Contrary to popular belief, Flo and I did not decide to just stay in Italy. The lack of blog entries for the week that we’ve been home is more due to a trip to Ikea and a desperate need to vacuum.

Italy was fantastic and there were so many cool things that they’re going to just come out like one of these guns that sprays bullets. What are those called?

1. Splügen Pass – Flo told me we would drive over the Alps this time, not through them in tunnels as we’ve done before. He wasn’t kidding. From somewhere in Switzerland, we drove up the mountains on hairpin turns and thin roads. They would be great for motorcyclists if only there weren’t other cars around. Flo complained every time a biker rode into his (Flo’s) lane. I tried to explain it rides better that way, but his answer? “Only until you hit the car whose lane you’re riding in.” I can’t really argue with him about that. If it has rained or the snow is melting, you see many waterfalls coming off the mountainside, which is fun. The road is so thin, if two cars meet at the curve, one has to stop and wait for the other one to go, which is why you always beep when you’re going around the curve, in case the other car doesn’t see you – which is very possible. One of my favorite things about the Pass was that the cows wear cowbells on their collars! Who knew cows still did that! Click the photos to take you to the photo webpage.

2. Italian Architecture – Reading as many books as I do, I often see descriptions of buildings as “Italianate” architecture and I basically had to imagine what that means. Not any more! And may I say that my imagination was excactly what the architecture actually looks like. Somehow everything looks grand, even if, in reality, it’s falling apart. Something that surprised me was that they use stone as shingles. The entire house is encased in stone, which has a very medieval feeling to it. They make their windows tall and thin, instead of perfect 9×5 ratio rectangles or perfect squares. Therefore, all the buildings look tall and imposing. I’m betting they have high ceilings too, although, since we camped, I didn’t really get into too many buildings to check out the ceilings. I saw many run-down buildings and (naturally) my mind went immediately to all the things I could do with each building if I renovated it. If I only had the cash….

3. The Mysterious Posterior Irritation and the Swollen Foot Scenario – I got a bug bite on me that wouldn’t stop itching and I thought I had contracted some kind of Italian Potty Disease or something. I really had a crisis! And me with only band-aids in the first aid kit… I don’t know if your minds work like this, but mine fixes on an idea and there’s no shaking it, so poor Flo had to deal with my obsessing over the potty disease for the duration of the itch. God bless Flo. He always knows what to do with a Kristy Crisis. After about a minute and a half of worrying about the itch, he distracted me and the itch went away. Catastrophe averted! Later in the week, however, he got three bug bites on his ankle and after a good night’s sleep, his ankle had swollen up like a pregnant woman retaining water! I immediately envisioned bringing him, limping, into the Italian hospital, where the charming, albeit somewhat backward, Italian doctor would instantly declare we must amputate his foot and me trying to explain that Flo needs his foot. Flo swore he would just dip his foot in the lake when we got back from town and the swelling would go down. What? Had we driven to Italy, but been mysteriously transported to the Jordan River, Naaman? Well, Manu’s parents were due in that night, so I decided to let it rest until we had a mommy’s opinion. As it turned out, I forgot all about it that night and by the next morning, it too, had cleared up.

4. Windsurfing – Flo’s family has surfed for years and Flo has talked about it so much, I really wanted to learn. Of course, it should be mentioned that Flo is a dolphin. I, am more like a bird – I like to play around in the water and get wet, but I’m not really built for it. So it was with a slight bit of trepidation that I climbed on the surfboard for the first time. The first thing I wanted to know was if my butt looked good in the wetsuit. After I heard the affirmative on that one, I calmed down and set to surfing. It really wasn’t as hard as I expected. My in-laws all told me I’d swim more than I surfed. I must have great balance (thanks Mom!) because I didn’t do too bad. Although after the second tumble in, my left ear plugged up and Flo had to shout all the directions at me in order for me to hear anything. Flo sat on his board and paddled behind me, instructing me what to do. It really was fun! I can’t wait to do it again. The only bummer was that the smallest sail we had was twice as big as I probably should have had, so what is normally a relatively exhausting sport became twice as exhausting. Still, I figure if I managed with a sail that is monstrously too big for me, I must have done pretty well! *Note – we still can’t find the cable, so if we ever find it, I’ll post the video then*

5. Swiss vs. Swabian – The area we live in is called Swabia, so the people who come from here are Swabians… I’m assuming you all know what Swiss people are. When we arrived at the campground, we chose a spot that happened to be between a family from Switzerland and one from somewhere nearish to where we live. The Swiss family (Robinson?) consisted of a father, mother, little girl and her younger brother, whose only word, I think, was “Papa”. In the Swabisch family, I only identified mother and two-year-old son. Another man might have been a grampa and one could have been an uncle; I don’t know. Every morning, the blond little girl next to our tent woke up at seven in the morning and began singing songs – loudly – in Swiss French. Shortly afterward, her brother woke up and yelled “Papa” at the top of his lungs for the rest of the day. I may be wrong, but it’s very possible their father put them up to this. He was already sour at us, because the corner of our tent butted up against their space and he no longer had a whole campspace to carry his boards and sails through. Oh no, my friends, he now had to carry his boards and sails (believe it or not – how audacious were we??) along the other side of his campspace directly through the gate to the beach. He made it clear this was a terrible development and in doing so, fully vindicated my opinion that Swiss people are mean and rude. The Swabians, on the other hand… Adorable little, mixed-race Benjamin was the quietest, cutest little guy we saw that week. The worst thing he did was pee in the lake, but come on, his mom took his diaper off: what was he supposed to do?? He even adopted the guy trying to sell watches along the beach walk, because he vaguely resembled his own father, who had already left for home. We never heard a peep out of him that was disruptive and his whole family was friendly, chatting with us while they drank their beer at 11 a.m. (OK, that was only the possible-grampa), letting us know how the weather should be for surfing the next day, lending us light after The Night of Firegames (see #6). They were great! I haven’t completely given up on the Swiss yet. They still have time to redeem themselves, but I can say, thank God we live where we do!

