The guest room

It's minimal but I believe it's now fully operational. And our first guest has arrived. I guess we'll get her report in the morning.

How many Ikea items can you spot?

I think this is the longest we've ever been in a place without having some kind of art to put on the walls. All that blank space is making us both nervous. We are going to need to do something about this, and soon.

Today's accomplishments

1. Rodolfo the plumber came this morning. First he and Danny moved the washer and dryer out of the second-bathroom-to-be.

Here they are coming through what will soon be the kitchen. That's Rodolfo in the yellow shirt. I keep waiting for him to burst into song, with a name like Rodolfo. In fact, he did sing to himself a bit while he was working, but nothing at all operatic.


Once the two appliances were installed in their new location in the alcove outside the existing bathroom, Rodolfo hooked them up. I immediately ran a load of wash.

In addition to being a good and efficient plumber and a cheerful fellow, Rodolfo likes to figure out ways to explain things to me despite the fact that he speaks no English and I speak very weak Italian. He is both patient and ingenious. He'd make a great teacher.

 2. Next Rodolfo rearranged the gas line and connected our new stove (in the corner of the first photo). So now we have a working oven AND four gas burners. Our one-burner induction hot plate has been retired. It's such a pleasure to be able to cook more than one thing at a time.

3. Pam and Romano's son Cri, who's a demon cleaner, came over for a couple of hours after Rodolfo left and scrubbed down the bathroom, kitchen, and guest room. I neglected to take his picture, but he did a great job and is a sweetheart besides. We didn't give the place a good cleaning when we first moved in, because there was no hot water, and then we just sort of got inured to it being not very pristine. Cri did things like clean the top of the tile surround in the bathroom and scrub off whatever that weird stuff on the front of the radiator was. Thank you, Cri!

4. Here's how the living room is shaping up. My inadequate photo doesn't include our glamorous ruffled Ikea light fixture, but you can see most of our other Ikea living-room furniture.

This photo wasn't posed--I just happened to catch Danny relaxing after moving the washer and dryer and putting together a little Ikea table--but he is in fact perusing the Ikea catalogue.

Note my little music practice corner. I have been dutifully practicing every day.

5. Once Danny had rested up we went over to Pam and Romano's and picked up a white table that they don't want anymore. Picked it up literally, since we carried it back here (Danny, at his insistence, hauling the heavy bottom part). We're putting in the guest room, where it will serve as my desk when we don't have company.  It's Ikea, too, so it fits our theme. As we left her place tonight Pam said, "If you stay here long enough we'll be able to clean out our apartment!"

Our friend Valerie is coming tomorrow for Easter weekend. We've made a bunch of restaurant reservations and our plans also include visiting some of the local boutiques and going to see an Italian movie whose title translates as "Put Grandma in the Freezer." I'll post a photo of the guest room tomorrow once I get it set up.

Little things I love

1. I tend to get up on the late side, 8:30 or 9. By the time I'm fully awake, the street outside our building is bustling with people going to work, heading to the shops, or meeting friends to drink coffee and catch up. As a result, there is a constant din of Italian conversation outside our windows, with lots of laughter and drama. Some might find this annoying, but I am charmed.

The street quiets down during the lunch break, which runs from about 1 to 3 p.m. Then the flow of Italian conversation starts up again, and keeps going until around eleven, and maybe a little later on the weekend. It all sounds very jovial, but maybe that's because I can't understand all that much of what they're saying.

It appears there was a sale on toilet paper somewhere

2. This town is flat. There are no hills to speak of. This makes me very happy. I am content to forego dramatic vistas when it's so comfortable to walk around. 

It'a also nice for riding a bicycle, which a lot of people much older than we are do all the time. (There's an abundance of bike lanes and bike paths, too.) We will have to try it. 

3. There are several kiosks in our vicinity where you can buy bottled water, beer, snacks, and other comestibles 24 hours a day. 

One of them stocks not only the usual cookies, candies, sodas, beers, and waters, but an array of local products, including honey and wonderful very fresh whole milk, plus yogurt, kefir, and fruit juice. Sometimes they have butter, pasta, and Parmesan. I find this extremely endearing. 

4. There's a church nearby that rings its big old bells on the hour every hour. It doesn't sound like a recording. 

5. Our street is nothing special; most of it was built (or rather rebuilt) after World War II, and the architecture is not very exciting. But it looks so Italian, so accogliente (cosy, welcoming, hospitable), It's especially lovely at sunset. Walking up or down it gives me a lift every time. 

Three more things that are different here

1. Whether you buy produce at the little fruit and vegetable market in town, or at the big supermarket on the outskirts, you don't pick up anything without first putting on a plastic disposable glove.

