Italian Thankmas!

After collecting ingredients, recipes, and advice from our moms and several weeks of planning, we felt confident and prepared to complete a successful "whole-works" Thanksgiving dinner with the girls. And it was a massively delicious success… except for a couple minor mishaps…

Cody got up at the crack of dawn Thursday morning to get us a Turkey at the fresh market before they ran out.... just kidding. It was a normal day for Italy so no one was lining up for them. But what he did find was an 8 kilo Turkey. Cody shopped for fresh products and the girls got the rest of the things we needed at the grocery store then we met at their place already Thursday night to bake some pies.

We baked a very large and successful Dutch apple pie but half way through the baking of our pumpkin pie and watching a movie, suddenly the oven, the dishwasher, and the fridge just shut off. The electricity worked everywhere else except for these 3 quite essential appliances. After checking out all the breakers - none of which had tripped, we consigned ourselves to bed with fears of loosing a perfectly good Turkey and in fact an entire Thanksgiving meal! Conveniently the girls have a nice hide-a-bed in their apartment so we stayed the night so we wouldn't have to go back and forth. This plan ended up coming in handy so we could get up and try to figure out what to do right away the next day.

Friday morning we woke up with still non-functioning appliances which ended in Cody and Brie going on a quest to find us an electrician. They finally ended up at one of our school buildings that was open. The woman working at the desk was conveniently married to an electrician and sent him over. However he didn't speak English at all and he also couldn't make it until 2:30 pm.....

So since it was officially the day AFTER Thanksgiving and therefore one is allowed to begin celebrating Christmas, we all sat around watching Christmas movies until the electrician came. In the course of all this, our stomachs were starting to feel the lack of delicious Thanksgiving food we promised them and.... we all ate the entire apple pie and therefore there is actually no evidence of our success in baking one except our smiling faces and momentarily appeased stomachs.

The electrician came while we were cutting out and hanging paper snow flakes everywhere and after we tried to explain "frigo non funcianano," he had everything fixed in a matter of 5-10 minutes. Turns out all we had to do was rip the base board under the appliances off and flip the switch on the surge protector underneath everything. Why did no one think of that?? He commented that the electrician who set up this arrangement didn't do a good job. We think that's what he said.... Then he made some waving-around gestures, which we took to mean what we had already concluded to be the cause of our plight: he suggested that we never run the dishwasher and the oven at the same time. We thanked him enthusiastically and he left without charging us. How nice. After we waited in fear of a wasted day and meal, we considered this quite a blessing.

The latch clicked as he left and we immediately set to work, resulting in a beautifully set table only 3 hours later. Only the green bean casserole didn't quite turn out... for some reason the beans just wouldn't cook. So even considering that we had to figure this all out using a convection oven, everything else was completely delicious and turned out so well. Probably the best Turkey ever! We have had glass bottle Cokes for something fun and spent the evening discussing blessings with friends who have come to feel like family and a place that has come to feel like home and becoming nearly pass-out full of some our favorite recipes from home. I think we all did or nearly fell asleep during "Elf" and pumpkin pie, but we dragged ourselves back home across the city with plenty of leftovers anyway. Oh it was a great day. ;)

Saturday we met up with the girls again in the Afternoon to check out another museum. Palazzo Pitti! It took us a while to get there though because Brie and I both had our cameras with us (she is taking a digital photography class) and we were both feeling inspired by the completely gorgeous day it was. Everything was all sunny and golden and we spent ended up spending most of our palace visit in its "Boboli Gardens" I can't believe all that land exists in the city behind the palace. It's so beautiful and is more like a forrest with trails and sculptures and fountains than a garden. Perhaps there are more flowers in the summer. Then we saw most of the palace where there are 5 different galleries: silver, costume/fashion, modern art, more art and then rooms preserved as they were when the Medici family lived there. I would like to comment how odd it is that they didn't carpet the floors of the rooms if they were going to have paintings on the ceilings. I would want to lay on the floor to look at them. Just saying. We didn't get to see the silver or costume galleries but it's ok because the rest exhausted us enough. Just can't handle all that beautiful extravagance at once. Hopefully we'll go back to catch at least the costume gallery before we leave.

3 weeks left and they are beginning to turn on the gorgeous Christmas lights they've been hanging in the streets and there are men in cherry pickers decorating the gi-normous tree in the Duomo square - It's like New York! As if the city wasn't enchanting enough already.... so you'll be joining us here for Christmas then, yes?

Love Always,
Kait and Cody