Italy Tips, for EB&Kids

Since dh has work colleagues coming over the next few months, I thought I’d do a series on living here to help them out a bit. I’ll start out with a random list of tips, and refine them and break up into posts as I go along, and as Internet access permits. I’ll include tips for others as well so this can be used as a general reference guide.

Getting to Pescara

The guys have been flying to Rome and then driving 2 to 2 1/2 hours to Pescara. There is an airport here but it’s cheaper to fly into Rome, plus the drive over is beautiful, with views of snow-capped mountains, olive groves, towns situated on hillsides/cliffs, etc. There are also trains and buses to Pescara from Rome but I won’t include detailed instructions here as they can be found elsewhere. Just google “Rome to Pescara” +bus or +train — this will usually involve getting a train from Rome Fiumicino Airport to the Tiburtina station where you can get the train or bus.

The Weather Here

Well, we got here in March and have been pretty much wearing our sweaters and coats most days, except for the kids who often find themselves warmer than I am — probably because they run around and all. It’s only really in the past week that we’ve been able to just walk without sweaters and go to the beach daily. The water is still pretty cold but the kids don’t mind taking a dip (so far, up to their waists) in between castle-building and just playing in the sand. The only other time we were in Italy was in November, so we were also wearing our winter coats save for sunny days. According to Lina the best months here are May and June.

One thing we’ve stopped doing here is checking the weather online — for one thing ‘net access has been tricky. For another it really is much wiser to just step outside and check how it feels, the way our grandfathers did it .

Rome tends to be warmer than Pescara because it’s “more city” — but if you go early morning I still would recommend taking a sweater.

The condo

Hopefully I won’t be writing this in vain and you’ll get to stay here as well. The floors are all tile, so keep that in mind as you’ll have kids that will want to run around, etc. There is no dehumidifier so we open the windows whenever possible, just not at night because of mosquitoes. Yes, there are mosquitoes — not a lot though. There are also the larger mosquitoes that we only used to see in Texas!! But you probably won’t see them in the house.

There’s no air conditioning (not necessary) and no screens on the windows. I love the grates/blinds though because they can completely shut out light. Bad idea though if you forget to open them and you take a nap — you might wake up disoriented and think it’s night — this happened to us quite a bit our first few days, so now we leave them open about a foot from the ground.

Aesthetically speaking, the woodwork and glass insets are just beautiful. The doorknobs and fixtures are old-world and there’s art everywhere. The kitchen tiles are 70′s-ish but that’s okay — cobalt blue and yellow in a kitchen is just perfect. One word of caution: the keys are antique (Paco calls them analog keys ) and not interchangeable. We just leave the doors unlocked to be safe. There’s one incident with the bathroom door that we need to tell you about — so remind us .

The main door is opened with a crazy multi-bit (?) key that works 4 upper and 1 lower bolt. A bit heavy handed so A sometimes chooses to just turn the key once.

to be continued…