I'd initially assumed you didn't need to bother with gloves if you were handling things like bananas, which come securely packaged in their own peels, or potatoes, where cooking is going to kill other people's lingering germs. But when Pam took me to a supermarket and caught me picking up an orange with my bare hands she sternly told me that this was Not Done and that I had to wear gloves like everyone else.

Since then I've been looking around and noticing that this is a rule just about everyone really does follow. Even men, whom I chauvinistically assumed wouldn't care all that much about vegetable hygiene. I snuck this picture of a gentleman obediently picking out fruit with a gloved hand at the fruit stand that I patronize several times a week. (Those are blood oranges in the foreground.)

On the other hand (har har), I haven't seen any of those hand-sanitizer dispensers that are so ubiquitous in markets and other public places in California. There we're worried about protecting ourselves from other people's germs. Here in Italy, people are expected to take responsibility for not imposing their germs on others. It's the difference between Americans' trademark every-man-for-himself individualism and the more communal attitude of at least some corners of the Old World.

They don't offer take-out drinks, either

2. If there's take-out coffee anywhere here, I haven't seen it.

There are dozens of caffes in this little town, and while they're rarely crowded they all seem to be getting enough custom to keep going. They serve coffee and pastries in the morning, espresso and panini in the afternoon, and wine, beer, and spirits all day and into the evening.

But whatever they're offering, you drink it there on site. I didn't realize how deeply ingrained the take-out ethos was in me until I got here and kept realizing that I couldn't offer to run out and buy a coffee for the electrician, or bring one back to Danny while he was engaged in some household drudgery, or grab one on my way to somewhere else. Suddenly I had to sit down in a commercial establishment and drink coffee like a civilized person.

Of course a not unrelated aspect of this is that the coffee drinks these establishments offer range from small (a cappuccino) to thimble-sized (an espresso). There wouldn't really be much point in getting them to go, since they take only minutes to drink; when people linger  over coffee in a caffe, as they very often do, it's to savor the atmosphere or continue a conversation, not to work through a lot of fluid ounces. Whereas the big tubs of coffee that Americans are used to are designed to be brought to the office or hauled around in the car and consumed over a much longer stretch of time. They're not a break from work or commuting or whatever, but a way to avoid a break.

3. I'm used to all the lotions and creams promising to get rid of wrinkles and restore youthful sparkle to your skin. They have those here in Italy, too. But what I hadn't seen before, at least not in quantity, was such an array of products that promise to turn back the clock on your lumpy old backside.

I guess I'm so accustomed to the fantasy that facial wrinkles can be smoothed away with a little high-priced grease that it no longer strikes me as insane. But I'm sort of aghast at the thought of how many people evidently are smoothing on all these anti-cellulite and "remodeling" preparations in hopes of making their rumps as taut and smooth as a 20-year-old athlete's.

I'm sure there's an important sociological point to be made about this, but I have no idea what it is.

Day at the opera

Today's adventure was a trip to the nearby town of Busseto, where Verdi once lived and where the composer now looms larger than ever, since he's the reason for the tourism that seems to be this sleepy little burg's raison d'etre. 

Months ago Danny bought two tickets to see La Traviata in the 19th-century Teatro Verdi, Busseto's 300-seat jewel box of a theater. But it turns out that the only way to get to Busseto from Fidenza, aside from hitch-hiking, is to take a bus, and the bus's infrequent schedule meant we'd have to get there two hours before showtime and not head home until two hours after the opera ended.

Well, we were willing to make some sacrifices for art. We took the bus, strolled around the very pretty historic center of the town, admired the fortress that houses the theater, and had a couple of quick panini at a nearby cafe.

Danny had bought the tickets on line, snagging what looked like the last two seats available, all the way up in the top balcony. We climbed numerous flights of stairs and discovered that the cheap seats in Teatro Verdi are hardly seats at all, but narrow wooden benches.  (The seat in the bottom left of the photograph was Danny's. Mine was to his right.)

The theater itself is a treat, with lavish decorations in the gold-loving Italian style and great acoustics. 

But this Traviata was by far the most uncomfortable opera experience we've ever had, and given how tightly squeezed and sitzfleisch-unfriendly many opera seats are, that's really saying something. 

The photo above pretty accurately captures the very partial view of the stage from my seat. Danny could see even less. The only way to actually see the stage, or most of it, was to stand up on the bench, which is what I and many others did.

See that white lump on the bench in the center? That's my coat, and I spent most of the opera standing on the bench behind it, trying not to bump my head on the fire sprinkler. (That's my purplish sweater hanging next to where I stood. It was also hot as hell up there.) Danny stood in the aisle, behind that lady in the gray sweater.

