WUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
30 June minus 4 May, equals, sorry sorry, what on earth happened to the blog situation? Have we now lost all our fans????? Flagellation for the inconsiderate me, not even finding time to do some minor updates…

How to capture main points without boring the hell out of you, don’t quite know.
But, we are now in the land of 100Mbps, which means we have upgraded from the phone line!

In the meantime, I have been working – hurray!!!
Check out Italy’s Environment Minister below, at the event I organised in Montecatini Terme, and before that a great picture of Xenya with fashionable Italian sunglasses.

Then there was some writing for a consultancy in Florence, and soon there will be a trip to Egypt to ponder air pollution problems… Man, the world has gone mad.

Before that there was a visit from Rolf and a medieval evening in Bevagna.

Cynthia and Lorenzo came out for a long weekend including Florence, shopping and the weirdest cafe latte you have ever seen.

We had dinner with Cece, whom we met in the Galapagos, and her daughter Laura, then, later, gelato in Cortona with Cece and Jack.

On the more important side of things, I have discovered that Cristian’s aunt makes the best pizza on the surface of the planet.
Check out her agritourismo below.

What else, there have been plenty of men in tights throwing flags around these past few weeks - girls, you would have loved it!!!

Coming up we have Luca’s stag night and Caipiriniah for Fox’s B-day, so more soon.


Tamas giving the MiniMat the slap he deserved.


Did I mention that I got the best birthday cake ever whilst on a birthday minibreak in Geneva?


Man in tights are the fashion.


Cynthia in Florence trying to figure out what to do with a glass of milk sprinkled with ground coffee.


Cristian and the girls (Cece and her daughter Laura) in front of the Scale di Sant'Ercolano, Perugia.


Xenya in glasses.


The view of Cortona from Gabolandia.

RETAKE
The florist who was also playing tennis the other day seems to think that there is some skill in me. He was clearly being polite… made me happy though so got a new addition to the flat. Now I just need a cow to make mozzarella!!

Basil and Cybil sitting on the kitchen window sill.

NAVRATILOVA VS ROGER FED.
Anyone out there willing to come over and teach us to play tennis? I did get to share the female changing rooms with a couple of lads if that can be of any incentive to any of you… Seriously lacking balls though (tennis, you perverted mind).

Firm tomatoes??

MEET THE PARENTS
Friends and readers, meet Piero, Rocio and her parents. In their flat in Este, near Padova, we would have tried to throw the dog out of the window and revive it with the phone wires, but they did not have a pet, so we had to sit around eating and drinking instead! Xenya has just told me that all of Australia is up in arms about a cat that can pee on a normal loo. Maybe I should start pet training and stop being an unemployed artist?

Testing the resitance of IKEA furniture.

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES
Les poules, je vous dédie ma première oeuvre d’art.
(Contactez Sotherbys pour la vente aux enchères de juin)

Cette semaine, ce sont les membres de la famille des gallinacés qui sont restés au devant de mes pensées. Entre un morceaux de verre, trois points de colle, deux crises de nerfs parce que la cementite préférait mon doigt au bois, je me suis pointee a Comacchio. Comment vous ne connaissez pas votre geographie italienne mes petites !! A cote de Ferrara, sur la cote, ou le Po rencontre l Adriatique. Et tout ca pour une foire du birdwatching. Vous me connaissiez une passionnee de la chasse au canard (H, le cassoulet a ete devore hier soir - ca sentait un poil la bouffe pour chien...), une mordue de la longue vue, une habituee des sous bois et fourres genevois, eh bien ce weekend fut dedie aux pigeons italiens. (je n’approfondirait pas sur ma recherche de boulot avec les ong presentes sur place).

Admettre d avoir roule quatre heures rien que pour se faire une piadina romagnola ne serait pas justifiable.

Marzia Dottarelli, the guru.

Half a bird.

On the bathroom wall.

Not a bird in sight, Comacchio, at the Birdwatching Fair.

MOULDS, YEASTS AND FUNGI
Feeling like I should bake some bread now. It is related to the fact that toasting loaf in this country never goes off. You can keep it open in the cupboard for a month and it still refuses to go green and hairy. The biscuits never go soft either... Will be fully preserved by the time I get back to GVA. Better get that 4MB recipe that Kate sent downloaded.

