Bunnai's Travel Adventures: Monday Market (Oct. 6, 2014)

We arose early today with high hopes of what there might be to find in the Mercato that comes to Atri every Monday. We walked out into the piazza where the duomo is, and were quite surprised to see many trucks with awnings coming out from them, and rows upon rows of vendors selling their wares. They completely took up the piazza, as well as the small streets between piazzas, and the adjoining piazzas. We walked up and down, checking out all the stuff. We didn’t end up buying anything except food, go figure. We decided to try porchetta which is a fantastic whole pig, barbecued on a spit. I think they must soak the pig in salt first as the meat is quite salty throughout, but very yummy. It certainly isn’t inexpensive, 18 Euro per kilo, but is truly something very Italian, to try. We had it with salad and fresh tomato that we also bought at the market, for lunch.

After lunch, we had a little lie down, and great nap. It was great! Graziano called to ask if we wanted to visit a winery, so we made plans to do that tomorrow. Mom and I had already planned to ask if we could stay over at their place tomorrow night, as the train and bus times didn’t correlate to allow us to go on our mini adventure to Venice and Florence. I spent some time looking up train times and routes for this mini venture and booked a place to spend the nights in Florence. So, we will visit the winery tomorrow, then catch the train from Pineto to Pescara, then switch trains to go to Bologna, and finally, arrive in Venice. There we will spend a few hours walking around and visiting the beautiful piazzas. There is not much to do in Venice in the evening and it’s very expensive to stay there, so we have planned to see Venice, fairly early, then jump back on the train and go to Florence. There we will stay for two nights, anyway, and perhaps longer if we decide to. We may decide to visit some other places in Tuscany after Florence, so we’re leaving it open and taking only our backpacks to save on space and lugging suitcases.

The rest of today was really pleasant. I spoke to a man who was in charge of the Tourist Information, that didn’t speak much English but was super nice and between us, very helpful. He told us how to take the bus from Atri to Pineto so that Graziano didn’t have to, yet again, come here to pick us up. Our evening was spent finding out where we catch the bus tomorrow morning to Pineto, and buying our bus tickets. Though this sounds easy, it can be quite challenging with the language barrier, and it’s always better to do a dry run before actually attempting to launch. So, we walked from the upper town of Atri, which we haven’t yet left, to the lower part, which is very new and a lot different looking than our area. We located the bus stop by the hospital and bought our tickets at the Tabacchi shop. It was very satisfying to secure our stop and the tickets to jump the bus. We are off tomorrow on another cool mini adventure. Oh, I almost forget that we stopped at one of the shops near our place, on the way home tonight, and bought a small stick of the liquorice that this region is famous for. It’s black liquorice and very strong. I didn’t like it much, until I had a sip of my red wine after it, and the wine then tasted like Port. It was rich and very sweet. An interesting effect from the pure liquorice. Not my cup of tea, but with wine, quite excellent. Something like an after dinner liqueur. Very cool.

Since we want to travel light, I am leaving my computer in Atri and we will just use mom’s IPhone for communication, as well as internet points if needed. Wish us luck……..lol. We won’t need it, we are going to have a great time. Can’t wait to show mom Venice and Florence. They are both so interesting and wonderful!

Take care loved ones. TTYL