Supertitles were projected above the stage in both Italian and English, but they were fuzzy and hard to read, particularly the English. Everything seemed to be conspiring against us.

But the production was clever and the singing was wonderful, particularly the Violetta, Isabella Lee. She not only has a beautiful voice, but managed to wring real pathos out of Violetta's moral predicament, which can too easily seem preposterous, and was very convincingly terminal.

When we first saw our seats, we discussed leaving after the first act, since we weren't sure we could endure much more of the opera on a hard bench, and we're a little old for standing room, particularly on a balance beam. The performance was so good, though, that we stayed almost until the end.

Nevertheless, we bailed as poor Violetta waited for Alfredo's deathbed visit. We'd remembered that there was a bus back to Fidenza at 5:53, and if we caught it we wouldn't have to hang around Busseto for another two hours. Which is what we did, because we felt we'd suffered enough for art for one day. 

Little milestones

1. This weekend we finally moved out of the guestroom where we've been camping since we first took up residence, because it was smaller than the master bedroom and therefore easier to make habitable with a space heater. Moving into the master bedroom meant finally unpacking our suitcases and deciding who gets which drawers and what goes where. We realize we need a lot more Ikea furniture.

2. Danny hooked up the oven. The stove is still waiting to be connected to the gas line, which the plumber will do when he returns, but the oven is electric and so usable now that the electrician has updated the kitchen plugs.

3. We had our first dinner party. That is, we were able to host Pam and Romano for a change, and Danny celebrated the newly working oven by making a juniper-flavored pot roast. Asparagus, fusilli, green salad, and fruit salad for dessert made up the rest of the meal, along with some good red wine and bread that our friends brought as housewarming offerings.

4. We've invited our first house guest. Our friend Valerie, who's in the midst of her own Italian home renovation saga in Orvieto, is coming to visit Easter weekend. That's another reason we probably need to hit Ikea again this week.

A stately presence

We know there are other people living in our building, but so far we have met only one of them, a very friendly and very helpful woman named Pia. She and I chatter away with each other in a mix of my bad Italian and her not very strong English,  and have managed to establish that she likes hearing me practice the violin (I think she means it) and that I am glad that someone so forgiving lives upstairs.

We have also met, repeatedly, one other resident, a rather grand cat named Attila--which is pronounced, in the Italian manner, AH-tillah. I'm not even sure how we know his name, since we have never met his owner, the woman who lives in the apartment below ours. (I think last fall the realtor told Pam who he was, and she told us.)

Attila often hangs out in our building's front hall, guarding the mailboxes or inspecting whoever comes in the door. He is very dignified, handsome but quite portly, an Orson Welles sort of a cat. (This photo really does not do him justice, but it's the best one I've come up with in several days of trying.) Attila is wise to keep himself well insulated, since the hall is icy this time of year, thanks to the breeze that always seems to be blowing from the courtyard.

So dark I had to use flash

The other place I encounter him is in his little nest by his owner's front door, which I pass on the way up the stairs. The light in her part of the staircase is out, perhaps by design, so even in the middle of the day Attila's perch is crepuscular at best. I have to peer in to see if he's in residence or out on patrol.

I wonder if he is ever allowed into her apartment. After living without heat myself for just a few days, I can't help hoping that he gets to spend at least a little time curled up next to a nice, warm radiator.   

It's all good

Our glamorous new modem

Well, mostly good. The man from the phone company arrived this morning, right on schedule, and quickly hooked up our new internet and wifi line.

Future site of the lavatrice and asciugatrice

Then the plumber dropped by late this afternoon and ascertained that everything we want him to do, including moving the washing machine and dryer from the back someday-second-bathroom to an alcove in the existing bathroom, is eminently doable and will be done sometime next week, possibly even Monday.



Romano even tracked down his friend the painter and it sounds like we might be able to get the kitchen painted before Ikea arrives with all the mobili. Then he can do the rest of the place while we're not here in May.

The one disappointment is that the SIM card that came with our new Vodafone package can't be used in a cellphone. What you can use it for is a mystery that not even Pam was able to crack, despite poring over the reams of warnings, instructions, and legal hoo-ha that came with our new modem/router.

The reason this matters is that just about everything in Italy seems to require having a mobile phone. We first realized this when we arrived a couple of weeks ago and discovered that the PIN on our Italian bank's ATM card was no longer valid. When we went into the bank to get a new PIN, they asked for a cell-phone number--but not an American one, which is the only number I have at the moment. There were only two ways to give us a new PIN, the nice man at the bank explained: either they could send it to me as a text message or mail it to my Fidenza address.

Well, then mail it to me, I said, since I don't have a phone number yet. I didn't realize till a week had gone by that it would take seven business days, not counting the day we were there, for the bank to mail out the new PIN, plus a couple of days for the envelope to travel through the Italian postal system to my mailbox--which ended up being almost two weeks.

