Our Daily Bread

Well, we actually get our daily bread from the panetteria next door to the Coop (pronounced “cwaaap”), but we get everything else, practically, from the Coop.  This is right across the street from Grom.  Danika and Jason are particularly excited here as Mary had just bought them cookies to sustain them for the “field trip” we were about to take.  It was very lightly snowing / raining as we started out our walk.  It was a great walk, down to the Tre Archi down the Corso Cavour. 

We found a running track (Mary is very excited indeed to get out and run) and then, to the kid’s absolute delight, we found the “scala mobile” (escalator).   These took us up, and up, and up some more until we’d reached the Piazza Italia, which is all the way up in town.  Nice.   We even took the scala mobile down one set and found we were really very close to our place.  With some well-chosen side streets we almost avoided taking any stairs at all until we got home (to the 52 steps to our apartment).

Even in the rain, the view from our apartment is wonderful...

Caio, David

Our Little Apartment

January 29, 2012

I thought I would post pictures of our darling little apartment and tell you all about it.  I realized that in prior posts I complained about the 52 steps to get up to it.  Now that I am rested and fed, I think I can be a bit more positive J

The best thing about it is that it is on the top floor and we get loads of sunshine and great views.  It has high ceilings which make it feel bigger than it actually is.  We also have a little balcony that connects the two bedrooms, a perfect place for kids to play pranks on their parents (and visa versa –hee hee hee).

View from the kids side window

View from the living room at sunset

Danika and Jason on the balcony

Let’s start with the kitchen/dining.  This is what you see when you first walk into our little place.  We have a giant refrigerator/freezer by European standards, and have yet to put anything into the freezer.  I plan on stocking it with Gelato, oh yeah.   Surprisingly, we also have a dishwasher!  No microwave because all of our meals are made fresh.  We seriously shop every day… Not sure how that would work if we had full-time jobs.  Nice four-burner gas stove along with an electric oven.  Finally, our little dining table complete with four chairs.  For those of you coming to visit, you will have to sit on the tile floor.

The living room boasts a sofa and entertainment center complete with TV.  Hidden behind the closed doors and in the drawers are the kids clothes!  There is no dresser in their room as you will see later.

The Master bedroom boasts two large closet areas, so our clothes from two suitcases fit very nicely.  The bed leaves MUCH to be desired, though.  The first night we slept in it, it sagged so much in the middle that it felt like we were in a netted hammock.  The springs are SUPER noisy, so any movement wakes the entire neighborhood too.  We found a narrow piece of wood to put underneath the mattress, which has helped, but we need to get more wood to make it really usable.  My back is not doing too well with it.

Thank you to Julie Firth for letting us borrow the bedspread

The kids room is great with two beds and two bedside tables.  Danika quickly snagged the tiny desk for all of her “girly” things.  She says it’s because she writes a lot of journals… which is also true.  Jason didn’t seem to mind.  They are getting along surprisingly well for such small quarters.

The bathroom… what can I say?  It is comical.  There is enough room in the shower for me to stand there and turn in place, but no bending is allowed.  I am really glad I lost that weight before I came, but what am I going to do in 4 months when I have gained it all back?  

My favorite thing is the heater in the bathroom.  It is a heated towel rack… great getting out of the shower to a nice warm towel.  Oh, that’s right, we bought towels!  Gotta love the colors!  They are small, but at least they are a bit thicker than the first ones we saw!

We have a washing machine in here, but no dryer.  This has changed my laundry habits because I can no longer do all of the washing in one day.  I pretty much do one very small load at a time, and then hang everything to dry.  Right now it is hanging inside as it is very cold out, and the man next door (one story below) has his chimney going full tilt.  I’m just not into the smokey musk scent for my clothes.  The second picture is out of the bathroom window of his chimney when he doesn’t have it going.

The toilet is great.  The only problem is that they installed the washing machine directly opposite.  As you know, I am tall. Most of my height is in my legs.  Even when the washing machine door is closed, my legs don’t fit.  Maybe I will be a gymnast by the time we leave here.

So there you have it.  Hope you enjoyed the tour of our little place.

~Mary

Stairs

Another addition to one of Mary's posts...

Mary has noted that there are 52 stairs into our place at Casa MariSara, Via San Giacomo #21, Perugia.  Since we come and go at least 5 times a day, that means we are up and down 500 steps JUST to get to our place.  There are at least another 100 into town, and that's because we take the zig-zag route which is less steep.   I bet we do over 1000 stairs a day.

Here's some pictures of getting into our apartment:

First set of stairs (there are two more like this)

Last set, looking down from our apartment door.

Looking back at our place as we walk into town.  Our place is right in the middle, just beyond the place with the clothes hanging off the balcony.

