First study trip. Check.

Nothing can prepare you for the realities of a study trip. 

Start with 25 people, 2 leaders, psychotic bus drivers of varying skill, and being on the go, all together, from 9am til 1am. 

Then add long stretches without food, followed by abundance of one type, for example, fresh cheeses. 

Combine regular lectures on locality, walking tours during the heat of the day and wine and olive oil tastings at random.

Mix together with a very southern Italian host *wink, wink* and long-drawn out dinners at traditional restaurants, wine-makers pairing their products with each course. 

The end result:

The spewing gastronomes...

Apart from the Friday being hands-down, the most miserable food poisoning experience of my life, the trip was exhausting, stretching - and thoroughly enjoyable.  The producers we met were so incredibly passionate about their work and why they do things the way they do.  People in Puglia were warm, generous and friendly.  Especially the men.  Very friendly.  Maybe too friendly.

Here are some highlights of Puglia.

Olive trees grow in the direction of the earth's rotation, which means that the groves resemble graceful, aged dancers performing pas de deux.  If you have 5,000 euros, you can even buy a 1,000 year old gnarled tree of your own and receive all the oil it produces, each year.

Cheese.  Fresh, raw-milk cheese of creaminess unimaginable.  Made right in front of us, like this fresh mozzarella that was fashioned into small knots.

Beautiful, complex, rich wines made from varietals I've never heard of before.  That's no longer a problem.  We met winemakers with major productions (1 million bottles +) who pick all their grapes by hand and proudly make only indigenous wines.  They're starting to break into the North American market now - keep an eye out for them.

 

Capocollo di Martina Franca.  There's nothing like standing in a shop piled high with large hunks of meat being seasoned in red wine, salt and pepper, covered in stretched intestines and wrapped carefully to age and cure.  Even better when your meat-obsessed roommate dives in and joins the third generation cappocollo makers in the job.

Seafood.  I never thought I'd say this, but on a hot day, there's little that beats a marinated octopus and cuttlefish salad in a waterfront cafe, with a cool glass of prosecco in hand.  The dinner in Brindisi at the foot of the terminus of the Appian way was a complete overload of the senses with five courses of plates piled high with seafood.  My stomach buckled finally when attempting to suck the brains of a huge raw shrimp.  I might have to stick to the ...

Forno.  A traditional restaurant where you choose your meat from the display, and it's cooked for you in the wood-fired oven. 

We ate tripe, donkey and some flavourful beef and sausage in a simple tomato ragu.  Paired with a beautiful Negroamaro that Jesse and I liberated from the other ends of the table once we finished our own bottle, the meal was spectacular.  Our group really seemed to bond on this night.  That might've had something to do with the wine...

The simple pleasure of a nonna's cooking.  From learning to make fresh pasta, to lingering over an alfresco meal of beautifully executed traditional dishes with the minister of agriculture for Puglia, our last night was exquisite in its down-home feel.

 

Puglia is all heart.  There's something about the landscape, the people and the products that draws you in and inevitably makes you family. 

What defines eating well?

Living in Italy is inevitably challenging how I view food.

At home, the abundant contents of my spice cupboard, cookbook shelf and fridge were a source of some small pride: at any given moment, I could cook almost anything for any number of people. In my experience, food creativity revolved around recipes. Of course, I gave some thought to seasonality, but often I'd create weekly menus based on what was on sale at the local grocery or market. While that was changing to a degree in the past year, frugality was a very strong thread linking my purchasing decisions and to some degree, will probably always continue to be so.

Now, there are three farmers markets every single week. The piles of fresh goods are so inexpensive and inspiring and there's real discovery in tasting, handling and smelling what's available. We buy what's good. We discuss new meals. Now, I feel the drive to learn techniques, not recipes. And the producers themselves recommend new ideas. Rosanna at our favourite greens stand describes, in vivid Italian, how to slice celery just so, and toss it with olive oil from Puglia and wide shavings of parmigiano from Ivan's stall just down the way. Yes, it's a European cliche, but market-given recipes persist because they're given by people who know their products intimately in a way those of us disconnected from the agricultural process just can't. And simply put, they're fantastic.

