New vocab and a BBQ

Ugh. What a terrible night's sleep we had last night. I've no idea why, but we both struggled to sleep (my mind was running wild with thoughts of bugs and beasties - which is disappointing as I thought I was starting to get over that a little bit - I'm not sure what kept Stuart awake). Nevertheless, I slumped out of bed at 6.45am and went outside to do a half-hearted exercise routine, definitely not feeling my best.

Stuart struggled to winch himself out of bed at 8am, never mind any earlier, and we both wondered why we had slept so badly and why we felt so ropey.

Thankfully, after a shower, some breakfast and a little bit of waking up time, we both started to feel more awake and ready for the day.

My morning held nothing of any particular interest - lots of office work. Stuart, meanwhile, put a new frame around the window in the apartment shower room, put some more filler on the bedroom ceiling in the apartment, and built a wooden rack for baskets to stand on in the bottom of the wardrobe, to keep them away from the damp surface of the earthquake protector step.

It was lunchtime before we knew it (leftover rice/pepper/courgette/kidney bean/egg salad), by which time the day was really starting to warm up - it took a lot of will power for me to make myself head back inside to the depths of darkness in the office cave.

After a couple more hours of work, I decided it was time to call it a day as we needed to head out to pick up some shopping and pay a visit to the post office.

I collected Stuart from the apartment (and inspected his handiwork while there), and we shut up shop at the house to go on another adventure.

Our first stop was a hardware shop that we'd found a couple of weeks ago. Our aim: to find a cable for the lawnmower. First step, find out the word for lawnmower: tosaerba. Second step, find out the word for cable: cavo. (We also found out the word for wire - filo - just in case 'cable' wasn't the right word, as we've found that sometimes these things get lost in translation.) Armed with our new vocab, we went into the shop and explained that we wanted a cavo for our tosaerba, and showed the man a photograph of the plug/socket on the lawnmower that was missing a cable.

He understood exactly what we meant, but initially seemed a little doubtful as to whether he had the right parts to give us. Eventually, though, he managed to pick out all of the relevant pieces we needed from his shelves, and after clarifying with us what length of cable we wanted, we left the shop armed with what was essentially a cable, two plugs and an adaptor:

This is the magic that will make the lawnmower work!

It seems a very inefficient way of making an electrical item work, but who are we to question?!

Next stop was MercatoTutto - our Albanian(?) friends at the second-hand furniture store. We realised last week that there were still three sofa cushions in the apartment that should have been taken away with the sofabed, so decided to take them down to the guys in the shop so they could sell a complete sofa.

While there, Stuart ascertained from the guy in charge that we need to go back with our passports so they can take a copy (seems that's quite a common thing over here), and once they have that paperwork in place, they will put the furniture & other items we gave them on sale, and if/when anything sells, they will split the proceeds 50:50 with us. Seems reasonable to us.

Next stop was the post office. This was 'my' thing so I had the honour of doing the talking (well, the single sentence that needed to be spoken). That was once we'd worked out the slightly complicated ticket system. Rather like at the deli counter in Waitrose, you have to take a ticket and wait for your turn to be called. Unlike the deli counter, you have to press a particular button for your ticket, depending on what service it is you want (imagine having to press different buttons at the deli counter depending on whether you want cheese/meat/fish...).

We eventually worked out what we thought was the right button for 'I just want to send some birthday cards to friends and family back in the UK' and waited our turn. The lady did slightly squinty eyes when I announced in my best Italian that I wanted to send these items to the UK, but I guess that the fact I had thrust 4 envelopes at her, all of which bore addresses with 'UK' at the end probably helped her understand my terrible accent and she realised what it was I wanted. She duly stuck postage labels on the four cards and charged us €3.40 - so, Dad, Mary, Lena and Tash you will all hopefully receive birthday cards from us. I've no idea when, but hopefully before your next birthdays roll around...

What we thought would be our final port of call for the day was Esselunga. We'd run out of drinking water again (tap water is not drinkable here - at least not without boiling it first, so we have to keep a stock of bottled water), and it was time for our weekly shop. While pottering around the aisles looking for bargains, the idea popped into our heads that if we bought a disposable BBQ we could actually cook outside this evening. The idea was tantalising and Stuart was soon off to the sausage aisle drooling over the various Tuscan sausage varieties.

We finished our shopping and suddenly remembered that in order for our plan to work, we needed a disposable BBQ (one of the many things on our list of things to do is to build a proper BBQ and/or pizza oven here, but like so many other things, we haven't got around to it yet). We went up and down the aisles searching for BBQs but to no avail - Esselunga had nothing for us!

I reasoned that, perhaps, over here nobody has any need for disposable BBQs - the weather is always great in the summer, so everyone already owns a real, full size, bona fide BBQ (why would you not have one, and why would you ever want to throw one away?). We decided in a last ditch attempt to save ourselves from having to cook the sausages under the grill that we would try Lidl.

Success! Lidl came up trumps and we drove home with a boot full of lawnmower pieces, our weekly food shopping and two disposable BBQs.

As it was already 6.30pm by the time we got home, we decided to start a BBQ and sit on the patio enjoying the sunshine while we prepared our dinner.

Veg prep.

Salsiccia Toscana.

Well, our tiny BBQ soon looked ready - the flames had gone out and the coals were white hot, so we started with the vegetables. Except rather than a satisfying sizzle with each vegetable that went on, there was a disappointing 'fzzz' but nothing much else. This was going to take a while!

We eventually decided that, if we were to eat dinner this side of midnight, we would have to give up on the idea of cooking the sausages in the great outdoors and resort to griddling them on the hob. In fact, we ended up having a sausage sandwich back indoors. The BBQ'd courgettes and aubergines were delicious though - and have definitely spurred us on to get the BBQ sorted sooner rather than later!

The zucchini eventually got going.

We sat outside looking up at the moon in the completely cloudless (bar a few aeroplane trails) sky. Our weather forecasts are all saying that we are in for a heat wave this weekend (30-35C) and into next week. We can barely believe that summer hasn't even really got going properly yet and we've already seen so much sunshine and warm weather. I wonder whether we will ever get used to it!

La bella luna.

Tomorrow is the big meeting with the notary to complete the purchase of the house (eek!). As it's also our anniversary, we've decided to give ourselves the day off work. The meeting is at 11.30am and looks set to be quite a long and drawn out affair, as everything (including the mortgage agreement) has to be read out in front of the notary in Italian and then translated into English too. I think we might deserve a drink once all of that is out the way! Wish us luck!