Looking the other way from the last shot.

Cheers... David

Parking While English

I thought that I would add on to what Mary has said about a few things.

The Euro 80 / $120 parking ticket was a clear example of "parking while English".  We had no idea as to what we had done wrongly...the ticket was all in Italian (of course) and there was just a set of about 100 boxes to check, and #40 had been checked.  All we knew was that we'd parked exactly where other cars had parked, and that there were lots of other cars around us without tickets.

We had just checked on the car on our way into town.  We continued into town, and as we're walking along the main street, we see two Polizia, and Mary suggests that we ask them what "#40" means when you get a ticket. Since we did not have the ticket with us, this seemed like it would be quite a challenging task.  As we start talking to the Polizia, the male of the two quickly realizes that we're English, and he'd ticketed an English car, even to the extent of remembering it was a Vauxhall Zafira (which we have seen only one other in Italy).   Apparently "#40" means that you parked "in a crossroads" or intersection.  As you can see from the photo, we're parked with an English car.


What are the chances that you'd actually talk to the Polizia that gave you the ticket?  And then what are the chances that his partner would realize he'd been really ticketing unreasonably and want to straighten it out for us??


The next day it was pretty easy to find the same Polizia, as they are in a specific place in the center of town, it turns out, at a certain time of day.  We walk up to the two Plolizia (the lady is the same, the man different) and she asks if I have the ticket.  I pull it out and she quickly asks me to put it away, and follow her "to the office".  So we walk to the office...it's about 5 minutes away. 

Inside the office is a much older man sitting behind a desk.  It looks nothing like a police office, more like a lawyer's office.  The older man welcomes us.  The lady police officer asks me for the ticket, and I give it to her.  She takes it, puts it on the desk with a pile of other papers and says "done". 
Since this did not seem "done", we ask if that is all, and she says it is.

 What a great way to do business.

Cheers, David

Day of Angels...

January 27, 2012

Yes, Angels must be watching over us.  Today was amazing!  Four MAJOR fabulous things happened!

First of all, we went back to a different Vodafone office, and the guy there, Martin, (or Mateo) was so incredibly helpful!  He got our phones working within minutes when the other office couldn’t do it in two days. 

The second thing is that we couldn’t get our internet to work on our computers.  Martin spent quite a working on it to no avail, but he just wouldn’t give up.  He finally got it all worked out for us.  Just amazing!

The third thing was that we were told it would take us all day to register with the Italian police if you are staying more than 3 months.  When we went to register, we first ended up in Immigration where everything was chaos and no one knew what was going on.  David told me to stay there and he would check around.  He called me on my newly working phone and told me to meet him next door.  Here we were given the proper paperwork.  We couldn’t understand it, so this Jamaican guy helped us.  It required some of our Landlord’s information so we had to call him.  When we called him, he told us that he had already filed all the paperwork for our registration for us, so we didn’t have to wait in line, we could continue with our day!!!  Yahoo!!!

The final and BEST thing was that we found some police on the street to ask them to explain our ticket to us because we didn’t understand why we got it.  One of the officers was the actual one who gave us the ticket.  He remembered the British car.  He told his colleague (who spoke a little English) that we were parked where the roads crossed.  We explained that we were not and that we were the only car that got a ticket.  The other officer was a woman and she asked us all sorts of questions and figured that we had gotten the ticket because we were tourists.  When she realized that we were staying for four months, she explained it to the guy in Italian and told him to give us a break.  She told us to meet her in the same spot later in the afternoon.  When we met her later on, she took us to the main police office and where we handed our ticket to her boss.  She said okay and nodded to us.  That was it?  It was all taken care of???  Oh my gosh, I got teary-eyed at how nice she was to us! 

We decided to celebrate by going out to dinner.  We found some students to give us a good recommendation for a pizzeria (to please our poor kids).  It ended up being a great place with authentic pizza that was absolutely fabulous!  We are home now with full tummies and internet service so we can feel connected again.

Oh Happy Day!!!  J

~Mary

Still Pissy...

January 26, 2012

If you see a lot of text and no pictures, it is me just venting to get things off my chest so I can sleep at night.  Feel free to ignore the post.  This will be our third full day in Italy.  I can’t sleep, so I am up early writing this on the morning of the 27th.  At this point, I am wishing we had taken David’s sabbatical in Hawaii!  I am really frustrated that my Italian is so bad and I can’t remember most of what I learned.  Communication is extremely difficult at best. 

