I left [[Colletta]] yesterday at 6:20 a.m., before the sun came up, and drove down the valley to Albenga to catch the train into Genoa. I wanted to spend at least one day of this two-week trip in the hustle of an Italian city.

Trenitalia, the Italian railway system, has an excellent English-language website, and a very quick and efficient system for ordering tickets online: I ordered my tickets the night before, received a 6-digit code by email and SMS, and when I got to the station I used an automated ticket machine (also usable in English) to enter the code, and my last name, and the tickets spit out. The fare into Genoa was 12 EUR each way, and the trip, on the fast express train, took about an hour.

At 9:00 a.m. I was on the street right in the heart of Genoa. Wow. After the idle quiet of the hills here in [[Colletta]], the city hit me like a rake. Not an entirely unpleasant rake, mind you. But it was a shock to my system.

Partly through circumstance and partly design I had no guide to the city, and was playing it by ear.

Walking out of the train station, a block or two along on the left I spotted an alley at the end of which was a sign that said Ascensore Montagalletto Castello D’Albertis. It looked like a funicular of some sort, and goodness knows I’m always down for a ride in a funicular.

It turns out that this particular funicular is more like a magic elevator. You buy a standard transit ticket from a machine by the door, and then step inside a glass box that holds about 8 people. After a minute or two of waiting, a gong goes off and the doors close and the car moves horizontally along a tunnel bored right into the mountain. After traveling for about a quarter mile, the car rounds a bend, passes a similar car going the other way, and then latches into a regular elevator shaft where it then goes straight up. The total journey takes about 3 minutes, and when you emerge you’re high above the city in front of the Castello D’Albertis.

You know those magic elevators from Willy Wonka. It was just like that.

I got a true sense of what a technical feat the Ascensore is when I walked back down to where I’d come from. It took me about 30 minutes, on a winding path down the side of the mountain. By 9:45 I was on the Genoa waterfront, primed for more adventure.

But first a cappuccino in a brightly coloured café down by the waterfront — my first “actually ordering a cappuccino in a real Italian bar” experience; it went exceptionally well ([[Catherine]] is going to be surprised and/or delighted when I insist that she whip me up a cappuccino every morning on her fancy Gaggia).

Next I spent a couple of hours in the Galata Museo del Mare, an oddly pleasant “museum of the sea.” I generally dislike such museums as they tend towards exhibits of ship models and thick rope. And there were ship models and rope. But there were also some interesting full-size ship recreations, lots of interesting maritime history (about half of the content is available in English) including the bittersweet tale of the great Italian liner Rex which won the Blue Ribbon for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic in 1933 and was sunk in 1944 at the tail end of WWII.

The highlight of the museum, however, was an exhibit that was part of the special Columbus show on the top floor: a series of corked glass flasks held samples of the fragrant spices that Columbus was in search of. Visitors uncork the flasks and smell:

Like all of the best museum exhibits, it was elegant, simple, involved other senses and no reading, and communicated its point very well.

After the museum I took a stroll in the sun along Genoa’s reconditioned waterfront. In a style similar to Toronto and Boston, the city is attempting to revitalize the shore with new infrastructure in old buildings. There’s an aquarium, a hotel, restaurants and shops, a long boardwalk, and several museums (think “Peakes Quay” in Charlottetown, but with bigger buildings and fewer Anne dolls).

I stopped at a small tourist information kiosk to pick up a map and ask some questions and, newly emboldened with geo-knowledge, I headed up into “Old Genoa.”

Now I’ve been in the core of some interesting old cities, from Porto to Split to Bangkok, but the core of Genoa is unlike anything I’ve ever seen: it’s a true “rabbit warren” of very tiny streets running every which way, laid out over steep hills. Streets that would be dark alleys in other cities are full of restaurants and tailors and laundromats. There are people everywhere, and there’s real everyday life going on, with not a hint of tourist gentrification. To imagine what it’s like, take your mind’s eye’s vision of what a tightly-packed European city is like, and then compress the streets in half and make the buildings twice as tall.

After wandering around this warren for an hour, I was exhausted and hungry and so I plucked up my courage and sat down at a table outside a restaurant on one of the wider streets:

A very kind English-speaking waiter helped me through the menu. I began with a hearty bowl of pesto (I was in Genoa, after all); the second course, which sounded delightful when called “little pieces of meat surrounded by vegetables” when translated, turned out to be a heaping bowl of cubed pork served with stewed peppers and eggplant. I tried to make my way through it, by my latent vegetarianism interceded and I only managed about a quarter, begging off the rest by claiming fullness. I finished with a tiny cup of strong espresso and, newly refreshed, continued on my way.

