Here’s a Roman breakfast. I had been, before going to Rome, resolutely eating 1500 calories a day except whenever I shared meals with other people, and losing a couple of ounces a week.

I had also reviewed a new book, The Smarter Science of Slim: What the Actual Experts Have Proven About Weight Loss, Dieting, & Exercise, which I might have mentioned before. This book argues persuasively, with a great deal of respectable research, that weight is about metabolism regulated by hormones, and is not primarily a matter of calories eaten and calories burned.

Rather, the author claims, it’s about eating foods suited to our bodies, rather than stuff we cleverly devised. Fruits and vegetables, lean meats, the occasional plain nonfat dairy products and whole grains, and some nuts and seeds to round it out. In other words, the same no-simple-carbs no-saturated-fats regimen on which I lost 30 pounds some years ago.

I thought I might give it a go, but obviously I didn’t plan to do that in Rome, where I intended to eat pasta, pastry, bread, cheese, and whatever else I was offered. 
 
I did eat everything I wanted to eat, and all I wanted of it. There definitely was pasta and bread and cheese, though not as much pastry as you might imagine — or not as much that I chose to eat, I guess, since I think pastry was available every day.

I lost a couple of pounds. #2 daughter gained a few.

Now, we were walking and climbing stairs for hours every day. We were drinking lots of water. We didn’t snack, and we ate no fast food and no junk food.

It is possible that, by eating wholesome ingredients simply prepared on a regular schedule and moving a lot, we both got our hormones and metabolisms operating as they should and began moving toward the proper weights for us.

I intended, when I came home, to continue eating in this wholesome fashion. I have not done so. We’ve had carry out or restaurant food every day, I’ve snacked on Hallowe’en candy and tortilla chips, and a couple of times I’ve drunk soda, which I don’t even like. I also only made it to gym class once and only even managed the Wii Fit 30 minutes once.

It is true, I think, that the environment here where I live is not conducive to healthy eating or to exercise.

However, it has also been a frantic and stressful week, which doesn’t have to be true of the coming week. I’m planning to go to the grocery store this morning and collect some lean meats and fruit and veg, and to get my house in order so that I can have a calm week.

The food of Rome, some of which I’m showing you here, was very simple. Good quality ingredients simply prepared, with very little in the way of sauces.

Most meals began with platters of sliced meats and cheeses and vegetables. Sometimes there were little meatballs, or olives, and sometimes the Caprese salads shown here. Melon or sauteed mushrooms might also be offered at this point.

We ate these things and thought we’d had quite a good dinner, but then the waiters would come along with plates of pasta or pizza. The pasta was well cooked and had just a little sauce, either tomato or butter and vegetable, sometimes a bit of bacon or something, but not the hearty red meat and cream sauces we have here.

This pasta had chopped artichoke on it, and I have to admit that I didn’t like it much. Most of the pasta dishes were delectable, though, and often there would be more than one.

Again, this seemed like plenty of food, and we felt a bit surprised when the waiters came along with more plates.

The next thing would generally be a piece of meat: beef, fish, or chicken with a bit of sauce which was again mostly vegetable and very light. The quantity was comfortable for me, not the large amounts generally offered in restaurants here.

Some of the Aussies and Americans complained about the sizes of the plates initially, but we would have five or eight small plates brought to us in the course of a meal.

The meat would be served with potatoes or risotto and several vegetables. There was also always bread, very delicious but made with white flour most of the time.

We had sparkling and still water and a couple of wines on the table usually, and I think that about half the meals ended in tiramisu. Either it was an amazing coincidence or this is a very popular dessert in Italy.

We had puff pastry with fruit and cream a couple of times, but generally tiramisu.

Next came espresso. Cappucinno is strictly for breakfast in Italy, cafe Americano can be had in Rome, and tea is served in miniscule quantities in the hotel at breakfast and otherwise forget it.

On one occasion, we had to leave without espresso because we were running late for a tour, and the innkeeper was very upset. He stood in the restaurant calling to us with an alarmed expression, “Espresso! Espresso!?” as though we had left our wallets behind.

So, while not all the courses made it into pictures, the photos on this page give a fairly good idea of a day’s eating in Rome. Just add a few more course and a lot more things to drink.

 A week ago I was traveling back from Rome, and I haven’t yet finished writing about the trip. I’ve hardly started.

