Okee Dokee

Okay so a quick back track to last Thursday which was my last day at the Cantina. That morning I had my first chance (and obviously the last chance) to drive Antonio's Audi to work. It was incredibly helpful as I had to go up and down to the house several times that day. My friends always called the windy road up to Antonio's house the road of poop. I never understood until I actually DROVE on up this hill just how annoying it is to have to curve back and forth so much. It did feel great to be behind the wheel of a car again though. So my first endeavor on Thursday morning was down to the Il Girasole shop in Roncà where I did the photo shoot. I brought all my clothes with me and luckily I had something that worked out beautifully. The lady, I think she said her name was Paula but she said it so fast and I didn't want to ask her to repeat it, took lots of pictures, mostly Christmas type pictures. She said that if I come back to see her when I return to the Veneto in November that she will have a photo album of the pictures as a gift for me. After this I went to work, but as soon as I got there I was sent back to the house to pick up boxes out of the cellar. I got back to the Cantina right at lunch time. We had a great last lunch together. I had brought two kinds of red wine...both were actually pretty horrible and we ended up drinking the Lambrusco that Augusto brought for us all as a goodbye present. We also had two frozen desserts that are popular here, Via Snella I think they're called. It involves layers of ice cream and other goodies depending on what flavor you buy. We had tiramisu and another one that had some kind of cookie thing in it. After lunch I ran around taking pictures with everyone and then at 4 I headed back to the house to start to pack my bag. I did all the rolling and put my clothes into their ziplock bag homes (another shout out to the greatness of ziplock baggies). Around 5:45 I headed down the hill by foot so that Daniela wouldn't have to spend time coming up the hill to get me. It was actually a really good thing though because I was walking at the time of sunset and I got some amazingly beautiful pictures (I will eventually post them in Casa Fattori). Daniela and I went grocery shopping and she bought me a very large fish from and three boxes of sea salt. She made me dinner at our friend Augusto's house and the three of us had a wonderful meal together. The name of the fish I can't remember, but it was delicious and all Daniela did was put it in a roasting pan (in fact we had to as the neighbor for a bigger roasting pan because the fish head and tail were over the edges of ours!), cover it with a loooot of salt, and then stick it in the oven. Amazingly simple and yummy (as long as you were careful not to mistake a large chunk of salt for a chunk of fish meat...that was a bit of a shock). After dinner our other friends from the cantina, Alessandro and Francesco, came to have dessert with us. Augusto had bought a cake like torte that was almond flavored with those yummy rice looking sugar thingys on top.Everything about this evening was beautiful. Well, except for me. I was an emotional wreck. I was sad to begin with but man, Oh MAN was I a mess. I have never felt quite so emotionally attached to a group of people like this before. I feel like they are my family now and the thought of leaving them after seeing them almost every day for the past two month literally ripped my heart out. This was surprising for me because usually I’m not that big of a crier. I don’t cry for movies or books, I’m just not like that. Not that night, if you see the pictures you’ll notice my makeup is all over my face…schifo but I couldn’t help how I felt.

I have to admit it probably wasn’t all just the fact that I had to leave my new family behind. I was scared. I didn’t want to have to try to fit all my belongs into my backpack again; I didn’t want to have to worry about which train I was going to catch to where at what time; I didn’t want to have to switch back to “Always on guard” mode that you HAVE to have when you’re traveling with your passport and literally everything you own (on this side of the world). But after all the tears were gone, I sucked it up, packed my stuff, said goodbye to Casa Fattori at 5:30am on Friday Oct 22 and headed out to the next leg of my adventure.