A Slow Week

We took life slowly last week to recover from our moving preparations and to give Jim a little downtime before he started work. We are anxious to find a place to live and a car to buy, but we have to be patient. I don't know if things happen more slowly in Italy, but I do know that we can't make assumptions about how things are done. For example, we learned that there is no real estate multiple listing in Italy. Each agency has exclusive rights to rent or sell a property. This means that to fully survey a market, you have to go to every agency in the area. We also need to learn how to buy a car. NATO personnel have certain tax priveleges, but the car must be licensed in a particular way. The person who knows how this works is on vacation for two weeks. Patience. In the meantime, we are living without a car. Jim is taking the bus to and from work, and I'm walking to the grocery. The picture to the right shows part of my route to the grocery store.

We spent the week looking around the area. Jim's job is in La Spezia, which is a military, ship building town of about 100,000 people. The town we are staying in, Lerici, is about 4 miles south of NATO. It's a seaside tourist town of perhaps 1,000 people. On the other side of La Spezia is the Cinque Terre, a famous destination for travellers to Italy. (More about that area in another post.) Inland is the town of Sarzana, which is maybe 20,000 to 30,000 people. Many NATO employees live in Lerici, but accommodations are expensive and limited, so many people choose to live in Sarzana, which has a beautiful old town with a large pedestrian-only area. The land all around here is quite steep, so there are a seemingly endless number of quaint hilltowns. Jim and I are torn between living out in the country for the tranquility and scenery versus finding a place in town that would give us good access to services and transportation. With the dogs, we are leaning toward country living. (More about apartment living with two young springer spaniels in another post.)


In addition to looking around the area, we also watched a small bit of the Giro d'Italia. The Giro is Italy's Tour de France. It is equally arduous and draws the best bicycle riders in the world, but it is not well known in the U.S. This year's route included a leg along the Cinque Terre. Without really knowing what we were going to see, we loaded up the dogs in the rental car and drove as far as we could before we had to hike to the race course finish line. We were able to see the racers come across the line as they finished their time trial (riders race against the clock and set out independently every 3 minutes). In this photo, the rider has bridged the 3-minute gap, hence his smile. We didn't stick around to see the top racers, including Lance Armstrong, because it was scorchingly hot and we had brought Bella and Boomer. But we were able to stand right along the fence at the finish line and watch a number of these tough athletes give it their all.