1 + 1 = 3 !

Dearest family and friends ~

Time feels like it's been flying for us!  We can't believe that it's just a little over a year since we got engaged and all the excitement of building our life together began!  So much has happened since that exciting day, whether you've been with us all the way through or for just some brief amazing moments we wanted to send you an update and thank you for being a part of such a special year!

Back in April 2011, after sharing the news of our engagement with our family and friends in Toronto we headed back to our world in Israel to celebrate and start planning for the wedding!

L'Chaim in Tel Aviv on Tamar's roof top!


Preparations of course included getting a wedding dress.  I wanted to do it in Israel with a young Israeli designer.  I had a crazy hard time finding something in my budget that would still look right and as I was about to give up on the whole idea I happened upon Limor Rosen's beautiful studio in Tel Aviv and she made me the perfect dress.  

Limor Rosen at her beautiful studio in Tel Aviv

Final fitting at Limor's studio.

Just a week before I had to head back to Toronto for the wedding we picked up the dress along with some of my friends and celebrated with cupcakes!  I promise although Chaim's carrying the dress he never once saw it until our wedding :)

We go the dress!! Celebrating with cupcakes!

I left for Toronto exactly a month before the wedding to get some very last minute things done, including printing and sending out our invitations.  It took us a while to figure out the details and we only gave ourselves 4 months for planning.  

Back home my awesome friends threw me the most beautiful wedding shower with Susie (in the photo on my right)  leading the way and hosting at her home.  Thank you sooo much!  Since I didn't know where we were headed after the wedding we made it a hat theme..I love hats.  This photo is of a group of girls I spent every Shabbat with in my last year of college and two years working for Hillel in London.  I'm excited to say that Sarah (second from the left) just got engaged yeyyyy!!  

I can't wait to dance at her wedding G-d willing very soon!

Shabbat Crew at the Wedding Shower

As wonderful as every moment was since our engagement the highlight still remains our wedding.  I can't even begin to express the crazy amount of love and joy I felt on that day particularly at the bedeken (veiling) and chuppah (ceremony)...we were on the highest high.  In Jewish tradition a bride and groom don't see each other for a week before the wedding but since Chaim arrived exactly a week before the day we actually hadn't seen each other for a month!  

The first two photos below are the first time we laid eyes on each other that day.  We both felt like it lasted for at least 5 whole minutes but when we watched the video it was just a few seconds.  

Time had literally stood still for us :)

After celebrating the most beautiful sheva brachot and taking a little more time to chill out after the wedding we headed to Italy.  Chaim and I still had a lot of work to complete for our M.A. degrees but we didn't want to just hang around Toronto.  We decided to find a place somewhere beautiful that was cheaper to rent and live in than Toronto and secluded enough for us to get some real work done.  You can read more about our trip in the post below but here are a few highlights.  

Arriving in Campobasso train station, it was pretty late.

We really spent most of our time doing work as you can see below, the other half the time we cooked and ate really well!  While we didn't do much travelling our touring we had a wonderful experience. 

Writing a paper on our patio

Studying while waiting for our train

Since we didn't tour too much we also didn't really bring much back with us.  A couple little gifts for family, a very cool wax stamp with our last initial, an album to put some photos in and welll I guess one more extra special thing.

Reading notes on the lawn by our house in Italy

:)

Most of you reading this already know...

Although for some of you it could still be a surprise...

YEYYYYYYYY!

 We are expecting a new little life to join us soon!

So we've decided to stay grounded in Toronto just for now, unsure of where or when we'll be headed out but we are happy to be here, close to family and our friends here.  As you can imagine life is pretty busy, we're about to move into a new place, Chaim is working like mad developing an amazing start up, and I'm doing an internship over the summer with Shoresh among other things that still need to get done, aaaaand we still have some seriously past due thank you cards waiting to get out (sorry :S).  

All of this plus baby!

Soooo if you are around in Toronto and we don't hang out much or call, or if you're out of town and think we have forgotten about you, we promise we love you and you mean a whole lot to us! 

So send us a hello, come by and visit, we miss you, we really do and we totally would be happy to be pulled out of our place for an ice cream or a drink or just a call to catch up.

So with that we are sending you all our love and hoping to be in touch soon with the great news!

Chaim & Tamar + 1

A Blustery Day

Today is one of my favourite kind of days in terms of weather.  It's a very blustery day.  The wind is really something awesome, the sun is shining brightly, the clouds are speeding through the sky, you could go outside in a t-shirt but it's much cozier to wear a sweater, little droplets of water hit your face probably from leaves left wet from a recent rain.  On a day like today you want to cozy up inside, make comfort food and look out the window while sipping something warm.  On days like today it's also fun to go on adventures if you have the right boots and jacket and a tight fitting hat but on this today we prefer to stay inside with all the before mentioned and do our work, taking little breaks to eat simple tasty meals and watch an episode of one of our favourite tv shows and read to each other.

 I think I owe enjoying blustery days a little to winnie the pooh.  He's been a favourite read of mine since I was little and still is today...if you haven't re read winnie the pooh in recent years I highly highly recommend it.  One of the stories (actually written by Disney and not A.A. Milne the original writer) was Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.

