Don't forget your hat! 25th gennaio 2012

Don't forget your hat! 25th gennaio 2012

It was a weird week in the pool. As part of the ironman training I need to be hitting the pool twice, and preferably thrice a week. This week was tricky. On Monday I do Tai Chi http://www.taichisiena.it/, well I should do Tai Chi, although I have only been able to manage to go once so far this year due to work nightmares :(

The swimming pool seems to open only at random times - only a few evenings a week, and then it only opens at 20:40, with limited lanes, which is a pain - and doubly so when you are a slow and rubbish swimmer. I am not yet prepared mentally to go swimming in the morning - it doesn't open until 07:30 when it does open, and I would be physically and mentally drained when I got to work, which is really the last thing that I need just now. Anyway, the long and short of this is that to make my swim sessions I need to go on a Wednesday and Friday evenings and once on the weekend.

So I jollied along last Wednesday after work, and actually after sorting some issues out it wasn't until 21:00 until I got there and the woman said that it was full. Obviously I spat out a dummy, starting swearing and kicking doors on my way out of there. Vada a bordo c@zzo!

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/costa-concordia-disaster-vada-a-bordo-cazzo

So, Friday I was early for swimming and all was fine, thankfully the woman - it's always the same woman - didn't seem to remember my little spat - and then Sunday morning came along and I was in there super early, well before 09:30 for my Sunday morning swimaroo. I jumped in the pool, and it was fantastic, empty and peaceful, no Italians were out of bed, the sun was shining in through the windows and it was the first time I had ever been when it wasn't dark. My goggles were fitting really well and I was starting to feel at one with the water, for the first time ever! And then one of the lifeguards stopped me and uttered something in Italian, of course I couldn't here with my ear plugs, but eventually I heard "cuffia" - meaning swim cap. I had forgotten it of course - and was struggling through, but she insisted to me that it was "obligatorio" and so it was. At that point I was going to spit an extremely large dummy, when she trotted off and spoke with one of the other lifeguards who lent me his cloth swim cap. That cheered me up a lot and I had a good swim. It really is very typical Italian in two ways. People seem a pain in the culo at times, but generally at the end of the day, they are pretty nice and considerate, and secondly, that there are always rules about everything, and always a rule to countenance them once you open some dialogue.

In other news, whilst I was riding on Saturday I passed a very fresh, if very flat porcupine corpse. At the side of the road there were lots of spines that had come off and I made a mental, if gruesome note to come back and do some pilfering, and eccomi - after swimming on Sunday I tootled off in the car and arrived at the corpse and collected a whole load of the spines. I can assure you that they are brutal but very pretty with different colours along their length. The thickest ones are the size and length of a big pencil and I would not like to be poked by one! They have traditionally been used in artwork as pens, and jewellery, as well as for sewing and as weapons. Of course, they are a protected species but you rarely see a corpse on the road as apparently they make delicious eating and the resourceful Italians have them away for eating as soon as they see them dead on the road!

Meanwhile, we have booked a week's skiing at a nearby ski resort. We had a look around and picked one that had good facilities so we could do some other stuff in case the snow was not great. Some work friends went skiing at the weekend and saw the hotel we had booked and one of them checked it out on the web and found the funniest thing on the homepage - talk about lost in translation.

Just to recap - "I will make my soul a casket for your soul, my heart a dwelling for your beauty, my chest a tomb for your p3n1s". We laughed our cavolos off! This really is classic Italian translations - unfortunately the standard of English is pretty poor over here. Of course, my Italian is nothing short of a disgrace, especially since I have lived here for two years, but compared to other European countries e.g. Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain - the standard of English is just not equivalent.

Classico! Over n out.