Across the street from the restaurant was the Libreria Bozzi bookstore, unusually open midday (most shops are closed from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.). I found some great books for Oliver and spent 15 or 20 minutes browsing their travel books on Croatia (being next door, they’re far more motivated in Italy, it seems, to have good Croatian travel books; in Canada you’re lucky to find any in most bookstores).

After wandering around the streets for a while longer, I somehow found myself back on the waterfront where I stumbled across the >Biblioteca Internazionale per Ragazzi E. De Amicis — a library just for children:

I took a walk through the library and it’s a truly delightful place: well-designed, colourful, and seemingly very well resourced. The library is on the 3rd floor of an old wharf building; on the second floor was La città dei bambini, a science and technology centre for kids 2 through 14. I didn’t go in, but peering through the front door and looking at their website, it looks like it might be the most fun place on earth for kids. I’ll have to come back with [[Oliver]].

From the waterfront I got on the small Genoa Metro (there are only seven stations right now) and went east to the De Ferrari station. I was looking for a bona fide department store so that I could do some Italian presents shopping. What I found was la Rinascente, which turned out to be well out of my league — more “Holt Renfrew” than “Sears.” But it was nice to wander about, and I did find something for Oliver in their special-for-Christmas-only toy section in the basement.

With a couple of hours still to go before I had to head back to the train station, I wandered around the neighbourhood for a while, and found myself outside of Palazzo Ducale, a grand old Genovese palace that was playing host to an exibition called Russia & URSS — Art, Literature, theatre 1905 - 1940:

Wow! I have a laughingly primitive knowledge of art and history, so wading through 35 years of Russian expression was something of a revelation to me. I absolutely love the boldness of Russian design, whether in newspapers, posters, books, or art. I’m a big one for the sans-serif, big statement school of design, and now I see where its roots lie. I had to buy the catalogue for [[Catherine]] so she can explain it all to me when I get home.

From the Palazzo Ducale I wandered back down towards the train station. Of course, being a timid travel conservative, I arrived with more than an hour to spare. The train station itself lacks for places to wait, so I wiled away my time by playing with a neato photo kiosk that lets you beam it photo from your mobile phone by Bluetooth:

With a little more time to kill, I dropped in at HB Café just up the street where I had a transcendent hot chocolate:

This stuff was as thick as pea soup, and drinking it was as close as I’ll ever come to living out my fantasy of swimming in molten chocolate.

And so my day in Genoa ended as it began, in the world of Willy Wonka.

The train trip home was quick, my car was still where I’d left it in the Albenga train station parking lot, and I returned to Colletta in the dark, 15 hours after I left, tired and happy.

I make this post only because I’m intrigued that as I get up early (6:00 a.m.) to catch the train from Albenga to Genoa, it’s still only 9:00 p.m. yesterday in California. Surely this time difference could be used to predict the future?

Yesterday was the “mandatory olive harvest recovery day.” Having been out of the manual labour-force for so long, I’d forgotten that one of the side-effects of manual labour is the post-labouring muscle creaking. So I spent much of the day laying about.

While the vrai Collettiani went off to have their annual meeting, I had the rainy village all to myself. After lunch I realized that my food supplies were again running low and if was to escape the fate of eating moldy broccoli for supper, I needed to run into Albenga for a refill. Fortunately by the time I set out the worst of the rain had subsided, and it was an easy drive; indeed now that I’ve done it three or four times, the “Italian roundabout experience” seems almost natural.

During December the COOP is open all day on Sundays, and it was bustling. From the various special flowers on offer, and “feste” signs around the town, I think yesterday was either a holiday, or perhaps simply a step on the road to Christmas.

It being Sunday and rainy, I toyed with the idea of going to the movies after shopping: Albenga is well-outfitted with cinemas, and there’s a 6-screen multiplex on the way back to [[Colletta]]. Alas although I was primed for La mia super ex-ragazza dubbed in Italian it was not meant to be: everyone else in the Albenga region decided that a rainy Sunday was a good day to go to the movies too, and as I drove by it was obvious that there wasn’t a parking place within 2 miles of the theatre. Another time.

So I reconciled myself to some late-nite Javascript hacking and Harper’s reading instead.

