Friday: the day before the wedding

Some notes from the 6th Jan. 

Another thing that's popular here in Idaho is homeschooling.  Liz and her siblings were homeschooled, and Cathy is still doing it with two of her boys. We met another woman at the wedding reception who homeschools all five of her children. 

Nampa - and Boise to an extent - are places where you need a car.  I don't know how you'd do shopping in Nampa without one.  I discovered later that there's an older part of town (near the reception hall, as it happens) that's more built-up, and where the shops are close to each other like Dunedin.  And Boise has a similar older area.  But in general everything is well spaced-out.  

Last minute things are being done all over the place - small things and big.  Chris is making a 'prop' to take photographs against (I thought it was for the couple, but it was actually for anyone who wanted).  It's a board with a couple of large rectangles cut out for people to stand behind, and a bunch of sepia photos in frames scattered around the rectangles.  It got a lot of use at the wedding reception.   We had been planning to go to the reception hall this afternoon to get things ready for the wedding tomorrow, but there was a funeral arranged at the last minute and the hall was being used.   Curiously, the wedding rehearsal was to have been today (Friday) originally; it had to be shifted to the Thursday because of another funeral!

Anyway, after a sandwich-type tea, put together by Margaret, a friend of Patty, (they're both friends of Cindy’s from way back, we went off to the reception hall for the big sort-out.   We were there for three hours almost, and got huge amounts ready for tomorrow, though there are still some decorating things to do - but they’ll be done by some others.  There were quite a lot of people - maybe twenty - so the work got well done.  Liz wasn’t there (she had gone to stay the night down the road with Sarah at a friend’s house) and neither was Dom, who hopefully got some rest before his big day.

The two sisters, Christin and Cathy got to grips with the thing, along with Cindy and Celia, and labelled stuff and organised and made it clear for the volunteer ladies coming in the next day as to what needed to be done.  Note all these names starting with C - there are more in Cindy's family.   And Chris and Carol (brother and sister) also start with C.  Thankfully, the children's names break the mould!

More on Milan

Amongst other things today we wandered down the Corso Buenos Aries, claimed by the Milanese to be the best shopping street in Europe. Well, by day, it looks like one of the more scruffy shopping streets to be honest, but by night (we were back in it tonight) it’s very sparkly and glitzy and certainly everybody and their brother was out. Along with a million cars.
We also went to the Duomo, a wondrous cathedral with its own Metro station and an immense Piazza, While we were there, we watched a Liturgy being conducted by a Cardinal - we think it might have been some sort of Harvest Festival equivalent, but can’t be sure. Anyway it was being relayed onto big screens around the immense church, while the voices of the speakers echoed and boomed. We couldn’t actually ‘attend’ it - they were keeping touristi out, but we watched it for some time, and, because we were handed a booklet with all the text in it, actually spoke along with the congregation - and sang. All in Italian, of course, at which we’re becoming very proficient. (As we did with German!)
Outside the church is a huge kind of 18th/19th century mall - a huge covered-in gallery with shops all down each side, and apartments up above. All of it in wonderful stone, with carvings and paintings. And as you come out the end of that, you run into one of the most famous opera houses in the world: La Scala. I’d completely forgotten it’s in Milan.
After some debate over how to get there - because Celia wanted to go on the buses in preference to the underground (not just because of yesterday’s incident, but to see more) - we found our way to the Castle. What a whopper! It puts most of the castles we’ve seen to shame, though it doesn’t have the antiquity of many of them. It’s as wide as it’s long, and though I would have thought it’s two or three hundred metres each side, Celia seems to think it’s only about one hundred. Not being able to get on the Net I can’t check. It has three moats because there are three walls, the second inside the first and so on. It’s thirty or forty feet high, and the tower at the front rises up way above that again. There are huge turrets on each corner. Inside it has cloister-like walls, and arched windows, and because it’s not made of the grey stone most other castles are made of, but rather a more reddish stone, it’s somehow more imposing. Very impressive, anyway.
By the time we finished with the Castello, it was getting on for half past five or nearly six. Celia wanted to go on a bus to find an area where there were restaurants, but we couldn’t in the end figure out which part of the loop the bus we’d caught to the Castello was on, and so we gave up and got on the Metro. We got out at Lima Station, which turned out to be back on the Corso Buenos Airies again. (We’d earlier found ourselves back on the street with the main police station in it while heading towards the Castello. It goes by the delightful name of Via Fatebenefrattelli.)
After we’d wandered up and down the Corso for nearly an hour we still hadn’t been able to find an actual restaurant. They were all bars, or pizza places. No spaghetti, no ravioli, no nothing - and no Asian or Indian restaurants either. Celia was getting exhausted by this time and proposed coming back to the hotel. We’d check on what was able at the Loreto Station area, and go from there. There was nothing. Not a thing. Even the McDonald’s was back down the Corso!
She couldn’t take walking around any more and we came back ‘home.’ And rustled up a perfectly good meal of wholemeal bread and cheese (she had the Gorgonzola, I had the Gruyere), apple, the remains of a salad we’d bought at lunchtime, and apricot jam. The bread and cheese we’d acquired during the course of the day, the former at an Arab bread shop, and the latter at Celia’s most favourite ‘museum.’ It’s a wonderful shop underground in the Loreto station. When we were in there today, around ten assistants were talking loudly to each other and the customers, and the customers talking loudly back, and there were cheeses galore, and all sorts of meats, and whole hams hanging up, and it all looked more like something out of the movies than real life. ‘My kind of shop,’ says Celia.

On language

12th Oct, 2007 again..

The language situation in Luxembourg was intriguing, you might remember. It‘s equally so in Switzerland, where German, French and Romany all exist - as well as Swiss German. The latter is their ‘native‘ language, but is so different in pronunciation from German itself that I found it impossible to recognise words when people were speaking. And yet they read and write ‘High’ German as their language, because it‘s the common denominator. Very confusing. Swiss German is even more gutteral than ordinary German, which sounds relatively soft by comparison. Celia reckons if she goes along making gggghhhh noises with her throat, she’s doing a pretty good version of the language.
She’s also discovered that the word, Migros, means supermarket in Swiss - it’s obviously a brand name but it helps to know what sort of shop it is. In some Migros stores there is a great range, but in the one we went to the other night on the way home from Thun, we went round and round struggling to find any sauces to use with the chicken we were going to buy. In the end we bought yet another couple of packets of Pelican filets - I don’t know they were filets of, apart from being fish (and they certainly weren’t Pelican; that’s the brand name) - which we’d already tried before and found quite tasty, if a bit salty and buttery. But to buy fruit and veges in this particular store you had to sort out the price ticket yourself, which meant getting the number from above the item you were buying, taking the goods to a weighing machine, pressing the number on the screen and waiting for a ticket. We’d already got to the check-out before we discovered this and had four items needing prices, which flustered the woman at the counter not a little. Rather too much in the way of self-service, to my way of thinking. Though in England, in some of the big stores like Asda and Sainsbury’s, you can check out all your items yourself. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it’s quite fun in the end.