A week ago precisely  I was in an airport, or possibly on a plane, because I find the time zones confusing. Air Italia is different from other airlines, I can tell you.

Things begin normally. There’s an announcement saying to sit down and put on your seat belt and the captain has put the no smoking sign on. All the American passengers do so.

Then an announcement is made in Italian. You would think that it would be the same announcement, but apparently it says, “Italian passengers, get out of your seats and have a party!”

The Italian passengers roamed around the plane, eating and drinking and laughing and sharing photos. They hung out in the flight attendants’ area and congregated near the lavatory swapping recipes. No one actually did laundry, but it was a near thing.

We stayed in a four star hotel, and it was lovely. Comfortable, clean, and elegant, with really complicated plumbing. I’d like to arrange to have my bed at home made up with fresh crisp sheets every time I leave the room for the day.

We had a buffet every morning for breakfast with whole wheat croissants, pastries, scrambled eggs, many different kinds of fruit from honeydew melon to prunes, yogurt, meat and cheese, coffee, tea, juices… I’ve probably forgotten some of the stuff. I know there were hot dogs. That struck us as weird.

Lunch and dinner were five course meals, usually, though one day we had sandwiches in a sidewalk cafe. We ordered “panini assortimente” or something like that. I know it was called “assorted sandwiches.” Sure enough, the waiter just brought out a bunch of different sandwiches and let us all pick one. We actually sat there politely waiting while he brought one after another, trying to figure out which was for which one of us.

We didn’t fully grasp the system.

Google gave us a lot of cool stuff in addition to the whole travel and room and board part. My favorite  thing is the Marmot backpack with our website’s URL embroidered on it. How cool is that?

We’re actually using our pictures of Rome at that website as well as at our various blogs.

I had a great time, but I didn’t want to stay and live there. Usually when I enjoy visiting a place, I start thinking about living there. Rome didn’t have that effect on me.

We were up for 25 hours straight on the way home, and it took a day or two to catch up on sleep. I had lots of work to do this week, which I like, and this weekend I plan to clean the house and stuff.

Then I’ll have completely returned.
 

So you’ve seen pictures of most of the stuff I saw during my trip to Rome, I know.  Therefore, I’m going to give you pictures not of the Colosseum or the Sistine Chapel, but of stuff you might not have seen.

For example, you might not have seen the medieval ruins at the Garden of Ninfa. This is the Garden of the Nymphs, a very lovely public garden built on the site of a 14th century village.

The prince of the village had a falling out with his brother, his brother destroyed his village, and so they all gave up and left it in ruins.

I kind of wondered about this as we were touring all the ruins. There must have been a time between when these buildings stopped being usable and the time when they became picturesque ruins worth saving. Why didn’t anyone ever think about cleaning them up or fixing them during that time? Perhaps they were too impoverished, what with all the barbarians and sackings and whatnot.

I don’t know. I guess it worked out for the best, though. The ruins are very cool.

Ninfa is outside of Rome, in the lovely countryside. It smells good, unlike Rome. In Rome, people smoke on the street all the time, and there’s all kinds of traffic, and there is also an odd sugary smell that I kept encountering. Perhaps it’s the sum of all the gelato stands.

The people from big cities were marveling at how clean Rome was, though, so those of you from big cities needn’t feel that Rome is a particularly smelly place.

Those of us from the country — well, good to know that the countryside in Italy, like our countryside, smells delightful.

While we were at Ninfa, a great thunderstorm arose and scared people a lot. It scared me less, because we have those where I live, but the people from Colorado and California just about jumped out of their skins. We therefore had to return to the bus instead of seeing the rest of the garden.

The bus took us to a nice little ristorante for a vegetarian meal. We couldn’t identify all the stuff they fed us, and we upset them quite a bit by leaving without drinking espresso, but I enjoyed it. Probably not as much as I would have enjoyed the garden. However, this was very unusual weather for Rome, so we all made the best of it.

I expected to be able to write every day in Rome, but that turned out to be impossible, so here I am with a whole week to write about, and it’s hard to know where to start.

Perhaps I should begin with losing my passport, since that in many ways characterizes my experience of Italy.

