Kitchen Ideas and Confussion

I've been obsessing over what type of stove/oven/range I want in a new kitchen we are planning and feel like I want a 48" range. It seems more confusing with more education on the subject and so I haven't really settled on a final decision yet, but here are some of the pros and cons according to my apparent wants and needs.

1.  I really like the look of a colored range in leu of a stainless steel look, but the colored ones are either too expensive to think it would be worth it, too boxy and untested, or somewhat unavailable.

2.  Most of the 48" ranges have a 30 inch oven as well as a small oven although the expensive colored one has a small oven that the company claims will fit lots of food so I shouldn't worry about that.

3. As part of the stove top, I have been interested in a French plaque which is a large cast iron flat unit that is hot in the center and gradually moves through cooler temperatures as it reaches the outer rings of the unit. The concept is really great in my eyes, but I really have no idea if it works any different or easy than a regular gas unit.
Anyway... a few of the stove tops have one of these, and I think I'd like to have one, but don't really know.

4.  A couple of the ranges come with a warming oven, which would be nice as then I wouldn't need to place a warming oven elsewhere in the kitchen.

5. One of the ranges also has a steam oven which I also have been investigating and if I don't get that range, I do think I'll get a wall steam oven.

Prague is Beautiful

It seems there is never a shortage of beautiful sites and interesting meanings wherever we find ourselves on this planet.

 After a pretty perfect week in Italy, we traveled to Prague, Czech Republic. We were picked up at the airport by the hotel car and the driver gave us a wonderful little mini tour on our way into the city.

Next morning was Sunday and we found church in a big embassyesque house not far from the Prague Castle.  Our individual phone maps and taxi driver were divergent in their agreement of where the church was located and we ended up walking as fast as my sandals would allow us to get there before the meeting was too far along. (Not only is my brain fairly well oriented to directions, but it seems like we should have listened to my particular phone as well.)
We were given headphones for an English interpretation of the Sacrament Meeting, and that was quite an interesting experience. Although I'm sure the Czech and English languages don't have the same number and length of words in a sentence, I'm pretty sure English has more than about 1 word for every 20 in Czech. However, I don't think the interpreter knew those other 19 words or how to express them.  Quite the lesson.

The Hubby and I walked back to the hotel the long way. It took us about 5 hours to make the 45 minute walk as we investigated the entire castle including Cathedral, Basilica, Palace for the royalty, village for the common workers, shops, and guard house changing. We also passed by famous bridges, vineyards, and beautiful views of the city.

 A little casual and formal all in one shot.

St. Vitas Cathedral is inside of the Castle walls, and took 1000 years to complete in its various stages.
Fabulous windows, sculptures in wood, metal and stone, beautiful organ and artwork everywhere.

For some reason on this day we were noticing and paying special attention to all the amazing doors that we came across. The hinges, inlays, and woodwork were really fun to compare.

When seeing a fire furnace like this big green ceramic one located in nearly every castle room, I always try to picture how it would be to never see your fire being stoked or created. The servants would do the dirty work behind the wall so as to never enter the room with the nobles. It would feel uncomfortable to never even be able to thank them, or do it yourself without having to call for help. Just so foreign to todays living.

This room had coat of arms and family trees uniting them all over the ceilings. Quite the artistry.

 Check out this hardware. Took a little while to create I'd say.

 Here's a small library cupboard. Such beautiful cool books.

Within the castle walls is also "Golden Lane" which housed many artisans and goldsmiths staring from the 15th Century clear up until the middle of the 20th Century. Now there is an extensive armory on display in the top floors with tourture chamber relics, and many different weapons. The tiny little houses were occupied with alchemist, seamstress, goldsmith, and other examples of life as it once was on the lane.

 Inside of the Cathedral.

After walking down the hill and past St Wenceslas Vinyard we found some interesting potato chips. The curly cut potato spread apart onto a skewer stick and deep-fried was quite yummy and novel. The Hubby wouldn't normally eat something like this, but I would (that is why he looks so slim and trim and I do not) so he got talked into this little snack.

