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!

A Whole Nother Update

After much deliberation, we worked out a deal with the consulate since our last update. The deal is if we have X amount of dollars in our joint checking account and various notarized documents from the bank stating various things, then we would be considered for a six month visa. It was explained to us that the protocol would be, we get the papers, mail them to David M. Gratta in San Antonio, he mails them to the Consulate General in Miami, they mail them to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Rome, then they mail us our answer. So, now that you're up to speed, here's how our last week and half went:

We were in Birmingham for a few nights to coincide with the release of Cumulus, Issue No. 1, which went very well. Then we moved on to Jacksonville for a few more nights to take care of some business. We had been having some trouble acquiring the aforementioned dollar amount, but with some help we got that amount while in Jacksonville. We've been waiting to get the information and print-outs from our bank until our accounts were up to date, so we decided to try to handle that during our time in Jacksonville. We did. Since we had the right amount and the right documents, I called our friend David M. Gratta to get his current address. Well, he recommended that we e-mail him the papers first so he could review them before we spent 35 USD on postage. So we did. He called us about 3 hours later with some information that sounds pretty promising. That part will remain private until further notice.

Needless to say, we feel about 300% better than we did in our last update.

Stay tuned.