Not cheese on toast

CANARD A L’ORANGE
This weekends’ entertainment revolved around the Festa della Primavera and the Festa del Tulipano, both well timed since the temperature decreased by 15 degrees and there are no tulips in sight yet… Still, better than party dinners!

A sociological study carried out by The Expat on Saturday revealed that Italians prefer the “dance of the ducks” to other higher forms of communication. Tests carried out on a pool of 50 volunteers illustrated intense shaking of upper and lower limbs in the majority of participants, in time with the rhythm of the duck dance. The tunes “Charlie Brown” and “Heidi” also provoked spastic movements in most of the test sample.


Want the lyrics? Click here

BLOW ME!
No flying pigs in Cortona, just half the tiles from the roof and three quarters of the bricks from the wall. Thankfully no one walked passed whilst the gale force winds were doing their best to blow the flat off the top of the building and knobble passer-bys with bits of debris. It’s Tuscany in Spring!! Unfortunately the gas heating system didn’t like the winds either so I can now confirm that cryogenisation of the first layers of skin does nothing to reduce wrinkles. In fact, I think it makes them worse as muscles twitch to generate heat.

OVER THE MOTORWAY SHE FLEW
She chose the weekend the Pope died to fly in and out of Rome. Innocently she boarded in Geneva and expected pick up at Ciampino. At the receiving end, a car revved the engines at 5am, released the hand brake and sped towards the motorway. Two hours later, at a standstill, the pilot took the wrong turn, distracted by the Easyjet plane flying overhead. To the dismay of pedestrians and smaller cars, the Mercedes did a three point turn and got back in line. In slow motion, the asphalt eventually led to the tarmac. Three days of caipirinah and too many shops later, the pimpmobile was back on the roads, this time heading over the Apennines. The Pope was being buried, Rome was gridlocked, migs only were allowed into the airspace, and car plus passengers were in Bologna.

The Pimp Mobile.

Tatoos and Caipirinahs.

APRIL FOOLS
After last night’s patriotic show at the party dinner (no, not dyslexic, did not intend dinner party), I thought it wise to find out how and where to vote (Italy is currently obsessed with the regional elections - and Alessandra Mussolini, and Charles and Camilla). Because, three weeks after applying, I have still not been approved as a citizen, I received the cold shoulder from the voting office… “you’ll have to wait until next year to vote,” they said. “It will take at least 6 months for the paper work to go through.” April fools???? Sadly, no.

Why not catapult a pig round the office for April Fools?

DOWN THE REDS, UP THE BLUES – VODKA PLEASE, I NEED A SNOOZE
Where do the women look like men and the men look very flushed??? At the Forza Italia dinner of course! How should I know? Easier than the first question: because I went there last night. A full 130 fanatics furiously clapping and gurgling surrounded me, the astonished rabbit. sitting there, not quite knowing what to expect next. It was one of those rare evenings, where you leave home bracing yourself for the worst and reality turns out to be well beyond what you had actually imagined… Even the prime candidate, the person everyone was there to celebrate, strolled in one hour and 30 minutes late, having not even bothered to comb her hair (more to the gusto of the local contadinis?).
What next? Watch this space.

Mummmm.

Muuuuuuuum.

KICK ME IN THE BALLS IF YOU CAN
I got winked at even before I arrived in the changing rooms. (Cliché? Very but true.) Training with the local female football club, I discovered too late, was a lot more intense than anything Nature United ever did. Fortunately, two of the girls were missing – injured, the first with a burst eardrum, the second because of knocking herself unconscious against the wall of the grounds – so having me as the extra pair of legs was not seen as too bad a deal. Petrified (knowing what had happened to the absent players) I ventured out on the pitch, sniffed far too much oestrogen and retreated after an hour of featureless running up and down back to the changing room (which was immediately immersed in smoke as most of the lasses lit up the minute the game stopped). Nice.

Me doing a backflip in my dreams.

