Saturday was a day for relaxation and crowd avoidance. I woke up early and needed milk for my coffee so went out to buy some. Hmmm, nearby store doesn’t open until 8:30. I walked around the neighborhood for a while to see if I could find another place. Nope! So, I went back to the apartment to wait.
I did a load of laundry which is quite a challenge over here. Very few people have dryers, not sure about washers. The apartment has a washer and a drying rack. There is a warning about the washer that it is very harsh on clothes and to only use the #4 setting or #10 Express. I used the Express. Then I turned up the heat in the bathroom and put the rack in there with my clothes on it, a few more hanging from hangers, and others from another contraption.
After a few hours and things not getting very dry at all, I put a fan in there. The bathroom is so small that every time I needed to use the toilet I had to pull the rack out into the study. When I went to iron my pants there were soap spots still in them.
I went out again later to get some ibuprofen and Tylenol as I must have either left mine in Nice or had it somewhere that it fell out on my train trip. I had hurt my knee last week and with all the walking and stair climbing it was pretty sore.
I also wanted to go to the ‘Travel Agent’ to see about getting a ticket to Paris.
This was around 1:00PM and, of course, everything was either closed for the day already or closed until 3:30. Back to the apartment. The Travel Agent would not be open until Monday.
I went out again around 3:30 and found a pharmacy and got my drugs, then went to the vegetable stand across from the apartment and got some vegetables and potatoes, and some wine. I had decided I needed a bit of a simpler dinner after all the rich food I had been eating for 3 days. I still had the half of a chicken so was just going to roast it with lots of garlic and olive oil along with potatoes and a green cauliflower.
It was absolutely nutso out on the streets at this time. Thousands of people packing them. When I looked up one main road, it reminded me of when I was in New York a few years ago and we were at a street fair that stretched for blocks. There wasn’t even anything going on except a weekend in the city!
You constantly see tour groups in the streets, but the funniest one I saw so far was a group of women all wearing pizza hats!
Pizza Hat Tour
I received a text from my friend, Marilee, shortly after I returned asking me if I wanted to FaceTime. It was funny, I had done that with Courtney, when I was with Don and Frankie in Nice, but hadn’t thought about doing it again.
So, it was nice talking with Marilee and Garry and catching up with what was going on with them.
I read most of the day and rested my knee. The ibuprofen and rest seemed to have helped quite a bit.
Pretty boring post, but it was a pretty boring day!
Millers' Time 
When I moved to Naples I bought a washer and gas dryer in Seattle at Goodwill before I left so I wouldn’t find out once I got there that they were hard to find. The was a place in my apartment, in the maid’s bathroom, where the washer was able to connect but there was absolutely no where in the apartment for a dryer because in Naples everyone hangs their laundry on a line outside their apartment. So I bought a clothes line and two pulleys and ran the line from my bedroom balcony rail to the kitchen balcony rail. I was then able to hang laundry and run it across the gap by just pulling on the line. I usually put the laundry out in the evening and took off in the morning. The dryer sat on the toilet in the maid’s bathroom until I found another American family with a home in the country that had room for one and they took it off my hands. At the time I moved to Naples, summer of 1981, I was told that there was absolutely no way I would ever get a telephone in my apartment because the wait was something on the order of 5 years or more. I suspect everyone in Italy now has a cell phone and land line connections no longer matter. We didn’t have cell phones then and only a very few people in my Command were issued pagers. If my Command needed to get hold of me they had to send someone to my apartment and that’s why each member of the staff who did not have a phone provided very detailed directions to where they lived so a Command ‘runner’ could find us after hours.
I laughed so hard I almost needed Depends. I wish I could work their hours. I was picturing you, with your love of crowds-not, pushing your way down the streets. I wonder if we looked just as ridiculous as the Pizza Tour when we had the Hall Family Campouts???
It is so fun to see everything through your special eyes awesome descriptions. Our high school English teacher surely would give you an A+ for your writing-look out Cheryl Lidowist.
Love ya,
Vanessa
Pizza hats! Aren’t you glad you aren’t on THAT tour. So startling to hear about businesses closed in the middle of the day or not open at all on a Saturday. Not like the US 24/7 shopping. Doing laundry there makes one appreciate all the mod cons we have here. Even with the simple meal the choices of vegetables is so much more interesting there. Hope your knee feels good, keep blogging.