Winding down

Too many things to do and the Italian bureaucracy and my lack of Italian skills to do it in. Who knew that returning bike keys could be such a big production? We went to the police station where we originally got the keys for their "City Bike" program (which, if you missed last summer's blogs is essentially a program where all of Alessandria's citizens get to trade out parts from the once new City Bikes for their old clunkers, leaving the City Bikes locked up in kiosks waiting for the 2 dumb Americans to come with their keys and attempt to ride bikes with no brakes, no seat, and or no handlebars- click below).

Anyway, at the police station...as soon as they saw us coming, a woman yells up to the second floor for someone up there to help us because it was too hard for her to move away from her personal conversation and cigarette. Then the guy making copies upstairs yells down for us to come up and takes us to a closed door where the woman who opened it looked like she must have been fast asleep just seconds before. This woman acts like she doesn't even know what bicycle program we're talking about (although the sign on her door, if memory serves, said Transportation Dept.) and why if we had their bike keys why we didn't have the bikes? We spend quite a while trying to make her understand just how Alessandria's City Bike program worked and just what we were trying to do... then one of us got the bright idea of showing her the room down the hall where we originally had obtained our keys last summer. But before we could get there we were intercepted a few times by other "helpful" folks, again who seemed to all be employed by the transportation dept. but looked at our keys like we had either stolen them or the bikes. Finally someone in another office, listening to our broken Italian and our helpers broken English, comes out of her office and saves the day. She was a real sweetheart, spoke English very well, AND seemed to know they had this program. So after filling out multiple forms with our key numbers and giving us 10 euro- and making many copies for us to later throw in the trash- we were free to apparently steal more bikes.

Speaking of copies of papers... There is ALWAYs a receipt or two or three for everything here. They won't let me leave the gelato stand without my receipt- "aspeti, Signora, aspeti!" (wait, Ma'am, wait!) while I try to make my getaway. They could replant the Amazon with all the wasted paper, I swear. BUT there is a law that says that the merchant must give out a receipt and the customer must take one and hold onto it for at least 100 meters. Or what?! So being the good temporary Italian residents we have not dared to find out the fate that might befall us should we lose the receipt at, say, 50 or 99 meters.

And then there is Telephone Italia and Alice, the internet service... I only wish I had a recording of the conversation I had with the phone company. God knows if our phone will be cut off tomorrow or 3 years from now.

It's way too hard to leave so I guess we'll stay. We really don't know how to cancel the internet anyway.