Welcome to Villa Verde

A funny thing happened on the way to Spain, we really wanted to get back to Italy. Back to job hunting and our very own cottage, just to be settled down again and a return to normalcy. I wish I knew the Italian word for normalcy but that is a whole other topic/headache. Our landlord, Dante, picked us up from the Zagarolo train station and helped us get situated in our cottage. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast and he offered to bring us a little lunch which we graciously accepted and devoured. Another pleasant surprise was that he brought us a couple bottles of the wine he makes. He also offered to show us where the supermarket was so we would be able to get some dinner. After the trip to the supermarket we were absolutely wiped out, we took a nice long nap and then made dinner. After dinner we watched a few episodes of Sex and the City (I’ve got Carrie-fever) and called it a night. Unfortunately, right before bedtime, Allie noticed a freaking scorpion that was trapped in a glass on the hutch in the kitchen! That gave us a bit of a fright and we started looking all over for the buggers. Surprisingly, this didn’t affect our sleep because we both fell asleep very quickly.

Saturday morning we went with Dante and his wife Marielle, and the Romanian couple, Radu and Donna, who live in the chalet, to the weekly market. It’s a nice market with one part having fruit, veggies, bread and cheeses and the other having clothes and home supplies. After the market, we spent the day doing all of the laundry we hadn’t done for the previous month. In our defense, we had done laundry, it was just all by hand so nothing every really got as clean as the machine gets it. You all have no idea how truly amazing clean clothes and fabric softener actually smelsl. While the laundry was doing its thing, we went swimming and also inspected the grounds a little more thoroughly.

Zagarolo is a pretty affluent area, Dante told us about a few television stars that live in the area but he was most proud to mention that Ursula (Anders), the quintessential Bond girl, lives in the area. He showed us a few places she likes to shop and where she bought her bread too. We suspect he has a little crush on her.

On Sunday, we sat around the war room and mapped out our strategy for dropping off applications on Monday. After we were satisfied, we gladly finished off the two bottles of Dante’s wine and went off to bed with hope in our heads and wine in our bellies.