June 5th, 2009
This morning Tiziana and I were responsible for doing surveys in the south part of the park by ourselves. I was surprised Giovanna paired us together since we are the newest individuals to join the project (Tiziana arrived in Villetta Barrea on April 25th), but I was excited since Tiziana is the closest to my age and very funny. I knew I was in for an adventure. That afternoon we ended up surveying 6 different GPS location, two of which were clusters. Overall, we did not have to face extremely difficult terrain and we got done fairly quickly considering the amount we had to do which was nice. The only issue we had was that the GPS failed to locate enough satellites half of the time causing us to do a bit more hiking than was necessary. We did not mind however, since we saw 6 different deer while hiking. It was bizarre! When we first started we spotted a roe deer in a cleared part of the forest, then 3 red deer browsing in the middle of the forest, a red deer fawn curled up against a tree (which Tiziana walked right by, my proudest find yet), and one more red deer at the end of the hike in the same location we spotted the roe deer in the morning. Most days we go without seeing a single thing during our survey hikes which made this day extremely weird but in an amazing way. I hope this kind of day happens again soon but with bears!
For lunch we ended up going to the town that Vilerio the “hot” park ranger lives (the one Giovanna, Tiziana, and I visited before who has the pretty baby) and stopped in a bar to have a sandwich and a coke. In the bar they were playing an episode of Dawson’s Creek which made me think about NC since it was filmed in Wilmington. I have only seen one episode of Dawson’s Creek my entire life so it was funny trying and figure out what was going on since the character’s voices were replaced with exaggerated Italian ones. Luckily, I had one of Dawson’s Creek’s most avid fans, Tiziana, with me to translate what was happening. Supposedly, it was the episode where Pacey and his teacher started falling for each other (for those of you who are also Dawson’s Creek fanatics). Needless to say, that show is very 90’s and was a bit painful to watch after awhile.
After lunch, Tiziana and I ended up going to Vilerio’s house for a coffee. Tiziana was very excited about this since in her opinion Vilerio is the perfect man. While we were there I finally met his wife, Beana, who was actually was born in Chicago and lived there until she was 8 years old when she moved back to Italy with her family. Her father had moved to Chicago when he was 16 but knew that if he did not move his children back to Italy when they were young they would want to stay in the United States their entire life. The US was not where he wanted to retire however, so he shipped his family back to Italy in hopes that his children would fall in love with it and never chose to leave. Every summer, however, when Beana was a teenager she would go back to Chicago to work for the summer while staying with her cousins in Chicago so her English would still be intact. It was actually really interesting talking to her since she spoke perfect English (that carried a Chicago accent) but also spoke perfect Italian so it was like I was like witnessing two different people. Basically, her Italian accent did not come through at all when she spoke to me in English which was fascinating to me for some reason. She also informed that a certain area in Chicago is known for its Abruzzo immigrants which I found very interesting. I hope to locate it someday when I finally visit Chicago to go be a studio guest on Oprah.
After coffee, Tiziana and I started our hour drive back to Viletta Barrea. The entire ride she talked continuously talked about Vilerio and how handsome he is but how unattractive Beana is in comparison. I hated to agree with her since I truly liked talking to Beana, but the difference in attractiveness was evident. However, I fail to find Vilerio as handsome as Tiziana claims him to be so the matchup was not as mindboggling for me as it seemed to be for Tiziana. Back at home we hung out until dinner which consisted of pasta with tuna and tomatoes. It was ok, but fishier than I prefer.
2 years ago