The other problem we are having is trying to get phone and internet access.  We did research before we left the states, and everyone said Vodafone was the best.  So far, it has been two days and we have returned several times to the shop, and neither our phones nor internet are working.  We bought Italian sim cards, so there should be no problem with the phones.  We get messages from Vodafone in Italian, so we know the phone is working.  However, we can’t read the messages and still haven’t managed to call each other on our phones.  So, it is back to the Vodafone shop again today, Ugh!

As for internet, just having gmail would really help.  I feel really disconnected.   Mom hasn’t heard from me in quite a while, and that really bothers me.  I think I am worried too that she won’t be able to come visit us here because of the steepness of the city and the stairs everywhere.  She just had knee replacement surgery and is a real trooper, but this is killing MY knees!  I do not recommend Perugia for anyone that needs wheelchair accessibility.

Oh No!!!  We got a parking ticket!  $120!!!  What???  We parked exactly where our landlord told us to park.  What?  None of the cars around us have tickets…  Something is fishy… David says we got the ticket because it was obviously a tourist English car.  I feel sick to my stomach.  Must have chocolate!!!  Thanks to Julie and Andrew Firth, I have two giant Cadbury Milk Chocolate bars with me.  Let the feast begin.

I am feeling really sorry for our kids.  We have spent so much time worrying about getting phone and internet service and shopping for our next meal that they have spent most of their time waiting outside of shops for us.  Right now I just want to get on the next plane home.   I sure hope this feeling changes!

What I need is a good long run to clear my head.  As far as running goes, I thought I was being a bit of a wimp when I said I wouldn’t run much because I don’t like hills.  At this point, hills would be welcome!  It is so steep here, that the only hills to run are the roads that switch back and forth up and down.  They are barely narrow enough for a car, much less a pedestrian trying to dodge crazy Italian drivers!  We get from place to place mostly by finding hidden stairways which have proved to be much safer!  I can barely walk the stairs without having to stop to catch my breath.  I can’t imagine being able to run them!  Check back with me in four months though, I should never say never!

One giant Cadbury's milk chocolate bar GONE!  Let’s hope today is a better day  J

Our First Bad Day :(

January 24, 2012

Today  was the day we were driving to our destination place in Perugia, Italy.  We rented an apartment from a guy who only worked in Perugia until 3:00 p.m., so we needed to be there by that time.  We decided to get an early start, just to be safe.  I drove first, and as we left Nice, we were in heavy traffic that turned into bumper to bumper traffic on the way to Monte Carlo.  It was a bit stressful watching the time tick by and not getting any closer.  There was construction going on everywhere in Monaco.  We had planned to take time and explore Monte Carlo a bit, but as we lost an hour getting there, we tried to exit as quickly as possible. 

 

In the process, I was looking in my side view mirror and drifted into the curb.  David screamed, we hit the curb and it was back onto the road again.  It was quite easy to hit the curb there as the streets are so narrow and just a little drift and there you are!  The kids started laughing because of the way David screamed.  I was completely stressed from driving in the traffic, so the laughter was welcome, and I couldn’t help laugh myself as it really was quite a scream!  I was just happy the kids weren’t petrified of my driving!  I think that was about the only laughter we had today.

So, it was on to Italy and once on the toll roads, the going was pretty fast as the speed limit was 80.  We drove through loads of tunnels which creeped me out a bit because for some reason I kept thinking of Princess Diana.  The traffic was moving superfast through the tunnels, and I just felt we might crash at any moment.   The speed limit stayed 80 through really sharp curves in these tunnels too!

The other weird thing about driving in Italy is that the speed limit changes a lot from 80 to 45… crazy…  So it was FAST then slooooooowwwwwwwww, and repeat. I was really tired after 3 ½ hours of driving!

By 1:00 p.m. we needed to contact our landlord, and we had British cell phones with us.  They worked just fine in France, but we couldn’t get them to work in Italy.  We were receiving text messages from the service provider saying things like “Welcome to Italy”, so we knew the phones worked, but couldn’t get them to make a call and it was our only way of contacting the landlord to get keys, etc. Yikes!  This was stressing me out yet again wondering where we would spend the night if we couldn’t get keys… 

We were also driving fast to make up the lost time.  We were on track for a 2:40 arrival, giving us 20 minutes to spare to try and find a pay phone and call the landlord.  Unfortunately, our satellite navigation GPS system had a really hard time once we hit Perugia because of the steep terrain.  It is so steep here that sometimes the GPS thinks you are on the road directly above or below the one you are actually on.  So, we drove around lost for awhile until we found a parking spot near the center of the old part of town.  We knew the apartment was somewhere near the center. 

So, we walked around, and thanks to Google Maps Street View (which we had looked at when we first searched for apartments) we recognized the street view and found the apartment.  Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a pay phone, and it was after 3:00 p.m.  So, I waited with the kids by the apartment in case the landlord showed up, and David walked 15 minutes to the train station to see if he could find the guy (He said he would meet us at the train station after 3:00 p.m.)

