- The Sandpipers, Come Saturday Morning
Aside from my appointment last Thursday, at which I submitted my citizenship recognition application, it’s been a fairly quiet week for us; we really haven’t gone anywhere, aside from a trip into the big town to get new SIMS for our cellphones. We were having some extremely irritating issues with Orange, the provider of the SIMS I purchased before we left the US, so scrapped them in favor of WindTre. Our cell service is now approximately 1000% better.
While the temperatures here are pretty decent - ranging from high 50s to mid-60s Fahrenheit, we’ve had a lot of fog and drizzling rain off and on - so waking up to sunshine this morning was quite a treat.
It being Saturday, it was Market Day. We spent quite a bit more than €6 this time, but on the other hand, we set out with a list:
We were able to get almost everything right on the street, although we did have to stop inside our favorite
mercato for the orange juice, eggs and a few other things I didn’t have on the above list. We didn’t see the bread truck today, so we decided to drop off our shopping and walk down to the
panetteria for a loaf of fresh bread. Incidentally, when we got back to our apartment,
this was parked
right in front of our door:
When I say “right in front of our door,” I mean I could kick the tire from the open door. Why was it parked there, you ask? Because Italy, that’s why.
As I was saying: we made our way down to the bake shop and purchased the desired fresh loaf; I also grabbed a basic (but delicious) "donut" type pastry to munch on the walk home. It was sprinkled with granular, not powdered, sugar. Next to the bakery, I stopped to take this picture of the view (the bake shop was to my right):
Since the weather was surprisingly nice, I was able to hang our laundry outside for a change (although as of this writing it’s still not dry, thanks to the humidity; sigh). We decided to take advantage of the (mostly) sunny weather and drive into
Larino, a large
comune (compared to ours, anyway) about half an hour away
. It has a Ducal Palace, a duomo (cathedral), and the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheater. We’d previously tried to visit, but turned back due to heavy fog.
Today we had no problem getting there. The problem was (as it so often is around here) driving down tiny, winding streets in search of parking. Paolo ignored the public parking lot near the palace in favor of seeking out on-street parking closer to it. Against my advice*, he turned down a very tiny street ending at a T, at which he chose to make a right turn - into an even smaller dead end street. When I say “even smaller,” I mean we could not have fully opened the car doors, at least without taking out someone’s front windows. I felt downright claustrophobic. There was literally no way to turn around. It was a nightmare.
After much maneuvering, several scrapes and dings to the car, and what seemed like an eternity passing (although in all likelihood it was probably "only" about 20 minutes), he finally managed to back down to another little alley where he could swing the car around and get us headed back the way we came. I wish I could describe this better for you, but a) I had to cover my eyes - I literally could not watch; and b) I’m just too traumatized. Actually, we were both so shaken by this experience that we decided to just go home, and save the sights of Larino for another day.
*For the record: I did refrain from saying, “I told you so.” Out loud, anyway.
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