We both had a good night's sleep last night (thank heavens), although when the cats started nudging us to let us know it was their breakfast time at 7am, I decided I'd better get up and feed them and go outside with my kettlebells so as not to disturb Stuart - at that point I didn't know how his night's sleep had gone and didn't want to risk waking him up too early, just in case.
By the time I'd come in and showered, it was getting on for 8.45am and he was stirring. The morning was fresh and although it had been cloudy when I first got up, there was a promising warmth in the air, and by the time I had finished with my exercise the clouds were parting and the sun was streaming through. It was such a lovely temperature that we both sat eating our breakfast at the table on the patio, looking at our lovely view and feeling very privileged.
There was no time to hang about enjoying our surroundings this morning, though. Once the washing had been pegged out on the line to dry (er... which is now a sore point!), we hopped in the car to head for Porcari and 'Car 2 Car' - the car dealer.
Stuart briefly mentioned yesterday having received some good news on the phone. The news was that the car dealer (currently still keeping the car we paid a deposit on around a month ago) had called to ask us to go and visit the office as they thought they had worked out a way in which we could take the car off their hands before our residency paperwork is sorted. They are clearly as fed up and frustrated with keeping the car for us as we are with not being able to have it, and they want the rest of their money to complete the sale.
We duly turned up at the office and had a five-way conversation between the two of us, and three of them (the owner/manager, the 'contracts guy', and the guy who speaks English). What they are proposing is that they will put the car on their insurance for us, allowing us to pay the balance and take the car away. THIS WEEK. Their insurance will cover it for three months, after which, once we have residency sorted, we will be able to insure it ourselves (at enormous cost, of course – car insurance is expensive here anyway, and even more so because it will be our ‘first time’ insurance in Italy – it'll be just like trying to get insurance as a 17-year-old again!). Anyway, the plan is for us to go back to the car showroom on Monday to sort out details and hand over a cheque, then collect the car on Wednesday!!! That will mean (a) we will have a bigger vehicle for trips to Obi/Mercatone/Ikea and for picking family up from the airport, but, more importantly, (b) we will be able (with a little help from a friend) to send our little car back to the UK before its MOT expires. It will be an enormous weight off our minds to have this sorted, so keep everything crossed for us that all goes according to plan!
So, car plan sorted, and feeling optimistic, we headed back towards Pescia to go back to the computer shop for the laser printer (stampante laser). Saturday is market day in Pescia, and we've not so far had the chance to go and take a look, so we decided to have a walk through the market before going to the computer shop. The market is large - it takes up the whole of the main square, and is busy! Probably 90% of the stalls are ones selling clothing, leather goods, household items, toys and so on, with only a very tiny section at the top end of the square selling anything food-related (mainly baccala (salt cod), porchetta (pulled pork) and various cured meats and cheeses). We've never seen the town as busy as it seems to be on market day - the stall holders clearly do a roaring trade, and the market is seems to be very well used by locals.
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| Market day in Pescia. |
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| Busy. |
Having walked the length of the market, we doubled back to head in the direction of the computer shop, but made a stop along the way to go into what we had assumed was a tiny touristy/souvenir shop (or as we affectionately like to call them, a 'tat' shop). Having had a few new keys cut for the apartment, we needed a keyring or two to make them more presentable to future guests. The one we had inherited gave me the heebie-jeebies (a plastic monkey which, when squeezed, screamed and its eyes lit up - shudder!), so we were looking for something, if not more classy, then just a little less scary.
It turned out that the tiny shop mainly sold toys, not souvenirs, but amongst them were a selection of keyrings as well as some Warhammer 40k armies - making it the perfect place for Ben to spend some pocket money when he comes to stay soon (no, I don't understand 'Warhammer 40k' either, I just know it's a boy thing and that Ben is into it [think fantasy games a la Games Workshop]). The man in the shop was friendly and tried out some of his 'schoolboy' English on us (pretty good, I'd say), and when Stuart told him (in Italian) that we had moved here/live here permanently, he gave us a loyalty card for his shop - one of those cards where you collect a stamp each time you go in and buy something, and when you've got to 10 stamps you get a discount. I'm not sure that we'll find enough of interest in his shop to warrant ten visits - we're a little beyond Disney toys and the like ourselves - but the sentiment was nice.
We remarked that it's so often the case here that the outside of an establishment (be it shop, bar, restaurant etc.) can be very misleading as to what is inside, and you really can't judge a book (shop/bar/restaurant) by its cover (exterior). You need to take the plunge and go into the most unpromising looking of places in order to find the good stuff and the lovely people.
Two keyrings purchased, we headed for the computer shop. Thankfully the man remembered us instantly and produced a laser printer with scanner from behind his counter. It was a little more expensive that we'd expected (at €100), but the cost will be tax-deductible once I get myself sorted, and it will be a worthwhile investment with the amount of printing I get through in my day-to-day work.
By the time we'd got through all of the morning's excitement and returned home, it was lunch time. We had our lunch on the patio - the garden umbrella had to go up because the sun was too hot without it. Not once did we think we might be in for torrential rain later on (er... that's despite the weather reports saying it was likely!)
Lunch dispatched, it was time to head to Mercatone Uno for a showdown regarding the missing kitchen. Well, I say 'showdown' but it was more of a friendly enquiry. The lady on the information desk recognised us and gabbled away in Italian. She seems really lovely and her colleague was equally friendly and helpful. Unfortunately, we probably only understood 40% of what they were saying, but they were clearly being kind and helpful. Their computer system reported that the oven and the sink have arrived in the warehouse, but the cupboards are all still missing. Because it's the weekend, they aren't able to phone and check when the missing bits will arrive, but told us to telephone them at 10.30am on Monday morning to find out when we can expect delivery. We did say (thanks to Google translate - the lady read the Italian from the screen on Stuart's phone) that if it can't be delivered by Wednesday, we will have to cancel the order... but the advice remained to telephone on Monday. So we'll see what happens!