 ALL the sidewalks in the entire city are made with little two inch square marble or stone pavers. Once in a while you'd see a piece missing or laying on the side, but for the most part the pavers were set fairly evenly and they made the city have a memorable look.

More fun food.
These are long strips of rolled out bread dough placed on round metal rollers that are spinning above a hot fire. Before cooking the girls roll the dough in a sugary mixture. Then after cooking they cool, take the sweet bread off from the rolling pin sized roller, and place them in bags for consumption. My style indeed.

Walking onto the Charles Bridge. So many tourists from so many places, buying so many artsy souvenirs, and taking so many pictures. The music from street musicians was almost always audible, and concert fliers for the churches and concert halls were being hawked all over town.

 From the middle of the bridge toward the castle.

Other side of the bridge. There are several other bridges that we crossed. This one was the only no vehicle bridge.

 Mostly Baroque architecture amongst the old Gothic and Roman buildings.

Apparently John Lennon was a big fan of Bohemia which Prague (Praha) is the center of. There is a John Lennon wall where a musician was playing Lennon's music and people were reading inscriptions of graffiti that were about him.

Electric rail cars go right along with traffic on many streets.

This is the astronomical clock and is the oldest working clock like this in the world. Erected in 1410, it has many mechanical expressions. It tells the time in several ways, i.e: 24 hour clock, Italian hours which indicate 24 hour time starting at sunset, Zodiac clock, Daily name clock on the lower face, etc. It shows the phases of the moon, and the sun, and shows the time of sunrise and sunset. All in all an amazing piece of machinery given that I don't understand most of it 600 years after it was made.

I found it quite fascinating.

A crowd gathers around it on each hour to watch an unimpressive display of 12 apostles spinning in a circle, a cock crowing, and "death" striking bells for the passage of time.

The main town square is just adjacent, and always had musicians, bubble artists, and street performers showing their talents.

Which steeple represents Eve and which is Adam?

Large statue in the center of the square is of Jan Hus, an early reformer, priest and leader of the people.
He believed that the bible should be read in the language of the people and that they should not be forgiven of their sins by paying the priest off.

The Hubby takes some cool pictures in this old city.

Huge chandelier in this old church, set off by painted murals on all the walls.

I joined this "free" tour in which you pay for what you feel you gained from it. JohnPaul was informative and entertaining, so he got a good tip from me after I followed him all over the east side of the city.

This Prague ham being cooked out on Wenceslas Square.

Narrow streets curving around with beautiful Baroque architecture.

The main Jewish synagogue in the Jewish quarter. Very Moorish in its design, because the Moors were more kind to the Jews than the Christians.

The Hubby had to work for several days while we were in Prague, so I took these city tours as well as a tour 40 km outside of the city to the summer home of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

If you go to your history books you can find that this man along with his wife Sophie, was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 - 100 years ago and is one of the major events that launched World War I.

This castle, named Konopiste was pretty well preserved and housed a CRAZY collection of weapons, armory, and wild game antlers, plumage and other animal trophies from game Ferdinand had downed. In his dairies he kept track of an estimated 300,000 game kills, and this place appeared to display a good many of them.

There were extensive grounds and gardens that we walked around and enjoyed as well.

Beautiful country and city.
Thanks to Hubby for taking me to this new and historical place.

5 Terre

The awesome Hubby and I have now been married 35 years. How did that happen anyway?

To celebrate, we started our vacation in Cinque Terre, Italy.
After a quick visit to the leaning tower of Pisa .....

 (I made John try to straighten it up a bit.)

(Here it is, peaking out from behind the big basilica next to it.)

we hopped a train to La Spezia and then got on the "Milk Train" to the Cinque Terre. Don't ask me why they call it a milk train, but it is basically the local train and we got tickets for on/off  to use while we were there, and then didn't have to worry anymore about how to get around.