The challenge to re-connect to food in a sustainable way is also greatly enhanced by my education. Reading and discussing the serious issues facing our global food system must boil down to: what can I do in the here and now?

Well, Friday mornings, we get up early to fit in a run to the farmers' market. And while we are dazzled by the array of products, we buy only what is needed for the weekend. It's all about having an abundance of creativity, not an abundance of supplies. It means every three nights, the three of us stare into our fridge and create a menu whose purpose is solely to finish off its contents. Three star cuisine it may not be, but the flavours are rich and so inextricably linked to this time and place. And when the quality of goods available is excellent, the simple meals are always good. Last week's caramelized onion, pancetta and castelmagno cheese frittata with roasted potatoes and sage and sauteed broccoli rabe left an empty fridge, but us perfectly satiated.

Good doesn't necessarily equate complicated anymore.

Polignano a Mare

Arriving in the white-washed centro storico of Polignano a Mare several hours later only served to reinforce our decision to take a relaxing seaside weekend before the whirlwind of our first study trip. Polignano a Mare is a small town about 34 km south of Bari, perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking a grotto with the most crystal clear blue and green water I've seen in Europe. The cliffs are dotted with caves, some of which reach to the centre of town, and many of the wonderful restaurants and hotels are built into them. Polignano is thought to be one of the most important ancient settlements in Puglia and ended up being invaded by everyone from the Huns to the Normans at some point. There is rich history everywhere you look.

I'd booked us into a b&b found on the internet and it turned out to be absolutely perfect. Carlo from Casa Dorsi met us at the main piazza, and led us through the archway dating from 946 AD into the centro storico. Coming through the maze of little streets, we burst out onto a look-out point overlooking the swimming cove.

Our bed and breakfast was just around the corner. Up a steep set of narrow stairs, our quarters were three stories high, including three bedrooms and an amazing rooftop terrace with an outdoor shower and huge stone picnic table. We spent many hours over apertivos of prosecco and local olives, looking out over the Adriatic.

Our mission being to relax, we relished some long, drawn-out meals - most memorably the one at a trattoria in the centro storico where I first tasted burrata, a creamy raw-milk cheese that is a near-religious experience.

As part of that meal, we also sampled the local fresh pasta variety, orecchiete or "little ears", and I tried my first whole fish.

Not only did I love it, so did the little cat we adopted sometime during our meal and dubbed "Principessa". She devoured the fish heads quite daintily, and the owner of the trattoria was so amused by the experience that he gave us a bill for the cat...

The three of us essentially took the time to wander aimlessly, take ridiculous amounts of pictures, gorge on seafood at restaurants with spectacular views over the ocean, swim as much as humanly possible in the cool sea, and enjoy regular naps. We even rented a paddleboat one afternoon to explore a little further.

All in all, we rejoined our classmates on Monday morning at the Bari airport with huge smiles and the beginnings of a suntan.

To Puglia we go

I've experienced some hair-raising travel days, namely the 24 hour attempt to get home from Fiji. However, Friday night's trip to Puglia went Murphy's Law almost from the beginning.

Apparently 6am is prime operating time for the garbage and recycling workers of Bra. For those of you living in less enlightened climes, there are five different recycling bins outside of every building, each requiring a rather noisy truck to take care of it. If each one takes ten minutes to empty all of their bins in our tightly packed apartment block . . . well, you can do the math. NOT the best of starts to a long day of class in a very stuffy room.

Fortunately, our bags were packed, and armed with our current addiction grissini al nocciole, we waded through the swampy air to catch the 17h54 train to Torino. Our spirits rising with each clatter of the railroad tracks, we jumped off to make our first transfer.

The train was delayed. Having given ourselves an hour's cushion to have pizza and wine in Torino, we just shrugged and started in on our grissini. Then the train was cancelled. The next one rolled in ten minutes late packed to the brim with two trains worth of weary commuters. When one man tried to forcibly stop us from all entering a car, I sprinted to another and dived in just as the doors closed. Then ensued a long, sweaty hour standing with my body pressed up against the door as our train stopped at every station on the way to Torino.

No chance of dinner now. Reunited, we caught the fragrant airport bus - fragrant, that is, with B.O. Checking in for our flight to Bari went through without a hitch. Then came the discovery that there was only one small cafe left open, serving only paninis of dubious provenance. Oh well, another bread-based meal it had to be.