Woke up this morning with my muscles back in form and to a beautiful sunny day. After a morning cappuccino and a walk around the village, I’m back in the e-dungeon at work. If I get accomplished what I hope to get accomplished today, I’m thinking of taking the train into Genoa tomorrow for a brief respite from the “working” part of the “working vacation.”

Today was the close of the Festival dell Olio di Colletta di Castelbianco. We began with a final sweep of the parking lot olive trees, and a few of those up in the hills above the church. Then at 1:00 p.m. we gathered at Frantoio da Olive Armando Garello up the road in Nasino, across the street from Ristorante Costa where we ate last night.

It was at Garello’s mill where the olives would be magically turned into olive oil. But first, we ate. The production room was temporarily converted into a dining hall: long tables were set out, and a variety of foods were laid out on paper plates (what exactly the foods were I cannot tell you, but they were all very tasty, albeit more deep-fried than fresh). There was plenty of wine, cake and coffee for dessert, more wine, and then, after two hours, the tables were cleared away and the milling began.

Rather than trying to describe the process by which olives became olive oil, I made a movie:

Part two of today’s portion of the Festival dell’Olio di Colletta di Castelbianco agenda began at 8:30 p.m. with a general rendezvous in the piazza in preparation for a convoy to Ristorante Costa. I was kindly offered a ride by Jack from California, and so Jack and his wife and daughter and I piled into his van. On our way out of the parking lot, Francesco (he of the bon ami from this morning) shouted after us: he had, it seems, been accidentally left in the parking lot by his wife (or perhaps it wasn’t an accident?). In any case, Francesco piled in too, and 10 minutes later we all piled out in front of the restaurant.

By dinner time the size of the traveling olive picking roadshow had grown much larger, as predicted, and we consumed all available tables and chairs, which in Ristoranta Costa means both sides of a very large old building (creata nel 1913).

By fortunate coincidence we entered the restaurant just as the family of il mio patrono, the “very nice Italian man” of this morning, was arranging seating for his daughter (or perhaps arranging seating for me), and I was ushered into a place of privilege right beside her. Across the table was Francesco’s wife, on the other side of me was an Italian rice merchant who spoke passable French, kitty corner was Jane from London (originally from Boston) and Jack and his family shored up the end of the table.

Because of my position, I was in the vortex of a swirling mass of English and Italian, sometimes alternating in the same sentence. Oddly, the more red wine I consumed, the more I seemed to understand Italian.

Italians, I was told, like to “sit at the table for a long time,” thus making the Italian eating-out experience not hospitable to restless children. This proved very true: we arrived just short of 9:00 p.m., and did not exit until just before midnight.

Along the way a dizzying array of courses arrived; I’m not sure I remember them all. There were breaded zucchini flowers served with goat cheese, a cheese fondue infused with truffles, a flaky meat-potato tart, ravioli with tomato sauce, potatoes with mushroom sauce, mushroom with mushroom sauce, and nicely prepared artichoke hearts. Each of these was served independently as a course of its own. And there was something I characterized as a “poached egg without the egg” for dessert — it turned out to be “poached cream” and it was very good.

Punctuating all of this eating was much chatting about Canada and Colletta and San Diego, and the hassles of renting out a home, and how crazy the Ikea store in Genoa is (and how nice Genoa is to visit otherwise). I understood the English bits, inferred (or had helpfully translated for me) the Italian bits. And I think I even agreed to buy three [[Colletta]] fundraising calendars at one point in the proceedings when Francesco was hawking them.

My neighbour Monica (the “very nice Italian man’s daughter”) was a very pleasant table-mate, and we turned out to have much in common. Jack’s wife (again, alas, I am not one for many names) was the Rosetta Stone of the table: being Italian by birth and raised in Brooklyn, and thus English-Italian bilingual, she translated into English for me, and into Italian for others. And, of course, there was “an Island connection” — her daughter’s boyfriend has always wanted to visit Prince Edward Island.

By the way, speaking of Prince Edward Island: we’ve got a very low international name recognition if this crowd was typical of a multi-national audience. About half of the group had heard of Nova Scotia, most others knew about Montreal or Toronto, and only one person of all those that I talked about “home” to had ever heard of PEI at all. If we’re ever going to pull off this whole “leveraging a small economy into a major world power” thing we’re going to have to work on this.

