Back to the Tower

2010: Pregaming with greasy egg sandwiches

I woke up this morning looking like I had just invented the flux capacitor.  I’m not sure about this going blonde thing.  Besides my Christopher Lloyd hair, I decided today was a great day to bring headbands back despite the fact that I knew the race I was running would be covered by film and camera crews.  There’s just no fighting a fashion sense like mine. 

Last year D.O.M. and Me at the Finish

A friend of mine had come across the “Run to the Tower” race last year so we stuffed five of us into a Cadillac and headed to Tuscany to run what we thought was an 8k.  The race seemed really really long.   Every time I thought there couldn’t possibly be any more course – there was!  Turns out the race is 12k not 8k.  Ooops.  Someone had dotted our half note and forgot to tell us. 

Gnom Gnom Gnommy!

After we finished, we got some fab gelato right at the base of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  It was the best ever gelato!  I almost felt guilty for eating it.  Not because of the calories…because I am not so good with dairy and I was riding back with four dudes in one vehicle for two hours.  Well, not all of them showered so I figure it all evened out in the end. 

This year: Mr., Me, D.O.M. looking damn excited to run

 -- notice the fab head band/bed head combo

This year came with the advantage of knowing the course and that the race is indeed 7.2 miles.  I also hit all the water stops this year!  Many of my closest friends don’t know that I struggle with being a complete klutz.  Husband knows.  He knows that I stop walking (WALKING!) to take a drink…and now so do you.  It seems that if my feet are moving, I no longer know where my mouth is.  I come off looking like a teething child who has drooled all over myself when I try to combine movement and drinking.  Both drink stations I managed to grab a Dixie cup and at least some of the water went into my mouth. Success!  Some of it of course went on my shirt and a wee bit into my headphones, but some went into my mouth!  That’s what we’re going to focus on here people.

Here we are at the not-so-leaning Tower of Pisa

Two weeks ago I really wanted to hear a song I used to listen to endlessly.  It had been a few years but I found what I was looking for.  The album was like going to a reunion!  Every song that came on was familiar and delicious.  The pace was fantastic for me.  The fact that the song I was looking for wasn’t on that album or even by that group didn’t bring me down a bit.  So I loaded Union Underground and took off for the tower.  My goal was to finish under an hour.  I didn’t, but I did take three and a half minutes off my time and don’t forget the drinking while running thing.  Not bad!  If I shave another three minutes next year, I will meet my goal. 

Again we took goofy finish line photos and ate gelato.  It was more or less Back to the Future 2.

Lost in Translation

After the issues with our choice of attire for the dress badly party, I sort of hinted that there were other more heinous translation errors.   Well, the delay in the post was not lack of material, rather thinning the candidates to a manageable number.  I chose three.  I like the number three.  It is cute and curvy and therefore, a natural. 

Number One:  We have these fabulous hand-me-down friends who came for dinner one random evening.  They have a daughter who is my age so I sort of think of them as my Italian parents.  This particular evening, Mama, Papa, their daughter and her boyfriend were sitting around the table with us having a lovely conversation in English.  Papa and the two my age speak English, but Mama doesn’t so I figured I would use my budding Italian language skills to answer a question about some of the food I was serving. 

Italian is all about pronunciation…or at least it was in this case.  I had gone to the town center that day and bought fruits and vegetables at the market.  This isn’t odd.  I do it at least once a week and was pretty sure I could make this into a sentence.  Well, with the word “market” on my mind I told them I had bought this at the “marchetta” which translates not into market, but “whore house”.  I did not in fact buy the veg at the whore house.  I was unaware that they even produced this sort of product.  I had in fact purchased it at the “mercato”.   His face turned bright red and he had himself a hearty laugh.   Oops.

