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Hey. It's Thursday morning, the first day of my new health regime, as I sip my fresh OJ and eat muesli before I head to the gym. The last four weeks have been an absolutely wonderful time filled with fun and food, oh, glorious food! Italy does know how to feed its visitors. They serve cakes and biscuits for breakfast, need I say more?

Last night we dropped my wonderful husband off at the airport and he is flying home as we speak. Or, as I write, I should say. (I do wish people would 'speak' back more!) It was very quiet and empty coming home without him, I have had a full month of spending all day with him, something which I have not had since we were on our honeymoon three years ago. And I can honestly say I love him more than ever before. We have had so much fun, travelling in foreign countries in a rental car can be stressful, and spending so much time together can lead to frustrations, but not with us. We have just been so happy. We are still super happy. I have to say that I think we're more in love now than we were on our honeymoon, we have grown more in our relationship, learnt more about each other's happiness and always make an effort to make sure the other is ok when things get dicey. It's a great relationship and I feel really blessed.

I am once again at my mother's dining table, where I have written most of my 'Return to the Nesterlands' blog. It's a good place to write. It's home in many ways. But every year my house in Australia feels more like home to me in many other ways: it's full of the things that make my life wonderful and easy, it's where Ash and I are happy together. I miss that feeling of ease and comfort when I'm away. But it always helps to be reminded of all the lovely things you have that you might otherwise take for granted. I love my  Tefal pans. I love my comfy couch. Etc.

Life here is a little less relaxing. I have to admit I feel anxious about what is going to happen if this house never sells. A lot of my mother's things are in storage, and the house was clean and presentable (to a point of display home tidiness) after I had finished all my work last year. But the house has not remained that way, because nobody can live in a display home. Everyday life happens, dogs join the family, and cats move into bathrooms. My mother will be the first to admit she is not a person with much discipline when it comes to housekeeping and a slobbery dog that is very fond of going into smelly ditches and ponds does not help either. I find it hard to live in a messy house which perpetually has sand and dirt on the floor, even after I have just vacuumed and mopped.

Let's just say I have a lot of work to do. People are always envious when I tell them how long I go to Europe for. But the honest truth is that it's not all lounging around wonderful countries and eating glorious food. The majority of the time I am trying to help my mother adjust to a lifestyle of getting by with very little money and it's not easy at all. For either of us it's hard to keep an eye on every cent we spend. We like to go out and share food, we like to treat people, we like to buy people presents, we like to buy ourselves presents. We've done that all of our lives. It's hard to reign in your enthusiasm. But we're getting there.

Now, it's also time to bring some discipline back to my body, which has not seem much exercise in the last month. So I'm off to the gym and hopefully get back to a shape which fits into my jeans a bit more comfortably. At the moment they're a bit tight! Luckily the weather is warm enough for skirts at the moment so I'm ok for a while.

More soon. x

When the sun returns

Hi team! Keeping it short today I think. There is too much to write about, I cannot remember when I last wrote and I have just settled down on a seat in the sun (yes, the sun! I have not seen it for three days) and it seems the wifi doesn't quite reach my spot. So I've loaded my 'posting' page and am writing this here in my sunny spot, and then I'll move back to the wifi zone and post it. An error message keeps popping up every time it tries to save my post, so that's a bit annoying, but what can you do. I. do. not. want. to. move. out. of. the. sun!

I am currently in a very heavenly place called Villa Dianella. It's a very nice B&B in the north of Tuscany, and it is the first place where I absolutely LOVE the accommodation. Our suite (the sage suite) is not only very large (3 rooms - the bathroom is larger than the sitting room!), but also very nicely decorated and it has wifi, plus a beautiful view, and it also has complimentary biscuits, chocolate and tea in the common room. It has gorgeous gardens and it is overall just a very lovely place.

That doesn't mean our previous locations have not been nice, they have all been nice. I have to say my husband has chosen well. So far we've spent one night in a 'normal' hotel in Florence near the train station, two nights in a nice B&B in the Florentine hills, one night in the cute little medieval town of San Gimignano and two nights in Villa Barberino where we spent a while on our honeymoon.

