Tours of the Bungalow, Episode 10 — The Walk In, Part IV

Hey, Precious Friends!
We've got another episode of Tours of the Bungalow: Bungalow Tours for you to watch and fall in love with forever. This is a tour of "Remembrance Cave," our most righteous apartment in Lawrenceville, GA. Check it out (in HD!):



In other news, we're moving to Boston on April 30, so look forward to newer, more improved, and even CRAZIER episodes of Tours of the Bungalow! HOORAY!

Bungalow Tours Renaissance!

Oh baby. We're back with another installment of Tours of the Bungalow: Bungalow Tours. It's our first one since being back stateside. In the following video, we introduce you the our Bungalow on Old Shell Road in HD. Oh baby.

Total Mind Blow.

We're back in the States now (and have been since March 4). After a month or so of bouncing between our families' houses, we've dropped our anchor in Spanish Fort at the lovely bungalow of Douglas and Amy Anderson. We have a huge backlog of "Tours of the Bungalow: Bungalow Tours" that we hope to upload one day when we feel like it. Also, we will continue with the "Tours of the Bungalow: Bungalow Tours" tradition here in Spanish Fort. We've got our room almost totally finished and when it's done, we'll film a Tour.

In the meantime, here's a photo I took of Daniel while he was visiting us in Italy. It was shot with a disposable camera that Daniel spray painted red and gave to me.

Tours of the Bungalow, Episode 8 — Beyond the Bungalow: La Questura/Ufficio Immigrazione

Welp, we finally got our permessi di soggiorno. We have been trying since the day we arrived to attain them, and now they are in our possession. We were never given a clear explanation as to what they are, so we don't know what they do; but we paid a lot of money and now we have them. HOORAY! While we were at the immigration office waiting to get them we decided to do a bungalow tour from "Beyond the Bungalow." Enjoy.

Tours of the Bungalow, Episode 7 — The Drawing Wall

Today we present you with Tours of the Bungalow: Bungalow Tours, episode number seven. In this episode we provide a tour of the wall where we place our drawings. We also extend an invitation for a chance to be featured in a future episode of TotB:BT. Enjoy!

Tours of the Bungalow, Ep. 6 — Holiday Tree

We got a sweet little package in the mail from Amy and Douglas containing a do-it-yourself Christmas tree. The following an incredible tour of us putting it together. Enjoy.

Literary Accomplishments and a Makeover

Hello Friends and Virtual Vagabonds!
While we've been in Italy, we have read a lot of books—fictional and otherwise. We have decided to share that list with you here today.

Books (and short stories) that we have both read:
The Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Fall by Albert Camus
Women by Charles Bukowski
Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov
The Wall by Jean-Paul Sartre

Books that only Lou has read:
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Confession and Other Religious Writings by Leo Tolstoy
Numerous Florence Guide Books

Books that Lou has started:
The Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Books that Josh has started, but soon sent him into an existential quandary and/or a state of pure intellectual inferiority:
An Answer to the Question: "What is Enlightenment?" by Immanuel Kant
Why I am So Wise by Frederick Nietzsche
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

Books that the two of us infrequently read aloud to one another:
The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, The Way by Charles Bukowski

Josh has also beaten Super Mario World Advanced on the GameBoy Micro—once with Mario and once with Luigi. They're Italian, right?

Also, we collaborated on the new header in order to give the blog a makeover.

How does that make you feel?
Let us know in the comments!

Tours of the Bungalow, Episode 5 — Espresso

In this episode of Tours of the Bungalow: Bungalow Tours, we provide a tour of our attempt to make espresso.

Lucca — A Day Trip to Dream World

Hay Guise!
We went to Lucca on Wednesday and it was magnificent. We packed a lunch, rode the train, walked around, then rode the train back. While we were in Lucca our camera battery died, so we started making short videos instead photographs. Also, our train had some electrical problems, so we were stopped in Pistoia for about an hour. Tthere couldn't exist a better representation of our day than the following video (don't forget that you have the option to watch the video in full size HD on the YouTubez. To get there, simply click play below, then click the video again to navigate to it's Tube page [for all the parents out there]).

Tours of the Bungalow, Ep. 4 — Dinner

In this episode, we tour dinner. This is our longest running episode yet, as we are hoping for an endorsement from Kikkoman.

TotB, Ep. 3 — The Way the Heat Works

In episode three of Tours of the Bungalow: Bungalow Tours, we will be giving you a tour of the way the heat works in the bungalow.

Also, for your information, we will always embed the videos below, but they are available in full size HD on YouTube.

Thank you and enjoy.

Tours of the Bungalow, Episode 2

In this episode, we provide a tour of the cupboard.

JOIN US!:

New Bungalow Tour (sort of)

HEY!
This is all you get this time—
A tour of our night:


Join us tomorrow for a tour of the "cupboard."

Tours of the Bungalow: "Bungalow Tours"

We've decided to begin a new series entitled Tours of the Bungalow, or, if you prefer, Bungalow Tours.
Included below is the first installment, "The Spice Cabinet & Pantry."
Let us know what you think in the comments.

