Perugia - May 28th, 2010

Today's quest to find "the cool street" took us out into the rainy streets of Perugia. Naturally, the rainy streets were much less crowded than their dry, sunny counterparts. There were still a pretty good number of people braving the weather anyway, equiped with umbrellas. Umbrella salesmen roamed the streets, selling umbrellas to tourists and locals alike, anyone who got caught out in the rain. We were offered an umbrella ourselves, but we were happy to share my little blue one as we walked through the tail end of the downpour. For all of its wetness, the rain was light and warm, and actually quite refreshing.

We were sucessful in our quest today, finding "the cool street", a winding, aspalt-paved road that zigged and zagged across bridges as it snaked its way up the hill. The road itself was interesting, but what got it the title of "cool street" is the spectacular views you could see from its railings. We snapped WAY too many pictures up there, many of them covering the same subjects we shot the day before, but from a completely uninterrupted angle. We spent much of the morning running around getting good pictures here.

We stopped into "Coop" (one syllable, pronounced "cope"), which may be the only all-encompassing grocery store in the area. Most of the shopping you do around here is in a tiny, specialized shop. Pastries from the pasticceria, hygeine and medicine from farmacia, sandwiches from paninoteca, gelataria for gelato, bottega di vino for wine. "Coop" is a chain of grocery stores more in the style we're used to in the US, but still a TINY, narrow little shop. The entirety of the store is about the size of a small aisle at a Safeway back home. Here at Coop we got some more bottled water, juice, and pesto. The pesto here is amazingly delicious. In our time here, Elly and I have eaten an entire jar of it spread on crostini bread. Molto delizioso!

Back to the hotel to drop off our bags (and to chronicle up to this point in the blog!) and now we're heading back out to the open-air market for more adventure.

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The open-air market was mostly shut down today. Apparently it is a multi-level shopping extravaganza, but only on certain days of the week at certain times. What was available today when we went was mostly purses, lipstick, dresses, and other girly trappings. It was set up basically like a flea market. We didn't buy anything, and Elly doesn't do much window shopping, so we were in and out pretty quickly.

More random walking around, somewhat directed by gift shopping for friends. We picked up some things, but mostly we just walked.

Blogging a bit before dinner. We're going to go to La Pasteria for pizza in about 20 minutes.

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Dinner was great! We both had pizza. Elly had a spicy diavolo pizza (red sauce, mozz, spicy meat) and I had a caprese pizza (fresh tomato, buffalo mozz, oregano). Very delicious. The service at this place was very good. Our server was this really cute middle-aged man who seemed to have a lot of fun working on his English with us. I got the impression that he may have been the owner of the place. We also had wine, cappucino, and dolce. Dessert was layers of cake, strawberry, and chocolate rolled together and sprinkled with cocoa and powdered sugar.

We have to get to bed early tonight, because we need to be out the door by 7am. We have a treno to catch to Biassa. The train ride will be about 5 hours. We're staying in Biassa 2 nights, then another train ride to Florence for 3 nights. After that we're heading back to Rome for another 2 nights. I'm not sure if we'll have internet access between now and Rome, but I'll continue to blog and take pictures, and upload them when I can.

Photos