TUSCANY IN A DAY; A RIVALRY TO NEW ZEALAND’S NORTH ISLAND IN THREE?
Robi and Nathalie brought the clouds, but they also brought the hoover bags, so who cares about the weather.
On Saturday, we had lunch on the main square in Siena, coffee in San Giminiano and dinner in Florence. Easter Sunday saw Nathalie sit in the Ferrari and Robi drive it round whilst we looked for cats behind the mangimi bags. To burn off the 5 course lunch we boogied all night at Cantiere 21, where Robi had a toilet encounter with Bichierino and I sported an afro wig. Monday, la Pasquetta, we trotted round Cortona, up to the monastery of Santa Margherita, and then over to Perugia.
Exhausted, the mini drivers hit the road to La Spezie on Tuesday.

Nudi man in Florence.

What a bunch!

Pisa?

Racing the mini.

EGGS AND BOXES
Whilst the giraffe was snogging the halogen lamp, we were buried in boxes. The feeling of claustrophobia is subsiding after a week of sorting but the War On Fluff is merely in its beginnings. Work, CV and websites aside, Easter is coming, as are Robi and Nath!!!! Hurray!!!!

View from the kitchen window.

The first to visit from Switzerland

They are very demanding guests.

WHY NOT INVITE ALL THE WEIRDOES ROUND?
Having survived the supermarket, there was no reason not to overcome the arrival of the shipment from Geneva. Cristian plodded off to work whilst I waited for the “inizio pomeriggio” – aka beginning of the afternoon. By Italian standards, I thought that would be about 2pm. At 5.30 I finally intercepted the van and its two unhappy occupants (I agree, going up 4 flights of stairs with boxes is no recipe for delight, yet surely they had had time for a 4 course lunch and a nice long siesta?!?).

Whilst I was leading the way and pointing out the narrowness of the stairwell to the navigator, the driver took it upon himself to find the only three drug-addict-terrorist-look-alikes of the whole area; and the next thing I knew, they were all making their way into the flat carrying my stuff. Panic attack. Breathe in, wait, one two, breathe out. Hold on till they go to get more stuff, hide valuables, remove handbag from view, try not to think that the only three people I would really not like to know that I lived here are about to come back in carrying my stuff. AHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Clean up the ash from their cigarettes in a frantic attempt to stop the whole of the old town catching fire. Practice inner poise and full-powered-zen until they leave. Drive the two removal people to Pozzuolo to drop off wardrobe (far too big for mini-flat), give them an earful.

Happy to be safe and sound (as opposed to diced and sprinkled into a bowl of acid by 5 strange men), I pour the first apéro of our new Tuscan life.

WEEK ONE IN CORTONA.
Lovely charming Etruscan medieval village perched on the top of a hill; where St Francis and St Margherita lived, and where Begnini shot some of La Vita e Bella. But, not where supermarkets are. Ohhh, not essential in the life of global travellers? Wrong!!! Who does not need a toilet duck????
So down into the valley I went and round my first Italian Coop I glided - only to find that I was being followed by a rather strange individual. This non-shopping male kept reappearing behind each isle. Even in the female sanitary section… After hiding behind the salamis for a while, I managed to make my way to the car park unnoticed and Schumachered back up the hill.

CASTIGLIONE DEL LAGO, PERUGIA, UMBRIA:
Eureka !!!
Today we move to our new flat in Cortona, this is now our new address:
Piazza Baldelli 4
52044, Cortona, Arezzo, Italia.
+39 333 310 20 34 Olivia
+39 335 744 17 91 Cristian
Baci

Castiglione del Lago.

I WANT TO BECOME AN ESTATE AGENT.
Make a couple of phone calls to earn two months rent; that is what it’s all about! Estate agents here are not like our beloved “regie” they don’t even act as intermediaries between the owner and the tenants, they literally just make a few phone calls, collect the keys, show people round flats and then get paid for it. Nice.

FROM POZZUOLO TO CORTONA AND BACK
Like a pair of rabid Jack Russel Terriers intent on sniffing out a hare, we launch into the most assiduous flat-hunt seen on the Tuscan-Umbria border for decades. We hassle and persist, blocking our ears to those who repeat that we will not find anything other than seasonal apartments for rent to tourists. After having been round the Trasimeno Lake and up and down the hills of Tuscany, we finally pick the best of a wilted bunch.