I do believe in faeries

So we have a french bed, and as romantic as that might sound, it is nothing but troubles. First when we moved in, the mattress on this French box spring had an odor that... well lets just say we were not gonna sleep on it. So the land lord (Livio) agreed to buy us a new mattress. But, he bought the wrong size. Turns out, there is no Italian mattress that fits a French box spring (an so our trouble begins) He chose to buy the mattress one size smaller than the box spring so the mattress would not hang over the edge. Thoughtful of him, right? (the one he choose was nearly 100 Euros cheaper than the size we wanted) Well, needless to say, we did not even take it out of its bag. We knew it was to small. So we began looking for a new mattress. I found the store from where Livio purchased the baby bear sized mattress, and asked if we could switch to a larger size and would they pick up the old one while delivering the new one? They agreed to do the switch, and credit us the amount paid for the little mattress, but would not deliver. Only after my lovely wife visited the same store did they agree to everything. They delivered a new mattress (of the proper size) we paid them the difference in price between the two sizes, and everyone was happy. BUT, I think I paid the delivery man twice what I should have. I was home that day to receive the delivery, and tried to convince the men to carry the mattress upstairs to the bedroom. When this did not work, and after I had made several trips up and down... talking and exchanging paperwork, it is quite possible that I paid the fellow twice. Which means we paid 100 Euro for our upgraded mattress instead of 50. *sigh* None the less, we had our new mattress. We plopped it down on the French speaking box spring, and it was too big. As Livio had predicted, it hung over each edge. Now the good news in all this is that it only hangs over 5cm on each side. Not enough to endanger us as we sleep.. so no worries right? Well, here is an interesting side note. The walls in our bedroom are not square, that is to say... the wall against which our french box spring lives, is crooked. So when aligning an over sized mattress on a french box spring against a crooked Italian wall, one has the choice between spacing the mattress evenly with 5cm overhanging on each side, thus creating a gap between the wall and mattress on the right side capable of swallowing pillows, or to fix the mattress against the wall smoothly, thus unbalancing the overhang so that sitting or rolling to the left side of the bed becomes equivalent to stepping on a tiger trap in the Amazon. Ah, the fun in our bed never stops! Personally I prefer the tiger trap. If one carefully sets the mattress in between the two positions I just mentioned.. then carefully stacks the pillows over the gap, and arranges the bed cover just right, you can create the illusion that not only our mattress fits its box spring properly, but our wall looks straight. This leads to even more excitement the next morning when Brandie has stolen 3/4 of the bed sheets, and I am sleeping naked, wedged between wall and mattress, shivering with no covers. OK Ok ok... I am exaggerating all this a bit.. sometimes I wear pajamas to bed, and Brandie only steals 1/2 the covers. Oh, and speaking of refrigerators... you know you own a short fridge when the coffee-maker machine, thing... (I don't know how to say it when it makes Italian coffee) is on TOP of the fridge, and Brandie can still reach it, and make coffee with it! I am not saying that we have a small fridge, we have plenty of space, its just that now I have no excuse not to clean it daily, since everyone can see on top of it.

So just a simple update: I finally heard back from the VA office. Seems the woman in DC is making things happen for me. That's the good news. The 'not so hot' news is that I would much rather have the case worker in Germany working on my file. The fact that the DC office is now contacting me, means that my file has not been transfered to Europe yet. But, concentrationg on the positive, I actually am in contact with someone who is in fact working on having my file transfered. So what does all this mean? Once my file gets to Europe, and I am assigned a case manager (who will be from Germany since there is no VA facility in Italy) I will be able to enrole at the University of Maryland located on the military base here in Naples. Until the VA has my file updated and transfered, I am not eligible to enrole. It all makes sense, and I understand things never happen as fast as you want them to, but I was hoping I was further along than it appears I am. No worries, this has given me time to get to know Naples. Brandie and I are still settling in... making our apartment feel more like home. We recently purchased a rug (thanks to a ride to Ikea from Mel and Donavan) It makes the living room warmer, and we can lounge on pillows near the heater. We have taken to calling our heater (her name is Bumbalina) our fireplace, since she does have an open flame (pilot light.. same thing, right?) Still a bit chilly, especially in the evenings. We are still hoping that the location of our apartment (not in direct sunlight) will in fact work to our favor in the summer. New Topic: We also found our missing boxes!! Two of our boxes with kitchen and office stuff had not arrived with all the other things. So we kind of counted them as gone for good. But then my mom sends an email from Iowa, saying that two boxes had been returned to sender! So, now they have been mailed to us again, one of them is already here. I feel like its a birthday gift, since I had counted on not getting these items. It will be cool to supplement our meager household supplies. New Topic: Brandie is now doing real science in the Lab. For the first month, she spent a lot of time reading journals, and getting used to how things run in Italy. But now she has her own project, which though she has explained to me several times, I will allow her to do so for you, since I would do a bad job of giving any details. Needless to say, she is happy to have some real work to do. She is so determined. I love that about her, very focused and driven, without being pushy or mean. How lucky am I to have her in my life every day? :-) New Topic: I joined up with my gaming group this past weekend. Two guys plus myself. I was going to play a character, but after the fist session, we decided to have me run the games. This is a role that I am more comfortable with anyway. Most of my gaming career has been running the games, not actually playing in them. So the real good news is the guys are very nice. Both are military, American, and are great about picking me up from the train station. New Topic: Brandie was invited to a "all girls, english speaking, social event" It is held not to far from our apartment and meets once a month. We have very few details about the group, but she will be attending this weekend, with one of our friends, so maybe she will have some details next week. New Topic: One of our friends is visiting Europe on a tour. She is part of a singing group that will be pereforming in several location in Italy. While touring she has 2 evenings free, and we are hoping to meet up with her. Brandie ordered some stuff, and asked that she deliver it to us, so at some point we will have to cross paths with her! I guess that is it for now, just wanted to say hello to anyone out there who is curious about what is happening in our lives. For any of my family reading this, you can email me directly also, I love getting "mail". Oh, and our US phone should be arriving soon, so we will be able to call you directly before the month is over. Ciao, Bart.