You have to take a very Zen attitude, as Pam keeps reminding us.

Since then, it seems a phone number is necessary for anything from getting a discount card at the local grocery to connecting with the agent who runs our building. Sometimes I can get away with giving my U.S. phone number; sometimes people will accept my email address as contact information. But being without an Italian phone number feels a bit like being undocumented. You can get away with it, but being phoneless means I'm not quite legitimate.

There is, moreover, a further wrinkle. Last summer, when we were in Southern Italy, I bought SIM cards from TIM, the Italian equivalent of Ma Bell, for our wi-fi hotspot and for Lina and Steven (Max wanted a super-duper powerful gamer SIM and insisted on buying his own). That insured that none of us had to miss a moment of whatever crap was on the World Wide Web while we rusticated in a remote mountain village in Molise. Then I got another SIM when we were here in Fidenza in November. And of course I didn't renew any of these SIM cards when they ran out, because why would I want to pay for Italian phone service when I wasn't in Italy?

But when I presented myself at the local internet shop after my visit to the bank and asked to renew my most recent SIM, I was told that I could neither renew it nor buy a new one. I'd had too many; TIM would have nothing more to do with me, at least not when it came to supplying me with SIM cards.

Apparently underworld types had been given to buying bushels of SIM cards and using them for  various kinds of shady business, so a tight limit is now imposed on how many SIMs you're allowed to have. I'm not clear if TIM is done with me for life or if I'll be able to become a customer again in a few years. For now, though, if I want cell phone service I have to turn to some other provider.

I'm already paying Vodafone, the second biggest provider in our area, something like $40 a month for internet, and it rankles me to pay god knows how much more for a phone number that I'll probably rarely use. Apparently that's part of the cost of being Italian, though, and so I will pay it. And try not to be stupidly petty about it, either. 

Italian style

I may be a sucker for a certain brand of Swedish modern baroque (for example, my infatuation with some of Ikea's more dramatic light fixtures), but I feel all that Protestant blood congealing in my veins when I am confronted with the glitz and glamour of the Italian every-day.

Here, for example, are two display rooms in a not particularly outrageous home-goods store we stopped into last week. So much gold...

For some reason I find the glittering gold quilt in the bedroom even more disturbing than the sequinned death's head on the couch.

Even comfy old-lady shoes get the bling treatment.

But for full-bore pizzazz al italiano, I look to the offerings at Fidenza's largest "Chinese store." General stores of various sizes run by Chinese immigrants are now a fixture in Italian towns all over, offering a wide range of low-priced household goods, clothing, and knick-knacks, much of it made in China. The locals call them "Chinese stores," and therefore so do we. There are several in Fidenza, including a gigantic one that we've visited several times looking for those odds and ends we don't know where else to find--a scrub brush, for example, or a cheap wastebasket.

On a recent trip this trio of handbags caught my eye. Particularly the one that looks like a teapot or perhaps a soccer ball. You could keep someone's head in there.

Mamma mia, that's Italian. Unless maybe it's Chinese.

And there was light

This morning Romano, Christiano the electrician, and Christiano's assistant, whose name I never learned, arrived a bit after 8:30. This was the third day in a row that we had to get up at an hour that is for us painfully early. (Catching the train to Ikea the past two days required a similar schedule). But it was well worth it, because today we got working light fixtures in all the rooms in the apartment. No more wandering around with a flashlight trying to find where the towels are or where I left my shoes.

Romano was there to get his friend Christiano started, since the electrician speaks hardly any English and didn't want to discuss the details of our circuitry and requirements without a competent translator on hand. After 20 minutes Romano headed off to Parma, to his job teaching singing at the conservatory, and Christiano and his helper got to work.

Christiano (bottom half)

The other guy

Meanwhile so did Danny and I. Two of the light fixtures we bought at Ikea the other day were something of a craft project and we needed to put them together before they could be installed. They're very ingenious concoctions of plastic panels held together by rubber bands. I think following Ikea's instructions was probably good brain exercise for both of us.

I noticed that it was important to me that I finished first. Being an oldest child is a hard mindset to shake.



Once we were done, Christiano put them up, one in the foyer, one in the hall. Bello, no? And cheap, too.

The two electricians also added a bunch of plugs for the new kitchen and redid the wiring so that we can move the washer and dryer into an alcove outside the existing bathroom.

In addition, they added some plugs to the first guest room so that when our kids come to visit both rooms will have plenty of places to plug in their devices.

We got all this accomplished using a combination of my Italian, sign language, and, for one particularly puzzling exchange about a relay switch, Google Translate. We were all pleased with ourselves.




