Easing into the weekend
Yesterday we took quick day-trip (a few hours, really) by train to a town on the sea called Viareggio. It has a long beach that I guess is entirely open to the public, although, for as far down the shore as we could see, you have to walk through a beach-front business to gain access to the water. Best we could gather the beach-front businesses are selling access to chairs with umbrellas, access to changing rooms, and refreshments. Nothing about how this worked was obvious to us. We walked along the shore for a while, toes in, but not being prepared to bake in the sun, we retreated to a large park not too far from the beach. It was very pleasant in the park beneath some very tall and leafy trees, reasonably cool on a hot day.
We bought our round-trip train tickets from a ticket machine inside the train station and a good thing, too; the line at the ticket window was very long. Not sure why more of those in line didn’t use the machine; maybe one ate their money once.
Our big adventure in Italian today came at the supermercato, when I couldn’t find the eggs and asked a woman working in the store where they were by constructing a verbless utterance along the lines of “Where eggs?”: “Dove l’uovi?” which she understood, but possibly not until I formed an oval using thumb and forefinger. She told we where they were, but non capito (as usual). Then, she pointed and said avanti, which either means forward or get the hell away from me you foreign piece of trash. Anyway, she did help me find them. Later, she turned up running the cash register in our check-out line. She smiled and remarked about how I must have found the eggs (this according to Mrs. W.) and then struck up a bit of conversation with Mrs. W., asking her where we were from and then how you say “uovi” in English. The word “eggs” seemed to amuse her. It is a funny word.
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