Today started out as a very nice day. Mel came over yesterday to do a little shopping on Via Toledo and hang out. We were up talking very late and since she took the metro in, she stayed the night. All wonderful. This morning we all got up, had tea, talked some more. Also, all very pleasant and enjoyable. Around 11.30am I decided that it was time to do a load of socks, so I put them in the washer. Not too long after that, I thought that it would be a good idea to turn on the heater in the bathroom to warm it up for a shower after the washer turned off. This was apparently, a very bad idea. I overloaded the circuit and the power went out. Unfortunately, I was unaware that I had blown the circuit, you see, I checked all of the breakers in our apartment and none of them were off. So, we sat in the living room for the rest of the day talking, with no heat. This was also, very enjoyable. At one point, I took responsibility for for the outage because I had commented earlier in the morning about the fact that we hadn't had a power outage in a couple of days. I was thinking that it was just the universe giving me a little smack.

Around 6.45pm our neighbor comes home and almost instantly, our power is restored!! Mel has gone home by now and Bart and I have already looked around the block and have noticed that it is really only our building that is lacking power, so we are suspicious as to the nature of our plight and the return of our power coinciding perfectly with our neighbor's homecoming got us to thinking....Maybe there is a Master Power Switch out in the hall that we don't know about...so we go out to ask.

What we learn in our conversation with our very nice neighbor, is that the Master Power Switch for our building is in her apartment. In her apartment. How could we have known that? Honestly, we should have been told that. So, we sat here all day with no power because I am a bad Neopolitan who ran too many appliances at once and because our landlord and our neighbors neglected to tell us that the breakers in our apartment are effectively useless. I am a little irritated by the whole thing for many reasons, not the least of which is that Livio did not call us back when we finally tried to contact him about the outage. You see, he has a key to their apartment and could have come flip the breaker. We do not have a key, however useful that would be.

We will be having a talk with Livio soon. I think I will also mention that the floor in the bedroom is caving in and we have cracked a couple of tiles.

I am done with all of this rain.

Why is quattordici Febbraio important you ask? Not only because Catholics celebrate St. Valentine, the priest who performed secret marriages when they were outlawed, but more importantly because that is the day that Bart and Brandie met. We call it our meetaversry. That is true. We have known each other for a full year and a day now. How much our lives have changed. Married, trips to New York, California, Washington, Iowa, Arizona and now here we are living in Naples, Italy. We have new cell phones, but no internet. No cars, but we are proficient at public transit. We don't eat meat regularly, but the pasta is cheap. So is the bread. We should be getting a mattress this week. We had to exchange the one that our landlord, Livio, bought for us because it was just too small for two people, though very nicely sized for one.

Bart and I (mostly Bart) have done, I think, a very good job of ridding the apartment of mold, including the new batch we found last night. I am allergic and have a cough and chest congestion and a stuffy, runny nose since we got there, but today I feel pretty okay. We also got a shower curtain which has made the bathroom smell of plastic, which is no better or worse than the bleach smell it had before, but is much better than the mildew smell it had before that.

Bart is amazing. I have never met another person like him and I am confident that I never will. I am so very glad that he is here with me. I am also very thankful for Michael, the Hoboken-born police officer who works at the questura processing requests for permits to stay in the country. As has been usual, we were misinformed about the requirements for Bart to stay. Michael, however, was wonderful, explaining what we had wrong and why it would be impossible to get him a residency permit. If I were here on a work visa, no problem, but since I am on a study visa, there is no rule addressing this issue and in fact, we were the first case that Michael had ever encountered. There is an agreement between all of the EU countries that addresses this issue, but we are not from an EU country. We told him that we totally understood what he was saying and why it couldn't work, but that I wouldn't be staying in the country without my husband, so what can we do to get around this detail? He went away for a long while. In total, we were at the window for over an hour. When he came back, he had it all figured out. We were very relieved. Currently, Bart is on a tourist visa that is good until May 18th and we should be able to get him permission to stay before then. It looks like he won't have to leave the country and re-enter either! Whew!