Number 2:  Mr Muscalo is a great product.  When your drain clogs because a house guest vomits into your sink repeatedly, it really is the only way to go.  The day that my translation skills failed me, I was faced with a drain that was clogged with my own hair.  Turns out if you treat your hair badly enough, it will indeed fall out and whoa doggie mine had.  It was at epidemic proportions when the water stopped draining.  No worries – I have Mr. Muscalo and Google translate.  I am golden!  Turns out I wasn’t so golden.  I took a bit of a short cut.  Instead of typing in all the directions in Italian, I got very clever and went to the product web site and Google translated the entire page.  Damn I am smart.  So off I go armed with my Mr. Muscalo and a pot of boiling water to battle the hairballs.  According to my research, I needed to poor the hair eating chemical into a couple liters of boiling water, dump it in and wait.  Um…when the granules hit the pot of water a strange thing happened.  They activated.  They activated all over my right hand that was holding the pot.  It was a Calphalon pot and the chemicals ate the inside of the pot.  Gnom Gnom Gnom.  They hit the rug which I miss very much.  It was way less effective with a large chemical burn hole in it.  Gnom Gnom Gnom.  The rest of the witches brew went down the drain and dissolved the hair.  Gnom Gnom Gnom.  While we are speaking of dissolving things, let’s revisit the hand that had been holding the pot shall we?  I ran it under cold water immediately.  I remember that much from chemistry lab.  Of course, in the process of getting from the sink to the bathtub I managed to knock over the remaining chemical granules which then stuck to my feet and found refuge in every conceivable cranny of my bathroom.  Um, “Husband!  Husband!  Can you come help me for a sec?”  Let’s just say he was not too impressed with my translation short cut.  Nope.  He did however help me clean up a fair amount of the spill, tossed the rug and the pot.  He also tried to get me to go to the hospital for what was a raging chemical burn.  I however was embarrassed, too embarrassed to get medical attention.  Seeing as I had never before had a chemical burn I had no idea what was in store for me.  The burn looked bad, but not too bad.  I had no feeling up my right arm, but when I would bring it out from under the cold water, it would feel like I had set it on the stove and left it.  Mmmm.  Just how embarrassed am I?  Nope, can’t go to the hospital and own up to my “translation error”.  That night sucked.  I put a bucket of cold water by my bed and kept the hand submerged.  It throbbed and tingled up to my shoulder.  The blisters were growing.  Still too embarrassed to go to the doctor I went on with my life.  The burning sensation subsided about the same time that the deep blisters formed.  I had made peace with the fact that I was going to be deformed for life from this and thought that retelling this story of stupidity every time someone saw my disfigurement was going to be my penance for cheating with Google.  I look at my hand now and all I can think of is how amazing my body is.  It fixed itself!  There are three spots where it was particularly deep that I can point out, but otherwise I have just slight discoloration.  My arm regained feeling a couple weeks after and by six months the tingling was gone.  Maybe I should have gone to the doctor.  Oops.

Number three :  In America, guys sort of leave me be.  Most of the social events I go to are with Husband and attended by his work mates so it makes totally sense that no one would drop the, “is that Windex in your pants…because I can see myself in them” sort of line on me.  But really, even when I go to the poker table I am pretty much left alone.  Ok, well this last trip to Vegas, there was this super odd fellow (think John Malkovich in looks with a personality that would normally warrant a straight jacket) playing the nightly at the Rio who, when we went on break, turned to me and said, “wanna go make out”.  Tempting…but no.  So, other than him, not a lot of folks in America testing the waters.  Here, it is just different.  People will just randomly tell you, “You are beautiful”.  As a girl who accepts myself, but has never been super secure (who among us is) with my looks, I was COMPLETELY taken aback the first time this happened.  I mean speechless.  Which is really amusing because it is said all the time…just never really to me by anyone who wasn’t related.  It took a while for me to adjust to the random whistle or cat call or huge compliment, but I feel like I have sort of settled into and it may very well be difficult to return to the US and leave this charming aspect behind.  Randomly I have been chatted up or asked out by men here way more than when I was a freaking bartender…and there was alcohol involved there.  Go figure.  Well, one day my normal routine with the Italian men failed me.  (Again, sort of strange – go from more or less invisible to having a routine for such situations) 

I like to walk the ¾ mile from my house to the running trail as a warm-up.  Then I stretch, roll my ankle capsules, and hit the trail.  I have mentioned it before, but it bears repeating, my running clothes are ridiculously bad.  Most of my shorts are in good repair, but my shirts are one disaster after the next.  Furthermore, I wear a neoprene waist pack (okay – it’s a fanny pack same as I have ripped on multiple times on here) and bright pink headphones.  Recently I have added to this stunning ensemble, a head band.  Smokin’. 

