A real Italian moat

June 19, 2008
So much to say, so much to review and process…perhaps it’s best to just begin at a new beginning: We are in our apartment on Villa Verona! To be formal, we are at:
V. Verona, #41, Alessandria, Italy. No, we are not living under a bridge as the San Francisco Italian Consulate inferred we might do a couple months ago when we went (in person) to apply for our year long visa…at the time we didn’t have a formal address and he wouldn’t give us a Visa without an address. Never mind that there were technical details involved in having a real address at the time. He sternly told me that "you just might live under a bridge and we can’t have that!" No, we can’t. To make a long story short, the realtor here (Rosanna) just sent a fake address on letter head with her signature and all was good; consequently, here we are and to be honest, I have yet to see a bridge in sight here in Alessandria.
We are in a little one bedroom apartment that is on the first floor but feels like a basement apartment. It has had "problems" with flooding in the past and is a bit damp. There is good and bad news about this: it’s cooler in the afternoon when it gets hot and I think it’s going to be rather chilly come the winter. Yesterday Kim and I spent the day cleaning—it was in pretty good shape but given that it’s a rental, there were a few details…One being, moving the living room divan/couch and finding: 1) a very wet, damp wall and 2) these two little box contraptions that I am going to try to post a picture so that you can get the true image. They look like a container (square, say 3x3 with water in the bottom and then in the middle a round container of what looks like soaked kitty litter and, by the way, smells just like soaked kitty litter. So picture the image of a miniature moat surrounded by pretty disgusting looking water and the land being the clump of litter with all the odor attached…it was a strong ammonia type smell that was driving me crazy until we found these little contraptions. I can’t tell you how fast they ended up outside once they were discovered. Our theory was (and was later confirmed) that they are there to somehow soak up the humidity that is emanating from the wall. Too bad, they are history! Our cleaning involved washing the walls with bleach and trying to not have too much of it disintegrate as I moved the rag over it. We also washed the divan cover and I would say about 85-90% of the smell has dissipated; as I write this I can still smell a bit but it’s much more tolerable and when coffee is made, all is much better.
Speaking of coffee, it like many things here (which I will get to) is quite the ritual; I speak of homemade coffee. Being the good Americans that we are, we tried to buy a Mr. Coffee machine that we saw in a window but the proprietor told us he didn’t have one…oh, okay. So, we did buy (after looking at several stores), the traditional espresso type maker. We have a small one that came with the apartment but the two little tiny cups that you’re supposed to leisurely sip out of just didn’t cut it and we were making two and three pots…So, as I write this, I am drinking the maiden voyage of our new bigger maker and it has made the equivalent of one US size cup…It took me about 20 minutes to make it because I’m still trying to figure out the stove and which turner oner belongs to which burner and then I didn’t screw the bottom tightly enough and there was a little leakage and simultaneously I was trying to froth some milk with a little battery whipper appliance that Kim purchased…
What all of this is leading to (and forgive me for the length of this but with a blog, you can chose to quit reading anytime) is that I am already discovering that much of life here will be just a ritual of accomplishing tasks throughout the day. Like laundry—we have a washing machine but no dryer. We have a very nice clothes dryer apparatus that goes outside (so get over your image of us hanging things from the 3rd floor balcony) and you just very systematically hang clothes in a manner that the air gets all around them. Then, you hope it will be a bit sunny and that your corner of this complex gets some sun. It does! Around 2PM or so and that’s how clothes mostly dry. At night we bring in the apparatus and it stands in front of the television that only brings us Italian stations (no CNN—what did I think?) At different times, you go and check the laundry and as it is drying, you turn it over or move it to a different place…it’s all quite strategic and I like it (for now—we’ll see how enamored I’ll be with it come the winter). This, like the coffee making is like a little Zen ritual/meditation that s l o w s one down because of the partial lack of modern appliances that speeds thing up for us and helps us to multi-task to a point of frenzy.
We are waiting for our telephone line to which we hope will be an internet attachment. This will take about 10 days and so in the meantime, we go to our local internet café which sounds easy but it has it’s challenges b/c everything is in Italian (imagine that!) and access to the US Google has been tricky. That’s it for now because I have to go make a second cup of coffee and who knows how long that will take.