I have read on many an expat website that Italians are not friendly. I completely disagree. Everybody here has been nothing but wonderful in helping us get around rules that everybody knows are stupid. I really like it here even though the weather has SUCKED since we arrived.

I met with Prof Vecchio on Monday, an hour and a half late after the world's longest bus ride. WLBR, I say? Yes, I do. let me take you back a bit to explain...

Currently Bart and I are staying with our fabulous new friends, Melanie and Donovan, who live in a little town about twenty or thirty minutes outside of Naples, depending on the driver. Instead of making them drive us into town all of the time, we all decided it would be better if we took the bus to the metro and the metro into town. We didn't know exactly which bus to take, but we knew of at least three from which we could choose. Mel has a friend who used to do it all of the time. We thought it would be best if we had a trial run before the day, so we set out on Sunday for our first Neaplotian bus ride. Mel took us to the place where these three busses stop and waited with us to make sure that the buses even run on a Sunday (this is Italy, remember). We were delighted to find that they do run on Sundays! We got on the one that has the longest route. It was a very windy, yet quick ride to a metro station, about thirty minutes. Determining where the bus would stop wasn't so easy. We actually jumped out when the driver was letting some folks on at an unofficial stop. This day was very easy: Get on the bus, get on the metro and in less than an hour, viola! We were anywhere in the city we want to be!!
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Monday was not as good. I was supposed to be at the university at 10:30 AM to meet with Prof Vecchio, so we left the house at 7:55 AM to do the approximately twenty minute walk to the bus stop. No problem. We catch the 8:30 bus, but this is not the same bus that we took yesterday. This is a bus that should be faster because it takes the main highway. But it is raining out and there is tons of traffic on the the "tange" as it is called, and there was no indication that the driver was going to get off of the tange at any time. Bart and I were a little disturbed when we realized that we did not recognize anything and that this bus was going way past where we had gotten off the other bus. Eeeek. Okay, so the bus takes us all the way to the other side of Naples to the Central Station. It is now 10:15 and I have already phoned Giuliana to let her know that I am going to be late. We can get on the metro at this place no problem, except that apparently there were some police with a dog searching people on the train, so we could not get on. That is another 20 minutes. When we finally arrive at the university, it is 11:30, but I don't know where I am going, so we have to wait for Giuliana to come get me. That takes another half hour. sigh

The meeting went mostly well. The project that I will be working on sounds very cool: A proteomic approach to assessing the effects of DNA methylation on protein interactions in complexes (that sounds redundant and I think it is, but I'm leaving it anyway). Neat. The only thing that is bad is that my stipend is probably going to have to be decreased. It seems that Prof Vecchio is not the best at math and didn't realize that I would be here for three years, not two, and promised me more than his budget can handle. Again, sigh.

It will all work out. It always does.

Other good news: We will be moving into our apartment on Sunday!!! Woohoo!!

So, the last time I wrote about the consulate I mentioned that I had to get copies of my acceptance letters back from them. When I was able to contact them the next day, I was told that I could only have the English version back because it was address to "To Whom It May Concern," but the Italian version was addressed directly to the Consulate General and it was therefore, the Consulate's property. More anger. Another series of calls and emails to the Embassy.

"Anna, they won't give me the Italian version because they say it is addressed to them, so they can't release it." "Who is it addressed to?" "The Italian Consulate General." "That could just as easily be us. I'll call them and ask for them to send them to you. Let me know when you receive the letters so that we can set up your appointment to come in. By the way, we are trying to work it so that you only have to come in once and get your visa on the same day." "Thank you, thank you so much!"

"Anna, I didn't hear back from you yesterday. Did everything go will with the Philly people?" "I left a message. No one called me back. Can you just ask Prof. Vecchio to fax us new copies?" "Absolutely. Not a problem at all." "As soon as we get them, I will set up you appointment." "Thank you for everything."

And that is where we are now, waiting for the appointment to be set up. It could be tomorrow or it could be six weeks from now. Just sitting here waiting for a phone call or an email or a carrier pigeon or maybe a hot air balloon, which would be very exciting for the people of Ames, Iowa. Not much happens here. Even the World's largest Cheeto is an hour and a half away.

Yea, Giuliana! She sent me the last of the translations on Thursday morning!!! So, on Friday I called the Italian consulate to see if it would be okay if I just mailed all the the paperwork that I have amassed for my visa application by mail or if they were going to be very picky about it and make me fly back to Philly and present it in person. Thankfully, it was okay to mail it. Express mail is WAY cheaper than a last minute plane ticket. Although, at almost $24.00, the mailing wasn't all that cheap either. And since I had to include a money order for $37.80, my free student visa application wasn't all that free. I think it was a fee for authenticating all of the translations that they wouldn't do in the first place. Better to pay someone to check other's work instead of just doing it yourself?

Anyway, the paperwork is now out of our hands and squarely in the belly of the Italian governmental bureaucracy. I'm terrified. I'm excited. No, really, I'm terrified. There are still so many things that could delay the approval of the visa AND the fact that they don't even have to give me one if they don't want to. I don't even want to think about that option...so, I won't. Maybe I'll go read a book.