Uncle Travelling Matt .com — the personal site of Matt Gifford

The weather here has really started to heat up, which of course would be great if I wasn’t stuck inside working all day. Yesterday it was pretty bad, I had so much work to get out and it was hot, not normal hot but that hot like you get in Vegas, where you feel yourself pushing through the air around you, like sponge cake. Makes thinking straight about coding really difficult.

Today is going to be little better, the forecast is for 31° however it seems to be consistently above that in actual temperatures. Summer here may well be quite unpleasant, and I now have better understanding why the entire country shuts up in August and goes to the beach. Unfortunately some of us will need to work during these months, fingers cross it doesn’t get much higher!

Below is a picture from my iPod’s weather application last night, notice the time at the top:

I’m sorry this has taken longer than expected, but I’ve had so many things going on, I haven’t had the energy to update this. Anyway, some news–finally!

My first couple of a weeks in Italy didn’t go particularly smoothly. I got sick and had a lot of difficultly eating well due to staying at a hostel in the middle of nowhere. I ended up losing about 8kg in weight in the course of 2 weeks, which isn’t particularly good. I also was having a very hard time finding somewhere to live, I was struggling with my Italian and not being in the best of health wasn’t helping either.

During all of this I was still trying to get some of work done. However after finding out that both of my Vodafone sim cards had been cancelled and buying new ones, I found there was almost no Internet coverage at the hostel, so I had to sit outside in the cold to upload my work, often at 33.6kbps modem speeds and then go back inside to get AC power. Then I got robbed they took my cell phone (so I lost everyone’s phone numbers and all my the text messages I’d saved from my girlfriend) and the plug adapter to plug in my laptop, so was completely cut off for several days and couldn’t get any work done either. A replacement adapter also turned out very difficult to find, as there’s no Dick Smith’s or Travel Stores kicking about here.

Fortunately in the end I managed to find a nice house, though it wasn’t available straight away and I ended up staying at this other place temporary. This is where things started to get better, as the girl I was sharing it with was Australian and had an Aussie to European plug adapter (was use the same plugs in New Zealand), so I was able to use my computer for the week it took to find a replacement. I had to buy a new cell phone, fortunately since the sim card in the stolen phone was only 2 days old, they were able to transfer my number and credit. This proved very fortunate was there was an expats get together in Florence I had been invited to however the directions were on the stolen phone, no problem I thought call/sms and ask, hmm numbers where all on the phone too, excellent. In the end I waited around 2 hours until my friend Nicki called and asked if I was still coming.

Since then I’ve been pretty boring, just trying to get through the backlog of work and get my health back up to 100%. I’m back to my normal weight now and exercising regularly etc, health ok though a little run down again at the moment, as I worked too many long hours this last week… not much else to report. The apartment I ended up getting is in Santa Croce, it’s quite a nice place modern with aluminum joinery, double glazed and new appliances etc. I’m sharing a room to keep costs down, as this place and Italy in general is very expensive. In the apartment is an Italian, a Mexican, a Canadian and an Aussie, all guys, 5 of us in total. Below is a picture of my side of the room, I did a bit of shopping at Ikea as the room was pretty bare before (the photo with the plant is newer).