Bar Roma Memories...the arrival

It's sad that I'm just now writing most of this down. I've never really been able to stop myself physically nad mentally enough to be much of a journaler or writer. I've always played with the idea of doing video journals since I'm more of a talker and story teller. But alas to keep from losing these memories I wanted to go back about 6 years to when I first arrived in Italy and tell some stories about my time getting to know the Via Roma people and working in the cafe/restaurant/bar there. Those were wonderful adventurous days that I will never forget and I thank the Lord for that blessing of being adopted into such a loving Italian family...an experience not many foreigners get.

It was August 2006, a hot and sunny day, when Amanda and I landed in Pisa. This big move had been a long time coming for both of us and we were more than excited to settle into our new apartment and get to know some locals. Our first couple days were spent cracking up at the furniture choices the Italians had made for the place and then stalking the comings and goings of all the neighborhood people. We had a balcony that ran the length of the front of our apartment on the first floor. This gave us an up close and somewhat personal view of all the people, stores, etc. etc. I loved to sit out there in the afternoons sometimes talking in English with Amanda just to create curiosity on the part of the Italians. You see not too many americans can be found living in Pisa, visiting the leaning tower yes, but not living there. During our first week we had gone to the local catch all store(mesticheria) and picked out paint colors for our new apartment. To our umm surprise the kitchen had been painted top to bottom in neon hunter orange. We came up with some choices we felt were more normal but the old gentleman who we later found out was named Fabrizio, was still shocked. We quickly learned that to Italians white is the best color all the time. Almost all of their apartments are white devoid of any wall colorings. Sad. I like to think white isn't even a color! It took just over 4 coats of paint to cover the orange.  One of our painting nights we got a little hungry after many hours of work so we decided to make a late night pizza run across the street. We, however, decided it was a good idea to go in our super american grungy paint wear. We made quite the scene at Bar Roma. From that night on we had a sort of staring back and forth relationship from our balcony with the workers there one in particulare was the pizza guy. We saw him wear cargo shorts flip flops and a baseball cap one day. Amanda and I were like whattt whose the americano working over there. A couple weeks later we'd find out he was really Albania. ha!!....really late now so more to come soon