We're back in Italy

September 21, 2006
We woke up this morning to a beautiful day here in Belforte. Despite being locked out of the house today and other little annoyances, we are happy to be back.

The building on the left is our apartment and the two balconies you see are ours! Our garden is in the front. If you look closely (maybe using a high powered magnifying glass), you will see that my tomato plants (to the right of the tree) have 14 ripe cherry tomatoes on them! The other building is where Veronica (our food supplier) lives--her apartment is the lower right door.

This is the view from our front door. Isn't this amazing? The tall building in the distance is the castle where we went to school last year. To the left of that is the "borgo" where we lived then and our first month back in Italy. Currently, there are 15 Brazilians attending school there. The house in the forefront was being renovated when we were here last year and is now occupied.

September 22, 2006 Good news! We got our telephone today. It is very high tech, but unfortunately the directions are all in Italian. We are working on figuring out all of the features. You can put your SIM card from your cell phone into the base, but we're not sure why! It also receives text messages, has an answering machine, and takes pictures! The picture can then be the background for the window--just like on a cell phone. We also got our international calling plan activated, at long last.

September 23, 2006 Today was market day in Belforte. Ours is not very big and we usually buy just fruit and vegetables. I will add pictures later to show our market and the market in Piandimeleto which is much bigger and is on Wed.

Today I went to the store and bought mayonaise, tomato paste, and milk. I thought you might like to see how we buy it here! I love the tubes because you don't dirty a spoon and you can't contaminate the food! I'm not sure if bigger cities sell milk in larger containers, but this is the only size sold here. The shelf life is only 5 days.

I had hoped to tell you that we have our luggage but, #&%#?@, we don't! This morning the airport in Ancona called to say the bags were there, but we needed to fax them a letter giving them permission to clear them through customs. So, I faxed the letter and then called to see if they received it. I was told then that they had only received one bag and would not deliver it until they had all three. I called back a few hours later and they now had two bags! Does that even make sense that they would send them one bag at a time? The next plane from Rome is in a few hours, so hopefully they will have all three by then. We're worried there won't be anything left inside by the time we get them!! Our bags went to Milan then Naples and then to Ancona--we haven't even been to Milan or Naples!!