And then the plane was delayed. After 3o minutes, there was suddenly a mad dash to line up at the desk. And thus began one of the more perplexing displays of Italian culture I've yet witnessed. These people stood patiently for 3o minutes in an orderly fashion. We went relatively calmly through boarding check, and were hustled onto two buses. These buses then shuttled us, packed tightly, about 30 seconds across the tarmac to the plane. It was now after 11pm.

Suddenly, all hell broke loose. People leaped off the buses, brandishing their suitcases like weapons. They charged the plane at both entrances, elbows extended painfully to keep fellow passengers at bay. Stunned, we were jostled and bumped to the back of the queue. To our peril, we had forgotten that Ryanair has no assigned seating - creating this free-for-all. Surprisingly, there were three seats left. Go figure.

30 minutes into the 80 minute flight, a woman six rows up from me sprang from her seat, calling "dottore!" frantically. Within seconds, the entire plane was on its feet, craning necks for the best view and stepping into the aisle, hindering the flight attendants and the doctor, from reaching the man. The man was laid carefully on the ground and treated for shock. Of course, the three of us could understand little of what was happening, but the man was conscious. The doctor was joking with his unexpected patient when another cry arose - a man in the seat directly ahead of the first patient collapsed and had to be laid out in the aisle as well. Again, everyone stood and stared.

It was shocking to witness such avid curiousity, that to my eyes was disrespectful to the men's dignity, not to mention detrimental to their treatment. And the staring was so blatant! But it made me wonder, is my North American culture less honest in its reluctance to get involved in a situation like this? Is what we call respect for someone's dignity more that we don't want to be drawn in - or to acknowledge our curiousity? It was a highly disturbing incident all around, made only better that both men appeared to have recovered by the end of the flight.

We stumbled blearily out of our taxi sometime after 1am at our hotel in Giovinazzi and fell into bed, I think all three of us questioning the wisdom of the trip.

Finding ourselves joyfully splashing around in our hotel pool the next morning, refreshed by cappuccini and buffet breakfast, the southern sun already baking our shoulders - all doubts vanished.

Pinch me, I'm living in Italy

It's all coming together.

We found a home. While we don't move into our new place til the end of the month, it's big, bright, beautiful, closer to the centre of town and has plenty of space for guests... It's also closer to the route I've been joyfully pedaling my little Vicini along this week. Despite the ever-present threat of thunderstorms this week, it's been a definite highlight.

The links between course material are beginning to make sense. And, in the midst of the statistics and policy classes, came a class on writing that completely inspired me to be a better educator and writer. This was followed by Sensory Analysis, which involved statistical lectures and practical wine labs. I got to test my understanding, nose and taste buds in a completely different, and thoroughly enjoyable way.

We started the first lab in silence, smelling 26 typical scents associated with white wines and creating a list of standards. The second part of the lab involved writing down everything we could smell in four different wines. Then we tasted, and discussed if the nose matched the taste. It was gratifying to see that Rasoul's spontaneous lessons and my WSET course have paid off! Day two, we moved onto reds, and explored four typical Italian varieties, which was a new realm of tasting for me. How can I not love a course that revolves around wine! Or spending time in a classroom that looks out onto a view like the one below?

We've begun to discover neighbourhood haunts - the train station cafe where we go for morning cappuccinos.

We have a favourite Panetteria we go into on our route back from the Farmers' Market where the owner teaches us new phrases and engages us in lively discussions in Italian. Yesterday she guided us through talking about our jobs at home, while she sold us flaky strudel di mele.

On a classmate's recommendation, we've fallen in love with a Formaggi where the third generation cheese-maker/proprietor speaks fluent French and allowed me my first opportunity in three weeks to feel like myself in a foreign language. It didn't hurt that he took us on an impromptu tour of his shop and cave. It was very difficult to pry Wendy away from the 2005 Parmigiano-Reggiano rounds that were quietly aging in the cellar.

Then I've been more regularly interacting in my piece-meal Italian, with people in town like the nonna who lives on the ground floor of my building. She's always out on her balcony, hair coiffed to perfection, in variations on the not-so-little black dress. Her original suspicious glares have mellowed in the face of my cheerful "Buongiornos", and now she talks to me about her gardening and teases me about my helmet when I roll up on my bike after class. At least I think that's what she's saying . . .