It all started yesterday with a very windy day, but not quite blustery yet.  I'm not sure where the line is between windy and blustery,  that's a whole discussion to itself which I'm not going to bother with.  But on that windy day you could tell the weather was changing a bit and I just kept saying to myself "it is so windy!" but not thinking too much of it.  The wind did die down and the night was clear so you could see all the stars.

The day before the blustery day was one month exactly since our wedding.  We were surprised how quickly it went by and it made us appreciate the time we have together.  It's been a perfect month.  There are two floors to our house and we mainly stay upstairs where the kitchen is, but downstairs are two other rooms and another sofa and a big table.  Chaim surprised me that night by pulling the couch out of the downstairs room outside under the patio umbrella, piled it with all the warm blankets and pillows we had, hung the flashlight lantern my Aba gave us and lit some candles.  And called me downstairs.   I don't know how he managed all of this without me noticing but it was a wonderful surprise.

We drank wine outside under the stars and watched one of my favourite movies Only You (which Chaim also surprised me with) in which Marisa Tomei searches all the most beautiful places of Italy for her soul mate who's name a fortune teller gave her when she was 10.  There's a scene where the two main characters pretend to be Audrey Hepburn & Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday at the mouth of truth.  Really it's more complicated and a lot more cute than it sounds..it is a lovely movie with a super happy ending, and the nice thing about watching it here is that the whole movie takes place in Italy and it had us laughing and smiling the whole time.

Only You

Roman Holiday

 For snacks we roasted potatoes which left our house smelling delicious but we didn't have enough and were not satisfied.  Being the special day that it was and wanting to have only the most special treats we (or I) decided that since we were so good at rationing the delicious challahs that Sarah Nechama baked for our trip we should eat one, and so we did.  After the movie we cleaned up and went back inside and watched a music clip sent to us by uncle Chaim of Eric Clapton singing Layla with Wynton Marsalis.  You can click HERE to see it.  We enjoyed it a lot and sang along in jazzy voices.  Thanks Uncle Chaim :)

Now we are still the night before the blustery day.  So the weather was definitely changing because we were awoken by loud claps of thunder and lightning in the middle of the night and a heavy rain which lasted for a while.  I didn't mind though...I happen to like stormy nights as long as I'm somewhere safe and cozy.  We woke up early to the most awesome sky full of clouds but completely pink, we had never seen anything like it and there were still distant sounds of thunder...I kept thinking to myself that this is what "awe inspiring" really means.  It was still very early in the day, and soon the strong winds pushed the clouds aside to let bits of sunshine stream through.  It was quite a site watching the shade of the clouds and breaks of sunlight role over the hills and villages in the distance.  Each time the light came out it so illuminated whatever it touched that the fields of straw looked like gold and the villages and their white houses shined in the purest shades of white.  I tried to capture this on photo but the clouds would move so quickly and the places were so far that I couldn't get the shot. That is how the blustery day began.

 That morning Michelangelo showed up, he had come to pick the remaining cherry tomatoes growing outside the house.  It made sense to do it this day because the wind kept it from being too hot and the rain was never long if it came.  I was wondering when he would come.  We made him an espresso and offered him some food, he thanked us and tried to teach us how to make better espresso in broken english, apparently ours was too weak.

I tried two tomatoes among the many other tomatoes I've had so far in Italy and I'm just going to say it...
Israel is much better at tomatoes!  I don't know if it's the season or the region although I had tomatoes in Rome but none have compared so far to the tomatoes I've had in Israel even when the crops were a little spoiled from the heat.

Pretty they may be, but it doesn't mean much if they don't have the taste 

Another thing I have to say is that cats are much nicer in Israel..maybe it's because they are less appreciated.  There are street cats all over Italy, not nearly as many as in Israel, but for some reason they have cats here on postcards and calendars all over the place "posing" on all the famous sites and statues so I'm making the assumption that they've got a thing for their cats...which Israel doesn't.
Anyway there are several cats in the area who frequent the grounds around our house and every time I try to make friends they either ignore me or run for it...so I'm put off by Italian cats.

That afternoon we spent doing work and I kept my eye our for sunny spots of time that I would use as an excuse to stop working and go outside.  There were many things to do outside of course.  I checked the fig tree to see if any were ready to be picked...no luck.  I chased cats and tried coaxing them towards me with gentle mewing sounds...no luck.  I looked around for flowers to pick and watched birds...satisfying enough.  I sat quietly and listened to the blustery winds...successful.

And the day had come to an end...so here we are finishing up with it and I have an online class from 10pm-1am and a wonderful day ahead of us tomorrow.

Happy Belated Birthday's to my Aunt Laury on the 16th, my Aba on the 18th and...
Happy Birthday Rikki Yunger Today!!

Ciao with love,

Tamar & Chaim

We have Bikes!

