shewhomust | Things to do in Pusiano during the Christmas holidays (Reply)

There's a good restaurant - La Pergola - where we ate the night we arrived. The local speciality is risotto al pesce persico, a rich cheesy risotto served with tiny egg-and-breadcrumbed fillets of lake fish. I upheld the honour of the group by ordering this, and enjoyed it, though if I had been less tired, I would probably have appreciated it more, and would also have been more sceptical of our hostess's assurances that the mixed starter was only enough for one - three or four of us could have shared it and not gone short. In fact, in general, the way to get the best of the restaurant would have been to order as a family and share things: everything we had was good, but dishes tended to be overwhelming quantities of one or two things.

Go shopping, of course. Since durham_rambler and I didn't have a car with us, we left the heavy supermarket shops to other people, though we did venture into Erba on Christmas Eve, on the bus which had brought us to Pusiano. It was raining, and getting dark, and mostly closed (the deal seems to be that small shops close for lunch. Some of them reopen again after, some don't bother). But we found a supermarket, and bought some necessities. More fun was the delicatessen where we bought a few luxuries, some additional cold meats and cheeses for the following day's feast: the older of the two women working there was delighted to have a chance to practice her English, and although it was beneath her dignity to serve us herself, supervised her junior colleague to ensure our purchases were handled correctly. I partcularly enjoyed one of their cheeses, very white, very creamy, with a rind which was no more than a boundary between cheese and not-cheese (this preference may reflect my fragile state, but it was a good cheese nonetheless).

Buy wine from the wine shop in Pusiano itself. The proprietor has very good English (at least for vinous purposes) and was enthusiatic about our tasting as many as possible of the wines he had on tap. To my surprise, he introduced his wines by the grape variety, and only as an afterthought by place of origin (perhaps because these were all from the same vineyards, none of them very distant). So the red we particularly liked was a bonarda, from the Oltrep&ogave; Pavese, and when we bought a litre, the sticker he placed on the bottle was different again, a name I couldn't read. (It went down very well at dinner, though D. wasn't keen, and the next day someone else went to the shop and got the bottle refilled).

This may explain why there was an outbreak of carol singing after dinner: valydiarosada had brought some books, and we all sugested favourites.

Or you can just sing, of course; it doesn't have to be carols. Later on, we spent an evening with some of the Italian contingent, trying to find songs that we all knew. Silent Night in a variety of languages is probably as close as we came. We were helped by the surprising familiarity of one of our Italian friends with the early repertoire of Joan Baez; also by the fact that most of us, when we say we 'know' a song, can produce the first verse and chorus to an approximation of the tune - but when valydiarosada knows a song, she knows it.

Visit a number of nearby towns. I was happy to pass on the massed descent of the culture-vultures on Milan; Leonardo or no Leonardo, it sounded altogether too much like hard work. I was sorry not to make it into either Como or Lecco (at the end of either branch of Lake Como), but by the time I felt well enough to risk a long excursion, it was our last day, and such a fine bright day that we went for a walk instead.

Make a pilgrimage up the cobbled path to Santa Maria della Neve. You can't miss it, the path is dotted with a series of shrines (the committee seem to have been undecided whether to illustrate the Stations of the Cross or Scenes from the Life of the Virgin, and to have settled for some of each). We paused at the chapel to admire the view over the lake, then headed slightly beyond, turned onto a minor path along the hillside running parallel to the lake shore with glimpses down between the trees to the water below. This brought us down through the gardens of Eupilio's houses (it's pronounced ey-oo-PEEL-i-o, apparently) on the side of another, smaller lake.

This was as far as durham_rambler and D. had come the previous day, and they had talked about the possibility of walking around the lake. So when we had installed ourselves at an outdoor café and successfully use our minimal Italian to order panini and chips (mmm! hot salty chips! made me feel well enough to risk a little mayonnaise), we texted D., and he and valydiarosada came out and met us for an afternoon constitutional. The first half of this was the best, where the old road had been redesignated a cycle path (which the cyclists scorned, zipping along the busy highway on the other side of the lake, leaving the cycle tracks to the numerous pedestrians). There were plenty of waterfowl on the lake, mallards and coot and further out something that might have been an egret, and great plumes of reeds slowing the water at their feet so that it froze into a fine glassy shell. Returning along the other side of the lake, we were too close to the main road for real enjoyment, but there were pretty views back to the town and beyond.

Play Scrabble, which I haven't done in a long while, and enjoyed: there's an exhilaration in playing with people who are both better than you and more competitive. I'm reasonably good at thinking of words, but lazy about finding the highest scoring position for them. F and I won, but only because A, who was clearly keeping an eye on everyone's letters (except those of his wife, sitting out of his line of sight) induced us to make the word 'qi' (a variant spelling of the Chinese 'chi' admitted by his dictionary, it seems) in two dimensions at once.