Back at the Laundromat

This time, I’m waiting for towels to dry. I’ve gotten the hang of doing laundry at home, finally—mostly, I’ve just got to stay on top of things, since it takes a couple of hours to wash a small load (the washers here are microscopic compared to what we’re used to at home), and then it’s several more hours—or a day, depending on what it is—to hang dry. Still, it sure beats paying a fortune to do it outside the house. Today is kind of an unusual circumstance; Rick and Donna will be arriving in a couple of hours, and I’m out of clean towels, so… eventually, I’ll learn to plan ahead for these things.

Other than the odd complication, though, it seems like life has settled into a comfortable routine. I guess that’s how it works—you experience brief culture shock while the adjustments you have to make sink in. Then, as you knock the obstacles down one by one, you get more comfortable and everything stops feeling so weird. Once I get home, I’ll probably go through it all over again. But for now, I’ve figured out how to order in a café, get my super-duper blister protection from the Pharmacia, get my watch fixed (I kinda smashed the crystal against a building) at the orologia, get around on the autobus, and generally handle the stuff of daily life. It’s somewhat empowering to realize that I can do almost anything an Italian grade-schooler can do!

Went to Fiesole on Thursday, and saw the Etruscan/Roman ruins there. They’ve got an archeological site there where they starting finding remains of these ancient cultures way ban in the early 1900s. After private citizens completed some test digs, the site was acquired by the community of Fiesole, and a larger-scale excavation was undertaken. What they found must have been astonishing at the time: a sizable Roman bath, a temple that went back to Etruscan (200-400 B.C.E.) times, and a well-preserved Roman amphitheatre. It’s hard for me to get my mind around sometimes—these structures I’m looking at were built thousands of years ago by people whose lives, like my own, were just a short blip on the planet’s timeline. It also makes me wonder whether my generation—with our histories recorded on paper and increasingly in electrical impulses—will leave any legacy besides a depleted ozone layer and millions of used CRTs. Let’s hope there remains something a little more noble in our wake.

Friday (yesterday—I’m always about a day behind in these notes), we finally got to that hike on Mount Ceceri. Reading the CAPA flyer, one might have expected a bit of a nature walk… but that’s before you realize that your guide is Lorenzo the Mountain Man, and he’s up on these trails all the time. Whew! We stood around and watched Lorenzo’s dog, Spiga, chase sticks as gathered the troops at the bus stop just before the main village at Fiesole. Setting off initially to the west, the trail made a couple of long, steep switchbacks up the hill until we came to a couple of caves which were actually quarries for the grey stone used in the main buildings here in Florence. We explored those for a few moments, got in touch with a small party who had gotten separated and were by now on a different trail (cell phones are a wonderful thing), and then ascended to the summit, which lay at about 1300 feet—a 1000-foot climb in just over a mile. The views were spectacular. It is said that Da Vinci sent his assistant off this very same summit to test a pair of wings designed by the master. The unfortunate gent was supposed to have crashed into the valley below, so we didn’t make any attempts of our own. Instead, we descended on foot into Fiesole, took another steep side trip to see the abbey just above the archeological area, and then invaded a local restaurant for pizza and wine. According to my GPS, the total distance was somewhere around six miles, so my feet earned their blisters that day. Coming home from Fiesole, we took the bus the entire distance instead of walking from the Piazza San Marco (another mile or so on foot—we usually just hoof it) and collapsed for a nap. I can’t say I remember what we did Friday night other than a trip to the grocery store, but I don’t suspect it was much after all that.

Okay… enough for one post. More later.

Ciao,
Leanne