As I write this we are sitting on the train traveling from Campobasso to Rome.  It is a three hour train ride.  Chaim being the amazing student that he is always has his notes in front of him; except in this moment they are dangling from the tips of his fingers as he’s falling asleep J

We were supposed to catch a train at 2:20pm but missed it because our taxi did not come on time.  The only big surprise I’ve had here in Italy is how few people speak English, and if they do, how little they know of it.  I called the taxi company hours before we had to leave.  The man who answered the phone did not understand one word of English, not one word!  I kept calling him back trying to communicate that I wanted a taxi at 1pm using google translate to figure out any words in Italian that would help and :orry wasn’t one of them.  Finally after the third call he put someone on the phone who knew a little English.  Well, I thought the conversation had gone well and that he understood what we were asking but at 1:15pm when there was still no taxi I realized I might have made a mistake.

At this point I called Angiola to try and get her to help.  I didn’t want to call earlier because I felt like she has helped so much already, I email her every day with questions so I wanted to give it a break but that didn’t work out.  Luckily just when I called she happened to be at the train in Campobasso and was able to send us a taxi.  She told us it would arrive in 20 minutes so we were hopeful that we would still catch the train at 2:20pm.  20 minutes went by, no taxi, 40 minutes still no taxi so I started to get a little worried and frustrated and at that point realized we would not make it to the train on time. 

An hour later while I was still trying to figure out how to get us to the train station we heard a honk from a car down the road.  I ran outside to find an unmarked car driven by a man who had to be well into his 80’s.  I asked him “taxi?”, he responded with a slight smile and a slow nod.  Then I asked him to give us a minute, naturally using the hand gesture for “rega” in Hebrew, only then remembering that it’s rude I ran off back to the house to call Chaim and get our things.  I’ve only noticed here in Italy how many Israeli hand gestures I took on without knowing it, it makes me wonder how long we would have to be here for the Italian gestures to become a part of my daily conversation.

 It was 3:00pm at this point and the next train was not until 5pm but I didn’t want to test our luck again trying to communicate with this friendly old man that we wanted him to come back in an hour, so off we went to the train two hours earlier than necessary.  The reason this was so complicated is because there are no buses in Montagano on Sunday.  On a regular day we could just walk into the village, get on a bus and be in Compobasso 20 minutes later no problem.   

The good thing about not catching the earlier train is that I had time to pack us a bunch of snacks for the ride.  Four sandwiches, a bunch of fruit (plums of different sizes), crackers, and left over lasagna from Shabbat, which Chaim suggested we eat before we leave so it never made it onto the train).

We spend a lot of time making delicious food and eating it.  For the first few days we were here it seemed that we had developed a cooking pattern.  One day I would make breakfast and the next day Chaim would, then we would switch for lunch. Dinner we usually cook together and it has been a different kind of pasta each night.  We didn’t have any room to pack kosher meat to bring with us but hopefully over this trip in Rome we will be able to pick some up.  I love pasta but I’m also craving some protein now.  But I must say we are eating very well.

Delicious smoked salmon, basil, mushroom omelette 

Potato pancake topped with spinach, eggs and grilled tomatoes and grilled peppers.

Pasta by candle light 

On Thursday afternoon the bicycles we asked Angiola to arrange for us arrived with a very nice man named Marcelo.  When we booked the house we asked Angiola for them..she did warn us that the bike ride to Montagano is quiet steep and therefore difficult but she was optimistic that we would be able to do it because the view is so nice which it is!  Marcelo like most of the Italian’s we have met was very kind.  As a side job he and a group of his friends rent out mountain bikes and help tourists arrange extreme sport trips.  He also told us about a graffiti festival in Campobasso today (Sunday) and invited us to come.  We were definitely interested but with the whole balagan of the taxi’s we didn’t make it. 

That evening before dinner Chaim suggested we go for a bike ride…truthfully I was not really in the mood for it but he seemed excited and that got me excited and so we went.  Angiola was not lying about the steep road.  I think I survived going uphill for less than three minutes; at that point I happily walked my bike up the hill and picked flowers on the side of the road as I went.  Chaim was more successful than me, but not by that much ;).  We actually got pretty far up (and I did manage to get back on the bike) but not all the way to Montagano because it was getting dark and I wanted to go back. 

We have bikes!

As difficult as the ride up was it was worth it because the ride down was so much fun and the view was indeed beautiful!  Chaim happened to pick some flowers for me too and at the end of the ride gave me this little bouquet.  

I wanted to write about this on Friday before Shabbat because Saturday was my grandmother's birthday..I didn't make it on time but I wanted to say Happy Birthday Baba, these flowers are for you :)

More updates to come very soon!  I hope you guys are enjoying reading and if it’s too long I apologize but I know our grandparents love hearing all the details and I love sharing it with them J

Ciao,

Tamar

Where we live

Shavua tov everyone,

I wish I had more time to write last week, I thought about it so much and I had so much to say but never got to actually putting it in words for you.  Tomorrow I travel to Rome for a meeting and I'll have plenty of time on the train to write so look forward to an update soon.  We had a beautiful first Shabbat here.  Big thanks to Sarah Nechama for baking us the most amazing challot to take with us and to Mark and Shainie for the beautiful Shabbat candle holders, your gifts made this house really feel like home this Shabbat.

And now here are some images of our home here in Italy...

Enjoy :)

Snack Time

The view

My Desk

Living Room

The path to the house