6. The Night of Firegames -  We played a lot of Uno and Phase 10 on the trip, because when it’s night time and no wind, what else can you do, really? One evening, we actually had no rain and in a celebratory mood, we carried the table out of the Camping Extravaganza Antechamber and played cards in the open air. Of course, it got darker and darker the longer we played, so Manu took out his SuperSun Camping Lantern and we played in the garish light of what must be a 783 Watt bulb… until the battery died. However, the SuperSun can be plugged in to normal power to recharge the battery, which we promptly did and found out we couldn’t use the lantern while we charge it. Is that dumb or what? I’ll be writing a very strongly worded letter to SuperSun when I’m done with the blog. We didn’t have other options, so Doro pulled out tea candles (God bless her Swabian sense of everything-must-be-perfect; I wouldn’t have thought to bring tea candles camping!) and we each lit a tea candle in front of us and held our cards in front of that, so we could see what we held. Of course, that left the pile in the middle of the table dark. So we played Uno for blind people that night: “grün 6″ “blau 6″ “blau 4″ “blau plus 2″ When we were able to turn the lanter on again, we had so much fun playing that way, we kept doing it. So if you ever play Uno with Flo and I, and we tell you every card we play, this is why.

7.  Italian Ice Cream – Most of the ice cream parlors in Germany are run by Italians who come here for the summer, so I’m told. With this knowledge on hand, I didn’t expect a great deal of difference when we went for ice cream in Italy, even though Flo’s been tantalizing me with descriptions of Italian ice cream since we met. First, I have to say, Italian ice cream is NOT gelato, as many Americans think. As far as I know, they are two separate delicacies. Italian ice cream is creamier than American and has a natural richness you would never find in a Hood container – not even Breyer’s. The flavors are distinct, but light, so they don’t overpower you. They offer many more fruit flavors than we find in America, but my favorites are still things like Nutella, Coffee and Stracciatella (which is milk ice cream with chocolate bits). The best part? No one in Italy scoops ice cream. The slop it. They take the cute little cone and an ice cream spade and just smoosh it in there until you end up with a giant glob of velvety goodness perched atop your cone. And this is a small! The trick then, of course, is to lick it quickly enough that it doesn’t melt into a mess on your hand in the heat. Naturally, Flo and I had to practice that a lot…

8.  Culture!! – I grew up with this identity that I’m Italian, because my mom is Italian, which makes me half, naturally (you can tell by my dad’s nice red color in summer and white color in winter that he’s not Italian, although if he got sick and turned green then he’d have all the colors of the Italian flag in him!) and we still have family in Italy, etc. People in Germany don’t seem to respect that being Italian-American is nearly as good as being Italian and at times I notice the absence of the ethno-familial culture I grew up with. I would say as soon as we crossed the border from Switzerland and saw the first Italian cows and houses, I knew I was home! The people just don’t hurry and aren’t so worried about efficiency like the Germans are. They’re content to enjoy their time. I saw one young guy just sitting on a chair on the terrace of a house, watching the cars that drove past. OK, so we drove on a Sunday; he probably didn’t have a job to go to on a Sunday, but still. Germans would have been cleaning something. The girls at the check out in the grocery store didn’t throw our food by the scanner in an effort to achieve a maximum number of customers served in a given amount of time. The people who served ice cream were friendly and smiled at us. Everyone drew out their vowels. I saw houses decorated with lacy things and the restaurants thought plastic chairs were classy! Everything was exactly like my Italian upbringing at home… well, except of course that at home no one speaks Italian. I could totally see living in Italy.

9. Everyone Else’s Dogs - I grew up with dogs and after a while of being in college, away from the dogs, I started to feel that they’re really a lot of work. They’re loud and wet and stinky and dirty and hairy and you have to feed them all the time and take care of them and you can’t leave them alone, because they’ll die if you just lock them in the house that long. And Flo doesn’t want a dog either, so we’ve never talked about it. But gosh darn! I love other people’s dogs! They’re so happy to be with their people and they just don’t care what anyone thinks. They play and enjoy themselves and they chill out when they want to chill out. Lots of campers had their dogs with them (although I even saw one cat on a leash, which I’d never seen before), but this guy was an Italian dog and he was my favorite.

10 National Pride – Americans are generally proud to be American and proud of their country. Germans have only begun to hint at this since they hosted the World Cup last summer. Italy is not a major world power in the same way that America is. It is not a major economic force, like Germany. It doesn’t seem to matter. Italians have it in hand. Perhaps they had recently celebrated some sort of festival and never took the decoration down, I don’t know, but this back alley had all kinds of patriotism on it and I llllluvit. Luvit.