Notes and Impressions

I decided I'd take a minute in between all my daily posts, and just share little bits and pieces that I think are interesting, funny, weird or whatever.

In the mornings at my breakfast bar, there's a TV that is always showing what I think are news programs – not sure, really. Twice now I've seen President Obama, once at what looked like some kind of big summit. I'm going to have to remember to try and find out what's happening in the world while on-line at some point. Seeing President Obama was nice, somehow, a little touch of home, I guess.

At one point in another broadcast, they played melancholy music and started on what looked like a story about dairy farms, maybe? Maybe a lot of them have gone defunct, hence the music? At any rate, they ended up talking to a man at a working farm and he talked for awhile while the cows ate, and then the picture switched to the camera lady who was filming him – in other words, someone was filming the camera lady. Then that camera slowly panned from her back to the man, and as he finished what he was saying, it zoomed in closer, closer, closer, until finally the whole picture was his now-closed mouth. The end. I had seen another fragment somewhere, where the camera work was very different from our camera work – lots of very close shots of parts of people's faces.

Italian men are apparently stylin'. In addition to the old gent mentioned in one of my posts (the red pants guy), I've seen numerous other men in slack of various shades of red/rose/coral, and saw one man wearing green (and I mean grass green) suede shoes.  Crazy, man...

About my ankle, probably everyone is thinking “she sure got upset about what must have been not much of a turned ankle” so I'll just give an update. It's still (Friday) fairly swollen and my whole foot is various shades of black, purple, red... I'm still wrapping it cause mostly that seems to help when I'm walking, but I'm noticing today that it feels like hen you press against a bruise – rather than the interior pain I had at first. So maybe I should quit the wrapping. Or maybe my ankle is saying “enough already with the walking!” Maybe when I get to what I hope will be my nice little apartment in Greve, I'll find myself so happy to be able to make a cup of tea now and then that I'll just sit in my room with my foot up. Probably not, but I'll tell you, if it rains some when I'm out there and I can't go walking, I probably won't be too upset. :)

And as a closing note, just let me say, the noise on the streets of Oltrarno is unbelievable!!! Vespas constantly buzzing by, horns honking, everyone with their TV's on full blast, everyone not watching TV seems to be outside talking to everyone else of yelling from sidewalk to window. It's kind of funny in a horrible sort of way, but oh, man, I could NOT live here. And all the streets, at least in my area are one way (cause they're so narrow) but one block goes this way, and then the next block goes that way. I wonder if maybe that's an attempt to keep drivers from flying down the streets at 90 mph rather than the 40-50 mph they seem to be doing. I told someone I was talking to that I didn't know why there weren't dead bodies lying scattered around everywhere, but with all the walking around I've done, I've never seen one, nor, more realistically, have I ever seen a fender bender. Go figure...