Vitto Messicano

In our attempt to save money, we have been cooking most of our meals. Of course, we had been cooking our own meals while in the States, but this is a different beast altogether. Our main dishes were based on black beans, cumin, cilantro, monterey jack cheese, Crystal® Louisiana hot sauce and Morningstar Crumbles™ (a vegetarian ground beef substitute). Here in Florence, we were at a bit of a loss without access to any of these ingredients. So, everything we cooked tasted like olive oil and salt. Except for the first two night were we didn't carefully inspect the spices in the cabinet and were using sugar instead of salt. But after a a week or so here, we found a "Health Food Store" (the sign is in English) that sells fagioli neri—that's black beans in I-tal-yan. Some days after that find, we found Mercato Centrale where we purchased tomatoes, cilantro, (what we thought were) serano peppers (but turned out to be some sort of hellspawn with a spice that gets you in the throat), Mexican avocados, and CHEDDAR CHEESE. Can you believe that? Cheddar cheese in Florence. All the travel books and blogs said it was impossible. (This cheddar cheese has buried it's formidable stank into the fibers of our refrigerator and we nearly pass out when retrieving anything from said fridge.) Later that day we found (overpriced) flour tortillas and (again, overpriced) Tabasco at Il Centro, our grocery store of choice, of the brand name "Casa Fiesta." This has been the best meal that we have had since we've been here. We were both terribly full at one point but continued eating solely for the flavor. We had enough supplies left over to complete the act again the next night.

Lou had the foresight to capture the meal in pixels:








After this, we starved for a week or two. Then, a few days ago, we bought soy sauce and eggs and we've been living on vegetable fried rice.

Theater Outing

A few days ago, Lou and I stumbled upon CineHall. It's an old theater that shows a lot of American movies with their original sound intact (OOS) and some dubbed in Italian. We found out that they were going to be showing a few movies from the U.S. in OOS, so we made some lose plans to go see one of them. Naturally, we forgot about those plans. Today, at about 16:00 (that's how Europeans tell time) we went wandering around with our books looking for a place to sit and read. We passed the area of the theater and decided to see what was playing. It was District 9, OOS. I checked my wallet and we only had 5€ on us, but the next showing was at 18:10 so we had some time to spare. We went back home and snagged some cash flow. Then we went and watched a movie instead of reading Fitzgerald and Salinger. What good Americans we are.

Click for a video of the theater from our seats.

Pizza by the Duomo

We've decided to use a chunk of our available, transferable data and upload a tiny video.
This one doesn't tell you much, but it let's you in on something we really love to do.

Enjoy, my friends (also, note Lou's sass at the 0:20 mark):

First Post Euro-Side!

Hello everyone.
Our post have much less frequent than we initially anticipated. This is to be blamed on our less than good internet. Connection is sporadic and once connected the signal is weak at best. N*E*Wayz.

We're beginning to blend into to Italian culture now. We're learning how to look and act and slowly learning how to speak. WE'RE LIKE AMERICAN BABIES!

We've got some photos for yous guys to peep and we will commence now:

We get caffelatte's every morning in the Tabbachi below our apartment.


This is our favorite pizza from a place by the Duomo.


This is Josh by a bunch of scooters.


This is a sandwich by the river.


66cl of beer for €1,35! (that's about 24 oz. and it's the expensive kind)


Here's Josh about to enjoy the cheap beer:


Here's a common sight, a family on a bicycle:


This is a 996 year old church we stumbled upon:


This is what our meals look like:


Our largest trip to the grocery store only cost us 27 euro!


This is our plug rig:


The flollowing are images from our trip to the Mercato Centrale today:

Progress: 98%

We have everything we need to get in to the country of Italy and enough money to sustain us while we are there (hopefully). We are almost finished packing, and tomorrow at noon we will print out our plane tickets.

Once our "U.S. Business to Take Care of" progress bar reaches 100% we will be crossing the Atlantic ocean on a U.S. Airways jet.

Then we will land in Milan and our Italian Serious Business™ progress bar will be at 0%.
In order to fill it up we will need to:
Purchase train tickets to Florence
Ride the train to Florence
Find the realty agency
Sign the lease and get our keys
Find our apartment
Freak out
Apply for a Permesso di Soggiorno
Be approved for a Permesso di Soggiorno
Try to apply for a Residenza Anagrafica

Other important things that we will do that don't count as serious business will be:
Freak out
Purchase prepaid sim cards for our cell phones
Eat tons and tons of food
Go see Every Time I Die and Bring Me the Horizon in Rome in October
Go see Horse the Band in England in November
Go see every country that we can afford to travel to
Meet Daniel Ray and Ryan Clay in December
AND MUCH MORE!

GREAT NEWS (FOR REAL)!

We got our visas in the mail today.
We bought our plane tickets online today.
We are going to Italy on September 14, 2009.
We are returning to the States on March 3, 2010.
Let's hope our realty company understands us canceling the last 4 months on our lease.

HELL YEAH!