Another, rather less demanding craft project was the ceiling fixture in the living room. It's just a pile of stiff paper, reinforced with wires on the edges, that you crumple ad libitum for the desired artistic effect.

Before

After

I had to darken these to make the detail visible; in real life the fixture gives off plenty of light. I am as ridiculously pleased with these new additions to our household as if I'd designed them myself.

Tomorrow Christiano and his buddy are coming back to finish up. Then we'll get the plumber in to ready the gas and water lines for the new kitchen, hook up the washer and dryer in their new place, and connect the stove, so we can cook on more than one burner. 

And another piece of good news: Vodafone is supposedly coming to install our internet on Friday morning. By next week we may be so boringly civilized that I'll have nothing left to write about.   

Don't read unless you like hearing me complain

Today we went back to Ikea, fine-tuned our kitchen plan, and ordered all of it, plus a few rugs and other odds and ends too bulky for us to haul home on our own.

It was a very unsatisfying trip, though, one of those days when one thing after another didn't go the way we'd planned.

We had an appointment for noon, so we took the 10:15 train, had a caffe and waited around the Parma train station for half an hour, and caught the bus to Ikea--which only runs every two hours. But when we presented ourselves at the Ikea kitchen department, we discovered that the very nice man who was on deck to work with us spoke no English, even though we'd specifically asked for an English-speaker. I was willing to plunge ahead, but trying to make dozens of decisions about the nuts and bolts of a kitchen in an atmosphere of linguistic confusion was just too nerve-wracking. We had to wait till two o'clock to get an appointment with an Ikea kitchen expert with some English proficiency.

So we shopped for a while and had an Ikea lunch (and yes, they do serve Swedish meatballs, in regular, vegetarian, and chicken versions).

Yesterday we'd had lox, which was a bit of a treat after two weeks of cured pork products. Today's lunch was less satisfying (mains: lasagne for Danny, a salad with shrimp for me), in particular the vegetable side of fennel, which we were sort of excited about until we realized that the fennel was (a) boiled, (b) tough, and (c) ice cold.

Italian food is great, but a lot of their vegetable dishes seem more a cliche version of British cooking: boiled, soggy, and flavorless. Why do Italians put up with such icky vegetables? Do they eat things like this at home?

At two we had our appointment with Alessandro, who spoke pretty good English and was delightful and also quite beautiful, in the way that so many Italian men are. But the appointment stretched on and on, because things had to be checked and printed and so on, and we watched anxiously as the time for the 3:47 bus back to the Parma station drew closer and closer. We also had to absorb the frustrating news that the soonest the new kitchen can be delivered is...April 9. So a few more weeks of living with one burner and no place to put anything.

Finally we were done. Danny and I sprinted down to the check-out, hoping we could somehow make the bus. Of course sprinting in an Ikea is no joke--there were miles (literally, I think) between the kitchen department and the purchasing endpoint. Once we got there, all we had to do was pay. And yesterday we had finally--finally, after two weeks!--gotten the new PIN for our Italian bank account debit card, so we were all set to pay for our new kitchen with euros we'd deposited back when the exchange rate was much more favorable to us than it is now.

But our bank, in its wisdom, wouldn't permit us to charge more than 1,500 euros on our bank card, and the bill for an entire kitchen was considerably more than that. A lovely Ikea staffer helped us figure out how to pay that much with our bank card and the rest on a U.S. credit card, and another gave us the gift card that we're entitled to because of Ikea's current kitchen promotion, and a third fetched the kitchen stool that we were carrying home with us. By then, though, the bus was long gone. And the next one wouldn't be until close to six o'clock.

By now it was almost four, and we'd left home a little after ten this morning, and much as we love Ikea we were pretty sick of being there. Plus I had gotten into that home renovation frame of mind where an extra hundred, or thousand, dollars here or there starts to seem inconsequential. So one of the nice Ikea folks called us a taxi, which we took to the Parma train station.

Instead of having an old-fashioned meter box, the taxi showed the fare on the rear-view mirror. So our driver could watch the growing dismay on our faces when we came to a stop at a railway crossing and spent two euros waiting for an empty, four-car train to finally go by. The whole trip lasted about 15 minutes but the fare ticked up awfully quickly and the total came to 14.50 euros, or almost 18 dollars. Even to someone in home-renovation mode that seemed a little steep.

Then we had to wait a half-hour for a train in the Parma station, which discourages loitering by having almost no places to sit and no area where you're not standing in a brutal draft. By the time we staggered back to our apartment, we weren't feeling at all celebratory, just glad that we don't have to go back to Ikea again tomorrow.