We then went into the 'market' part of Mercatone to pick up some bins, a safe and some tea towels, all for the apartment, as well as a new pair of industrial strength (hopefully thorn-proof) gardening gloves and a set of tweezers (Florence has managed to pick up a tick, so we need some tweezers to make an attempt at removing it - although we strongly suspect that getting her to keep still for long enough for us to have a go will be our biggest challenge!).
Our next port of call was Brico, just around the corner, for some shelves and coat hooks - we'd spotted some floating shelves while in there the other week, and decided that was just what is needed in the apartment living room.
The final task on this afternoon's to-do list was to visit a shop we'd seen advertised several times, imaginatively named 'Materassi e Materassi' ('mattresses and mattresses'). We find ourselves in the position of needing two new mattresses. The mattress that has been sitting in the apartment all winter is somewhat covered in mildew and not particularly pleasant, thus we would like to get this replaced before we have any guests in there. The requirement for a second mattress comes courtesy of our furry friends. It seems that when they first arrived they weren't quite as settled straight away as we thought they were, and one(?) of them started marking his/her territory in the spare room. Unfortunately, we didn’t find this out (as we rarely go into that room) until it had clearly been going on for several days. We’re pretty certain it had to do with stress and strange smells – the fact that we rarely go into that room means it’s probably the room they least associate with us and that smells the least familiar to them. Anyway, the upshot of it all was that unless we emptied several gallons of Febreeze onto the mattress, we weren't going to get rid of the smell, and we reasoned (any friends and family planning/hoping to come and visit will be relieved to hear) that it would be far more hygenic to actually replace the whole mattress.
So, we knew that Materassi e Materassi was in Montecatini Terme (Obi and Decathlon territory), so headed in that direction. As we were driving, I used our phones to look up the address of the shop, then used the navigation app on Stuart's phone to attempt to locate it.
Well, first of all we ended up in the middle of Montecatini Terme on a very unlikely looking street. Needless to say, we drove up it and down it, and there was no sign of a mattress shop. We drove around Montecatini a bit more (which seems an interesting place - lots of tourism based on its thermal spas, and lots of very grand buildings), until Stuart decided to pull over and look the address up using Google maps instead.
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| Just one of Montecatini Terme's grand spa buildings. |
In the end, we decided to head back into Montecatini, as in the meantime I'd found the website and address of another mattress shop in the town - so we decided to try our luck there instead. All the while we were doing this, the weather was looking increasingly threatening, with the blackest of black skies.
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| How's that for an ominous looking sky?! |
As we headed back into the town, the rain started to come down and the headlights went on. We were in a slowish queue of traffic when I spotted a bed & mattress shop (which was neither Materassi e Materassi nor the other one we were heading for). Stuart quickly pulled the car over and we hot-footed it through the raindrops into the shop.
The biggest concern for us was whether they would be able to deliver the two mattresses in time for our guests' arrival - but the sales guys (one of whom spoke near perfect English) said that if they had what we needed in stock, we could actually take it away with us today! We explained that we had only a small car (piccola macchina), but he explained that the mattresses come rolled up and vacuum packed, so we would probably be able to fit one in the car without a problem (as long as I sat in the back).
The two mattresses we need are of two different sizes - one is a standard Italian size, and one is a slightly smaller, non-standard size. For this one, they said, they would need to 'make' it. This rang alarm bells with us initially, as it sounded like a long and drawn out process (we are used to these things taking 6-8 weeks in the UK), and they said they wouldn't have it ready until around a week on Tuesday. Huh?! A week on Tuesday?! That's FINE!! They gave us a significant discount on both the mattresses (well, that's what they said, I'm never quite sure how much of that is sales talk, but we weren't too worried as we felt the price was reasonable regardless - plus there was the added benefit of no delivery charge as we could fit them in the car and take one home today, and pick the other one up once it's ready).
Thrilled to have finally found a mattress shop, and to have managed to leave with one, and order another which should be with us/ready for us to collect in 10 days, we left the shop - by now, the thunder was crashing about and we got soaked running to the car.
We drove home (me in the back seat) through the torrential rain, with lighting flashing all around us and thunder clapping above. I kept expecting to see Noah sailing around the corner in his arc - the way the rain was pouring off roofs and guttering and out of drains was astounding. All the while I kept kicking myself for not taking the washing in after lunch!
When we got home, it was wet, but not as wet as what we had driven through - so we wondered if maybe the worst of it had passed our little hillside by. We were amazed to find the internet still working, so set about writing this blog post and doing some filing.
Roughly 10 minutes into writing this, there was an ENORMOUS flash, CRASH, WALLOP, and everything went dark. It was such an enormous clap of thunder that we suspect the lightning rod may have been hit. Stuart hot-footed it to the apartment to check the smart meter - but all appeared to still be running down there. Next check was the consumer unit, and sure enough the main breaker had tripped. Switch reset, the lights came back on, and there was the reassuring noise of the computers springing back to life and the modem re-setting. Incredibly, even this didn't seem to upset the internet - we have had far less severe storms and been cut off for hours - so we are hopeful that we may get another evening's iPlayer/ITV player watching in tonight and maybe even get up to date on the Tour de France (we managed two stages last night).
Here's hoping for a quieter night and a calmer day tomorrow!
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