Our departure date for the trip to Italy is rolling around with somewhat alarming rapidness, and I was reminded to send out an email to everyone coming, earlier this week, just alerting them to some salient information from the owners of the Farmhouse where we are headed.

We're doing 2 weeks of cookschools, so there will be two seperate groups of people - all of whom we will be picking up in Asti on the appropriate Monday - and I just wanted to make sure we had means of contacting each other. How much easier that whole process is now, compared to 8 years ago and our first trip away, when I was the only one that had a laptop computor, and we were reliant on a dial up network, that was tragically slow and capracious in its desire to connect..

Rick and I are reasonably sorted  on where we're going both before and after the cookschools, although still have few nites to book and train trips to figure out. But slowly and surely, the pieces are starting to slot into place.

I am not a relaxed and easy traveller. For a whole host of reasons really - and that has made the build up to this trip somewhat complex, as I oscillate between excitement and terror.

We do the cookschools, becos that is how we fund the opportunity for us to get to the other side of the world, and absorb the food culture of both Italy and France. And with the cookschools comes the responsibility of wanting to ensure that our customers, who are people who matter to us, get to relax and enjoy themselves.

So I worry about that.

And then I also worry about a whole host of other things: the international travel itself, the lack of language and communication, all the things that can possibly go wrong when I'm so far away from the people that I'd naturally turn too to help. You name it! I will worry about it!

I think I'm just wired that way.

I also know that I am a reasonably competent person, and while I may be in unfamiliar territory when I travel internationally, between my husband and myself, we have enough nous to figure our way through most situations, so there really isn't too much point in worrying about stuff that could possibly go wrong in advance.

 I really do wish I could speak other languages more fluently, and I think that is one promise I have made myself, is to put some concentrated effort over the next few years to build up my linguistic skills.

We make these trips to learn. To be stimulated and educated in a way that the vicarious learning from a book or movie can never hope to approximate.With those you only get a very shallow appreciation at most, and always seen thru someone elses perception. But when you get to go yourself, then the whole process is filtered through what you choose to bring to the experience. And I promise that once I get my butt in the seat of the plane, I will be ready to embrace the experience, and while I may still default to worrying about certain things along the way, I won't let that stand in my way of enjoying what is on offer.

A thought confirmed by a conversation I had in the restaurant last nite with dear friends, who described a work colleague who had taken a big once in a lifetime world trip a few years back, and came home with an unrepentantly morbid take on most places she had visited. Scotland was wet, Paris was dirty etc, etc etc. She was a negative personality type before she embarked on the trip, and they realised in retrospect that they had been totally unrealistic in just assuming that she would respond to the glories of Paris with the same rapt wonder as they had.

 When you travel, you take who you are with you - and your reactions to all things, will therefore be tempered by the sort of person you are.

The photo slideshow that is on my computor quite regularly slips in pictures of our previous Europe trips, and I never look at them without a smile of recognition and a little reverie about what was happening at the particular time the photo was taken. There are a host of incredibly special memories and I wouldn't be without them for anything, even if there is a fair amount of angst that goes into getting the trip in its entirety organised.

C'est la vie!

I go on this website on an occasional basis to catch up with this womans acidic and pertinent take on the world in general, but especially the food world.  She uses alot of codes for people and places, some of whom I've figured out and some of whom I haven't, but she makes me laugh out loud becos she is so direct in the points she makes, and it is true that in the food world, there is so much money spent on fudging the truth, and encouraging people to believe it makes no sense to cook from scratch, and that they'd be better to buy company ABC's product for dinner, becos it only takes two minutes to rehydrate, so where is the fuss?

I trust her. I also happen to agree with her politics so its a natural fit, and when I read this today, I just had to share, maybe to take away a little of the grossness leftover from the Paula Dean deep fried cheesecake.

Posted in italy, petrified newsstand

I've been working my way thru a number of books during the year in preparation for our trip to Piedmont next year, and the universal truth that is coming thru in all of them, is that it is well off the tourist circuit, and it  one of the best food areas in Italy. Both major pluses in my world.

So verification from a woman as honest as this, just underscores that we're in for a wonderful fact finding trip.

For some months now, we've been tossing around the idea of planning another European cookschool - a plan that gained considerable momentum, when we were introduced to a beautiful property in Piedmonte.

Finding the right property tends to be our first point of call when we're looking at these overseas cookschools, and once that is sorted we tend to stand back and see how the area will work for us. Never a particularly easy call when you're talking a reasonable number of people to all be housed together.

By mentioning what we were considering doing during cookschools and at other times,  I was able to draw up a list of names of people who asked to be notified when we started making definite plans,  and that allowed me to go directly to those people a couple of weeks ago.

And just yesterday we got confirmation of the last couple needed to fill the 2 weeks - so the trip is now officially on, and I'm allowed to start getting excited!

Which I will do - becos having something on the horizon to look forward too, is making me realise just how drab the last 2 years have been, and its going to be a useful impetus for all sorts of thing.

The stack of books on the region is just getting larger and larger, as I absorb the culinary style of the area. The kind of research I thoroughly enjoy!