Instead, first thing in the morning the electrician is coming. We hope he will rearrange the gas line for our new stove, put new plugs where the new kitchen is going so that we can plug everything in, and put up all our light fixtures. But after today I am braced for things to go less than smoothly.

Kitchen decision-making

I've fallen behind on my blogging, partly because slowing down seems to be in the air here, and mostly because we've been spending so much time planning, worrying about, and fighting over the when and what of our new cucina.

The apartment originally had a smallish kitchen behind a formal dining room that opens off the front hall, opposite the living room. At some point the owners made the dining room into an eat-in kitchen and used the former kitchen for...we're not sure what. Storage, maybe?

Italians take their kitchens with them when they move, including the appliances and cabinets, and when we bought this place there was no kitchen left in either location. Faced with the challenge of an almost blank slate, we've been debating whether to keep the kitchen in the front room (the "new kitchen") or move it back to where the kitchen was originally. Just in the last four days we've gone back and forth on this question at least twice. This has led to some marital stress.

We gave ourselves a deadline of today by making a plan to go to Ikea (known in these parts as "ee-KAY-a"). Ikea has a big store outside of Parma, not far from us, and you can get to it from here by public transportation, a train and then a bus. Ikea is where we're getting the kitchen, and to figure out the pieces we had to know where the kitchen was going to go.

So last night it was decided: we're putting the kitchen in the back room, the "old kitchen." What clinched it was that Danny really wants to have the dining room table by the window, which is where the sink, stove, and so on would be if we went with the "new kitchen" option.

In real-life version walls won't be transparent

I like putting the kitchen in back because it will mean we can sit around the dinner table after eating without looking at the dirty dishes in the sink.

During our visit today we spent more than an hour with one of Ikea's kitchen planners, who thankfully spoke quite a bit of English. To the right is what we came up with, as rendered by Ikea's nifty kitchen-planner program.

To the left is what the room actually looks like at the moment. We have to check a few of those measurements...

And here to the right is the "new kitchen," which is going to revert to being a dining room, but which we've made into our temporary camping kitchen while we wait for everything to get organized. (At the moment it's where all the high-powered electrical outlets are.) I captured Danny making pork cutlets for our dinner tonight on our Ikea induction hot plate. The dining room table will eventually go sort of where he's standing.

What will go on the other side of the room is still under debate.

We're going back to Ikea again tomorrow to finalize the kitchen plan and pay for all of it, including delivery, set-up, and installation.

But while we were there today we picked up a bunch of other things. At the top of our list were a few light fixtures. We've not only been living without heat until recently, but also without any lights in most of the rooms. We're still making do with a flashlight and a few plug-ins. The light in our temporary kitchen is actually part of a mood-lighting sort of lamp that will go in the living room as soon as we get the light fixtures up. To do that we're inviting in an electrician, whom we're happy to pay to climb up a ladder to install them on our ten-foot ceilings.

So we bought light fixtures. Also food-storage jars, extension cords, a bathmat, a couple of sconces, and some other odds and ends. Then we hauled it all home.

At the bus stop. Ikea here seems to do all its business on weekends--during the week it's pretty empty.

You can't see it in his bag, but Ikea sells real cacti as well as ceramic ones and Danny bought a second specimen. He's put it on the living-room windowsill, next to its older brother (on the left--you can see it has started blooming) and a basil plant that Danny bought at the supermarket a few days ago.

Everyone keeps saying how exciting it must be to buy a new kitchen, to say nothing of all this other stuff. I did feel a real rush when we finally had a worked-out plan. There's so much anxiety, though, so many decisions, so much negotiating. It's a little too exciting for my taste. I think I'd really rather blog.

Today's grievance

This morning I went to a qi gong class that was conducted mostly in Italian (although the teacher, Patrizia, insisted on translating a few things for me). I was pleased that I understood about 80 percent of the instructions. It helped that Patrizia spoke nice and slowly and repeated things several times--I hope not just for my benefit.

That's her on the left. I took this photo while Patrizia and two of the other students were admiring a picture they'd just taken of themselves. The class is held in the community center's martial-arts dojo. Evidently a lot of Italians are into this kind of thing.

In further pursuit of some minimal fluency, I am trying to make myself get at least a little of my on-line news in Italian, so this afternoon I read a few articles in Corriere della Sera and felt like I grasped the essence, at least.

I also watched part of an Italian movie (Tutto Quello Che Vuoi, "Everything You Want") on Netflix. Although both the kids' slang and the old poet's high-flown language are way over my head, I caught enough of the dialogue that I could follow along. (It helps that the plot is cliched enough to be pretty obvious.)

In addition, I wrote a 144-word message to our friends down in Montagano, in Italian, which took me about an hour to compose, check, and correct. It's probably full of infelicities but I think it will be comprehensible.