When my feet start moving, I am all up inside my own head.  It is amazing how much clearer everything is when you can’t see all the crap around the house that needs done.  So, given my turtle like state, I was startled when a guy stopped me and began chatting me up.  I was lost in thought.  It looked like a thrift store had thrown up on me.  I was so not expecting this.  My brain was speaking English and I stumbled to find an Italian word that made any sense.  I told him “I marry” and his face went void.  Here he was asking me if I would like to go for drinks this evening and I was proposing marriage.  Suppose that was moving it a bit quickly.  Eventually between the two of us I got it across that “I am married”.  He then told me I was beautiful (low standard obv) and I went on my way.  Opps.

With the young, the wise, and with household chemicals, the opportunity for translation errors abound!  I have one more year here in Italy to try to top those I have made to date.  I think I will avoid the chemicals though.

La Mura di Ferrara

The city I live in, Ferrara Italy, is surrounded by an ancient wall (mura). How freakin cool is that? Since this is totally my first time living in an ancient walled city I, understandably, sort of got my dork all over it.

Here is a bad photo of a really old map done in a time when the wall was complete. I love this map and wish I had found it in the attic with a skull shaped rock and cryptic instructions so that me and my friends could go on an adventure and save our town from being turned into a golf course. But no.

Kite Festival March 2011

In the center of town there is a really cool castle. There is a cobblestone road that is heinous for riding bikes, Ercole d'Este, that runs from the castle to the top of the wall and this building. It is called the Gate of Angels, which I have heard referred to as the executioner's house. They loved to kill off folks back in the day, and damn it, most of them probably had it coming. Anyway, this gate was considered pretty posh and was used when all the cool people came or the dukes went hunting in the grounds across the way. Those grounds are now Parco Urbana, or "urban park" where there are tons of cool goings on. My favorites being the kite festival and the hot air balloon festival which are both annual events. My least favorite would be the old men sunbathing in their speedos during midday.

The building isn't a proper gate or house any longer. Currently it is being used as an art exhibition space. The current exhibit is a fun mid-century style of cartoon drawing that is captioned in Italian. Oh, and there's this outside:

On permanent display directly outside the gate (or executioner's house - who knows?) is this creepy Blair Witch art. I don't get it, but I look every time...and shudder.

A large portion of the wall, about nine kilometers, remains intact. In relatively recent history, there was a restoration of the wall that turned it into a great place to workout or ride bikes out of traffic.

This is a pretty standard section of the wall where I run or ride bikes. I took this picture mid day and as you can see it is pretty well deserted.

Here is the wall just prior to dinner time – roughly seven o’clock.  There are a couple prime times for exercise.  Seven pm is very popular as is lunch time.  The morning gets an okay turnout, but not usually from me.  Oh, and working out at seven PRIOR to dinner was not a typo.  Restaurants don’t even open until about seven p.m..  When we first arrived in Italy we nearly starved (okay, we had plenty of reserved blubber to live on, but still, one likes to eat).  We would be hungry for lunch and it would be reposo where the whole city just shut down.  Then for dinner the, restaurants didn’t open until after we had put the kiddos to bed.  Mama Mia.  Amazingly, we have adapted. 

 

It hasn't rained a lot so my trainers come home looking a bit post apocalyptic.

Is that nuclear ash or Ferrara dust?

There actually is a second fitness trail associated with the wall.  The area that contained the moat remains largely park area with a pavement/packed dirt trail.

There are some really cool remnants of past architectural elements.  One of my favorite is this one which I am told had something to do with crafts in the moat, but I could have completely misunderstood that.  No matter.  It is a great place to find folks playing with their dogs in the evening. 

This a Jazz club and restaurant. It has a limited schedule and you have to get some membership to Ferrara clubs, but it is a good time. A better time with wine and friends!

http://www.jazzclubferrara.com/ All my local Ferrara peeps, you can use this link to get the jazz club schedule and the number to make reservations. You want to make reservations.

