First Days in Italy.

Baveno, Lago Maggiore

Well, we've been in Italy for a couple of days now, doing very little apart from recovering from the flight and adjusting to the new time zone (9 hours different). This is our third time staying in Baveno, about an hour and a half from Malpensa airport (Milano), but up in the mountains on the shore of Lago Maggiore. It is a picturesque spot, as are most all the little towns near here, but there are few of the "must-see" tourist attractions that might incline one to jump out of bed early. It is a good place to rest and recover, and we have had no agenda except to take take an occasional walk into town for a gelato or a good meal, or to stroll along the promenade in the evening. And we've been napping quite a bit, trying recover from the lack of sleep during the journey (Los Angeles-New York-London-Milano) while still managing to stay asleep during some large fraction of the nighttime.
Our Italian language skills are serving us well, and we have been successful in doing all our hotel and restaurant business with hardy a stumble. The town is fairly crowded with tourists, mostly Italian, but with a good number of Germans and a few French and English speakers. Most of the businesses on the main street are equipped to deal with all of these, we're sure, but still our efforts seem to be appreciated: it even seemed to us that we were given preferential treatment -over French and German-speaking couples- in getting a table at at local restaurant. Or maybe they even LIKE Americans in this area. There are almost no "PACE" (Peace) flags displayed here, but rather an unusual number of Italian national flags, possibly a sign of a right-of-center party dominance(?).

The flight was uneventful. Mercifully, we were traveling as points-upgraded business class, so our seats were fairly comfortable, we had plenty of legroom and polite flight attendants, and we could take advantage of the special lounge areas in the stop-over airports. Of course all these things only mitigate what is inescapably an unpleasant assault on one's sense of time and space, however much it is miracle to travel so far in so few hours.

–Jim