Thursday in Trento

Today, while Maya was at summer camp and Christine was at work, Cora and I went on a walk. I took a few photos while we were out. Turns out walking with a two year old puts certain limits on how long staging a photograph can take. Our first stop was a playground near the train station in Piazza Dante. Next we took a stroll along the river to another playground (I smell a theme developing). We stopped by a small market in a church courtyard and bought some lunch: pollo allo spiedo, patatine fritte, and crochette alla cipolla. Essentially, rotisserie chicken with french fries and onion-ey tater tots. I’m gonna go ahead and call it church’s chicken. We stopped in a small park (with a playground) to eat our lunch. We shared our lunch with a few bees, but Cora let me know that I didn’t need to flick them away and if we just sit still they would go away. She mostly followed her own advice. After rinsing off our greasy fingers (every playground has a public spigot of potable water), we doubled back to playground number two to try (unsuccessfully) to rescue a small misplaced toy. A quick stop at playground number four (which happens to be immediately outside the apartment) finished our outing, coincidently just in time for nap.  

Italy, Week 1

We arrived in Italy last Tuesday completely unscathed. We’d had some warnings about trying to enter Europe on one-way plane tickets. The airline’s check-in system did require us to talk to an employee in person, but she didn’t care that we didn’t have return tickets already booked. We flew from Austin to JFK with a relatively short layover, then from JFK to Milan Malpensa. The service on the transatlantic flight was super slow; about two hours after takeoff, I finally asked for Cora’s meal to be delivered so she could eat it and go to sleep. It was, she ate, and she slept. Maya even slept.

We arrived in Malpensa almost exactly on time. With just one phone working (one of the lessons from this week is how messed up and backwards cellphone service is in the US), we were able to connect to our friend here in Trento to let her know when we’d be arriving and we headed through immigration to get our bags and our car. Both of these were pretty easy. Our car (a Citroen Berlingo) is what I’ll call a “microvan.” It has five very spacious seats and then an enormous trunk.  Our luggage fit more easily in the Berlingo than it did in Tim’s Forester on the US side.

The car is really nice. But it’s larger than we really need. It’s also too large to fit in the garage at our apartment. This might end up being ok; the condominiums have some dedicated “free” surface parking spots, too. We haven’t tried them yet because we didn’t really learn much about them until this weekend, when we haven’t needed to pay for street parking. But from what we can gather, one needs to drive over a not insignificant curb (our car can handle this), and then, if the easy spots are unluckily taken, one has to maneuver around a pedestrian walkway and some concrete planters. I’m not sure about this. It’s a manual transmission, and I’m proud to say that neither of us has killed it yet. (This is a small lie; I did kill it last night just as I pulled in to the parking spot at the apartment. However, I didn’t have to turn it back on, so this doesn’t count, right?)

Anyway, after collecting our car, we drove from Milan to Trento (about three hours, with stops) without much trouble. Both of the girls slept, and Tim and I both managed not to. We arrived at our apartment, where our friend Amy met us. She had already collected the keys for us and chatted with the owner, so she knew all of the details about the place, trash, etc. The apartment is nothing short of fantastic. We have two balconies, one at either end of the apartment. The living room/kitchen balcony opens up onto a shared rooftop deck. The girls share a very spacious room, and even with slightly different bedtimes this hasn’t been anything of a problem yet. In fact, I think they kind of like it. Amy and her family also loaned us a significant amount of toys, games, and books, so it was easy to quickly settle in. If you’ve been paying attention to international weather, it’s REALLY hot here. Like 39 degrees Celsius. It probably goes without saying that our apartment does not have air conditioning. Also, fans seem to be sold out everywhere in the vicinity, including on Amazon. With the two balconies, the apartment does get a cross breeze sometimes. The heat seems to have broken a bit over the weekend.

