come all this way down not to get this shot!

It was really beautiful to see and I'm so glad I did! It did however dawn on me at that point that I had come all this way down and it had taken me quite a while....and now the only way was back up. I certainly earned myself that (amazing) hot chocolate on the way home. I walked past the castle, alongside the river, and all the way back up to the alcazar. Then I made my way to the Plaza Mayor, through the city streets, stopping for a look in a few shops, and eventually ended back up at the acueducto. 

 It was around 5.30pm at this point and I knew there was a coach back to Madrid at 6pm so I headed back to the station and hopped on. The drive home only took around an hour and 5 minutes, and the coach stopped off in Moncloa, dropping me practically outside my front door which was just perfect. 

It was lovely day out and I'm really glad I went and did it. One more thing ticked off my bucket list!