On that day, we had taken a bus tour into the coutnryside, admiring the beauty of the architecture and the agriculture, and had visited the lovely Gardens of Nimfa. There we had seen medieval ruins, as the rain steadily poured down. When lightning nearly struck us as we explored the ruins of a church, terrifying our guide so much that the flashes from cameras began to cause her to scream, we left without seeing all the cool things. 

We  drove to a little ristorante for a five course meal of things like risotto and roasted peppers with lots of wine and laughing and crusty bread, finishing up with tiramisu. We had one boy who refused to eat anything prepared, and the innkeeper consulted intently with our guide and came up with a sumptuous meal for him, and we had a couple of people who felt ill or upset and stayed on the bus, and we had people who needed to smoke and others who wanted the bus at 17 degrees celcius and those who wanted it at 22 degrees and those who were upset because they had gotten wet and the one guy from the Netherlands who went down to the front of the bus to adjust controls and also wouldn’t stay with the tour.

Eventually, we all got back on the bus and made our way back to Rome, where #2 daughter and I went upstairs to pack, since we were leaving the following day.

Our hotel room was lovely, with pink walls and striped chairs and all sorts of elaborate plumbing, and very clean and tidy at all times. There were little drawers and cupboards for ev erything, and nice stands for the luggage, so packing was easy. Then I went to make sure that I had my passport and plane tickets — and I did not.

We searched everywhere and unpacked and repacked everything, and tried to remember all the places we had gone to where I might have lost the passport. I had carried it with me when we had gone out for the first five course dinner the night we arrived. There are a lot of different kinds of policemen and soldiers and things all over Rome, and I had thought we might be required to show it. In fact, we had simple been plied with enormous mushrooms and tender beef and several types of pasta and numerous kinds of sausages and melons and squashes and multiple wines and grappa and limoncello and tiramisu, but it seemed possible that we might have to show our documents.

There had also been lunch that day. We had arrived at lunchtime, after many many hours of travel, deepky confused about the time, and the hotel would not allow us to check in. They did allow us to leave our luggage, pointing out the room in which we could put our bags. When I took my bags over to the room, the doorman, with an expression of revulsion appropriate for someone who was torturing small animals in his hotel lobby, made me go back out of the room until he went into it. At that point, he allowed me to come back in with my luggage. He haughtily pointed out to me the right place for me to put it.

Having cowed all of us sufficiently, he allowed us to leave, and we went to a pizzeria. We were ignored for quite a long time there, and then had to deal with several waiters who were entirely flummoxed by the idea that we weren’t going to have a pizza each, and who were quite determined that since we were Americans, we would drink beer on ice.

At this point, we had not yet been completely forced into submission, and thought it was all about communication. We were insistent on wanting water, and planning to share food, and stuff like that, and had lunch.

At that place, they offered an “American breakfast.” This was croissant, marmelade, eggs, hotdogs, and hamburgers. They also had an “American bar,” where #2 daughter went for her Roman flirtation later in the week, but at that time we didn’t know this.

Anyway, that seemed like another place where I might have lost my passport, but then we rememebered that we had checked in at the hotel after that, and of course we had to have our passports for check in .

So once we had done all the thinking and searching and so forth that we could, I bravely went down to the front desk and told the gentleman in charge that my passport had gone missing.

He handed it to me disdainfully. Apparently, I had left it on the nightstand in the room. Determining that I — a woman who had shown her unfitness to hold a passport by wantonly using the wrong serving spoon at the breakfast buffet — should not be allowed to keep my passport, they had taken it down to the desk. It was sitting in a little cubby marked with my room number.

Now, in an American hotel, had someone decided to remove the passport from the room, they would have mentioned it. A note, a message on the clever electronic messaging device, a remark as I passed by the desk one day — it would have been very easy for them to let me know.

Clearly, they felt that I deserved to be terrified about having lost my passport. It served me right for being so ill governed and, well, American.

Italy was all about doing things the right way. They smoke on the street, they drive any old way, they set down their buildings with less order than children set up their blocks, but some things have a correct way in which they must be done, and people are obviously revolted when you don’t do things as you should. Waiters will firmly tell you to drink the wine, and will take one away and give you another if they think you chose the wrong one. They will take your plate if they think you shuld move on to the next course, and tell you to eat things if they want you to do so. They will also go to enormous amounts of trouble for you– so long as you are following the rules properly.

