Yesterday was market day. I decided to get my first porchetta panino. In Italy panini are not grilled or heated. It is just the word for sandwich. Porchetta (pronounced por-kay-ta) is sold from trucks and is the most wonderful concoction. It is a whole pig that has been boned and then wrapped in it’s own skin and roasted for a long slow time. The outside gets crunchy crispy and the inside is soft and juicy. At the Wednesday market there are 3 different porchetta trucks. All the time I’ve been going to the market there is always an enormous crowd around one truck. I always figure that that would be the place to get porchetta as obviously everyone else seems to know.
For some reason when I was passing THE truck I noticed there were way fewer people. In fact I was served almost immediately. I asked for a panino and they sliced the pork up right onto a soft roll. I intended to save it for lunch but alas I almost didn’t take a picture of it before it was gone! My favorite part was the unexpected crunch of the salty cracklin’ skin.
My cousin Meg asked me to put up a picture of our sofa in situ in our living room. So here it is. It is very large but fits the space perfectly. It will seat a bunch of folks or two lying down 🙂 I put our two new pillows in the corner.
We have a friend here whose name is Michelle. She is living in a house just behind us owned by a woman named Hillary who owns Alpacas. Michelle is house/alpaca sitting for 10 weeks while Hilary goes back to England to see her new grandbaby. We met Michelle just when she arrived. She was born and raised in Bermuda and speaks with an American accent. She is adventurous and has lived in many places most recently Cypress in a goat shack as she describes it. She likes to garden on the terrace of Hilary’s place so I brought some of the plastic planters with succulents from our terrace to see if she would like to replant them. In turn she brought me a bag of alpaca shit. I spent a bit of time getting it up to our terrace in stages as it weighed a ton. She tells me that unlike horse manure it doesn’t need to “cure” to be used as fertilizer. I will save it until I get new planters. Michelle will only be here a few more days. I will miss her as she is an interesting person. She is going to get her teaching certificate from Montessori and then she thinks she will move to Vietnam for a while. Her partner crews large tanker ships around Africa. Scary nowadays with all the pirates.
Yesterday evening around 9PM or so we heard a lot of people talking from BEHIND our house. This is unusual as it is a tiny little alley of a street and is normally very quiet. It is the same street that has the cat ladder I mentioned. I peered down from our window and saw a bunch of folks and several long tables with benches all set for feast. And feast they did!
It got very loud and they had an accordion. It sounded like the perfect Italian celebration. We weren’t sure of the occasion but I think it was an engagement party. I suppose it could have been an anniversary party for a long married couple. Whatever it was it was obvious they were having fun. I got up at 12:30 and it was silent and there wasn’t a trace of the party. The picture above isn’t very good but it will give you an idea of the tiny street and the people gathered there.