Hump Day.

Well, if I didn't cave today, I won't cave.

Today it rained. In fact, it's still raining. When it rains here it doesn't just kind of lightly sprinkle periodically, it barfs water for hours. Luckily this does not happen as often as the Milanesi would have you believe.

However it also means I just don't want to do ANYTHING. Rain is terrible like that; it takes away your will to live. I totally meant to go to the pool but didn't make it out of the house til almost 12 (though I did make soup); then the nine flights of stairs up to my English lesson nearly did me in. I was so close to taking the elevator -- it's almost automatic when you know you have to go up 9 flights. My own seven flights seemed like peanuts, on the positive side.

Another positive was that I ate my homemade yogurt this morning and nearly died because it is SO GOOD. Everyone should do this at least once. You will never go back to storebought, I swear.
And that brings me to today's topic of discussion: food. Today we had to renounce all packaged food and consume only local products.
Because life is so hard, I limited myself to things that come in reusable packages (glass, durable plastic), and only ate things from Italy. I don't think i would have eaten too much otherwise. EVERYTHING comes in a package here; at some stores, you can't pick your own fruit from the bin and must bring it home on a styrofoam tray -- even stuff like bananas (which come from Ecuador, so I can't bring thos ehome anyway). I would really like to be buying my grains and beans in bulk, and I think I have found a store at which I can do this; loose-leaf tea made from things harvested in Italy, however, or coffee, is an entirely different matter and I am not too sure I am at the point where I give up caffeinated things because they don't grow here. Individually wrapped cafeinated things -- I can probably handle that.

In short, this is definitely the hardest day, and I can't say I fully succeeded. In fact, I am not sure I ever will, since some things I don't feel I want to do without (bananas and caffeinated beverages aside -- avocado, spices like curry...) Also, I struggle with the packaging thing. There are only so many plastic bottles you want to keep around, or so many glass jars you can wash out and hang on to. The key is finding sources at which you can refill them with whatever it is-- milk, beer, wine for example -- and that can be hard in the city. Maybe this will be the start of breaking my Nutella habit??!

Tomorrow should be really interesting. I am grape-stomping my clothes in the bathtub in honor of "use as little energy as possible" day! I may or may not blog -- I am using my laptop on battery until it dies, then charging it only when I am using it so that whenever it is plugged in, it's also being used, ad when it is off, it is always unplugged. If I have juice at the end of the day, you'll hear about it -- if not, stay tuned for Friday...

Here I am in the kitchen, working on battery power, making yogurt after lugging the milk and fruit I bought up seven flights of stairs. So far, so good!

I feel amazing right now, actually. It's surprisingly empowering to reuse plastic vegetable bags and to buy only produce grown in Italy (today there is no market -- on Thursday I can re-stock with 0 km food). It seems silly. But I am beginning to see that once you have built your personal infrastructure it is easier and easier to subsist on what you already have.
I'd still like to find a solution to the problem of non 0-km ingredients for the food you make at home. As well, ingredients still come packaged, though you can buy them in larger quantities (huge bags of flour for example, versus a small bag of bread. I still haven't found milk in anything bigger than 1 L plastic bottle; maybe there is a way to get your milk containers refilled but not in the city, that's for sure. I' using old plastic bottles for water.)

Today is the day we "green" our commute. That means, for me, cutting out any automated mobility devices -- no escalators, moving sidewalks, or escalators except where stairs do not exist. It also means going home on the last subway, always, to avoid having to use cabs, and carpooling when it is socially awkward to refuse a ride somewhere. Since I don't drive here, it's relatively easy to rpomise myself to walk or take the bus; it also means that today I'm considering the possibility of never owning a car, just to think about it and what it would mean for me.

Did you take the bus today? Sometimes life is hard when you can't just drive to where you need to be. Cities are so big, and here they have the added obstacle of many spread-out villages with a city as their common centre for commercialism and industry, with many mountain roads and no train or bus infrastructure. At home, things are just so far away that sometimes it isn't practical. It's definitely something that needs to change here in Italy, though; I'm glad to see many smaller cars and hybrids, but there are still too many. There is also something called Eco-Pass, which is basically a zone of the city encompassing the downtown area where you cannot take your car unless you pass an emissions test. Milanesi say it hasn't changed much, though. In Florence you can't even drive downtown! But Milan is much bigger.

Stay tuned for more flights of stairs and how the yogurt turns out... right now it's busy multiplying on the hot-water heater...