And we're back

Fidenza's main piazza this afternoon...not exactly my Italian fantasy

As all five of the people who read this blog probably already know, we did finally close on the apartment in Fidenza and we are now Italian homeowners.

Our friend Pam served as proxy and met the seller, the charming daughter of our charming new neighbor, at the office of our glamorous notary to complete the sale. This went down a few days before Christmas 2017.

Between then and now we've been packing up all kinds of things we wanted to bring (Danny) or frantically avoiding the daunting challenges of setting up a new household in a foreign country (me).

In our domestic division of labor, family travel planning falls to Danny, because he apparently enjoys contemplating logistics, fares, and packing lists, instead of feeling paralyzed by even a temporary change in domestic routine.  That was still more the case this time, when planning involved so much more than merely deciding which airline to fly with or which hotel to stay in.

When we sold the house in the desert last fall, we doubled (or tripled or quadrupled) our stocks of bed linens, artwork, kitchenware, and miscellaneous household items. Danny couldn't imagine buying more of any of these things for our new place when we already had them in such abundance, albeit on a different continent. So he bought a suite of suitcases, packed quilts and sheets into vacuum bags, wrapped pots and pans in towels, and plotted how many kilos of luggage our frequent-flyer-mile tickets to Italy would allow us to haul.

Meanwhile I did my best to pretend that our next visit to Fidenza would not be taking place until sometime in the far distant future. When I finally forced myself to start packing, a few days before our departure, I found myself sharing a (large) suitcase with metal mixing bowls, a hammer, a fancy wrench, several large cooking knives, and dozens of other home necessities.

On the road from the airport...

Thus we arrived at the airport in Milan with three 50-pound suitcases and a carry-on bag, plus a knapsack, a tote bag, and my violin. We were greeted by icy winds and snow that's forecast to settle into sleet and freezing rain for the next several days.

Moreover, our clever plan to have the electricity and gas in the apartment turned on just before we arrived turned out to be not so clever after all.  The contract I signed before I left in November turned out not to be valid past Dec. 31 (despite what the lady at the electric company told Pam), meaning that our apartment is currently without either electricity or gas, which means no lights, no heat, and no hot water.

So as soon as we got to Fidenza I had to fill out and sign a new set of utility contracts so that Pam could email them in. It will take anywhere from two hours to five days to get the power on, and we are already well past two hours. We've got a hotel room till Sunday. After that...well, we're discussing our options.

...and the street outside our apartment once we arrived

I'm going to try to not let this blog devolve into an endless series of complaints, but it is going to be a struggle.