Cannes and Cinque Terre

Remember how I said "to be continued" about a month ago?  I'm clearly not back in my blogging groove yet.

When Harry and I finally boarded the ship, we crashed and slept for another three hours.

Our brief view of Barcelona

Since the flu was still wearing off, and we were getting used to the time change and a rocking boat, we didn't eat much that first week. We mostly drank a lot of water and had a lot of fruit and toast, which was great because it was almost constantly available.

Our first stop was in Cannes, France. We took a little boat to shore and just explored everything on foot. We climbed a hill to a church called Notre Dame de l'Espérance, and enjoyed the view.

Stopped in this beautiful park to explore a map.

Handsome.

The view from Notre Dame de l'Esperance

Inside the church courtyard

A car as big as me.  Harry thought this was totally hilarious.

Little apartments.

Shop windows.

Caught Harry fiddling with these music box parts outside a shop.

We didn't have any other plans for Cannes. It was a small, quiet, fancy beach town, obviously where the Cannes Film Festival is held every year.  It was so nice to be able to just walk around and take it in.

The next day we docked in Livorno, Italy. Livorno is only a few hours from Florence by car, and we considered signing up for an excursion to see the Tower of Pisa. While doing research though, we discovered that hiking through Cinque Terre was an option, and we immediately opted for it.  I have friends who have visited and said it was really cool.  Plus it sounded like less of a tourist trap.

Cinque Terre is a collection of five very old fishing and winery villages right on the rocky coast. Over hundreds of years, the residents have carved out the mountainsides for their vineyards. A train connects the five villages, or you can walk between them, but there are no cars there.

It was cold and rainy, but Cinque Terre was so beautiful and quiet. We felt so secluded on the coast, in a very small group. We walked through the towns one at a time.

This was pretty much his expression the whole time.

Vineyards in the mountainside

Walking to a neighboring village

Walking to a church/graveyard at the top of this hill

Walking around the church courtyard

View from the top

This picture that Harry took deserves a gold medal.  I think it's so beautiful and captures the scale of the coast, with that tiny fisherman in the lower right corner.

For lunch we ate here. This is a picture of the actual chef. Harry caught a glimpse of him but we didn't have the nerve to ask for a picture with him. For lunch, we shared a huge terra cotta bowl of freshly caught mussels in butter and garlic. I got lobster ravioli in a cream sauce with fresh shrimp. It was probably one of the top three meals I've ever had in my entire life.

Yes this is real.

The most random thing happened. We ran into some friends from Las Vegas! They happened to be in Italy for a Periodontist Conference.  Freakishly small world.

Friends!

More photo dumps coming your way soon!

It's been a while.

Here's what has happened lately.

Harry graduated and took the California bar.

Both sets of parents came out for the ceremony

Hail the conquering graduate (name that movie)!

It was about 95 degrees that day and I felt so bad for him in his suit and velvet robes. 

So happy and so so so sweaty!

Then, we moved away from Palo Alto. It was very hard/depressing/difficult.

I keep the melancholy feelings at bay by trying not to think about it. To this day.

We drove away from our little apartment after my buff, awesome, not-so-little brother and some of our amazing (and I mean uh-MAZ-ing) friends helped us pack, move, play tetris with our boxes so that they all fit in the three cars, and, despite our protests, SCRUBBED OUR APARTMENT CLEAN. If service like that doesn't guarantee exaltation I don't know what does.

Final Palo Alto run with Cameron

Friends worthy of gold medals for helping us out (husbands not pictured)!

Harry, Cameron and I drove to Irvine, caravan-style. I kept reciting mantras aloud as I drove to keep from melting down- things like, "It's okay!" / "This is just another adventure!" / "Don't be sad it's over, be glad it happened!" We had fun hanging with my folks for about 15 hours, and the next day we moved our myriad boxes of stuff to Vegas.

I am loving being here. We are working part time, cooking a lot, and best of all, chilling with people we really, really, really, really like chilling with.

Then shortly after our move, my SIL Sarah got married. It was glorious. Travis is the bee's knees and we couldn't be happier that he's in our family. I cried during the ceremony, we ate tacos at the reception, we danced all night, I drank an obscene amount of fresh watermelon juice.

Then four days later, my brother got married. It was glorious. Katelyn is the cat's pajamas and we couldn't be happier that she's in our family. I cried during the ceremony, we ate tacos at the reception, we danced all night, I ate lots of See's chocolates.

Below is a post that I wrote back in June about my 26th birthday, but I never posted it. It makes me laugh to read it now, over three months later, but here it is anyway.

