Friday, May 7—Trying to blend in with the locals

We were able to make our own breakfast here at the house, because we had picked up a few things at the grocery store in Camaiore on the way to the house last night. We then went for a walk up in the “neighborhood” of the house here in the hills above Camaiore. About ten minutes from our house is a tiny church, Catholic, of course, as is everything in Italy! The sign on the wall, in both Italian and English, says that this was the church for the territory of Camaiore, and that there are records for this church dating back to 817! However, the church was remodeled to its present state—in the 11th century. So it's not so old after all. Not! It was cloudy and cool today; comfortable for hiking, but still not sunny as we'd imagined Tuscany (thanks to the title of the famous movie).

This afternoon we went into Camaiore to try to check it out, as Alex had told us it had just about anything we would need. For one thing, we were in search of an internet cafe, as the house has no internet access or telephone. Also, the television channels are all in Italian, so we are really out of it, which is hard for any news junkies like us. We found a computer store where this heavy-set 40-something guy sells and services computer equipment. He told us there was no internet cafe in town, but that he “sold” wi-fi time and he let us sit in his chair in this very cluttered, little computer store with computer parts everywhere. It wasn't ideal, but it worked fine and it was great to get online and get some banking and bill-paying done, not to mention checking email, Facebook, etc.

Anna had pointed out a pizzeria to us last night as we went through town, which she said sold good “take away” pizza, so we stopped there and picked up a large pizza. Ordering a prosciutto pizza with green olives proved to be a huge endeavor with the friendly proprietors of this pizzeria! Camaiore is not a tourist town whatsoever, which is great in many ways. But because they are not used to having Americans in their town, most of the locals speak little or no English. We tried to help them out by using the Italian word for “green,” which is “verde.” This did not register with them one bit! They started pulling out all sorts of bins of ingredients that had nothing to do with olives, including some relish and other things that I would never think of putting on a perfectly good pizza. Somehow, we finally identified from one of their bins of ingredients some “green” olives that are actually Italian olives that still have the pits in them, and they put those on the pizza, along with the prosciutto. Obviously, they do not consider their olives to be any shade of “verde,” even though they are! It was more funny than frustrating, and we bid them “Ciao” and “Buona notte” and left with all of us smiling, and obviously mutually amused at each others' linguistic shortcomings! After many nights of being in hotels or guests in homes, it was nice to hunker down on this Friday night in “our own” place and eat pizza, drink a little wine, and wish we understood Italian television.