Shoes and coffee ... bellissimo!

Greetings from Lucca!

It's a very cold, very small and very beautiful city - my favourite kind! - And every afternoon after school, my little sister has to walk me home so I don't get lost. I now have a vast collection of maps in different sizes and fonts, and each one is as useless as the next.


Yep. It's the maps. Shut up and deal with it :)


Lucca is, as I said, quite the stunning citta. Each morning I brave the sub zero temperatures for a stroll around the perimiter of the city atop the ancient wall - a very Lucchese thing to do, I might add, though I don't wear lycra. And never, ever will!! I've had a brilliant few days of dinner parties, gelati-runs, coffee overdoses and speck; a food and wine related adventure this has been! I'm finding this trip a lot more relaxed than the last one, for various reasons, and even my experience of learning Italian is more enjoyable this time around - I've now got the accent and I'm not afriad to use it! And I no longer feel like someone's throwing bricks at my head in the guise of la lingua di Italiano.

Ok. I do. But they are softer bricks!

Four days into my Italian term, I am still pretty much crap but so far have managed to fool everybody from the shopkeeper at Desigual to the mechanic at the servo; first conversation about putting chains on tyres and conducting an auto service may not have been a complete success but at least no one got hurt.

Yet.

I also got to talk shop with a Jehovah's witness - this was pretty funny actually. I don't think either of us actually took the other seriously, and I nearly peed my own pants when I professed to being a committed Catholic.


The real tragedy of this trip is that I've already run out of my allotted spending money for clothes - in spite of my generousness towards self!!! I guess my pocket wasn't generous enough :( So, now I have just one question:


Santa Claus is real, right?


It is a serious question. I have only purchased one pair of boots when I wanted two; Motivi could deck out my winter wardrobe for the next two years if I let them, and I bought two gorgeous jumpers from Desigual and they were't even brand Desigual!! FAIL! I know I don't need any new clothes, but that's just in Australia,; in Italia, I am a massive bag lady! True story.
Besides, need has never been an argument, but I do need to shop as much as I can before December 31st for my beautiful, shapely, well made in Italia gorgeous costumes. This is when my new year's resolution to be moderate kicks in.


I haven't yet set my parameters for moderate. The dictionary on my phone - which is moderate - says less extreme. If you're a moderate centre-right, however, you are still a fuckwit. I need hard and fast rules. For example, does it just mean one less pair of shoes?

(And a little elf in the cobbler's workshop just died; another elf put a nail through his head) Mia culpa.


so, one less caffe latte?


Being moderate is going to suck!