For the rest of this week, we’ve been trying to take care of some of the things that are necessary for us to be able to stay. For instance, we’ve now got Italian cell phones. (8 euros each per month for the talking, texting, and data we’ll need… which is 4GB of data and plenty of texting and talking.) We’ve put the utilities for our apartment in our name. I’ve opened a bank account. We’ve started the process to get Internet in our apartment. And so on. All of this was made so much easier by our friend Amy holding our hands and walking us through it. She’s not only done most of these things herself, she also speaks WAY better Italian than we do. We’ve had one hiccup so far. We went to register Maya for school (Amy was told to come to the secretary of the school during the summer hours, and to bring Maya’s parents after we arrived). However, they didn’t want to register her for school. It has nothing to do with Maya in particular, but they’ve had “many requests” so they aren’t assigning any of the spots to any of the students until the end of August. Maya will get a spot in some school. We hope that Maya will get a spot in the school we’re interested in (it’s really close, her friend Milena already goes to school there, and they already have some English instruction in the classes). We just won’t know more for another month. We did buy some basic school supplies today, and Maya was excited to pick them out. Hopefully little things like this will get her excited for school.

You might think that the above paragraph is missing any mention of the copious amounts of Italian bureaucracy that we’re almost certainly going to need to wade through. We did get codice fiscale (something like a social security number) for everyone this week. The university got one for me to process my contract; Tim apparently had already had one automatically assigned the last time we were here; the girls got new ones (they need them for school registration). Tomorrow (Monday) morning, we start with everything else. The university has an office that will help us, but the woman that speaks English was away last week.

We have managed to get in some fun. As in the girls have had gelato at least twice (maybe more; I’ve been at work some, and I don’t know what happens when I’m there). Tim has been vegetable shopping (yes, this falls under the category of “fun”). Yesterday we spent the day at the lake in Levico with our friends Amy, Milena (age 6.9), and Viviana (age 2.5).  It was a little disappointing that it wasn’t as hot yesterday, but it was still a very relaxing and refreshing day.

Up for the coming week: that Italian bureaucracy I was speaking about above, plus summer camp for Maya (“Asilo nel bosco” … “bosco” means forest), and work for me.

2014 Newsletter

As we bring 2014 to a close, the Juliens are well. We hope you and your family are too.

(Yeah, next year, we'll do better at taking an actual family photo...)

Maya is a growing seven year old second grader. She is bright, energetic, and simply fun to be around. She amazes us every day with her patience and love for her little sister; their age difference (for now) seems to be a real positive. Maya is super active this year -- girl scouts (we're Brownies now!), dance (ballet and tap), swim lessons (Mays's become a fish), and we just added basketball. She regularly has a great time hiking with her dad and some of their friends.

 

 

Cora is an amazing two year old. The kid's language skills are beyond compare (her grandmother regularly comments that it feels like she's conversing with an adult). She loves her school, and she's clearly really growing there. Her favorite things are dancing and baby dolls; she's turned over a very maternal leaf. She also started dance classes this year, and she really thinks she's one of the big girls now. Cora LOVES her big sister!

 

Tim and I are also both well. Not much has changed for us -- same jobs, same house, same general well being.

We did some great traveling this year, so if December is the only time you check in on our blog, here's a quick run-down: Tim and I went to Luxembourg in January (Tim also got to see some of Belgium and Germany while I was working); Maya, Cora, and I took a trip to Chicago for spring break; Tim, Maya, and I went to Budapest in March (check out Maya's travel blog); the whole family took a trip to Washington, D.C. in June; I went to the Galapagos Islands in August; and we all went to Saint Louis for a long weekend in September. All of these trips were fantastic; as we travel more and more with the girls, we are forever thankful that they are pretty good travelers. We also think its so important for them to be exposed to the world, and it is so rewarding to watch them explore it in their own ways. Here is a smattering of photos from these various journeys; travel is the one thing we keep up-to-date on the blog, so use the links at the right to see more.

Chicago in March

    

 

Budapest in March

 

 

Washington, D.C. in June

 

Galapagos Islands in August

 

Saint Louis in September

Another first for us this year: we took the entire family to ACL Music Festival. (Well, Tim and I went all three days, but the girls came with us for the entire day on Sunday.) Even though it was sloppy muddy, I think everyone had a really fantastic time.

 

As the girls grow up, it's so fulfilling to be able to share the things we like with them (traveling, music, food, etc.).

We wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy holiday season. We hope 2015 brings wonderful new adventures to your family (and to ours!).

Saturday in the Park

We headed out to Bull Creek today to get some pictures of our fast growing kiddos. It was, needless to say, a beautiful day!