Excellent stuff - been back at work a whole two days and time for another day off - result! the reason this time is that tomorrow is Epiphany and so no early start but a leisurely trip to Decathlon, the largest sports retailer in Europe with a branch near Florence is called for, bike shopping for Dawn and sports stuff for me. Then sadly I have to pop into the office in the afternoon as my boss, who is based in the US, is over for a few days and we need to catch up whensoever we possibly can.
Today I was given my carte bancomat which means I will be able to take some money out of the bank - yay! Only a month and three days after opening the account - mind you, it did require me a) having an Italian mobile phone number, and b) having some money in it! Naturally the process was complicated, and required me filling in yet another swathe of forms, interestingly this time it seemed that I had to sign each one thrice, and sign some for online banking, oh and you only get one pin number for the life of the carte bancomat - if you lose the pin number then you have to apply for a new carte.
This week we had snow again! Never previously been seen in the history of Siena having so much snow in one year. It was cold on Sunday, a furious 5C, and then we awoke on Monday to an inch of snow. Not that cold either, only 2C or so. It snowed all day and we had about 2 inches by mid afternoon when the gods of Siena decided that enough was enough, that the snow was an afront to the very being of Siena, and that it was time to rain again. Tuscany is a very green place, very fertile lands, excellent growing for olives, grapes and sunflowers. But this comes at a cost - it seems to rain all the time, and biblical rain too. Since it started raining it seemingly hasn't stopped for a second and the rain keeps up this relentless intensity. I am expecting a bumper crop of grapes, olives and everything this year! Speaking of which, we made a bowl of olives about a month ago which are now ready. The process was to put the olives in a bowl and cover with salt and leave for a month - cos cor blimey they were disgusting raw. I have taken a photo of the bowl of olives covered with salt! So I shall try them tomorrow as I am ready for my pudding now!
Postal update - my parents received the Xmas hamper today. Within 3 weeks which is pretty good, and undamaged except for some superficial damage to the outer packaging (thank you Alan Partridge!(coincidentally I am as we speak eating a Terry's chocolate orange!)). So, my faith is restored in the Italian post, after Dawn losing a letter or two. Although I would not gladfully embrace it. The Italian postal system that is. Too many forms and random erratic queueing aka Brownian Motion.
Sunday, which was cold, as previously advertised, I went out on the wheels of steel for the first time - that is the road bike. Wrapped up warm, buff (stooopidly not the VISOR BUFF TM) and hit the tarmac. Lovely smooth roads, but the hills are a killer, should have a third ring on my front derailleur really. But yes roads were lovely, and the traffic is used to cyclists, and I coped quite well with looking over the wrong shoulder. Roll on more cycling when the light gets longer.
Went to karate again last night, good fun, and I even swapped some words with some of the Italians. Karate was good again, some technical aspects of distancing and evading gyaku zuki, countering with oi zuki etc - good class, enjoyed it. One interesting note to the sartorial of you all - Italians don't seem to possess towels, but sort of hooded towelin bath robes which they combo up with as towels.
I feel obliged to highlight amusingly named products or slightly sweary ones. I have included a picture of a smoothie called "mukki" - ho ho. Very funny. Actually it was pretty disgusting, like one of those cheap, horribly overly sweet ones in the UK, so yes pretty mucky indeed. Bluuurgh.
Italian still comes along slowly. Thanks for the help Pete. Finally we got around to "Quando a Roma, fare come fanno i romani" which we both approve of. Interestingly, I find myself increasingly thinking of French words and in lessons I am constantly thinking of little words in French like "there" "also" "that one" - they just pop into my mind, even though I have never attempted to speak French since my GCSE. Strange. Shows how much it says about learning young, and m French was pretty poor.
On Saturday we went to Lucca - a walled city to the north east of us, about an hour and a half, in the direction towards Pisa. Beautiful city, the wall was built in the 1500s and was only ever used as defense when the pesky sea tried to invade in the 1800s. The wall is a flat raised section of about 4km which people walk round and cycle round as it is wide and flat and very pleasant. Photos to come.
Whilst strolling around the centre of the town, which was very Xmassy and just rammed with people, we stumbled across a Chinese restaurant. As I mentioned earlier, in Siena there is practically no choice for food, other than Italian :) and we instantly craved Chinese food. So once we had completed our tour we thought we would try and find it again. No joy. So we googled for a chinese restaurant in Lucca and we found one. Plugged it into the sat nav and successfully found our way to a deserted square outside the walled city with a fantastic looking bike shop - but no chinese! So we tried again and found another - New Hong Kong Restaurant. We turned up and it was just like one of those completely overzealous 1970s Chinese restaurants - the floor of the restaurant was lined with glass and you could see koi carp swimming underneath your feet! Starters were excellent, fried seaweed, spring roll and dumplings - amusingly the dumplings were referred to in the Italian section of the menu as "ravioli" :) The main course was very disappointing, my pollo picante was not at all picante and Dawn's battered sweet and sour pollo was not very well cooked with the batter being very soggy. So this left us hungrier and more craving Chinese food than when we started!
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