We're getting to know the other people in our program, slowly yet surely. Last night we invited a couple of the guys over for a potluck of Farmers' Market goods - starting with cherry tomato salad, sauteed zucchini topped with soft-boiled egg, and crostini with caramelized onions and capers.

With a gleeful heart, Wendy fulfilled her deep frying craving with zucchini blossoms stuffed to bursting with fresh ricotta and parsley.

The guys brought potatoes au gratin that were to die for - using the pan from their toaster oven. Apparently not all student housing apartments have ovens! And these chefs proved it's not always necessary to have all the right equipment to prepare a good meal.

We laughed a lot, swept our plates clean with some fresh pane di bra, drank some very good wine until late, and finished off with a round of robiola (local cheese made from cow, sheep and goat's milk) and an herbaceous provenzal.

This morning was made slightly rougher by a necessary late-night round of laundry - our washing machine sounds like an hour-long alien landing gone horribly wrong. But that's nothing a good cappuccino or three can't cure.

And tomorrow we catch a late night flight to Puglia. Our first study trip begins Monday morning, but we three roommates have decided to have one last hurrah before we move on out. We have several nights booked at a quaint b&b in the centro storico in Polignano a Mare for general grotto exploration, good seafood, and some solid beach time before we rejoin the rest of the class for five, 18 hour days of touring, tasting, meeting local producers and getting our hands dirty. Apparently we will all know each other a little too well after this trip is over. I can't wait.

If this post feels a little like a gratitude list, it is exactly that. Pinch me, I'm living in Italy with all that entails.

Buongiorno Bicicletta!

It's now been two weeks since I've been on a bike - the last ride being my favourite Southlands through UBC endowment lands route. When this week I began petting every pretty bike I passed on the streets of Bra, I realized the withdrawal pains were serious.

So today I took myself to Tecno Bike and picked out a much loved Vicini Italia, added a basket, and purchased a helmet that no one in Italy seems to wear. I do have to admit - I went helmet-less on the way home. The sheer joy in pedaling slowly over cobblestone streets with the wind blowing through my hair was indescribable. Yes, I know I've reached the cliche status of Stuff White People Like, but the weight of the week rolled off with each push of the pedal. Now to explore this town from a different perspective.

Life as the student, not the teacher

It's been a rough week. Nothing they tell you about the interdisciplinary nature and intense pace can prepare you for a week like this one - it was just our luck that it happened to be our second week in Italy.

Let me just say that I have so much more empathy for my students now that I'm settling into the academic life yet again. Six hours of lecture every day is actually a long time to stay still and be actively learning. Even though we have a beautiful location to learn in . . .

And the courses are phenomenal. Any professor who can spend 6 hours daily for 2 straight days fleshing out contemporary food systems, environmental issues and sustainability and make it engaging is worth his weight in gold. The discussions were stimulating and the material riveting and controversial.

But cramming material that could realistically take up an entire term into two days, and then putting together presentations and writing an in-class exam connecting all the material the day after, is overwhelming. It's going to be an adjustment to be bombarded with so much information without time to really process it all before being evaluated. I'm learning that's the beauty and the frustration of this program: the opportunity to be completely immersed in all the elements of gastronomy, but at the same time having to be patient and allow all the material time to sink in, even when it's past the point of actual assessment.

Needless to say, there was an almost giddy lightness of spirit as we burst out of the classroom. So how did my apartment choose to celebrate? By making dinner, of course. Fresh fish fillets with lemon and herbs over a sweet chicory salad tossed with grapefruit, and asparagus topped with pancetta and poached eggs with farm-fresh orange yolks.

The lovely Arneis we bought last weekend in Cheraso was the perfect accompaniment while we talked over food, travel and our histories for almost three hours. Dessert was a local cheese and some Kiwi golds, and we watched the sunset from our terrace with much lighter hearts.

Yes, we have 300 pages to read by Monday, but it's almost the weekend. And this weekend holds the prospect of the Saturday morning market in Torino, one of the largest in Northern Italy, and home of the infamous Bike Market . . .