Wines and Whines

As mentioned earlier, we did go wine tasting in the Chianti region. Call it snobby, but we managed to arrive in the hill town of Radda during their wine festival. So we tasted all of the Chianti Classico, particularly the Riserva, to our palate's delight. Talking with the vineyard owners, I gained a greater appreciation for the science and culturing behind each bottle of wine. Each year, the vineyard will produce much different wines. 2001 and 2003 were overall good years, but 2002 was not. It definitely is apparent in the tastes and the bouquet. I found that I loved the wines that sat in the bottles. Our poor parents will enjoy our wine that we have bought... but only in three to five years.

It took us awhile to get the hang of tasting the wine, rather than drinking it. After all, many owners will pour a quarter of a glass for optimal aroma. Use your imagination as we definitely were in good spirits after tasting wine over several blocks of tables. Thankfully the buses run late and we caught the bus with seconds to spare. Unfortunately, Tuscany is not known for being flat and the bus ride was tortuous at best.

We met up with Lily in Roma and traveled to the central south of Italy. Pompeii was incredible, though we spent too much time in the bakeries. And we took many pictures of the stairs. The most common question during that portion was whether we were Japanese or Chinese or Korean tourists. The answer was yes to all three questions. That really confused the street vendors as they thought we were siblings or something!

Though K and I are not going to be able to finish our entire regional experiment plan to the south of Italy, due to transportation and scheduling difficulties, we did experience the chaos of the South. (Perhaps a road trip will be in order next year.) After barely catching the train to Roma from Napoli, we realized the train was not moving. Surprise! Train strike on June 15. Randomly occurs every so often due to high levels of unemployment. This is according to good ol' Putnam. So true.

With that chaos, we found a couple of students who spoke English and Italian. We pushed our way onto the buses that were meant for the Eurostar (more expensive train than we can afford to travel on between cities) passengers and had a hot bus ride to Roma via the Autostrada. Thank goodness we travel with bookbags and a plastic bag of food.