A teensy bit of shopping

Finally today all pretense of financial austerity was cast aside and Jutta and I went shopping. With her passing her exam with flying colors on Friday we both felt we deserved it - she because she did and I because I am an extremly emphatic person ;-) At first the selection of stuff seems dazzling - so many wallets to look at, so many purses to consider so many colors and shapes and styles. There were purple purses,and orange ones, green, pink, aquamarin, petrol and canary-yellow, plus the usual selection of black, browns, camel and reds. After three hours of full concentrationa nd dedication I have to admit: the bounty was good - several purses and wallets, three leather belts (5 Euro a pop on sale for a leather belt - what's there to complain?) and a T-shirt. We had chats with half a dozen of the sales guys - one of which seemed to be Italian - but all spoke Italian, plus English and some German, and one even fluent Spanish. We got invited to the "disco", one wanted to go have pizza with us and some of the rest I didn't understand. But one thing is for sure: with a "bionda" around, especially one that is "natural" like Jutta it is never hard to strike up a conversation with a sales person on an Italian street market - whether he is actually Italian or not.
I was the first really warm day and surprisingly the city - at least where we were, just outside the Bermuda triangle of Duomo, Ponte Vecchio and train station - was surprisingly quiet. But then again, maybe it wasn't surprising: this is a long weekend here, like in the rest of Europe, with Thursday being May Day and therefore a public holiday and most people do not even think about working on a "bridge Friday" which makes this a perfect long weekend for a getaway. Seems many Florentines did just that, leaving the city entirely to the tourists. Tourists in Florence seem to be like the visitors to any of the great American National Parks - there are busloads at the picknick tables next to the road, you walk five minutes you loose 50% of them, you walk 30 minutes you loose 80% of them, any further and you are able to enjoy the nature pretty much by yourself. Only in Florence the radius is even smaller. Anyway, it was fun to go shopping without having to watch Max and prevent him from running into the street, pulling on stuff that isn't his, stepping on people's feet, sitting on the ground in the middle of pigeon poop, and having to listen to him telling me the hundredth time about shooting a pistol or a canon.
In the afternoon Jutta, Max and I went up to Piazzale Michelangelo - the piazza on the other side of the Arno river with the nice view on the city and Jutta got a good impression of what it means to be traveling with a kid in a big city. There wasn't much talk about topics other than what brand of cars where parked along the road, where the policemen had their pistols, when they would use them and the usual canon stuff. One basically has to string Max along from one "attraction" to the next. He all of a sudden wants to stay at the Piazza Vecchio and chase pigeons so one has to think quickly and come up with something like "let's quickly go to the Arno river and check which direction it flows". After that is done there needs to be another incentive like "let's walk over to the next bridge and see whether that cat is still sitting there" and then "come on now, we got to climb the stairs to the piazza and count them because we have to tell Papa how many stairs there are" and then "now we run over there to see when the bus number 12 leaves because that is the one we have to take to get back home", ....

After pretty much three weeks here I am still on the fence about the entire Italy experience. Maybe I just expected too much, none of the other locations was or is so fraught with ideas, hopes and expectations as Italy. Partly it is nostalgia, this used to be the first non-German speaking country I visited repeatedly (without my parents) when I was still fairly young and impressionable (in my teens) and in my mind it's still the country of fun and freedom from helping out at home, behaving well, dressing properly, and getting up early only that these days I still do the house work, behave independently of the explicit orders of my parents anyway, dress in Silicon-Valley-casual and get up darn early every day of the week because some little guy slips into bed next to me and starts talking and never stops until he has a nap 7 hours later. I also think that reality has caught up with the Italians over the last few years. I just recently read about a survey (where, oh where??) that the Italians are the most unhappy people in Europe. It seems like reality has caught up with them, too, reality about their 62 governments since WWII, their problems with illegal immigration (600 more just the other day on Lampedusa, an island the size of a small American suburb), the corruption and Mafia and all of that. "La Dolce Vita" seems to have gone the way of the Dodo bird and it's hard to enjoy life carefree and happy if people around you aren't happy and the news talk about people starving in Africa, monks dying in Tibet and the bottom falling out of the American economy (that the stock market rallies on that news is a different story and one that convinces me even more - if any more convincing was necessary at all - that, whatever the markets are, they are not rational. The whole idea of investors behaving rationally is naive at best - well, at least in my humble opinion which nobody on Wall Street, Washington or anywhere near gives a damn about anyway).
Anyway, before I get too political for my own good I'll stop and dedicate some time to finally upload some Italy pictures to the webpage.