Part 1 is here.

The Condo, cont’d.

The Living Room

The living room has 2 leather couches and 2 divans that fold out into beds — so you can have sleep-over guests if you want. Signora Farina also bought a new TV for the place; however, it only delivers local channels. Surprisingly, and as E has already noted, Spongebob Squarepants and Simpsons (neither of which do we ever watch in the US) are acceptable when in the Italian… while you don’t understand a whole lot of Italian. I have no idea if they’re still okay once you can instantly translate in your head.

The walls are painted a nice sunny yellow and there are a few pieces of artwork (framed prints).

The Dining Room

I really should just call it the dining area since it’s still part of the living room really. There’s a dining table with 4 chairs, similar in make to ours (and your) dining table back in Ohio. It extends, but we haven’t been able to find the inset leaves in the garage. We bought a vinyl tablecloth to protect the wood and I’ve covered up the seats with cut up 1 Euro pillowcases so the kids don’t accidentally stain them if they happen to spill something.

There’s also a huge sideboard with a marble top and glass shelves (with doors) — this is what we use right now to hold our homeschooling books and supplies.

Oh, and there is also a bureau in the foyer which you could use to store homeschooling supplies, though we’ve only used it as a catchall for keys, mail, etc.

The Kitchen

The eat-in kitchen is small but adequate. The fridge is about half the size of our (very American) fridge in the US; however I find that to be an advantage since I see everything that we still have more easily than I used to with our humongous fridge… which means less waste and that can only be a good thing. The cooktop (gas) and oven (electric) are both new (Electrolux) though you may have to adjust cooking habits a bit as they are considerably smaller than their American counterparts. Signora Farina bought new pots and pans, but they are all the flimsy Teflon-coated ones, so I bought a couple of stainless steel pieces that we plan to leave, at least until our last trip here. She also gifted us (or rather, the apartment) with a new pasta pot — obviously, extremely useful here in Italy . She also bought new flatware and kitchen utensils (the basics — pancake turner, long-handled spoon, pasta server, several ladles — all stainless steel). There’s a space-efficient Miele dishwasher which we will dearly miss when we go back home. The house comes equipped with lots of lightweight plates and bowls (Arcopal’s Veronica pattern), plus small coffee cups with matching saucers, and Bormioli tumblers (plus a few Nutella ones). There is also a large (hee) 3-cup capacity Mokapot + a solo Mokapot. No kettle so we use our skillet to heat up water for tea, and no microwave (microonde). Which is just as well since we’re trying to get away from that. Also in the cupboards you’ll find plastic dinnerware — which (whoops) the children have appropriated (some of them anyway) for beach play — yikes. S.ra Farina also provided bakeware (probably for lasagne) but I don’t know if you plan to do any baking — they’re Teflon coated, like the pots and pans. I got a package of those coated Italian bakepans instead.

I brought my Wusthof chef’s and paring knives (“have knives, will travel” is my motto) and bought a cutting board here. Three more items rounded out my batterie de cuisine: a peeler (so the kids can help me with peeling potatoes and apples), a whisk (the easier to beat eggs for tiramisu with, my dear), and a corkscrew — can you believe it, a house in Italy with NO corkscrew!? Oh, wait, one more. A salad spinner. The first couple of weeks I was rinsing out and drying the lettuce leaves by hand, it was crazy.

Next time, the laundry room, bathroom, bedrooms and balcony.

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…