Weekend Update

It's Sunday night here and we just ended our second weekend. As you know we are thinking about furnishing our new apartment, so much of this weekend has been looking at sofas, coffee tables, light fixtures, bath mats, etc, etc... I'm not sure how many of our readers know how Malinda meticulously plans the placement and style of furniture wherever she lives, but she could teach a class on it. We received a blueprint (not really but sort of) of our apartment drawn to scale with measurements on the day we got the keys. Malinda has made little cut outs of different sizes of furniture (also to scale) based on the measurements in the IKEA catalog. She spends hours agonizing over whether we should have a 3 seat couch and a love seat, or a sectional and two armchairs, or some other combination. If I don't snap her out of it, she could easily flip out and totally lose her mind.

So, on Saturday we rode the bus to two furniture stores that are not too far from each other, IKEA and Fly. I should tell you about our bus riding experiences. I don't think we wrote about our first time riding the bus, but to make a long story short, it was a disaster. We walked A LOT, got lost, and paid 15 CHF (Swiss Francs) for nothing. We accidentally bought a train ticket instead of a bus ticket and rode the bus to IKEA and back without ever buying a bus ticket Luckily we got on the back of the bus both times and the bus driver never asked us for a ticket! But we didn't realize we were cheating the system until we did it right this Saturday.

We asked the person at the front desk of our hotel and found out the bus picks up about 100 ft from the front of the hotel. We also found out you tell the bus driver where you are going and pay for it on the bus (not at a kiosk like we tried before). Also it's only 6 CHF for a round trip ticket instead of the 15 we paid for a one way train ticket... This last bus trip was a huge success and took about 3 hours less time than last weekend.

We are now confident about being able to get around somewhat. We also can ride the bus from our hotel to our new apartment (and back!) which is much easier than the 45 minute walk which includes a very steep hill to get to our place. We also found out that a lot of people at IKEA speak English, they have name badges with little flags under their names to show what languages they speak. They usually have 4 or 5! We feel like idiots because we only speak English. So furnishing is under way and Malinda can probably handle most of it by herself next week.

This weekend there was an Autumn Festival in Lugano. It involved people setting up little stands and selling cheese, dried sausages, jellies, scarves, wines, etc. They also had people dressed up in traditional, local costumes who sing and play instruments.

We ate at the festival Friday and Saturday night and I have no idea what it was, but it seemed traditional, so we went for it. The first night we had some sort of pasta that looked like rice crispies and a mystery meat. I hope it was beef, but I would not swear to it. Later that night we saw people in long lines getting food from guys who were stirring mixtures in giant vats that sat on the ground with what looked like canoe oars. So, we decided we would try that on Saturday.

Here is a picture of what we saw. I also wanted to try and get some red pants in the picture. There are a lot of guys that wear red, orange, or yellow pants here and they are awesome! So I think this is a picture of a big vat of polenta. They give you a scoop of this in a bowl and then you get another scoop from another vat of your choice. Malinda got some creamy mushroom goop, and I got something that looks kinda like gumbo. Mine was very gumboesque in my opinion and I liked it.

Today we went to an Anglican Church that we heard about through one of Malinda's e-mails to the American Women of Ticino (AWOT) group. We missed church because we took a wrong turn on the way there, but after we found out how to get there, we went back and met everyone after they got out for a pot luck lunch. It was great because they all spoke English. There are a couple of American families and several British families. We spent lunch with an older man from Oak Ridge, TN who works at a super computer lab in Lugano. He was very nice and very happy to answer our stupid questions and fill us in on some tricks of living here. It basically involves smuggling food in from Italy, where it is half the price. He also reconfirmed that we really must get a car. This was further confirmed when we had to bum a ride from one of the nice women in the church to a expat garage sale this afternoon. We didn't find much there, but did get Malinda a hairdryer, a picture frame, and some Italian cookbooks.

We got dropped off at our new apartment with our loot and I passed out. Malinda thought it would be really cool to take pictures of me while I was asleep. We have at least six of these...

Successes this week: getting an apartment, riding the bus in the city, riding the bus to other cities, buying stuff at IKEA on our own, getting a home phone, and finding English speaking people.

Better luck next week: getting a hair cut, not having to sleep on the floor, having real internet access, searching for a car, not eating out every meal.