I had no idea that a wall could be such a cool attraction or part of a city, but it is.  Ferrara’s history is thick.  It is mind boggling to be running along listening to my i-pod on a wall that defended the city long before America was a country.   

So what's on my i-pod: Lost in Hollywood by my all-time most super favorite band, System of a Down. This isn't one of their absolute best songs. In fact I could easily name off more than a dozen I like better. This is one of their songs that the guitar player sings...instead of the singer. Whatever. So why is it running laps in my skull? It is my favorite song when running on the wall. There is a line, "I was standing on the wall, feeling ten feet tall" always puts a little pep in my step. Of course, then Daron goes on to call the people of LA maggots. Whatever, I'm from PA.

Steak tartar and other International Delights

At one point in my life I was stupid enough to run a marathon.  The running of the marathon is not the hard part, it’s the training.  The training chart in Runner’s World looks so easy with all these rest and cross training days.  My goodness was I ever going to have to really run?  It was deceptive (as most good plans are) and took the miles up so slowly that seven would turn into seventeen in the time it took Britney’s latest song to fall off the charts. 

Something else deceptive about the whole running underworld, is clothing.  Apparently when one runs more than a couple miles, certain things can happen due to friction.  I had no idea men’s nipples could bleed.  I’m sure it is massively painful, but whenever I would see one of those poor souls with the bloodied boobies, I snickered.  "Hehe – you’re a dumbass.  Buy some band-aids".  When I showed up in Okinawa the only athletic clothes I had were for tennis.  They did fine for a while, but eventually I just needed more to keep from doing wash every other day.  I went to the main store, where they had no running shorts.  I bought basketball shorts instead.  They had the same general shape as running shorts and they were on sale which is always a motivator in any of my clothing purchases. 

I prefer to run outside by myself.  It is better that way.  When I am in the gym I get all nervous that people are looking at my pace and calling me out for being the weaksauce that I am…so I tap it up a notch or two…because that’s a game changer for the rubberneckers.  Treadmills also hurt and don’t do hills very well.  Sometimes, like when it is over 100 degrees, rainy or the middle of the night, it just isn’t practical to run outside...then treadmills rock! 

It just so happened that the day I got my kick ass retro Nike basketball short shorts was one of those days that the treadmill was made for.  In I went with my free-with-purchase headphones to plug into the tv wall.  Awesome – Oprah was on.  This was going to be cake!  Up I climb – eager to knock out this midweek fiver.  No prob.  Oh, wait, maybe a problem.  My inner thigh is killing me.  Ridiculous!  I am like a mile down - no way I can have any pain!  Run through the pain little girl – run!  Oh crap – totally not letting up.  My hand instinctually reaches down to the affected area and comes back up bloody!  No kidding. Bloody.  Not how I saw this episode of Oprah going.  So there I am in the front of the gym on my rat wheel in stunned stupidity with a bloody hand between my bloody thighs, I am fully leaned over with my face roughly at the level of my cool new shorts trying to figure out where I am bleeding from.  Turns out the seams on really cute retro basketball shorts are not as friction friendly as on running shorts. The treadmill next to me stops.  Great.  So much for keeping a low profile and suffering in anonymity.  I was just waiting for the dude to start pointing, and say, “hehe, you’re a dumb ass – buy some Band-Aids.”  Which I guess is preferable to him thinking that Aunt FLow had arrived in town and was beatting the shit out of me, "hehe, you're a dumbass - buy some tampax"

Through this random series of events, I come to learn there is a sports shop attached to the gym and that they sell running shorts.  One of those lemons/lemonade things I guess.  Swollen and bloody (dead sexy I know), off I limp.  The clerk greets me in her heavy Japanese accent.  I politely inform her I am looking for shorts that don’t do this - as I expose my raw thigh.  Immediately she says, “SHOWTS NOT PWOBWEM.  MEATY INNA THIGH PWOBWEM." She was yelling at me.  Was she going to send me to clothing detention?  Surely she picked up my shock at this frankness and continued, “my dotta.  She have same pwobwem.  She wear holes in pants wight here” indicating right where my lower love handles are.  In the back of my head I am thinking…”yeah, that happens to me too”, but still I am unable to make words come out of my mouth. 

