A combination of overwork yesterday, and a sudden “oh no, I won’t be in Italy any more come tomorrow” prompted me to make a quick dart into the seaside town of Alassio today.

Getting to Alassio from Colletta is half the fun. Once you’ve completed the exciting ride down the twisty roads of the valley down to Albenga, you head west and immediately hit a series of tunnels, the longest of which is 2.3 km long and seems like it will never end. And then, suddenly, you’re in Alassio. The whole trip only takes 25 minutes.

Everyone I talked to about “what to see in the area” last weekend here in Colletta raved about Alassio, so it seemed like a good place to visit. I was not disappointed.

If Albenga is the gritty workaday Hamilton-like seaside town, then Alassio is its Niagara-on-the-Lake idyllic cousin up the shore. The Budello is a pedestrian-only shopping corridor, like Strøget in Copenhagen, that is the spine of the downtown, running between the main street and the sea. It is, oddly enough, an easy stretch to miss if you don’t know it’s there; I happened upon it completely by accident while looking for a place to eat.

As elsewhere in this region, the shops all close up for lunch at either 12:30 p.m. or 1:00 p.m.; I arrived at 11:30, so I had precious little time to fulfill my dual missions of gelato and coffee refueling and last-minute piccante olive purchasing.

One of the amazing things about the Budello is that it’s literally steps from the sea, and all along its length there are short tunnels that lead right out to the beach:

I have no idea what happens when the sea gets angry, but I imagine that global warming will not be kind to Alassio.

Reasoning that my shopping efficiency would be dramatically increased if I ate sooner than later, I stopped at La Pizza Al Volo, a small hole-in-the-wall, and got myself a simple slice to go:

Suitably energized, I made short work of my entire task set: I had a strong cup of espresso at Allevolte Caffé, picked up two jars of spicy olives at Terre Di Mare, bought a cool Italian car for Oliver at Pino Giocattoli, and finished it all off with a chocolate gelato at Gelateria A Cuvea. Along the way I got a got tour of the length of Alassio.

My parking ticket was set to expire at 1:28 p.m. and I arrived back at the car at 1:26 p.m. just in time. Almost as soon as I stepped inside the car the heavens opened up and a torrential downpour began. I couldn’t have timed it better.

Some practical suggestions. When you come off the highway from Albenga and follow the signs to “Centro” — downtown — you’ll eventually come to a place where the road appears to continue straight ahead, with a small tunnel off to the right heading under the train tracks: turn right at this point and you’ll end up right where you want to be. If you continue on, as I did, you’ll end up driving high into the hills wondering where on earth Alassio is. Although you can park on the main street, it’s hard to find a space. There’s a nice pay-parking lot right beside the train station; you simply buy a ticket for the amount of time you want to stay and leave the ticket in your windshield. Remember that shops shut down (although not bars, restaurants nor some tourist-oriented shops) at either 12:30 p.m. or 1:00 p.m. and the Budello becomes a ghost town; plan your trip for the morning or late afternoon if you want to be there for the action.

Island doctor Barry Ling on starting a course of chemotherapy and radiation next week:

It’s hard to describe the feeling that I have with regard to them. It’s kind of like eagerly awaiting to get the crap beat out me. Seriously though, I am very eager to start.

Dr. Ling has been blogging his cancer treatment. It’s a great gift, especially to experience this through the eyes of a physician. And a man of good humour.

I had an odd dream last night. Kevin “Boomer” Gallant rose up out of the sea, wearing hip-waders, and brought forth an ominous (although witty) message about the acidification of the world’s oceans. Bruce Rainnie was nowhere in sight.

As I have written in this space before, I have made it a habit to walk up to the Telecaffe La Colletta — an exhausting journey of some 15 seconds — for a morning cappuccino (spelling hint: all of the consonants inside cappuccino are doubled except the final n).

In our family it’s always been Catherine who has worn the coffee pants. I have been content to be a tea geek and leave all the bean grinding and brewing and milk steaming to Catherine. This is partly from habit, partly because I have a conception of myself as having an addictive personality and never wanted to get hooked, and partly, frankly, because the taste, smell and culture of coffee never appealed to me.

The first cup of coffee I ever had was served to me by Ron Gaskin. Ron has the distinction of being the heppest cat I ever met: put Ron in front of a radio microphone and what you hear positively sizzles with electric heppicosity. The man has style.

There was a brief period of time when it looked like Catherine and I were going to inherit title to Ron’s apartment, an apartment on the first floor of the building on Union Street where Bill Kimball and Martha Cockshutt lived, a building that was sort of a hipness nexus in Peterborough.

And so one morning I dropped over to Ron’s place and found him in the kitchen. On the stove — a 1950s era hip stove — was a pot of coffee. Ron welcomed me in and said “how bought a cup o’ joe?”

How could I refuse — it was like Mingus asking me to sit in.

Remembering that I had never ever had a cup of coffee in my life, you can imagine that said cup of joe hit accelerated my heart by about 200% and took me to a whole other level of consciousness.

I didn’t have another cup for many years.

It’s not that Ron’s coffee wasn’t good: I simply realized that I had uncovered a route to awesome super-powers, and I wasn’t sure of my ability of manage these powers for good.

My next significant cup of coffee wasn’t until 2003 when my Dad and I landed in Ancona, Italy after taking the night ferry from Croatia. After landing at 7:00 a.m., the first place we walked into was a dock-side bar and I got all caught up in first-time-Italy excitement and ordered “una cappuccino.”

Wow, was that ever a good cup of coffee.

Since then I’ve been flirting on the edges of coffee-drinkingness. When Cynthia and I “go for coffee” at Timothy’s I often find myself ordering some highfalutin $5 “molto bene latte supremo” drink. And often what I end up with is more like snappy hot chocolate that what I was served by Ron or on the docks.

As much as I’ve encouraged Catherine’s coffee fetish — it has provided a 15 year string of Christmas gift-giving opportunities after all — I’ve also felt that the coffee-obsessed culture, whether in its Starbucks or Tim Hortons incarnations, was a little too fey for me. I could never get my head around all the roasts and milks and cups brews and the like; it all seemed like so much effort for so little pleasure.

Well, I’ve tipped.

I’m now one of them: as much as I’m uncomfortable being branded a coffee geek, as much as I’m hesitant about honing in on Catherine’s terrain, the delights of my morning cappuccino have convinced me that there’s something to all this.

And I’m afraid that I’m going to turn out to be one of these really pretentious coffee geeks, flying in green beans from the coast and roasting them myself over a custom-built propane contraption that I construct in the back yard, refusing to lower myself into the world of the large double double and generally being a prick about it all.

You have been warned.

Oh, and here’s video of my walk home from the bar here at Colletta (4.3 MB MPEG4). Apologies for the wavy video: my Nokia N70 could do with some image stabilization technology. The bar is the red door on the right as I swing around. If you listen carefully you can hear the noon bell ringing from up the hill.

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.