When visiting an Italian city, there’s a certain progression to the day that we aim for. It goes more or less like this:
9am coffee & pastry
10am coffee
11am coffee
1pm lunch
Europe
Italy: Wandering around Padova
We have some good friends who live in Padua (Padova), so we like to stop by every time we’re in the area (“the area” basically referring to the Veneto, the region of Italy around Venice). It’s a gorgeous city, full of narrow porticoed streets, cathedrals, bustling squares, and humiliated graduates.
Italy: the tiny Dolomite towns
On our recent trip to the Dolomites, we mainly kept close to the adorable cabin where we were staying, but we did venture out to explore some neighboring towns in Veneto on a couple of occasions.
Edinburgh’s Hogmanay: the torchlight procession
After a very expat Christmas in the US, we came back to Edinburgh to experience the glory that is Hogmanay for the first time.
Scotland: soaking up the Isle of Skye
Our road trip through the western Highlands ended with several relaxing days on the Isle of Skye.
Western Highlands: Plockton
It was still raining as we pulled into Plockton, but the charm of this small seaside town was evident even through the dreich.
A snowy New Year’s in Finland, without snow
Happy New Year! Where did you ring in 2014? We seem to start out each year somewhere different (in our five years in Munich, I think we were only there for its warzone-like Sylvester once). This year we had the pleasure of being invited to join some friends at their log cabin on a lake in a remote part of Finland. We’d lapped up their stories of snowy snowy New Year’s Eves past and could not wait to experience it ourselves.
Eastern Scotland: castles and hiking in Deeside
After following the northern coast of eastern Scotland, our route turned inland towards Loch Kinord, where we stayed for a night. This area is known as Royal Deeside, due to its proximity to the River Dee and to Balmoral Castle, the queen’s famed vacation home.
Settling into Edinburgh
About time for a wee blog update, isn’t it? Let’s fast forward from my month in Tokyo (we’ll come back to it, I promise) and jump all the way up to present day, where Scott and I are just your typical, everyday serial expats settling in after yet another international move. We’ve been in Edinburgh for about five weeks now, long enough to have most of the new-country administrata out of the way. The first few weeks of a new expat gig feel the same pretty much anywhere, even if the details are different. Register this, paperwork that. Sign up for a cell phone, figure out where all the various kinds of recycling go before the growing tower of vodka bottles in the kitchen falls over, that kind of thing.
Edinburgh: the apartment hunt
We’re more than a week into the hunt for a flat in Edinburgh, and it’s been quite the rollercoaster. We’ve seen some horrible places, and some less-horrible ones, but nothing that we’ve fallen in love with yet.
The main problem is our stuff. It’s always the stuff. When we moved from the US to Italy nine years ago, the agent had a hard time finding apartments for us to view because we were adamant about not wanting to buy a kitchen. In Milan (and Munich), the vast majority of rental flats come completely empty – no light fixtures, no window coverings; the kitchen is usually just an empty room with a water pipe coming out of the floor where the sink should be.