Yes, you are right, it has been a much longer time than usual. Lets see, my last post was about 6 months ago, and although I can't guarantee that posts will become as common as they used to be, I shall endeavor to do one once a year. Ha, yeah I know, keeping those expectations low. But if on the other hand you feel that I should give the blog up altogether please drop me a comment saying so. Life as I'm sure you can imagine has been very busy. You are likely aware that I became Jody Hackett as of the 22nd of May (if you haven't seen any pictures go here http://freezingtimephotographyblog.com/?p=299 ). Life before the wedding was full of wedding planning, work and, more importantly, Mitchell. Life after the wedding included a honey-moon, and the weekly ritual of getting our lives in order and, still more importantly, Mitchell. :)

I'm happy to report that life has slowed down a little, even allowing me the leisure time to sweep my floors at home. :D

As for the long awaited details of Italy, I shall try to recount some of the highlights.

It was a very looong flight, with very short, and mostly uninteresting entertainment. I was very happy to have company for the trip, as most of my flights had been alone up until that point. Mitch read to me, and we listened to music on his IPOD and entertained ourselves the best we could. I even managed to sleep. Our layovers were brief for the most part, with the longest one being in Ontario, which gave us enough time to switch from Air Canada to Alitalia. We got to hear all of our flight details and instructions in Italian, peppered with thickly accented English from then on. I think it was then that we realized that although we had learned a little conversational Italian, keeping up with the speed, variety and mumbling would be a challenge. Not to mention the challenge of being able to recognize your own name being called for boarding, when it's pronounced entirely different, cutting out some of the sounds, like "J", altogether.

I suppose it's kinda obvious to say that we made it there in one piece, although we had to wait around for over an hour in Genoa because one of our bags decided to take a later flight. We found lunch in the mean while, picked up the bag and caught a train to Spotorno, where we stayed for the duration of our trip (other than day trips). We used monasterystays to book our lodgings. Our hosts were the friendliest people we met our entire trip, and that is saying something. There was a language barrier, but with the help of charades, our mini conversational Italian dictionary, and google translator we managed to get by. We mainly had to satisfy ourselves with the simple niceties such as good-day and so on. There were a few oddities we discovered while in Italy. For instance, people in Spotorno do not own washing machines, they use a wash board or send their dirties the the launderer who would return them clean. Another thing was that they go shopping for their food pretty much every day. We discovered this by the fact that if someone owned a fridge it was no bigger than apartment sized.

Next, I shall cover the day trips we took..but I have run out of time, for I must away to work.

To be Continued...

Jode