Staying at the second most southern of the "Five Terraced" villages, an adorable hilled assembly of colorful houses and various buildings called Manarola, was a really good choice on our part. This picture was our window view from out rented room. About as perfect of a location as we could have possibly dreamed. At least 2 of the other villages would have been great choices too, but it seemed that we couldn't have lucked into a better view/building to stay.

 From the same window in our little "hotel" room, we could take this shot to the right. These terraces have been maintained and farmed for 500 years, and are located all over these hillsides on the coast. They grow grapes, beans, grapes, squash, grapes, figs, citrus, and most anything that we grow in Northern California.

Walking along the village paths we find all sorts of alcoves and treasures for photo opps.

There are also paths connecting the five villages and although one trail was closed due to land slides into the Mediterranean, we were able to successfully hike the "easy" treks.

 Staring off from Monterossa this was one of the most built up areas of the trail.

John is in his photographer mode and we are always lucky when that happens.

Honestly, the guide books say they are easy, but we did not agree. If I can walk a mile in 15 minutes, that is what I consider easy. If it takes me 1 hour and 30 minutes to walk 2 miles, I think it must be a little more difficult. It is not that we had to crawl up any sheer cliffs, but there were thousands of rocky stairs of varying levels and widths, as well as narrow ledges and creeks to ford.

 The mountains go right to the sea. This reminds me a little bit of Big Sur.  We should really take more advantage of living as close to Big Sur as we do. I'll put that into the mind catalog for future use.

 Looking back at Monterosso, which is the most be beachy of the villages with crowded pebbled beaches and wall to wall bodies lying on them.

The next village was only 4 km away and yet it took us 1.5 hours.

This is Vernazza and is also just so quaint and cute. All villages have a church with ringing bell tower in the middle of the town. I'm sure it used to be the most important building for the people so they made each church accessible to everyone.

One thing we always like to do is check out the inside of the churches. Some were fairly simple, but most had some pretty fancy ornate decorations reserved for the best building in town.

 After a nice breakfast of eggs and vegetables, we headed out to the next town of Corniglia. I'm kind of a shiny sweaty girl here.

Another building that each town seemed to have in common was an old walled castle at a high point. Romanesque in nature, they were the lookouts for passers by.

The wild flowers along the way were mentionable. Poppies, scotch broom, all sorts of pretty things.

Here we are approaching the tiny town. This one is up higher on the hill than the other 4, so you have to climb down stairs to get to the beach or the train station. We did notice there was a small shuttle bus between the station and the main area of town, but we of course didn't take that.

 In Corniglia we had lemon granite. Like a slushy but better. What we call granita's I think.

 Finally to the last town of Riomaggiore, where we ate again. I'm seeing a theme here.

 The train between towns is in tunnels most of the way, so the scenery is not part of the ride.

To walk to the train stations you also have to walk through tunnels. This particular pedestrian tunnel is in Riomaggiore.

John, sitting down for a wonderful meal where we just ordered antipasti. We had 12 different types of antipasti - including about 10 different fish dishes. Really unique sea food. And of course lemon gelato to finish it off.

One of the days we took a boat from the 5th town back to the 1st town stopping at each (except Corniglia) as we went.

View from the sea.

Our town of Manarola had some huge rocks that people jumped into the sea from. The girl in the black suit up there could never quite get the courage to take the plunge. She had quite a crowd cheering her on.

 Looking back onto Manarola from the path which is closed up ahead.

Another fun thing about Italy in general is their lack of clothes dryers, or rather their proliferation of clothes lines. This man here is adjusting the laundry from his balcony. We had a line from our window, and it made me want to have one even more in California. The clothes become so fresh and white when hung out in the sun to dry. I've been considering a line since before we redid the back yard at our house. Just can't quite come up with a cool solution in this small brain of mine.

My camera has some really cool settings and this is John experimenting with it.
Such a cool sketch of our little vacation town.

Overall one of the best vacation spots we have ever been too.

LOVED IT!!