Well last night (Sunday, May 31) was our last night at the hotel. Tonight we will be spending the night in our new house.  Needless to say that we learned a few lessons about the differences in European “technology”. For example, we thought our windshield wipers on the car didn’t work, however, who would have known (unless you were familiar with European cars) that the switches are different.  Then we couldn’t figure out how to put the car in reverse (it’s a manual), again, unless you are familiar with European cars you wouldn’t have known that in order to shift into reverse you have to lift up on the shifter and put it in reverse at the same time.  You want another example - yesterday we were moving things from the hotel to the house. We also went grocery shopping so our car was full of frozen foods. Well I was in the process of washing/drying clothes, making a pizza and putting away groceries when all of the sudden the electricty goes off.  We spent an hour trying to figure out if it was just our or the neighborhoods.  I was worrying about the frozen food.  Luckily, after about an hour I saw our neighbor outside. She’s italian but is married to an American.  She speaks enough english to explain to me that if the fuse box wasn’t tripped then it had to be the main circuit breaker which was located outside our gate.  Sure enough it had been tripped!  Her response was “Welcome to Italy, we do it backwards here”.  I am so lucky to have them as neighbors. She even said she would take us on a tour and introduce us to key people in the neighborhood.

Geno and I have picked out what furniture we need and now we just have to go get the estimate along with the tax-free papers so that we can be exempt from paying the Italian 20% VAT (Value Added Tax) that is tacked onto the price of EVERYTHING!

Our household goods(HHG) are not supposed to arrive for a couple more weeks. For now we are using the governments lovely (or should I say not so lovely) furniture.  We get internet on Wednesday but we won’t have a tv until our HHG get here.

Well, that’s about it for me. I’ve added some pictures of our new house to this blog. There are many more pictures if you click the Flickr link to the right of the blog.

This is our half of the duplex -

Look at our yard - we are truly blessed

Our kitchen. The kitchen/living/dining rooms are all combined.

Kids Bathroom

I love the staircase!