Trials and tribulations

The good news is that we're in our apartment. The bad news is that living without heat, hot water, wastebaskets, or a mirror is proving to be more of a headwreck than I expected.

We bought an oil heater and borrowed a second space heater from our friends, but then we learned that electricity is much more expensive in Italy and that the regular electricity contract we signed only allows us enough wattage to run one heater at a time. Pam and Romano are used to turning off the clothes dryer if they want to run the microwave, but this kind of everyday energy austerity comes as a mortal shock to us prodigal Americans. Particularly when it's 37 degrees outside and only about 5 degrees warmer in here. 

For the moment we're holed up in one of the smaller bedrooms with the heater and two quilts and a blanket on the much warmer than the refrigerator interior. Tomorrow morning the plumber is scheduled to hook up the temporary kitchen sink and do a few other minor jobs. But we won't have heat or hot water until the gas is turned on and we get a different, gas-expert plumber in to turn on and flush the boiler (or something like that). And we do not know how soon that will be.

Nevertheless, we are getting a few things accomplished. Today Pam took us to a gigantic discount store that sells pretty much everything you might need. It's noteworthy that the houseware section offers more than a dozen different meat slicers, which I guess people need so that they can slice their own prosciutto di Parma. We didn't get one of those, but we did buy a stove, a dryer, and the above-mentioned heater.

Only a portion of the meat-slicer selection at Rossetti

Filling out the forms to get the appliances delivered took only about 20 minutes, lightning fast compared to some of our other transactions.

For example, yesterday the PIN on our Italian bank's ATM card stopped working and we spent an hour in the bank, waiting for a staff member and then discussing the problem in as much depth as my elementary Italian would permit. Yet we still don't have a new PIN because my cell phone's Italian SIM had expired and, since the bank can't text me the new number, they must send the PIN to me by mail, which takes one to two weeks.  

Today when we went to get a new SIM for my phone we learned that because I've already had several SIMs in the past year (I got a bunch for the kids and a wifi hotspot when we were in Montagano last summer) I am not allowed to buy any more unless I switch to a different carrier. This is an anti-terrorism or anti-corruption measure, I gather, but also extremely aggravating to those of us who are neither terrorists nor members of the current Republican administration. 

Thanks to this regulation, Danny had to be the one to buy the new SIM. This also took an hour or so, much of it spent standing around while the saleslady madly filled out forms on her computer and then had Danny sign various papers in eleven different places. 

What made all this not so hard to take was that the discount store, the bank, and the cell-phone outlet all had heat.