Moved In!

June 19:
Although we are really excited about moving into our own home, we still haven't received our car yet. The website says it is "Enroute". It's been "Enroute" ever since we got here. Once we move to our house, I won't be able to walk to work anymore, and we just don't know when our car is going to get here. So we decided to get a VW Rabbit. My good friend Marlene (she's from Hawaii) has one and it's a great car. Consumer Reports rated it the number 1 compact hatchback. Problem solved, right? Nope. Even though the car is right there in the dealer showroom across the street from base, it has to be sent to Germany for military registration, then shipped back down for us. That will take a week, so we had to rent a "Punto" just to get by. At least we'll have a car and get ourselves around rather than mooching rides off of people all the time.

I call our car the "Punty little Punto". It's a stick shift, so Cynthia isn't doing much driving. Driving in Italy is a real adventure. Driving a stick shift in Italy is even more of an adventure. These Italians are crazy!! Sure in the movies it's all about the laid back lifestyle, the food, the wine, La Dolce Vita. But you put these people behind the wheel of a car and all of a sudden it's like they have their pregnant wife in the back seat and her water just broke. Once I was doing 40 mph on a "two-lane" country road that really is only a lane and a half with a 6 inch gravel shoulder and a 4 foot ditch on either side. Oncoming traffic is zooming by and the guy behind me on the moped thinks he can pass me. Nuts...

We moved into our house on the 19th and got some very important lessons about living in Italy. The first has to do with keys. Every single door in our house has a key. And not one master key that opens all of them, noooooo, separate individual keys for each one. Ironically enough, the only door that doesn't have a lock and key is our upstairs bathroom. That's already caused some exciting incidents, but nothing I want to include in the blog.

Now one of the nice things about using Franca as our real estate agent is that her husband Robert produces a guidebook for new renters. A recurring theme in Robert's guide is a warning about getting locked out of your house because Italian front doors lock automatically EVERY TIME they close. So you have to have your keys on you every time you leave your house. Cynthia learned this lesson REALLY well the first day.

After we got our telephone hooked up, I went in to work for a few hours, leaving Cynthia alone to receive our temporary furniture and our small shipment from Hawaii. The temporary furniture drop went well, but the furniture ain't the greatest. It will get us by until our stuff arrives. When our partial Hawaii shipment arrived, Cynthia went out front to open our gate... and let the front door close behind her. Of course she had no key. The delivery boys had another house to go to, so they started unloading our stuff on our front steps!! Eventually the redhead convinced one of the delivery boys to hop up on our front balcony and enter the house through the open balcony door. As he handed Cyn the keys he quipped, "I thief your house!"

Later that day, Catterina wanted to show Cynthia how to open the gate using the keys rather than the remote. Cynthia grabbed the gate keys, but not the front door key. Locked out again!! This time Catterina's son, Michele (that's Italian for Michael), drew the short straw and shimmied up the balcony to open up the house. Twice in one day... Catterina later told us about an Italian saying that goes something like, "There is no 2 without 3." Three is going to be a doozy, but that's another blog...