Tuesday, April 9, 2024 Adventures in Italy Part 4

(To start at the beginning: Adventures in Italy Part 1)

Hotel Le Robinie – August 2016

 Today is the day that our journey really begins.  Kris has meetings until around noon and then we will take a taxi to the airport, catch a train to Milano, and then catch another train to Genoa. 

So, it turns out that each floor of the hotel has 2 elevators and 3 stairwells, only one of which is the non-locking kind and they all look identical in their signage.  Naturally, I managed to find the other locked staircase the next time I went downstairs and had to be rescued again.  I’m done with the stairs here. 

The lights in the hallways are motion activated, so that as you walk down the hall, lights turn on as you enter each new section.  It’s like getting some sort of amazing red carpet treatment.  Isn’t that smart?  Think of all the electricity they’re conserving!

I walked over to a shopping area yesterday afternoon while Kris was in a meeting.  It was like a strip mall with a super Wal-mart (stuff and groceries).  I went into the Wal-mart-type store and wandered around looking at stuff.  It turns out Italian stuff isn’t much different from American stuff, except with Italian labels and prices in Euros. 

The sign says:  School soon…go! (or something like that)

Leaving the store was more difficult than I had anticipated.  There were lots of little exit areas, each one by a cash register, but they had forbidding looking symbols on them and I noticed that people who were leaving were sticking something in a device which allowed them to leave (found out later that these were their receipts).  What?  I found an exit (uscite) that appeared to be safe and tried to proceed through it but was waved away by a stern-looking woman with a couple words that needed no interpretation.  Perplexed by this turn of events, I began mentally reviewing what little Italian I knew to try and formulate the question of how I could leave this place (shades of Hotel California!!).  I walked down to the other end of the store and just as I was about to ask someone, saw one last uscite that seemed safe and walked through it without incident.  Just one more reminder that “we’re not in Kansas anymore.” 

I saw another example of Italian brilliance in the parking lot.  Each parking space is lined with paving stones that are cut in such a way to create little diamond-shaped spaces in a pattern.  Each diamond was filled with crab grass and other weedy plants, but because they were in a pattern, the overall effect was one of beauty, rather than the usual ugly appearance of weeds.

Probably should have taken the photo from farther away, but you get the idea.

Kris and I went back to the mall later and had a chance to use our Italian when we bought some gelato and then pizza by the slice for each of us, birra (beer) for Kris, and aqua naturale (non carbonated water) for me.  The vendors knew about as much English as we knew Italian, but it wasn’t too much of a hindrance.  The gelato lady started dishing up my cone and seemed to be asking me if I wanted another scoop, to which I replied “no.”  She nodded and it seemed that we had worked it all out and then she proceeded to give me another scoop.  All in all, not a bad outcome. 

 Piu dopo!  (More later)
Ciao!
Love,
Lynn/Mom

I’ll probably delete this in the morning – all in all, not a bad outcome.

Adventures In Italy Part 5