My point is that I am working at this, and little by little I'm seeing results.

Then I opened up DuoLingo and saw my 68-percent fluency badge drop back to 67 percent as soon as Duo realized it was me.

This really does not seem fair. 

But then I remind myself that I'm about to take my second hot shower in two days, and patience with myself and with DuoLingo seems a bit more possible.

Va bene!

We have heat. We have hot water.

The whole apartment is warm. The toilet seat temperature is unnoticeable instead of heart-attack-inducing. 

We can take a nice hot shower.

Life is good.

This morning the gas man arrived as promised and turned on the gas. Then Romano called the company that services our hot-water boiler and used his magical knack for getting things to happen sooner rather than later. (We call him the "'crat whisperer.")

A short while later Michele and Lorenzo (I'm not sure which is which) turned up. They took the boiler apart, cleaned it out (the water here is full of minerals), put it back together, and made sure all the taps and radiators were working.

There was a problem, however. A valve in the bathroom needed to be replaced, and until that was done...no hot water in the sink, no showers. And that required a plumber. On a Friday.

Could we have gotten this close to getting clean and still be denied for the whole weekend?

We asked them to recommend a plumber who might come today, and they did. This time Pam made the call, and eventually Rodolfo showed up--three hours after originally scheduled, but we were just grateful he was there at all. He quickly replaced the valve, and now everything is working.

Danny and I celebrated with a glass of pinot nero (that's what they call it here) and some deliciously lamby lamb stew made with meat from our Egyptian butcher, sitting at the table in our now pleasantly warm kitchen. And next we're both going to take a long, hot shower.

Life is so, so good.

And yes, I'm going to bring the GasPlus lady flowers on Monday. 

The Zen of Italian bureaucracy

Two days ago Pam called the gas company (the aptly named ENEL) on our behalf to find out why the gas line for our apartment still hadn't been turned on, when we'd submitted our application back on March 1. The gentleman who answered assured her there was no such contract. When she gave him the contract number, he said, Well, then, the documents aren't complete. She then read him the email from ENEL saying, "The documents are complete."

"Ah," he said, "now I see. They called and there was no answer." The phone number we'd given them was Pam's cell, and after ascertaining that this was indeed the number on record, she assured him that she has had it on her at all times and no calls have come in from anyone at ENEL.

He again looked through his papers or his computer or his girlie magazine and said, "Hmm. There is a note here that there is a 'technical issue.'" What kind of issue? Not specified. Could Pam call the local branch that was supposedly responsible for connecting us and find out what the problem was? "I don't have that number," he said.

But not to worry. "They will connect the gas in the next few days," he assured her. "And then they will call you. For the second time."

When you've lived in Italy for a while, Pam told us after reporting this conversation, you have no choice but to develop a Zen sort of attitude about the mysterious ways of the country's bureaucrats. "There's no point in stressing about it," she said. "You just have to take it as it comes."

But Zen notwithstanding, Pam decided to look into alternatives just in case, and yesterday she called GasPlus, a smaller, more local gas company that has an office right here in Fidenza. Pam presented our problem to the woman at the GasPlus office, who said she would call ENEL and find out what was going on. Ten minutes later she called Pam back.

"I have been living in Italy for thirty years and I thought nothing that happens with Italian bureaucracy could surprise me," Pam subsequently told us. "But even I am flabbergasted."

What the GasPlus lady had discovered was that since ENEL had dallied so long without activating our service, our contract had automatically been voided. But no one at ENEL thought to tell us. The mysterious "technical issue" was likely that our contract no longer existed. Said Pam, "This is a new low."

This morning Romano and I went in to the GasPlus office and signed Danny and me up for service. As usual, I had to sign dozens of pages of forms, about ten signatures in all, agreeing to god knows what. All the pages were then photocopied and stapled. Then Ms. GasPlus called up the technician to find out when he could come to our apartment and turn on the gas--a five-minute procedure, we've been told.

"He says the earliest is next Tuesday morning," she reported. That meant another long weekend of icy sponge baths and freezing rooms, and my face revealed my distress. The GasPlus lady looked none too pleased herself.

"Just a minute," she said, and got back on the phone. I'm not sure whom she called, but after a few minutes she had good news: someone will come to turn on the gas tomorrow at 9:30 in the morning.

I am braced for disappointment. But if it happens, we will have warm rooms and steamy showers. We'll be able to wash dishes in hot water. The toilet seat will no longer be shockingly, painfully cold.

In that case I'm going to bring the GasPlus lady a bunch of flowers or one of those big chocolate eggs.

