Our view in Siena

The picture below is the view from our window in Siena. We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner right next to the window, which is pretty fantastic. We have a huge room with arched ceilings and a sofa in the loft. The kitchen is literally in a cupboard, which seems strange at first until you realize that when you close the cupboard, you can't see any of the mess! The cleaning lady seems a little appalled at just how much we cook, but we can't exactly afford to eat out every day or even very often, and in Assisi we won't have access to a kitchen. The other day, we made farro tagiatelle with fresh porcini sauce, which was amazing even though I didn't buy the porcinis the first day I saw them in the store and so was stuck with the dregs. I've never cooked with the fresh version before, so that was fun. Now there are figs - I better make sure to get some before they too disappear. It's been a long time since I was in Italy during this season of the year, and I'd forgotten how good the fruit is: melons, apricots - all at their best. Our favorite restaurant is serving a melon risotto which I have to try next time we go - the first time, all we could focus on was the various porcini dishes. The most fantastic tomatoes are around 2EUR/kilo, so a typical day might see us eating farro salad with tomatoes and pecorino for lunch, and pasta integrale with tomatoes followed by pecorino for dessert for dinner. In the US, I've always had trouble finding farro, although I believe it's available at some health and specialty stores. Farro is around 15% protein, which is high for a grain, but more importantly, it has a nutty flavor and barley-like texture that make me think I'm eating like a true hipster contadino whenever I have it.

Before arriving in Siena last Saturday, we spent one night in Pisa because our flight from Cologne got in late in the evening. B had booked a random B&B which we picked because it was close to the train station and the cheapest place we could find - around 65EUR/night for a private room. It turned out to be one of the most charming places we've ever stayed. B will post a picture later but let me just say that we had a view of the leaning tower from our terrace! The place was an apartment with just two bedrooms and two baths that had obviously just been fixed up with satellite TV, A/C, internet, a kitchen, and, wonder of wonders in Italy, complete night-time silence. Did I mention it was around 100m from the train station? Incredible! We didn't do any sightseeing or even go to our favorite bakery on the other side of the river, since we had to get to Siena, but the place was nice enough to make us want to come back just to stay there again.

The last couple days before we came to Italy were a little crazy. Wednesday evening (the 17th), we arrived in Koblenz, having biked the length of the Mosel river from Metz in France to its end in the Rhine. More about that trip to come. Our posterior sections were not in the best of conditions after six days on rental bikes not built for us. So, on a whim, we decided to return the bikes in Cologne and head to Brussels the next day. Unfortunately, a sad miscommunication about which track our train left from (hello, B, you could have just asked!) meant that we missed the first THALYS we had booked, but luckily we were able to change our ticket without any trouble. To add to the morning's mishaps, just after we left Bonn, the ticket controller came by and informed us that our tickets were not, in fact, valid as far as Cologne - but, unusually for a ticket controller, she told us this "just FYI"! (Next time, B will actually know which Bundesland Cologne is in, and so will I.)

The THALYS was nowhere near as fantastic as we had hoped, addicted as we are to the long-distance comforts of ICE trains, but it was certainly fast. As we sped through both Aachen and Liege, we fondly remembered certain mishaps that occurred on a bike trip there last year (Luik?!?, the ambulance, and so on). We even sped through Verviers, scene of the vending machine pre-dinner dinner.

Brussels was fun. 24 hours there were far too short, and we were too physically tired from biking to do much ambitious sight-seeing, so instead we ate. The strangest experience was going to dinner at Aux Armes des Bruxelles, which is located in the incredibly creepy street Rue des Bouchers, which is lined by three-language menus and touts on both sides of the street, leading to a claustrophobic feeling remedied only by being received into the cool French brasserie nature of the restaurant. I daren't recount exactly what we ate - let it be said that the meal was absolutely spot-on, with the minor exception that my cheese was served at refrigerator rather than room temperature.

Friday morning, we did a leisurely workout in the gym at the hotel (booked on Priceline for a meager 55EUR, although they wanted 21EUR/person for breakfast so we high-tailed it to the bakery just across the street), then hopped on the THALYS back to Cologne, where we picked up the luggage we had deposited there and repacked. Now, my backpack was left in the conventional left-luggage depository, but the lockers are another story. Cologne train station has a fully-automated locker system, where you simply put your bags into a machine, and the machine whisks them away underground to some far-distant locker, then returns them to you when you insert your personalized card in a matter of 40 seconds, to any of the automated locker stations! I'm not explaining this very well, but the coolness of seeing your bags disappear into a locker-sized compartment, then knowing that they travel to some place unknown before coming back to you 30 hours later or whenever is quite fun.

Pictures of some of this will follow at some point, although B has been a bit lazy with the camera. During the first part of the bike trip, our friends J&J took all the pictures, so hopefully we'll get some from them at some point to share.