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.