 However, I am sad to say, Villa Barberino was not as glorious as we remember it, which was mostly because of the weather. It was cold and wet the whole time we were there! The pool, which was too cold to use anyway, was being restored so we couldn't even take a picture of it, and though we booked a suite this time which was much nicer than our previous room, it was also at the far end of the property, which is fine when you stroll in the lovely sun, but if you need to get to your car in the pouring rain and it's a five minute walk it's not so pleasant. And the worst thing was the wifi. There was no internet in San Gimignano, which was fine, but another three days without internet when the weather is shit is really quite boring. I couldn't play Draw Something, I couldn't really blog, I couldn't read any other blogs, I couldn't check when the weather would improve, I couldn't do anything much. It's fine when you are told 'there is no wifi here', you accept that, you do something else. But when you are told 'there is free wifi here' and it DOESN'T WORK it is very frustrating! They had this annoying login thing where you were given a piece of paper with a login and a passcode, both of which were a sequence of 16 numbers, which you had to fill into a webpage and then it would give you 24 hours to use the web. If you wanted the countdown to stop, you had to log out. And you could only use one device per login. But even after logging out, it would simply not let you log back in and keep saying you were already logged in. I think I spent at least an hour each day trying to log back in and it never eventuated, and when reception no-speaka-di-english and are a five minute walk in the rain away you end up just giving up. Sigh.

Anyway, we did have fun when we went for a drive in the rain to a nearby castle called Castello di Brolio, where we did a really cool little tour of a tiny museum with armour and belongings of the family who have owned that castle since 1141. Yes, 1141! It was so super interesting, though it was very chilly walking around the grounds and gardens because the castle is located right on top of a hill (as happens often with castles) and the wind and rain were blowing a gale. But we enjoyed it. And then afterwards we visited a cute little town, also atop a hill (lots of hills here, as you can guess) called Volpaia where we had the most delicious and cheap bruschetta I have ever had, and some fresh OJ. Yum.

Food here is so delicious and really affordable, especially when compared to Provence or even Australia or Holland. We paid 12 euro for five big pieces bruschetta and two big glasses of OJ. And it was so tasty!

Anyway. San Gimignano is a favourite in our book, and it was awesome to stay there for the night, especially at the hotel where we had lunch last time on our honeymoon and awarded it the best dish of the trip back then and the view is also very stunning. So obviously we were keen to try it out for dinner this time. The food was great, the view was lovely (though the clouds were gathering) and the service amazing.

A funny thing happened at dessert time, I had ordered a moscato and when our waiter poured it, I thought I recognised the bottle from somewhere. As I started drinking it, I realised what it was, and that I love it, because it was the very first bottle of wine I had ever bought for myself on my 27th birthday! So I asked the waiter if I could please see the bottle so I could make a note of it and look for it on our tour of Italy. However, this specific waiter did-not-speaka-di-english-so-bueno and came back with a different moscato and another glass, poured it, and proceeded to pick up my old glass to take it away! Of course I made it immediately clear that NO! I LOVE THIS ONE! Confused, he gave me back my glass (phew) and let us keep the other one he poured and wandered of. Obviously he thought I did not like it and wanted another one! He never did bring us that bottle for me to look at, so after a while I drew the attention of another (younger) waiter who did speaka-di-english and told him what had happened, and if I could please see the bottle because I liked it so much. No problem, so he comes back with the moscato that the other waiter had poured to replace the original. No, sorry, wrong one, I want the one with the bird on the label? So back he comes, with the right bottle, and I take a picture of the label. Then this kind waiter says to me: 'Iffa you lika, I canne aske you canne buya di bottle fromme ouer stocka? Itta costa 15 euros?' So of course I said "YES PLEASE!" It was given to me after our meal, chilled and wrapped and ready to go. However, the weather wasn't right for Moscato on a terrace the last few days.

But here I am, sitting in a heavenly garden drinking that very Moscato. (It is from La Spinetta wines, by the way, Bricco Quaglia Moscato D'Asti. Super sweet and light, most of you would hate it!)

Anyway, adventures all around, pretty scenic drives everywhere, Tuscany being its gorgeous self, and the prospect of increasingly warmer weather is really not such a bad thing. Oh, and did I mention we have a 2012 Golf Cabrio (=convertible) as our rental car? Yah. It is amazing and sexy as!

I have to say, that our honeymoon three years ago in Tuscany was friggin' awesome. But this trip is even awesomer. I'm calling it our honeymoon 2.0. Fancier car, fancier accommodation, longer time to spend everywhere, a day and night in Monaco (Ashley has brought his James Bond suit & shoes for the occasion...) and we are more in love than ever. So I am going to give up the blogging and get ready for another lovely (no doubt) meal.

Arrivederci!

