Friday 9th April

This morning the sun was out and the church bells were chiming in the distance again, this is a pleasant daily custom the bells ring about every hour through the day. We haven’t worked out the exact schedule as they seem to change, so unfortunately we can’t say things like “Darling please be home by the 6 0’clock bells” because sometimes they seem to chime off the exact hour and on the half hour.

Today the Lucca markets are on, they occur every Wednesday and Saturday morning just within the Lucca walls. They are quite large with everything you can imagine to buy. We purchased some linen for the beds and had a pleasant lunch at a small sidewalk café. Charlotte then used her leftover bread to feed the pigeons in the piazza. We thought we had better walk off the pasta and bread from lunch so we hired a bike for Charlotte and walked on the Lucca walls. The Lucca walls are 17^th century ramparts that encircle the central part of Lucca. They are very impressive with tree-lined promenades offering entrancing views of the city. It took us about 45 minute’s power walking to complete the full circle of the walls (4 K’s). After our walk we rewarded ourselves with a gelato!

Later, back at home we meet our English neighbour, Gary Upton who lives up the hill a bit. Gary came to make sure we had found everything ok at the villa and answered some of our many questions. One of which was what are the road rules of driving up the hill? Gary informed us that you had to beep the horn on blind corners to alert other drivers, and never, back down the hill on a blind corner; the other vehicle has to back up in this situation. But as our car unfortunately, has French number plates, that stick out like beacons to the Italians (they are red and the Italians are white).Gary thought we may have a bit of trouble with Italian drivers giving away to us as they apparently don’t like the French! (Leon says “I am an Irish Italian Jew driving a French car in Italy and I ownsa the rroada”) Oh Mamma Mia time to find some valium!

We also didn’t know what to do with our rubbish as there seemed to be nothing like our wheelie bins anywhere to be found. So Gary explained the rubbish system here in Italy to us. First of all, rubbish has to be separated into different categories, such as recyclable, cartons & paper, organic and whatever else. Then you take it down into Ponte where there are large bins in the car park behind the Piazza and pop everything into the correct bins, and you must be careful as there are a force of police, who actually make sure you do this correctly or you end up with a hefty fine, yikes!

We realized this was the only way as we hadn’t figured how a garbage truck could ever fit on most of the roads, let alone drive up the driveways, these ones make Kuranda’s look positively flat! So after talking with Gary we drove down to Ponte and correctly dumped the rubbish and met up with some local ambos, who spoke very little English but very kindly showed Leon through their vehicle. Back home for dinner and watched some entertaining Italian TV.