Up early as usual. Yesterday it had been much colder and rained quite a bit yesterday and evening. As we drive to work we could see snow on the mountains to the north of us - hooray! Might pop up into the mountains over Christmas or maybe New Year. The lucky and miracle-working statue of Buddha is still there and has not been smashed by a flying statue of Milan, unlike Silvio Berlusconi's nose. I thought the Catholics might have crept up in the night and wreaked some terrible carnage, but no, maybe Melissa the confused and recently healed from a terminal tumour cat is repaying the kindness by protecting her saviour's 90 pence plastercast hide?
Today we took a quick trip to the post office to post a Christmas gift to my parents. Never ever again. Never ever ever? Ever ever ever? You bet your ass. Those of you who thought you were going to get Christmas cards can go and get bent - I'd rather fly over myself and personally hand the cards over than go through that again. We got there, that was mission number one. It is hidden somewhere in the Aqua Calda region of Siena (Hot Water - I think there are some natural hot spas there) in a back street - really really well hidden. We got there and immediately felt the fear. Rammed diddly jammed it was, with a dog tied up outside who looked like he'd been there for several hours. Inside was a disorganised throng, 5 desks, with a bizarre ticketing machine with three different types of tickets. We chose the one for what we hoped was for letters and packets (that thankfully was) and waited. People came and went, but not from the letters and packets coding. It could have been that the cleaners decided that a Monday mid-morning was the best time to clean the air filters above the desks on a ladder with a hoover could have delayed it. The one or two people that were posting parcels were using Italia Posta complicated boxes and seemed to be filling in endless pieces of paper and scanning barcodes and sticking various bits of paper. Whilst we were waiting, I started to get annoyed with the lack of queueage. People were just milling around and getting in everyone's way. The best bit about the experience was that the ticket machine was really quick and when people pressed the button for their selection of whatever they were doing in a post office (clearly not posting anything, bizarrely) the ticket would come flying out and fall on the floor. Like home, the mid-morning post office was full of old Italian gits, well I guess there wouldn't be too many Italian old gits at home, anyway, out would fly the ticket and then be on the floor and the old cranky oldies would have to bend slowly over to pick up the ticket and then someone else would open the door and it would blow around before they managed to get it. Heh heh.
After about an hour it was our turn. Our process seemed to be simpler because we were posting abroad - but it still took over 20 minutes to post this one stupid box, filled in all our personal details on the form, scanned the barcodes, several carbon copies of the document, we got one, one went somewhere else, another one got photocopied (photocopied - of a carbon copy!!) and then we paid them and we were done. All in and out in about 80 minutes - result. Not that it will get there before Christmas, but I did try Mum and Dad! As we were leaving, I raised my arms aloft and shouted "Yay!!"quite loudly which seemed to delight the locals and several of them started laughing.
Sounds like I'm moaning all the time. I'm not really. Job is good, people are lovely, food is good, and stupid stuff like going to the post office is still like an epic adventure, so it's all great.
In the evening, I left early, the earliest ever, leaving the office just before 6. We went to Tae Kwon Do class run by one of the guys from work, a 3rd dan. Great class, really enjoyed it, and as shocking as it sounds it's the first proper bit of exercise I've done in about 3 or 4 weeks :( So yes, good fun, good atmosphere. Taught in English, well I say English, the guy is an American ;) but I will try and get down the karate dojo this week before I decide what to have a crack at long term.
Excitingly the 2nd series of Californication and 6th series of Desperate Housewives arrived from Amazon today so we're going to tuck into that in a moment.
Posted some photos:
1 - my office - the 18th century "Master's House"of the villa.
2 - the other side of my office showing the sadly emptied and never to be refilled swimming pool.
3 - taken on the side of the road a few hundred yards from our house. Vines in the front and you can just about make out snow capped or snow dusted mountains in the distance.
4 - another view of the swimming pool in front of my office with some other non-snow-dusted hills in the background.
No comments:
Post a Comment