Florence + bike + Florence

So I forgot to mention a few interesting facts we learned about Florence on our bike tour - one of which is that Florence used to really stink and be full of shit, literally. And also that the famous bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, which is famous for its jewellery shops selling gold (I've dubbed it the Bridge of Bling) used to be home to lots of butchers, who would cut the meat right there and chuck all the leftover bits in the river below. Tasty. So from Bridge of Butchers to Bridge of Bling. Quite the upgrade.

Omar also showed us the spot where the golden ball which adorns the top of the Copula of the Duoma fell in the year 1600, it fell down in a great storm. Luckily no-one was injured. There's a white circular spot of marble in the paving there, but it's not marked any other way, so it was good to have a guide tell us interesting things like that. Here he is:

He also told us many interesting stories about many interesting people, all of whom lived a long, long time ago and had many long Italian names, and they not always made much sense to me as sometimes his accent got a bit thick. Italians talk very fast generally, so sometimes they're hard to follow. He told us though, which we thought was quite amusing, that whenever the Florentines don't know who made this statue or drew that picture, they always credit Michelangelo. He was considered superhuman. The Florentines are humble (for Italians) in comparisons to Rome, but are always proud and like to point out all the things that were invented in Florence and were first done here. Like architecture. Invented right here.  And Florence was always trying to improve itself, has always been a very forward thinking city and was once upon a time, from 1861 1866, the capital of Italy! Florence is a know genius. Direct quote from Omar. So I thanked him for the compliment.

Right, so after the awesome bike tour we got our things from the hotel and needed to find the bus to our nice B&B up on the hill, which Ash chose and booked. However, once again, he didn't really know where exactly it was, only that we needed to catch the 11 bus. He didn't know where to catch said bus, or in which direction, though. Once again I realised that though I complain about always having to organise everything, at least I know what to know. But, I must also note, that we once again found the right bus stop (though I wasn't convinced at the time) and got on a 11 bus, which got us up the right hill.  So the lesson I'm learning is that we will get where we want to go, and to not stress if I don't know where to go. It's a tricky lesson.

When we got to our B&B we got to choose our room, and I think we chose wisely - now two days later, because we chose a room at the back of the house and it turns out the road out the front gets very busy at peak hour. It's a nice leafy street, though, in the 'Beverly Hills' area of Florence.  And it has a lovely view.
We were pleased to find out the bikes they have here were free for us to use in the afternoon, so after we settled in and changed out of shoes into strappy sandals and a t-shirt because it was such a warm afternoon, we hopped on the bikes. My feet were sooooo pleased to be out of those shoes!

We rode to San Miniato di Monte, a lovely cathedral on a nearby hill, with an amazing view and an amazing ceiling.  It is also surrounded by quite an impressive cemetery.

We rode on to the Piazza Michelangelo, another hill further along, where there was another impressive view of Florence and another church, not quite so impressive. It was a lovely afternoon for bike riding and my feet we so happy to not be rubbing in those shoes, that we decided to take a detour on the way home to the Fort Belvedere, which is unfortunately closed indefinitely since a lady fell to her death there four years ago. The ride back to the B&B was a bit tiresome so we took a break before riding into town for some pizza and gelato. Both establishments I found using the Tripadvisor app, which I highly recommend. The gelato was amazing! Here's Ash about to enjoy his - caramel and cheescake flavours! I had Nutella and Mascapone and Hazelnut. So delicious.

However, all the fun ended when Ash convinced me to take the short route home. By this stage my bum had gotten sore from the saddle and I was tired. The short way home was also the steep way home, you see and it ended up being a long walk home. Well, some of the way. By the time we got home, it was shower, blog and bed. Which is exactly what I've done tonight as well. But that's a story for another night. Or maybe tomorrow morning? Buonanotte!  

Queen's Day Part II + Florence

Man, so much has happened in the last 24 hours, most of them so memorable that I want to write about them right away, but I better stick to the chronological order of things as I tend to forget events about as quickly as I experience them.

So I ended yesterday with Monday's Queen's Day events, when Ash and I had had a quick catch up with out Dutch friends who own an amazing woonboot on the Prinsengracht. We've already had some fun adventures on that boat in our lives, by the way, but that was before I blogged. Maybe I'll write about it another time when I don't have so many other exciting things to write about.

