Fidenza Shopping Village 22 September 2007

Today was a lot of driving over the mountains, on the way back we took the autostrade to cut down on the number of corners. We drove to Fidenza to visit the outlet shopping village where Matt and Belinda found a few things.

Yay! Time to go shopping...

The bistro stuffed up my lunch and had to remake it - this is what happens when Belinda and Matt get bored!
I liked the paving!

Just about to take a last photo of the day's loot (I didn't buy anything but a Lindt ice cream!) when the security guard started pointing to something... (we think it probably meant no photos!)

Found a book yesterday, “A Thousand Days in Tuscany”, the author, Marlena de Blasi, also wrote “A Thousand Days in Venice” which I will have to hunt for. I am really enjoying reading her Tuscany novel; I can almost sense the lives and stories in the villages we drive through every day.The day before yesterday, on our way home from Santa Margherita Legure, we ended up on the wrong mountain with dark rapidly approaching. We stopped near a village and turned around hoping to knock on a door and ask for help. A lady must have seen us turn around as she came out of her house. Even though she spoke no English (and we no Italian worth noting) she understood and took us down to another house where she though they might speak English. We were invited inside (and no they didn’t speak English) and they tried to sort us out. Unfortunately, where we are staying has no real address, and the clues we had weren’t meaningful as they were on a different mountain from the one they lived on! Next, they brought the younger girl from next door in who knew a few English words. Unfortunately, when the man figured out how to use his phone there was no answer at the accommodation so no help at all! We then tried to call Belinda’s brother but that was a mobile number in Germany and the man didn’t know how to call that!In the end we drove back down to the village (30 minutes down the side of the mountain in the dark) to locate a phone. No one in the village, including the policeman, seemed at all concerned that we were lost – LOL. We called the people where we are staying and made use of the Italian-English dictionary I had bought on a whim at the tourist shop earlier. Using the word for ‘lost’ we managed to communicate we were coming home if we could figure out how. At this stage we were already 30 minutes late for dinner!With directions which consisted of the name of a village to aim for, and the written instructions which would work once we found that village, we set off again. Another 30-40 minutes on roads mountain-goats would like, we finally found our ‘casa’ (house). We were over an hour late for dinner and Belinda was so relived to have got home she ran in and hugged our hostess so long I wondered if the poor lady could still breathe! Wonderfully, dinner was still waiting and was warm and fresh and wonderful – margherita pizza for starters, followed by risotto, then veal schnitzel with vegetables, then apple pasty dessert (I might have forgotten one course) – all organic and accompanied by the locally grown wine. (Now you can see why I haven’t lost any weight!).The hospitality in Tuscany and Ligure (we are actually staying a little north of Tuscany) is amazing – the people are warm, friendly and welcoming and somehow we manage even with no Italian on our side and no English on theirs.Talking about dinner, we have our pre-dinner music playing downstairs so I had better make sure I am semi-presentable as 8 pm approaches…Love and Hugs, Chel
PS In case this is confusing, I wrote this journalling in September!