Yes, we came here with eyes wide open. Different culture, government, customs are all a part of this jam-packed experience – life. So what kind of craziness are we experiencing and actually laughing over.

How’s this… we sign up for Italian lessons, offered through our region at a very affordable price. BUT hardly any of the employees in that office speak any English to help us. We’re signing up to get better at Italian, but don’t understand enough of it to figure out what someone is saying 100 miles an hour.. Seem a little off to you? Does to John and I and we just laugh. Thankfully, our good (Italian) friend, Stef, called the office and got all the details. Then, trying to locate the class… Google said one thing, or maybe two… here we go again on navigation. Stef got other information when she called the office for us. In the end, we had to stop some young folks on the street to get to the building two blocks over from where we were. It all worked out fine and now we are in Italian classes 2x a week for the next 6 months!

Cellphones and internet. Very cheap here. Rather than doing a two year contract like we had back in Virginia with Verizon, we do a month to month SIM card. Internet is 30 euros a month for 30 GB. Two cellphones a month – 20 euros. Now that works for me. And the internet is SO much faster than what we had back in Nelson County. But, there is a little glitch…our international calling is messed up. Been on the blink for over three weeks and the provider is ‘working on it’. It really shouldn’t be this difficult to fix, but again this is Italy and things just work in a different manner. So we have email, FB, messenger, etc. to stay in contact when needed. Ok, update on the international calling as we stopped by the store yesterday evening. When the support ticket was placed, it was only placed for credits due us, not for the technical issue of the international calling. That is now in place and I’ve been promised it would be working in 24 hours or refund and new provider. Guess I’ll know by this evening… And we are still laughing… Good sign.

Deliveries to our house. Now this issue is a truly perplexing one. The mail lady was able to find us, so no issues with mail deliveries. Common courier is another story. As packages cannot be left here without a signature or a paper handed over to the receiver, a call is made from the courier asking if we are home at a certain time to receive the package. All well in good, but usually the caller is speaking Italian very fast. I’ll try to slow them down, we work out a timing, but it’s our address that throws them. First there is no street sign up at the intersection. Google has not named our road and we don’t think most of the drivers are using Google anyway. Another problem is no one has lived at this address for a long time, so there isn’t a reference for these younger drivers. It’s definitely a learning curve to get them down here, but slowly we are working through it. Some packages make it here, some down the road at the winery. One right now is lost in limbo and trying to get that solved. We’re not laughing as much about this craziness right yet…

But the craziness is just, once again, small stuff. It works itself out. Usually. What we remember mostly about each day are the beautifully unique places we visit, the people we meet and new friendships developing. Today Luigi, our property manager and new friend, stopped by to drop off some paperwork. Along with him was his friend, Massimo. They bring laughter and friendship into our home and we are blessed for it. Yesterday, a friend of Luigi’s, Arturo, delivered us a second load of firewood.  We’re stocking up for winter. Arturo was with his family at the local restaurant for dinner. We were there as well. At the end of our meal, desserts showed up. We remarked to our waitress that she must be delivering them to the wrong table, as we had just finished ours. She said the gentleman (Arturo) at the other table had bought them for us. How could we refuse! New friendships everywhere we turn in this rural community.

This afternoon, we finally drove a few miles up the coast to a beach town – Pineto. I say ‘finally’ as we’ve been living here a bit over a month and not visited the sea yet. The sea is in my blood. My mother’s family was from a seaport in Abruzzo and my father’s family from Naples. Both on the water and the traditions of the sea and seafood were handed down to me. I learned to swim at the Jersey shore with my dad as my instructor. So not to have gotten down to the sea, as close as it is to us here, is just crazy!

So we took a break from the ‘setting up house’ thing and headed to Pineto. Not only does Pineto have a wide beautiful beach, of course deserted at this time of the year, but a shoreline of ancient, commanding pine trees. These imposing sentinels supply deep shade in the summer and today added mystery with the subdued lighting of fall. We were also pleasantly surprised by a food & crafts market along the village’s main road.  I’m just sorry I didn’t come more hungry. 😉

 

I would say John and I are changing. We can laugh through the craziness. It’s not something we did as readily in the US. Maybe it’s because we realize that we’d miss out on the gift of being here. Or it may be an acceptance that  it’s all part of this amazing life here in Italy.