After that we really just very slowly walked around a very orange and festive Amsterdam, until about 3 pm when my feet were getting blisters and tired and Ash and I made our way back to my sister's to pack our stuff and take a tram and train back to Brabant. It had been an amazingly sunny and warm day and by this time I was very tired, very very tired, but I didn't manage to sleep in the train as it was full of noisy Queen's Day revellers and we had to change trains twice. By the time we reached Elsendorp with Mum it was nearly half past seven and we were all too tired and hungry to cook so we ate at the local pub, which has very decent food. Then it was packing the tired way.

Packing the tired way is very slowly and quite ineffectively. We flew Ryanair so we had to keep our bags under a specific weight: two check in bags under 15 kilos and two hand luggage under 10 - which were not allowed to have liquids (ie toiletries) in them, and we had two pairs of shoes that had to go in a hard case so they wouldn't get squashed, etc. It was like a mathematics question and it took us too long to figure out. There were things to print out, things to check on the web, some stuff in the dryer not to forget, a shower was also necessary and it wasn't until after 11 that we finally got to sleep. But not for long.

Six twenty am we are woken by thunder and rain, just before the alarm clock. We had to catch a 9.05 am flight to Pisa, which was fine, I dozed off a few times on the plane but not enough to feel any less tired. When we got to Pisa is was unfortunately quite grey. Or as the pilot put it: "A few degrees warmer than back home, but otherwise the same". We remembered where the train station was from our honeymoon and this time didn't need to line up at the ticket office in the arrivals hall, as we knew there's ticket machines at the station. Which often speak better English than people behind counters. It was quite full on the platform and when the train arrived I almost had to laugh: it was one carriage. One carriage with one double door in the middle, through which quite a lot of travellers had to squeeze, up four seriously steep steps, with luggage, which had to be placed in overhead racks. Even the heavy big ones. Yes. Welcome to Italy!

We made our connection to Florence in time, but this was also a very full train, and sleeping wasn't an option here either. When we got to Florence, I was hot and tired and hungry and consequently not in the best of moods. So when we got out of the station and my husband, who had taken charge of the organising on the trip, did not know where the hotel was or how to get there. This, I must say, did not go down too well with me. I am always extremely organised and look things up on the internet and google maps and save stuff to my phone so I know where to go. Not everybody is like that, though. Not everybody. But, we got to the hotel eventually, it wasn't too far from the station, and though it was a bit chillier than in Pisa, it wasn't raining like it was back home. By the time we got to our room, which was quite comfortable, I didn't know which I needed more: sleep, food or a panadol. Sleep won out, I lay down on the bed just for a moment and I was gone.

After a decent snooze we went out to find food. Unfortunately I had only brought the pair of All Star shoes I had worn the day before and it wasn't nice walking in them again with blisters, but I persevered. Ash had chosen a church not too far from our hotel to visit, the Santa Maria Novelle, which we found easily, though by this stage it had started raining a little. Lucky for us the piazza on which it was located had some great little food stalls because it was a public holiday and we found some cheap yummy things to eat. Then we visited the church, which was lovely. When we came out, it was pouring down. I was still tired and my blisters didn't enjoy the walking so we made our way back, and discovered the church's amazing ancient pharmacy and perfumery, which was very pretty, around the corner.

When we got back to the hotel my shoes were soaked and my feet were sore, so we rested a little bit and I called my mum. After a while it seemed like it was starting to clear up outside so I used the blow dryer to dry my shoes as best as I could and we ventured out into a sunny, drying Florence. We found a nice quiet place for a plate of decent, cheap pasta and went for a short stroll around, finding another nice little church along the way.

I was very pleased, though, when we finally got to go to sleep that night.

In the morning it was sunny, and it promised to be a nice day. We were going to visit the duomo but decided to go for the bike tour instead, considering the sunny weather and my sore feet. When we got to the place that did the bike tours we were sad to find they no longer had the flags on their bikes like they did last time we were in Florence as they said I (heart) Florence, with a bike in the heart. We took the  photo below last time, and I wish we had been able to take the tour then as we spent five hours walking around and as you might have figured out by now, I don't particularly like walking. 

But this time, we had planned four days in Florence which meant we had time for the bike tour, and it was awesome. We were the only ones on the tour, so it was personalised and the guide was great fun. When I introduced myself as Florence he laughed and said 'Well, I'm New York!' and I quipped that my husband, who was in the toilet, was called Amsterdam. We set off on our bikes, in the lovely morning sun, and had a great tour, including a lovely gelato in front of Palazzo Piti. Omar, the guide, recommended many great spots to visit on our own which many of which we have since then.

