POSTCARDS FROM EUROPE: Our Trip out of Perugia

07/22/2005, 20:42 PM

Yeah! We finally left Perugia and the daily exercise of riding the city buses around Perugia. We went to a town called Passignago on lake Trasimeno. We took pics but of course I forgot to put them on to a disk, so I will add them into a post later on.

It was a wonderful day. The first thing that we did was walk out to the lake side, get on a boat and take it to a small island of the coast. I don't remember the islands name, but I have it on my camera. It was a very small island and didn't have much to see in the amount of time we had before we had to get back on the boat. We would go tomorrow but the Perugia buses are on strike so we cant even get to the train station to get out there. After a short time on the island, we took a boat back to main land and bought some gelato. Eating gelato in Italy is a daily thing. Its a food group not to be missed. After relaxing under some umbrellas while we ate, we looked around the local dish stores. The dished were like the ones that come out of Deruta, Italy. Deruta specializes in this grand craft. This picture shows a small part of what they do. These beautifully crafted dishes are sometimes pricey depending on the intricacy of the designs.
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Although we didn't buy any dishes, it was wonderful to see the many patterns that were produced on these pieces.

After walking around the stores, we headed back to the station. We still had 2 hours left until our train, but this town was small and there wasn't much left to do.

When we got to the station we bought some snacks and sat out on the "deck" and just relaxed. It was very peaceful to just sit there with a nice breeze, watching not only people but also a storm moving in and listening to music. Now that is what I pictured us doing everyday when we came to Italy. Not so much at a train station, I was hoping more for a busy piazza, but beggars cant be choosers.

When we got back into Perugia, we did some shopping. A whole cart load of stuff, we thought would cost a huge amount, only cost us 60 euros. Food is so cheap at these co-ops. If we had bought the same things in an American store, it would have easily cost us over 100 dollars.

The rest has still yet to be written. We are now at the internet café buying tickets to go to Zurich, Switzerland for next wed. We leave wed. night around 10pm, sleep on the train in a sleeper compartment and arrive in Zurich around 7am Thurs. where we have the whole day to go around. We then get back on a train Thurs. night and arrive back in Perugia at about 10am. Its going to be so much fun. We are a bit worried about leaving the cats alone for that long but we know they will be fine. They are very independent cats. When we come home from being gone all day, they look at us, stretch and go back to sleep. We are glad to see you guys too we think.:)

As I mentioned yesterday, on Tuesday we are going to Rome on a bus tour. We are also looking forward to that.

As of Aug. 1st though, no more day trips during the week. That is because we finally start school. I cant wait. We need to learn how to speak Italian. Yes, so far we have gotten by, but it has mostly been because of body and hand language. That will only work for so long before we need to start speaking the native tongue.

I had so much to say in here, but because i forgot to bring my journal along with me to Passignago, i forgot a lot of it. So i guess this will have to do. Below are some internet pics of the town we went to but i will put more up, hopefully tomorrow. Also, look for the news of the strange and wacky at the end of this post. Ciào.

This is the plate stores we looked at.