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

Well the lack of posts isn’t because I’ve been lazy, or haven’t been doing anything. It’s just I haven’t been doing anything particularly interesting. I’ve been working a lot prior to my holiday next week, up to 14 hours per day.

However, I have been to up a couple of things outside of work, my morning coffees and visiting the supermarket. The supermarket in itself having been interesting, learning to battle the self-checkout machines that really don’t like reusable shopping bags. However I’ve since decided the last machine on the left has dodgy scales and is best to be avoided. These machines if you’ve never used them weigh your groceries as you bag them and compare it to the barcode you just scanned, if the two don’t match it gets rather shitty. The problem is the shopping bag weights just a faction more than plastic ones. Anyway, they have two areas you put your stuff on left, scan it in the middle and bag on the right (the bottom of bagging area is a scale) once you’re bagged all your stuff you put your money in the machine and go, when it works it saves you heaps of time, when it doesn’t, well it’s still faster than going in the normal checkout!

The other night about week or so ago I went out for drinks with my flatmates, Marco (Italian) and Andrew (Australian). Now drinking out around here is expensive, it only other time I drank out (at an actual bar that is, since you can drink whatever you like in the street and most people do) it worked out at about $14 kiwi for bottle of Becks beer. Since then I haven’t drank out for obviously reasons! However this time we went where the Italians go, to this little deli on the other side of town. We were able to sit at a table and have nice bottle of wine each, cheeses and bread. Sum total for the evening, $7 kiwi!! Try getting a cheese platter and 3 bottles of good wine at a pub in New Zealand for 20 bucks. So yeah, moral of the story avoid the places with tourist prices, which are usually 5-6x what the same item would be at the supermarket.

I also watched the first game of the 2008 historic soccer the weekend before last, the Calcio Storico Fiorentino. The game is more like a cross between rugby, wrestling and bare-knuckle boxing than soccer in reality though. There are very few rules, and as long as the refs aren’t watching beating the living crap out of your opponent is perfectly ok. You score a goal by throwing the ball into the long net at the end, however if you miss it’s ½ a point against your team. The game I watched was our team Santa Croce (azzurri / blue) vs. Santo Spirito (bianchi / white) which we won 5 to 3½. The final yesterday was between Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella (rossi / red), and unfortunately we lost 8 to 5½ I believe. There are actually four teams, with the fourth being San Giovanni (verdi / green) who played Santa Maria Novella the day after the game I attended, these being the four ancient city quarters.

Yesterday was also a public holiday over here, the Feast Day of San Giovanni (St. John the Baptist), so pretty much everything was closed so I found out after work (after walking 20 minutes to the supermarket in 35° heat, ug!). I didn’t go to the final because I needed to finish as much work as possible this before my break. Though in retrospect, I probably should of, nothing was open and it was noisy as hell, with half of Florence outside my window, helicopters swirling low overhead and all the drums and church bells ringing—made concentrating a bit difficult!

Last night for the public holiday there was also the most impressive fireworks I have seen in my life. Much better than even the Easter ones at the Duomo last year. We were standing on Ponte Grazie (the bridge closest to home, with most of the rest of the city as you can see in the photo below! lol) and the fireworks were going off out of over the water in front of us. However the best part was as they were expanding out, they were coming towards you. It was like you could almost reach out a touch them, they looked that close. There were several that exploded with one colour, then flew out further and exploded again, and then did this again. And also ones that made shapes like the outlines of crosses and so forth. Pretty damn impressive, the display went on continuously for 40 minutes as well.

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).

I now have a rather flash looking complete with holograms 12 month multiple entry Schengen Visa, which means I can work in Italy and live pretty much anywhere in Western Europe.

I’m sending off my Italian Visa application in the morning. At this point I’m really hoping they issue one since I have had to buy tickets and insurance prior to applying, otherwise it’s going to be a rather expensive exercise.

Travel dates are now leave New Zealand on Tue 15th April and arrive in Italy on the 16th. Start looking for a flat over the following week while staying at my friend Anna’s place. On the 23rd I’m taking a quick trip via Roma to Istanbul, spending the night there and then traveling down to Gallipoli the following day. After the dawn memorial service and a little exploring heading back to Istanbul, another night there and the most of the following day. Heading back to Bologna late on the afternoon of the 26th.

After that continue to look for somewhere to live, if I haven’t found somewhere already. Also on the list at some stage is a trip to Casablanca, since I now have enough Frequent Flyer Miles to go there and back for free! And visiting friends in London and Ireland. Though these trips will be a bit later on in the year.

UPDATE: Visa application has been sent, now we wait…