He also recommended a place for coffee, where Ash and I had lunch after our tour, and we went back to the hotel to gather our things so we could move to our next accommodation - a lovely B&B in the Florentine hills south of the city.

Oooh, it's dinner time, we have to go. Will publish this now and try and finish the rest of the story later. Pasta awaits!

Florence in Florence

Hey! So, I am now sitting in a lovely room with a lovely view in the Florentine hills, after having spent a lovely sunny day mostly riding a bike. I couldn't be more pleased, it was a lovely day.

Our Tuscan adventure didn't start quite so glorious, considering we had had quite the weekend in Amsterdam before and we were exhausted, plus it rained. You see, it was Queens Day on Monday, which meant it was Q-night the night before which means party time. I myself am not much of a partier, I prefer coffees with friends, but hey, I managed to have that earlier in the day. Perhaps I should begin at the beginning?

Sunday morning we took a train to Amsterdam, where we made it to my sister's lovely apartment and I was quick to drag my husband to Screaming Beans for my first delicious coffee since leaving Melbourne. It was delicious. We went for a stroll through the lovely area called De Negen Straatjes (The Nine Little Streets) where my sister lives and made our way to a little diner I remember from last year called Het Buffet van Odette for lunch. Since last year, however, it has gone through a bit of an upgade and moved to an even fancier location in the city and grown considerably in size. It took us a bit longer than I had expected to get there and when we arrived we were told they were no longer serving lunch as they were closing early for Queens Day. But when I told them we had walked there especially from their old location because I remembered how nice it was and wanted to introduce the place to my husband, we were told we were very welcome and looked after very nicely. The food, as I remembered it, was fantastic. The new space they now occupy is also very nice, though a bit less rustic and cute than their former location, it's now quite fancy!

We then made our way to the Westergasterras, a restaurant/bar in the Westerpark where I had organised some drinks to catch up with some of my lovely friends and family in Holland, however Ajax (Amsterdam's soccer team) was playing and mysteriously nobody showed up until after the game...It was lovely to see everyone.

That evening we planned to tag along with my sister and her friends to a party at Hanneke's Boom but when we got there, it was already packed out and we were not ever getting in. So we ended up drinking in on the Nieuwmarkt and later made our way down the Zeedijk and ended up in Amsterdam's smallest and oldest gay bar called 't Mandje. This is where we were when the clock struck midnight and the barman rang the bell and requested we all sing happy birthday. After singing it, Stella asked: "Who's birthday is it?" Why, the queen, you dill! We were offered a shot of Oranje Bitter by the bar lady. Ash sniffed it and said it smelled quite nice. To which she responded: "Smells nice, tastes like shit."
To be honest, it wasn't too bad.

We ended up on the street a little further down, couldn't go any further as there were drag queens putting on a show (which we couldn't really see but hear all the better) and that's where we ate some lukewarm, sauce drenched but delicious spring rolls and I was told by a rotund policeman that I was boring for choosing to stay sober to look after my friends...

Not long after that Ash and I headed home, I had been up since 6 am thanks to my jetlag, so I was dead tired. We walked back to my sister's, a good 20 minute walk, and totally crashed around 3 am. My sister and her friend came back around 4.30, but we were all sitting eating a very delicious breakfast prepared by Stella around 10 am! Some lovely freshly squeezed OJ, eggs and bacon with tomato and cheese, crusty rolls from the oven, a cup of tea and an espresso later and we all felt ready for the day ahead. Outside my sister's place on on the Naussaukade the party was beginning...

The gang having their first taste of beer out on the town.

Nassaukade warming up for the day

Our friends' little girl playing her recorder, her brother in the background.

The white woonboat on the right is our friends' one!

Busy on the Prinsengracht

Ash and I walked around the area and made a tour through a small part of the Vondelpark before we realised it really was quite warm and we were in need of some water, so we headed back to Stella's, where we met some of her friends and all of us went out into the now full-on party that was Amsterdam. It was slow going at times, and I am guilty of sining along to 'Een eigen huis' while squeezing through a massive crowd in front of a stage. We had a quick hug and chat with our good friends who own a woonboot (houseboat) on the Prinsengracht and were informed their kids (9 and 6) were raking in stacks of coins with their respective games-stall and flute playing. There is a chance I might get to stay on that boat for a little bit later on...

















Oh dear, in the meantime I've run out of time to write. It's late and Ash has already gone to sleep and it's early days tomorrow. I shall continue my story of Queens Day and Tuscany tomorrow. A domani!