Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Further adjustments to local life (a superposition of fail and win)

I received a piece of mail today!  At one point, when buying train tickets, I signed up for their "club card" or something like that.  I wasn't sure if something physical would arrive - and it did!  But, it is a credit card?  I possibly accidentally signed up for an Italian credit card.  This is the CartaFreccia that I intended to sign up for, but I clearly need to do some translation of the fine print to understand why it is also a Visa prepaid card.

I went to retrieve my dry cleaning, and thought to look up some helpful words beforehand.  It seemed like it wasn't ready yet, so I guess I will go back later this afternoon.  My original plan had been to head to OSR after picking up my laundry, but not it looks like I will be working entirely from home today.  I hadn't had internet access at home from the weekend until last night, but it is back today.  Hence, working from home is entirely possible.

On the way back from the cleaners I saw that the "market" was happening.  My Airbnb host had told me there was a market on Wednesdays - this was the first time that I was there for it.  I was pretty excited - there were two stands with a variety of produce, a meat stand, a cheese stand, and then a variety of non-food tables.  I bought a chunk of cheese, a melon, and some fava beans.  I love fava beans, but I failed to correctly convert from kg to lb.  At the grocery store I typically buy 0.5-1 lb of favas for me... so here I asked for 1 kg.  That was the wrong conversion!  I now have a lot of fava beans to cook and eat.

It turns out that wasn't the market... that was just the first chunk.  It actually went back along another street, with many other booths and tables.  Most of the produce stands had close to everything - these aren't "farmers markets" at all, but more like an outdoor grocery store.  There was even one truck selling pet supplies and songbirds!  About half of the stands were selling clothes, craft supplies, and housewares.  While I was tempted by the fish vendor, I figured that (1) I would have difficulty cooking the fish with the oven/cooking supplies here (2) I have no idea how to describe how I want the fish cleaned in Italian.  I had a hard enough time buying the right type of onions at one of the booths!

Now it is time to get back to work... I spent most of the morning trying to plan travel.  I'm having a difficult time finding convenient/fast/affordable (pick 2?) ways to get to the Eastern European cities I hoped to visit.  It doesn't help that I'm trying to plan trips 3-10 days ahead of time.  I've reached the conclusion that transit will be $300, and I might as well prioritize accordingly.  I'm considering taking a night train to Vienna (and flying back).  I haven't taken a sleeper train before - not only would it satisfy my "take a different type of train each trip" pattern, but it has the greatest odds of me completely failing at doing it correctly!

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