Out with the old...In with the new (Italian Mobile)

Most of you who have known me within the last 8 years have associated me with the car above, a 1993 Civic. It was a gift for my sister for her high school graduation in 1993. I eventually inherited it from her during my senior year of high school when she got yet another new car. Many of you that have known me longer knew that my first car was my family 1982 Dodge Ram conversion van, also remembered as the "Shaggin Wagon" or the "Mystery Machine". How many people can say that their first car was one that they rode in a car seat when they were a baby?
Anyhow, many of you already know that while I've been here in Rome, my civic has been losing its steam back in Florida. It has required so many random repairs in the last year that my parents deemed it not reliable as an everyday car. So it was a bittersweet feeling when my parents informed me I should be thinking about what new car I wanted. For the first time I got to choose a car that actually suited me. When I asked a friend of mine from high school (and fellow high school civic driver) for some car model advice, he reminded me that my old civic has had so much history. That is has. My Dad and I drove it back and forth to Cincinnati when I worked there the summer of 2004. It's gotten rear ended and broken into. Uhhh...and it's been pulled over a multitude of times. Oh yeah, it was at one time a rice burner.

So when my parents let me choose, I knew I wanted something adult like and practical for my daily habits. My parents tend to prefer Toyota's and Honda's. I originally thought I wanted something like a Camry, but then I also wanted something that made it easy to move crap around (I feel like a modern day nomad towing my crap all around the world every year) and something easier to haul my surfboards to the beach. I managed to carry both my shortboard and longboard in the civic but that meant I couldn't carry ANY passengers. So that brought me to the SUV market, but I also didn't want to buy some absurd SUV that guzzled up gas and was bad for the environment. So the Toyota Rav4 became my choice after some research. So as sort of a birthday gift/early graduation gift my parents scored me a new 2007 Rav4 this past week (similar to the one below).

As both of my previous cars had nicknames, I wanted to give a name to the future one. I also wanted to make it have some type of Italian name since it was bought while I was over here and because it will probably be carrying my 3 Italian roommates in Gainesville around. Even though I thought of some typical Italian people names I finally came up with "Il RAVioli Quattro". For all of you that loved my civic, don't worry, my family is still keeping it around. I may also keep driving it on my solo trips to the beach.

The Filipino Family Switcheroo

The previous post talked about my trip to visit Corrado's family in Priverno, Italy. This post is about Francesco's trip to my hometown of Orange Park to meet my family on the same weekend I was in Priverno. Well I heard from both ends that my family and Francesco had a great time. Maybe a good tradition was started with my mom and Francesco exchanging recipes. Francesco taught my mom how to make his famous lasagna (picture above). They brought this to my nephew Nathan's 4th birthday party at his family's house out in Jax Beach. The lasagna was a hit! My mom made a ton of food (as usual) for this party so Francesco got a few lessons, too.

Francesco got a little taste of everything. He went with my Dad to look for a new car for me (more on that later). My sister took him around OP to run some errands for my mom. She also took him to the beach and Super Target (my sister's favorite store). The main thing though was visiting a ton of my extended family at my cousin's house for Nathan's party. Who would have known an Italian would have had fun at a 4 year old's Pirates of the Carribbean themed party. Everyone is already looking forward to the next time .

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