By the time we arrived back in Colletta at midnight, I’d eaten a lot of food, shared in much good conversation, been halfway convinced that I should buy an apartment here, and primed for the culinary wonders that are coming tomorrow.

Must sleep now.

My friend [[Stephen Southall]] called me today from Ontario. He called me by ringing my office number in Charlottetown, which is patched through, on the voice-over-IP (i.e. “the Internet”), to my apartment here in Italy. We talked for 22 minutes. Beyond the cost of a normal call from Ontario to PEI, the jump over to Italy cost me 37 cents. Not 37 cents per minute, 37 cents total.

Remarkably, given all the hocus-pocus involved, the voice quality was great. Not quite “in the next room,” and a little shy of “a local call,” but very little interference or delay.

By comparison, the standard Aliant rate for a call to more than 37 kilometers away is 36 cents a minute. In other words, calling Summerside from Charlottetown with Aliant costs 22 times more as calling Italy from Charlottetown using VOIP.

If you’re using a Mac and want to watch live video from the Liberal Convention in Montreal, you’ll find the video at CTV isn’t watchable — it complains about an incorrect version of Windows Media Player. If you’ve got Flip4Mac installed on your machine, however this direct link should work, at least for Friday, Dec. 1 (this link might work Saturday, but I’m just guessing).

Warning: today, at least, it’s like watching paint dry. Right now they’re debating Amendment 12, to add the position of National Membership Secretary to the national Liberal executive.

This morning my alarm went off at 8:00 a.m. and I was out the door just before 9:00 a.m. hunting around for my olive harvesting compagni. They were nowhere to be found. After a few minutes of milling about, a very nice Italian man came around the corner and we managed to agree, he in Italian and me in English, that things were running late and we should just sit tight.

So that’s what we did, engaging in little snippets of conversation like “I have a place between Como and Milan and another place in Sardinia” (him) and “Prince Edward Island — yes, piccola isola… piccola isola” (me). By the time the rest of the crew converged 10 minutes later we were at the stage where I’d earned an introduction all-round as Peter dal Canada.

Although there are threats of 70 for the big harvest dinner tonight at Ristoranta Costa up the road in Nasino, the core olive picking crew numbered about two dozen. By 9:30 a.m. we had all re-rendezvoused near the pool, been assigned wicker baskets and yellow rakes, and the harvest had begun.

There are, it seems, three ways to harvest olives.

The first, and, to my mind, most kind to the olives, is to simply pick them as you would, say apples. They’re smaller than apples, of course, so you can often grab a whole handful in one go. In contrast to raspberry bushes, nettles and other things-you-can-pick, olive trees are pleasant to be around, you don’t need any gloves, and you appear to be able to pick for hours without suffering any great damage to the hands.

Competing with the hand-picking method is the “yellow rake” technique. These little rakes are made of plastic, and are about twice as big as a common garden trowel with tines spaced about an inch apart. The idea is that you brush said rakes through the branches of the trees, pluck off the olives, and leave them either in your basket (if you’re good) or on the ground, where they fall onto a net and can be gathered up later.

While theoretically more advanced, the yellow rake seems mostly to pluck off branches and leaves, with the olives remaining on the trees. While they have a unique ability, when stuck on the end of a bamboo pole, to reach otherwise unreachable olives, I quickly jettisoned mine.

The final technique could best be called “bashing high branches with a bamboo pole so that the olives fall off.” Several veterans of earlier olive harvests were very wedded to this approach, and very good at pulling it off. Success demands a rather frenzied bashing style, and good netting coverage down below so your efforts aren’t for nought.

Early off the mark I was identified as one of the hallowed alto (tall) pickers, and was given special assignments and a ladder and sent to places others dare not tread. I attached myself to the Italian friend I’d met earlier, and his wife and daughter, and we worked the same trees throughout the morning. By mid-morning we were humming along at a very comfortable pace.

Now as my brothers and parents will tell you (to say nothing of [[Catherine]]), I’m not a big one for the “manual labour” and will generally shirk any opportunity for same if I can finagle a way. So you’d think that volunteering for labour would be the last thing I’d do.

But I soon found that labour that is, as I wrote yesterday, sforzo collettivo per compiere un’opera di interesse comune — “collective effort in order to complete a work of common interest” has its perks. There’s the whole “camaraderie” thing, something made more piquante by the multinational nature of our force — Italians, Irish, Americans, English and me, the sole Canadian. And then there’s the eating.

