Caffe!!


It has been a trying two days, but everything is under control as far as we know. This would not be possible without good friends and at least a couple of people who speak some English and the Danes who speak perfect English. Our friend Marello at the hardware store called Paulo to come and fix our broken pipes. I could have called him, and said, “water broken help”. He was there within an hour and then came back in the evening to do the job. He even missed the Italian team playing football. Paulo had to use a hammer and chisel to fight his way through the outside wall of the bathroom. He has state of the art pipe benders and fasteners, but then he pulled out a large piece of horse tail and cut some off and wrapped it around the threads to make a better seal than tape. He said that horse hair expands when it gets wet.  He will be back later to plaster the wall, we can’t see it so we don’t care, as long as it is before September. He charged 70E which is ridiculous so we gave him 100E.

The Hole in the Wall.

After the water was fixed, Jim went to turn on the gas. Now the next discovery! The gas was turned off and had been locked by someone. Luckily we have our grill so we still had dinner. Our friend Victorio road by on his bicycle and we ran down to greet him and of course ask him questions about the gas and the trash. The next morning we went to the Commune (city hall) and he had already found out the gas was off because we had not paid the bills. He had talked to the gas company and if we went to the post office and paid the bill he would fax it to the gas company and they would turn on the gas. All of this happened as promised. He also gave us our tax bill which we paid. Just a couple of examples of how you can think you know what you are doing, but you don’t. The money we left with Victorio was just for the trash: not the taxes. Sorry to everyone we told the taxes were so cheap. They are actually about $300 per year. Jim and Gregor had been to the gas company to get the bill paid through the bank, but that obviously didn’t happen. Jim had been using this as an example of how one can communicate and get things done without speaking a language. So forget that idea.

The Commune Castelvecchio Subequo


Now the water and gas are working and we have our cool compost bin provided by the Commune. They pick up organic material and trash two times a week, but there should hardly be any trash as there are recycling bins down the street for glass, cardboard and plastic. I know we could do this in Vermont. It has to be made easy with the bins and degradable plastic bags provided. All the towns in this valley are working together. I think our neighbors that have the garden seem to have big bags of compost that they are using.