My daughters are waiting for me to go to breakfast with them, so I will continue later.

#1 son came to dinner, which was spinach and Italian sausage quiche. I was extremely lazy yesterday — and then this morning I felt ill, so I was extremely lazy again today. 

This isn’t the best route to laziness and relaxation, but #2 daughter was under the weather yesterday, so I guess I caught it from her or we both caught it from someone.

Or maybe I just needed to be lazy.

In any case, I’m planning now to have a hot bath and then to go to bed early and read a bit. Everything starts up again tomorrow.

Last weekend we went up to the Big City for two speculative business meetings, a fruitless attempt to get site approval (and a check) from a client up there, and a training session.

We got back here in the evening, and the next day we turned around and went to a rural county near us where we were to pick up photos (and a check) from a client over there. He didn’t give us the stuff, but we spent four hours driving through this pretty area and walking around looking at his spread.

The following day I had a business meeting, which has actually resulted in some business, so that’s good. We continue to wait on checks from a variety of sources, and when any of them arrive I’ll be able to pay #2 son’s tuition, so there’s a little anxiety over that.

On Saturday I leave for Rome. Between now and then I have two more business meetings and I finish up and grade a class. I am therefore planning that this weekend will be an oasis of calm. True, I have some work to do today, including late quarterly reports and grading papers, and I also have to do the grocery shopping and housework, but I also plan to knit and read and possibly sew.

I hope to get to spend a lot of time alone. 

I’m an introvert. I have good social skills, I enjoy spending time with people, I’m not the least bit shy, but I need time alone to recharge and destress.

People misunderstand the idea of introversion and extroversion, I think, and connect it with shyness or misanthropy. I think it’s really all about energy. Extroverts find other people’s company refreshing and inspiring, and time by themselves is when they use up the energy they’ve gotten from other people — perhaps in wonderful productive and creative work, perhaps in brooding or worrying about why they don’t have anyone with them right then. Introverts find being alone refreshing and inspiring, and time with others is when they use up that energy — sometimes by sharing new ideas or doing productive and creative group projects, sometimes in wishing they were alone and worrying that there’s something wrong with them.

We had a working breakfast at a creperie yesterday, discussing events tracking and goal funnels over crepes with spinach and cheese and creme fraiche and hot drinks. Then more hanging around, with a little bit of working, and a business meeting.

Or maybe a business meeting. We met with a couple of businessmen. It seems possible to me that the whole meeting was a ruse for the older of the two to see #2 daughter again, but I may be wrong about that. It’s unlikely that the meeting will result in any business, though.

Next up, a beer and bacon mancake dinner. Yes, these are pancakes made with beer and bacon. What more is there to say?

Our hostess is an HR worker for a company that insures carnivals. Just carnivals, which require a lot of insurance, as you can imagine. There was also a lawyer specializing in discovery. We see him every year or so, and he always has a contract with a company that involves sorting through all their old emails looking for evidence of wrongdoing. Remember this when you write emails.

Today we have a training and another business meeting, and then we’ll head home.

We got to visit#2 daughter’s office at a big marketing firm on Madison Avenue (not that one — different town). They have conference rooms with the names of great cities from around the world and snazzy cubicles, plus a kitchen with all the coolest appliances. The kitchen is labeled “Cafe.”

We went to the Apple Festival but didn’t end up with any apples, though it was fun and fairly athletic. The jaunt also included wine tasting in an 1839 German Lutheran church. The wines were good, and unusual, and I was really taken by an effervescent mead which was amazingly lively.

We went to a tea store and a book store, but I bought nothing in either. Window shopping is fun, though, as long as it doesn’t go on for too long.

Home, then, to warm up leftovers, watch things on Netflix, and talk.

I’m at #2 daughter’s place in the Big City. We went to Buca di Beppo last night for dinner (I’m probably spelling that wrong) and now I’m up creeping around wishing I could find where she hides the tea. I probably should have brought some with me.

I need to grade papers this mornng so I can participate in all the fun once the girls wake up. Doing that without tea is tough, though.

Once the girls woke up, we made egg and bacon cups, a clever idea #2 daughter discovered somewhere. Line muffin cups with bacon, break in an egg, and top with cheese and pepper. Bake. Yum. Not for people worrying about cholesterol.