Totally drought-tolerant

Italians seem to have a crush on the idea of deserts. We've been looking in a lot of home-goods stores, and I've noticed they all offer fake cactus plants and faux succulents. Rendered in ceramics, plastic, or metal, these artificial desert flora are even lower maintenance than the real-life versions but can still give your casa that exciting Death Valley look. Here's a sample from our shopping trip yesterday.

In metal...

...metal above, plastic below...

...ceramic....

....plastic...

...and more plastic

I'd love to buy all of them and turn our living room into a faux desert preserve, but keeping them all dusted would probably be a nightmare.

One of our favorite local trattorie has an impressive display of barrel cactus in the dining room. They are plastic, too. And, as you can see, very much of a piece with the overall decorative scheme. In this photo they kind of match the clientele, too.










Danny, being a lover of both deserts and desert plants, already bought a real cactus when he was here in November. It has been living happily in our living-room window ever since. If the weather continues to warm up, it will soon move out to the balcony. It looks like it even might bloom.

To round out the plant theme, let me report that yesterday Danny chose some (real live) herbs for the kitchen windowsill while we were shopping at OBI, the local version of Home Depot The only ones on offer were thyme, oregano, sage, marjoram, parsley, and rosemary, but they had dozens of each. We bought the first three and hope to make good use of them.

Today's accomplishments

We still have no heat and no hot water, and now we're also waiting to hear when Vodafone will install our new "iperfibra" internet service. But we have made some small bits of progress.

Tomorrow's project: Installing the interior shelves

Danny almost singlehandedly got our massively heavy medicine chest up on the bathroom wall. This is a huge life improvement, because it means we at last have someplace besides the floor or the bidet or the windowsill to put lotions, toothpaste, eye drops, and other necessities. 

It also means we now have a decent-sized mirror in a good location. I'm scared that when I look into it tomorrow in daylight I'm going to see that cold-water sponge baths aren't keeping me as clean as I'd hoped.

Meanwhile, having gone to the town tax office yesterday and registered as a garbage creator, today I was able to walk over to the town dump and claim our official recycling containers.

Food waste on the left, paper on the right

An unlooked-for bonus was about 20 pounds of free bags for different categories of recycling. I was glad to get them, but I had to carry them home, a mile's walk that suddenly felt very, very long. As I trudged along, living without a car momentarily seemed ridiculously primitive. Sort of like living with no hot water.

Sorry, I don't mean to whine.

Soup's on

I love looking into the frozen food cases here to see what kinds of things people eat at home day to day, and one thing I've noticed is a lot of vegetable soups. This gratifies me, since I'm a big vegetable soup fan myself.

Many of the Italian soups are pureed, in all kinds of combinations--spinach and potato, squash and carrot, lentil and potato. There are also all kinds of minestrone, bags of veggies cut up into small pieces, often beefed up with grains or pasta.

A few days ago I bought a bag of frozen vegetable minestrone, a combination of carrots, beans, tomatoes, squash, potatoes, some dozen vegetables in all. How wonderful not to have to do all that chopping, I thought, especially since we are operating in a minimalist kitchen at the moment.

The soup was a cheap supermarket brand, so perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that it was pretty disappointing. The vegetables tasted flat, as though they'd died before they were frozen. It tasted the way I imagine food in an Italian prison does. Even adding a bouillon cube didn't help.

Yesterday, ever hopeful, I tried one of the pureed versions. The label promises "Vegetable Lightness" and notes that this soup has 50 percent fewer calories than the average soup made by this company. But what appealed to me was the idea of an all-vegetable soup, not the calorie savings, as I hope the salami and bread in the picture prove. 

The bag felt a little lumpy; I thought maybe the soup had thawed and then refrozen at some point. But when I opened it I discovered a mass of what looked like little...well, what? ginger cookies? frozen turds?

They seemed most un-soup-like, in any event. But when heat was applied they melted into a brown puree very much like the one depicted on the label.

Unfortunately, "Lightness" apparently required a total absence of salt and, once again, a minimal amount of flavor. This soup, too, was a dud. (And considerably less attractive, visually, than the zombie minestrone.)

Of sociological interest, though, is what seems to be an Italian predilection for freezing things in little nuggets. The freezer case also features bags full of cubetti of chopped spinach, chopped chard, chopped mushrooms, and other items that I presume cooks want smalls amount of to put into a pasta filling or a sauce. This actually seems pretty smart. Do we do that in the States, and I just haven't noticed because I never buy frozen food at home?

Tonight, while waiting for our dinner to cook, I chopped up a mess of fresh vegetables (romano beans, peppers, carrots, leeks, mushrooms, celery), topped it all off with some tomato puree, water, and a couple of "classico"-flavored bouillon cubes, and made myself a big pot of non-frozen vegetable soup. It tastes really good, if I do say so myself.