While David was gone, the Landlord phoned him and said he had already left town and would head on over.  David walked back to us and we all waited outside of the apartment, tired, hungry, and desperate for a bathroom.  Forty minutes later, the landlord finally arrived!  That is when he told us that if we were using a foreign phone, we needed to put a ‘+’ in front of the number before we dialed!  Ughhh!

It took an hour and a half for us to go over everything with him and get our luggage up the four plus flights of stairs (52 steps to be exact).  While driving the car to a closer place so we could unload, the street was so narrow that David scraped the side mirror, our first Italian ding!  After all of that, we were too exhausted to unpack, so we walked to the train station where we could get something to eat and then we shopped for a few groceries and necessities like toilet paper.

Surprisingly, towels are NOT provided in this fully furnished apartment.  It is also very difficult finding a shop that sells them.  Of course, my Italian completely left me, and I couldn’t remember how to ask for them either. We finally found a shop that sells super thin, terrible quality towels for $25 each!  I am talking about towels thinner and smaller than ones you would find in the cheapest motel in the States.  I just couldn’t buy one for $25!!!  So, we are going to use camping towels until we go to the market this Saturday to buy some real towels.  All in all, just one exhausting day!

Hopefully better news next time…

~Mary

So Nice in Nice!

January 23, 2012

Our last day in Paris was spent at the Musee d’Orsay.  It is too bad we were not allowed to take pictures of the artwork there as it was incredible.  We couldn’t believe that we could walk right up to so many famous paintings.  Incredible!  David did manage to take a picture of the main Gallery from up on the fifth level.  It used to be an old train station… love the interior now.  We were also able to take pictures looking outside through the clock.

That evening we went to the Arc de Triomph and saw the eternal flame for the Unknown Soldier.  Then we walked the entire way back down the Champs Elysees to the Louvre. 

We had to stop at the car dealerships because they had all of their concept cars there, so David and Jason had a little fun with that.

Then we said goodbye to our little studio near the market… so sad…

Then next morning we drove from Paris to Clermont Ferrand and stayed with a colleague of David’s from UCLA , Arnaud, his wife, Pillar, and their three children.  They treated us like royalty!  After walking through the city, we had dinner at their house.  We had zucchini soup (Pillar’s family recipe from Spain) and a local French dish made with bacon, onion, potatoes and cheese.  Absolutely divine…  Then they bought a special Galette des Rois cake with porcelain figurines like the one we had in Paris.  Danika ended up with a figurine again and became Queen for the day.   The next morning they served us an incredible breakfast with croissants and pan aux chocolate (pastries with chocolate inside) and we also had baguettes with something like Nutella, but even better!  Yes, we were spoiled rotten. 

Then it was off to drive south, and what a beautiful drive it was.  Driving through the south of France reminded me of driving through the hills of Southern California..  It was glorious sunshine once we were further south and the temperature warmed up to sixty degrees Fahrenheit, so it felt like summer to a Montanan!  So nice to feel the sun on our faces.  Then coming to the sea felt like being in San Diego again.  That morning we had decided that we would rather have two longer days of driving with a day to play in the middle instead of three short days of driving every day.  So we pushed through to Nice.  What a great decision that was!  Arnaud helped us find a place to stay that had a kitchenette and was only two blocks from the beach.   After checking in and a spot of food, we walked the beach at night.  It was so relaxing and so nice to be out of the misty rain and low clouds.

Lovely day today!  We walked up the beach to the old part of Nice.  On the way, the kids stopped to build rock towers and skip stones in the sea.  Then it was a walk up to the Chateau de Nice, up on a hill between two bays.  The panoramic views were spectacular and the kids enjoyed the surrounding park. 

On the way back to the hotel we stopped so they could have their first swim in the Mediterranean Sea.  Too cold for us, but they didn’t seem to mind.  It is so nice to have warm weather (58 F).  Feels just like being in San Diego this time of year.

Danika, soaking wet and happy!

This evening we walked the Promenade des Anglais along the beach again and went into Old Nice for a typical Nicoise meal.  Fabulous J  Then it was a nice walk back along the beach to the hotel. 

We shall pack up and leave in the morning.  We will finally be at our apartment in Perugia, Italy tomorrow evening.  It may take a few weeks to get internet access, so not sure when the next post will happen.   We are so excited to finally unpack and stop living out of suitcases!!!

We are missing all of our friends very much.  Keep posting the comments because we love hearing from you.  It really helps us feel connected. 

~Au revoir  to France, next post will be from Italy!!!

Mary