Things are starting to settle down for us. Emilia’s first week of school went great, as best we can tell. She’s thrilled to be spending time with other kids (even if she doesn’t understand half of what they say yet), and seems to be bouncing off the walls less when she’s home now. The 45-minute tram ride each way isn’t ideal for me and Erin (Emi enjoys it, at least), but that’ll be down to a 18-minute walk once we’ve relocated to our second apartment in a month. Plus, I’ve already been able to spend a lot more time wandering the streets and neighborhoods, so that’s been a nice change. You really do see something new every day.
The cold snap (I say that relative to the area; it never dropped below freezing) and rain that had been going on and off since early into our stay seems to have abated, much to the relief of the locals. Romans and winter weather seem not the greatest of bedfellows, especially in contrast to what I’m used to in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone’s been bundled up like they’re prepping for the Iditarod. If even a sprinkling of rain touches the ground, the umbrellas pop open in numbers. I’ve felt compelled to buy my own puffer jacket (which I must admit, I kind of dig) and use an umbrella more just to fit in. In any case, I’m now very much enjoying the 60° sunshine.
We’ve begun plotting out some of our travel plans for the coming half year. There’s a lot more we have tentatively planned, but thus far in the books we’ve got Zermatt (in Switzerland, by the Matterhorn), Venice (for Carnevale), and Marrakech in the next month or so, plus Siena for the Palio in July, which I will discuss in far more depth eventually.
My exciting news of the week is that on Friday, I snagged us reservations at Osteria Francescana, the reigning “World’s Best Restaurant.” It’s in Modena, not too far from Bologna, which we’d talked about possibly visiting for the first time. It’ll be easy to plan a trip of a few days around this. I’d been trying to get a reservation since the beginning of December; at 10am on the first weekday of each month, they release all their reservations for the month three months ahead (i.e. at 10am on January 1, all of April’s reservations go live). Seems relatively simple, no?
No. For my first foray into this system, I logged on to their reservation portal at 9:30am (Italian time, 12:30am in Portland) to get a sense of it. At this point, I was informed that I was around 1100th in a queue that their website did not mention started before 10am. Mind you, this place has 12 tables, is open five days a week, and only does two seatings a day. It did not go well. After watching my place in the queue get down to the 900’s by about 2am, and then randomly jog backward a couple hundred spots in the queue, I went to bed. January rolled around, and apparently I missed some memo about them opening up reservations earlier than normal, because apparently everything was already gone when I looked on December 31. Boo.
I did more research ahead of February (for May’s reservations), though couldn’t find any confirmation over how early the queue even opened up. I was determined to find success this time, as things were only likely to get harder as the reservations were dipping into peak tourist season. 24 hours before the 10am release, I started checking the reservation portal every hour on the hour, but got the same useless screen every time. Finally at 2am, I needed to sleep, and set my alarm for six hours before the reservations dropped.
Groggily, I awoke at 4am, logged in from my computer, and found myself 67th in the queue. That would have left me excited, except when I checked again 10 minutes later, I was somehow now back around 130th. I think that when my computer was going to sleep, it was refreshing my place at the back of the line. I turned off all the screensaver and sleep functions, and I went back to bed with tempered expectations. I awoke again around 8am to find I was now in the 90’s. At this point, I pretty much spent the next two hours sleepily hovering by my computer, wiggling the cursor around every couple minutes to make sure it knew I was in command now, yet not doing anything that might dare anger it. I watched my place in the queue inch forward every few minutes, a Grinch-like grin curling over my face. I knew some poor souls were probably experiencing their own frustration as they’d been sent the wrong direction down the queue wormhole, but four hours of interrupted sleep and angst over the fickleness of the reservation system had left me largely devoid of pity.
At last, 10am arrived with me sitting pretty at 55th. After the first wave of people started completing their reservations, the queue started blazing by, and within eight minutes, I was in. We got our reservation for May. I’m trying not to set the bar in my head impossibly high; I’m sure there’s some high-concept weird food there that is probably going to sail over my child mind. I’m never sure what to make of places with dishes with names like “An eel swimming up the Po River,” or “Sometimes mallard, sometimes partridge, and even bollito,” but they had me at “Five ages of Parmigiano Reggiano in different textures and temperatures.” In any case, I’m pretty stoked, and will surely be recapping the experience afterward. Will I be brave and try the tasting menu, or will my picky self wuss out and go à la carte? Probably the latter, but who knows?
Ellen seale
I love your articles!!!!