If today’s experience can be used as a gauge, it’s important to spend an equal amount of time during the olive harvest eating and drinking and chatting as it is actually up in the trees. Around noon, after a good two hours of picking, we gathered up the nets and the rakes and the olives and loaded them into the truck and convened on the pool deck for an excellent buffet of salami and cheese sandwiches, spaghetti with garlic and oil, wine, bread and ice cream.

There’s nothing like a good bowl of spaghetti by the pool in the crisp fall air after you’ve been up in trees all morning.

Over lunch I got to meet Coleman and Katie from Ireland, Colin from Brighton, Jack from San Diego and Francesco from Italy. Francesco speaks about three words of English, but he has bon ami that more than compensates, and made a point of making sure that I understood the heavy schedule of eating and drinking that is to follow (it’s not only dinner to night, but lunch tomorrow and dinner again tomorrow night).

After a brief post-lunch break, we reassembled in the piazza at 2:00 p.m. (a due, as Francesco emphatically told me) — our numbers now cut down by about a half — and walked over by the Colleta church where we harvested a group of a dozen trees on the terraces there. Some of these trees were hanging out over the terraces and so the aforementioned “crazy bashing” technique was called into action while Francesco and I scurried about in the mud below spreading out a net.

By 3:30 p.m. we were done, the olives, nets and rakes in the truck, with plans to gather again at 8:00 p.m. for the convoy up to Nasino for dinner.

On the agenda for tomorrow, if I understood correctly, is some additional olive picking followed by a trip back to Nasino to Frantoio da Olive Armando Garello to turn olives into olive oil. Which, goes the theory, they should be by this time tomorrow.

More eating apparently planned for Sunday.

What a wonderful day.

PEI Health Minister Hon. Chester Gillian is reported as suggesting that “there just isn’t enough demand to bring midwives into the health-care system” in Prince Edward Island and that “It would be adding another service to one that is already provided.” This in reaction to news that Nova Scotia will soon introduce legislation to regulate midwifery there.

There may be valid reasons for keeping midwives out of the province — I don’t know of any, but I’m open to hearing them — but Gillan’s logic is simpleminded.

I spent five years in the midwifery milieu in Ontario. I have several friends who are fully-healthcare-funded professional midwives in Ontario, and several other friends here in PEI who, given the chance, would likely work for similar qualifications. I spent 3 months in El Paso, Texas while a friend was training to be a midwife, and I learned more about preeclampsia and forceps than you can possibly imagine. Many of our friends have children who have come into the world with a midwife guiding the way. In short, I’ve seen midwifery up close as a valid and important part of childbirth, and I’ve seen how midwives can work hand-in-hand with doctors and nurses as part of the healthcare system.

I’m certain we would have profited from the services of a midwife if we’d had the option — certainly having Sylvie Arsenault as our doula was an invaluable resource before and during [[Oliver]]’s birth.

But apparently, according to Minister Gillan, “there just isn’t enough demand.” How does he know this? And, indeed, how can one gauge demand for a practice that has not existed in PEI for several generations. Midwifery is an important and valued art around the world; indeed at one point it was a valued and important art in Prince Edward Island. Just because childbirth has, in recent decades, been centralized and hospitalized and taken over by physicians, is no reason to think that, with promotion and education and funding there might not be incredible demand for the service.

And Mr. Gillan’s assertion that midwifery would represent “adding another service to one that is already provided.” Leaving out the fact that midwifery-attended births, whether in hospital or at home, can be entirely different from operating room hospital births (where birth seems to be treated more as a “condition” than an important life event), Mr. Gillian is correct in this assertion. So what? Why not give Islanders more birthcare options? Why not work to enrich the variety of services available to prospective parents?

I have no doubt that introducing midwifery legislation and funding in Prince Edward Island would improve the lives of Islanders and Islanders-to-be. It is simply irresponsible not to at least open ourselves to this potential because there’s “no demand” or because “that whole birthing thing’s already being taken care of.”

[[Bruce Rainnie]] announced on [[Compass]] tonight that the program will be moving back to a locally produced full-hour format starting in February 2007, with national and international news integrated in.

I imagine they will also use the opportunity to change the name of the show back to [[Compass]] (from the ghastly “cbc news at six” it has called itself lately) at the same time. Why not take this opportunity to advertise your support for the repatriation of the name with a class Canada Now. Compass Forever. T-Shirt. They make great Christmas gifts!