I enjoyed turning 26 so much this year that I wish I could do it over again.

My actual birthday landed in the middle of Harry's finals week, and was the day before a gigantic quarterly meeting at work, so Harry assured me the celebrating would take place over the weekend, and offered almost no additional details. He’s nice and cryptic like that.

My birthday fell on a Thursday this year, and that day Harry hopped over to work in the early afternoon, and we split a hot chocolate and a Hot Lips raspberry soda at Coupa Café near my office. We ate In-N-Out for dinner, because birthday girls do not cook.

Friday was insane, but in a good way. For the first time, I was going to have the bulk of the responsibility for the quarterly meeting since the other more experienced assistant who usually handles everything was taking the day off. I got to work at 7:30 am, and thankfully the meeting went off without any (major) hitches. I was on my feet nearly all day, and as a result, the day whizzed by in a flash. I was so grateful that it went well, and at 4:00 pm, I headed home, thoroughly thrashed and exhausted.

I got home, and tried to decompress from work. Sometimes it’s difficult on a Friday afternoon to leave the stress at the office. I often come home feeling really anxious and jittery on Fridays, and it’s a very hard feeling to shake.

Harry had told me he wanted to take me out to dinner in San Francisco. As I sat very still on the couch, trying to capture a zen “weekend” feeling, Harry said, “Is all this driving going to be too much for you right now?” I said, “No, I don’t think so.” He then said, “Well, maybe we should just stay in San Francisco tonight then.”

Then there was a pause.

Then there was a, “What?!” from me.

Minutes later, we packed our bags and hit the road for San Francisco.

Harry had made hotel reservations at this really neat hotel literally right on the border of Chinatown. The two girls at the front desk handed me two cupcakes and a small box of chocolates and wished me a happy birthday. We threw our bags in our room and headed out for birthday destination #1: Caffé BaoNecci. Since we were staying so close to everything we wanted to do, we didn’t use the car once from the time we got to the city until we left Sunday morning. The restaurant was a short walk away, through the heart of China town.

Caffé BaoNecci is run by an Italian family, and all the waiters have the same hipster haircut, and the light, thin crust pizza with minimal fuss and the most fresh tomato sauce I've ever tasted plus this dreamy imported Italian ginger ale was exactly what I wanted.

Walking back through Chinatown

For dessert, we came back to the hotel and munched some chocolates and watched “Tron” on TV. Man, is cable awesome or what?!

The next morning, we scrambled to make it out the door so we could eat at Dottie’s True Blue Café. We ate there a few years ago. It’s worth the 1.5 hour long line every time.

Finally made it to the front of the line!

My Dottie's Date

Bakery menu

Harry got the cornmeal blueberry pancakes, and I got pumpkin chocolate chip pecan French toast, because with a name like that, how can you not?

The places we walked to for the rest of the day included:

1) Blick’s Art Supply. Last Christmas my secret santa at work had given me a gift card for it, so we meandered around and bought some graphite and charcoal pencils and sketch pads.

2) We saw two opera singers in a random alleyway and stopped to listen.

3) The mall on Market street, where we wandered around and almost got roped into buying sea salt body scrub by an enthusiastic salesman, who, everytime his pitches were rebuffed by Harry, would said, "Stop it, business man!" with a wry smile and in an almost coquettish way.

4) Britex fabric store. I wanted to buy some material for a skirt at Britex. The problem is, after spending time in the LA Fabric District, everything else is always so overpriced that I couldn’t bring myself to spend any money there. Ah well.

5) The Ferry Building and farmer’s market. We split a meyer lemon donut, bought some chocolate and drinks, and walked around by the ocean.

Ferry Building

Ocean view

6) A crème brulee cart (yes, this is real).

7) 7-Eleven for some water because we were dying.

8) For dinner, we went to The House. It was a really great Asian fusion restaurant. Normally when the words “Asian” and “fusion” are used together to describe a restaurant, I’m not a big fan, but this place will forever be the exception.

9) And of course, we had to hit up Double Rainbow ice cream on the way home.

I think I’ve hit my processed sugar limit for the next year.

Now Harry is studying for the Bar. What! Is! Happening!

The next 6 months are going to be totally topsy turvy, in the best way. Big changes make me nervous, and moving away from our friends here will be so difficult that I’m not even letting myself think about it. Instead, I think about how I’m so pumped to live closer to family and to see Harry’s years of hard work start to pay off. He’s the most wonderful, kind, patient man and the best person to have a birthday weekend with.

Here's to turning 26 again next year!

That's all for now.  Coming soon: Sarison hits the Mediterranean!  We just have to go there first.

Good night.