Where we're at

We arrived in Fidenza on Monday evening and are staying in the Albergo San Donnino, which is on the town's main drag, Via Cavour, at the other end of the little downtown from the apartment of our friends, Pam and Romano.

The San Donnino is a funny little place that is both inexpensive and shabby, in a way that I mostly find endearing except when I'm waiting for some bit of data to make its way through the sludge-like wifi connection. The staff is friendly, the sheets are clean, and the room and bathroom are spacious, but the hotel's aspirations are a bit comical.

For example, I see on Wikipedia that one requirement for a two-star hotel (which Albergo San Donnino claims to be) is "a reading light next to the bed." The San Donnino seems to have scrounged around in someone's attic to meet this requirement.

 It's got a frayed cloth cord and you turn it on by plugging it in. It's also broken so that the light can't possibly point at anything you might read unless you were on the ceiling. And there's only one of them. But since Danny and I are both using Kindles, it hardly matters.

And how can I not like a hotel that still offers linen towels and room keys that look like they're from a magic castle?













On Tuesday, our first full day here, we rose early (for us),  gulped down some (excellent) coffee, snagged a couple of things from the San Donnino's rather dreary breakfast buffet of plastic-wrapped pastries, and hurtled off into the pouring rain to look at a series of six apartments with three different realtors. But that story must wait till tomorrow's entry because it's already well past midnight and I haven't done my DuoLingo exercises yet today--currently my only, increasingly tenuous link to some hope of Italian fluency.

A domani!