I left with a pair of shorts that didn’t turn me into steak tartar.  I bought a second pair of real running shorts for the race.  I had to get them out in town.  The only size that fit was a men’s large.  Ok, a Japanese men’s large, but a men’s large nonetheless.  It was the only set of bottoms I bought on the Japanese economy the entire three and a half years I lived there.  Last week I picked up a pair of running shorts in America.  I bought an XS.  A ladies XS. 

You guessed it.  The smaller top pair is the men’s large.  I would say I am more a small sort of gal than an extra small, yet these shorts fit nicely.

Here is a photo of me wearing my new shorts.  It has that decapitated Barbie Doll look…without me being a Barbie doll or decapitated.

I have this theory that as America fattens up, the clothing companies make folks feel better by making the sizes bigger.  “I know I weigh 40 pounds more, but I am only one size up from college.”  I think the cure for this would be Japanese-American sales clerks and Japanese-sized clothes. 

I Hate Running

Women running.  That’s hot right?  I mean think Bay Watch babes bounding down the beach, perfect hair tossing perfectly upon their perfect faces attached to their perfect bodies.  H.O.T.!  …and then there is me.  I have been running for years, yet ½ a mile from knees up, I look like I have conditioned my scalp with a half cup of Crisco.  Regardless of outside temperature or weather conditions, I am dripping sweat from my entire face.  By mile one, I am wet through the bands on my shorts and my bra.  The backs of my knees have pasted from glistening to downright swampy.  Still I power on.  Fueled by mass quantities of pasta, I am a running machine.  I look like I may need immediate assistance from a defibrillator, but I tell you I am a running machine. 

You may not know this, but despite logging 12-20 miles a week, I don’t like running.  Nope.  Not a fan.  I have been known to wear my running clothes for hours procrastinating the eventual push to pavement.  So why go?  I don’t like it.  I’m not really training for anything in particular.  It isn’t part of a figure sculpting plan (I have Brazilian Butts for that). So why spend my time doing something so horrendous that I look like I am going into cardiac arrest?  Well, for the men.   I spend my time running alone.  Sort of.  I mean I start out alone, but once I pass through the gates, I am spending time with Rob Zombie, Serj Tankian, Buckcherry,  the entire gang from Five Finger Death Punch, and when I’m feeling mellow, Chris Martin of Coldplay.  To have a rough day and sweat it out with John 5 is more than okay.  To be feeling a little low about where I am in life then hear Josh Todd of Buckcherry croon on for 50 minutes about addictions that he clearly doesn’t recognize puts a little bound in my step and leaves me feeling like maybe being me is preferable to being him.  Any time you can start out despising the idea of something then end up feeling better than a rock star, I would call that a good workout. 

I have an awesome girlfriend and every time I would get down on my body with all its curves compared to the Italian women (and my friend Lauren) she would always say something encouraging like, “Here in Italy we are different Kelly.  This is the only time in our lives where we are going to be the exotic ones”.  True.  Check me out.  I’m exotic in all my average American-ness.  I am exotic running with my massive headphones I bought for playing poker, not for running.  I’m exotic in my miss matched Wal-Mart cast off clothes I have been handed down and garnered from trash-to-treasure swaps.  Exotic.  Yeah Baby.  But, I’m not in Italy right now where I can assume they are staring because I look…exotic, I am in America where each passing car has to be thinking, “should we take that red faced girl to the emergency room or get to The Coral for a coffee stirrer?”  Well, no one has passed up the ice-cream treat for a chance to save a shorty.  Can’t blame them.  The coffee stirrers are amazing. 

Sometimes when I am running I think to myself, “Self, what are we doing out here?  It’s hot/cold/wet/snowey/stinkey."  I realized that I hate running…right up until the first foot hits the trail, then I love it…even as a hot mess.  I would like to run another marathon one day, but putting a time line on it seems a bit too motivated…just like I plan on loosing three pounds and thinning my closet…lifting my butt and buying a red Bay Watch-esk bathing suit.