Vercelli

It is great to have the President and Sister Dibb back in Italy again!  This week was pretty normal, if you call transfer week normal.  Monday President Dibb held the normal transfer week staff meeting.  Only 4 new missionaries coming in and 5 departing.  Tuesday we went shopping for the two dinners and one lunch we ware doing this week. I got my traditional transfer Tuesday haircut.  Wednesday we found out the arriving missionaries will be 1 day late.  Now we will do two lunches and one large dinner.  Thursday the Transfers occur and the new missionaries arrived on time with all their luggage!  We have taco salad for lunch for everyone. Then I train the new missionaries on finances and bikes.  They leave to go to the Duomo and the departers arrive.  While the president is interviewing the departers I take care of all of the final finance stuff for them. (taking their money away and then giving them enough for luggage fees and food on their flight).  Peggy made 3 large dishes of Lasagna (yum) and there are 17 of us eating dinner at the mission home.  Both the departers and arrivals sleep in the old Burger apartment or with the Elders. (Now we are also running a hotel with Breakfast!) Friday there is new arrival training and the match-up with their trainers followed by permesso training by Peggy and then Foccatia Sandwiches for lunch.

I was hoping to go to the mountains on Saturday, but it was way overcast and the forecast was for rain from noon on.  We decided to go to Vercelli instead.  Vercelli is about 1 hour west of us and is the rice capitol of Italy - paddy after paddy of rice.  Very green and quite beautiful.

 We first stopped at the Vercelli Cathedral.  Very large and some big statues on the facade.

Front doors going in.  They did not allow any pictures. It was very ornate with wonderful stained glass windows

 Here is a great door on the side of the building.

A view of the Cathedral as we were coming back to the car.

 Peggy noticed that there were many levels of roof tiles on this building. Lots going on.

 The cathedral had a nice park in front of it.

 An interesting building as we were walking 

 Here is the side of St Andrews Basilica.

Here is the front facade of the Basilica.  Interesting how the grey stones on he lower part suddenly switch to red and white for the upper towers.

 The building across the street from the Basilica.

 The Basilica is connected to an old monastery.

 The basilica is completely different than the other church we visited.  Very stark, plane and almost cold.

 It even had flying buttresses.  However it looks like they have now been filled in.

 Walking back to the car we found this hole in the middle of the street.  It was fenced off and it appears that they had found an ancient foundation.  All of the levels were marked off with survey tags.  I guess they were going to install a new sewer under the street and ran into this.

 We then found the main shopping area and walked around there for a while.  One of the shops had this dog dish out for the shopper with pets!

 These were enormous door knockers that were 8 feet high.  Most people could never reach them.  This lion has a human nose and teeth!

Here is an ancient wooden door on the outside and a modern glass door on the inside.

 Sisters even ride bikes here in Italy.  This is folding bike.

 The main piazza in town.  We were looking for some shoes for me but could never find anything bigger than a size 46 (about a size 11.5 or 12 in the states)

We took the back roads back home and enjoyed the many little towns and beautiful fields of rice.  We ended up at a restaurant that we had eaten at about 8 months earlier a little north of Pavia.  It was just plain good Italian food.  The fixed menu today was bread with a home made chile salsa,  rigatoni with a tomato / cheese sauce, grilled vegetables, and roast pork, with a peach crosatta.  Very nice.