Ken's Birthday

On March 7th we celebrated Ken's 65th birthday with a cake bought at a local bakery.  Since we don't have an oven in our apartment we had to leave the baking to someone else. The cake was a traditional Florentine cake with cream filling and a Fleur de lis design for Mardi Gras.  Since it was far too much cake for us to eat, we celebrated with our classmates at Instituto Italiano.  They seem to enjoy the cake with great gusto.  Too bad we didn't have espresso to go with it.

(half of) Ken's birthday cake

Our first (grammar) class

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here are 5 of our classmates......Anestazia (Greek), Stella (a teacher for prisoners in California), Jessica (British doing her Gap Year), Marti (The Hague doing his Gap Year) and Nazareth (Spanish studying law).  Not pictured is Bose (a 32 year old female bank officer in Britain with roots in Nigeria) and Ferdinand (a  man from Canada who tours the world as an economist with roots in Italy)

Ken's birthday dinner at our apartment

First course was Spaghetti al Tonno (Spaghetti with tuna sauce).  Then we had maiale (pork chops with rosemary and savory) with patata picolo (little potatoes) and fagiolini verde e carota.  (Green Italian beans with carrots).  Our landlady, Maria Chaira gave Ken a great bottle of red wine which, of course, we enjoyed with dinner. 

The next few days are somewhat of a blur.  Between Theresa's gout flare-up and Ken fighting a cold, it was all we could do to attend school and keep body and soul together.  In order to get a prescription for colchicine for Theresa we had to go to a "Doc In The Box".  For 34E he wrote out a prescription without ever asking one medical question.  The prescription was filled at a pharmacy that gave no directions on how to take it and gave back the prescription after filling it.  Our wonderful doctor back in the states emailed us the directions for taking the meds.  We also bought 60 Vitamin C pills for Ken and they were 14E (about $20).  He doesn't have a cold today (March 11), so we guess they were pretty good pills.

Our electricity has been sporadic and the electricians almost know us by our first names.  They did finally get our lights to work and, if we turn off the water heater while we cook, the fuse box is a lot happier.  The apartment will get more power in about 19 more days after the government okays our request to up the current supply.  Then we will not have to choose between appliances. 

The weather has been mostly overcast with a few sunny days.  We did get out to see an American movie, "True Grit", and found ourselves looking at the Italian subtitles.  The theater was absolutely grand.  Plush seats, huge screen and very ornate.  We also found an Episcopal church with masses in English.  On Ash Wednesday we got ourselves to an evening service for the dispensing of ashes.  Amazingly enough we did not see one other person with ashes on Ash Wednesday.  Either the Catholics here don't do it anymore or people don't go to church during the day, or they just don't go to church.  Who knows?