yearning for italy

(taken with nikon f on kodachrome 64)

hi.
today is very cold and beautiful day.
i feel the sun light.
the harshness of the cold air gives me a good stimulus.
i'm going to enjoy today as much as possible.


recently italy is growing on me more and more.
maybe because i like drinking wine lately.
and maybe because i watched the dvd movie, "eat pray love", which julia roberts stared, last weekend.
to tell the truth, i didn't really like the story itself, but loved the scenes shot in italy.
i definitely envied julia because she's in italy, eats italian food, absorbs the atmosphere italy offers.
just after watching the movie, i made a promise to myself to learn italian more seriously.
well, 3 days have past since then and i haven't started to learn it yet, but i'll .... yes, i'll do that!

my husband and i went to italy about one and a half years ago for the first time.
i suddenly came up with the idea to go somewhere in europe this time of the year 2 years ago.
i didn't exactly know where i wanted to go, but when i started to search air tickets to somewhere in the web, i typed in the word of "italy" in the blank of the destination.
my husband and i have been together for 17 years now, and before we got married we liked to eat out in the italian restaurant and talked like this; "sometime in future, we should go to italy, shouldn't we?"
then we got married and we had a 10 year anniversary last year.
as we didn't have honey moon trip when we got married (we even didn't have an official wedding party), i thought that the trip to italy to cerebrate our 10 year anniversary must be a prettiest idea.
this way, our destination fell on italy.

a year later since then, this year in other words, we went back to italy.
we could go somewhere other country in europe, but we didn't come up with that idea.
we slightly changed the destination within italy this year, but mostly the same region.
of all the places we've visited, we utterly fell in love with south.
puglia (the heel part) is amazing!
basilicata (the bottom part) is also pretty.
and next, i need to visit calabria (the toe part).

i was born and raised in japan and had been there for 25 years.
now i'm in the u.s.a. and have been here for 11 years.
i love both japan and the u.s., but someday in future, i want to be in italy as residents with my husband and cats.


so, what's your country you've wanted to live sometime in future?
if you have such dream, maybe learning its language might be a nice resolution of the coming year. :))