Although there has been a slight delay in our updates (4 weeks behind, oops…) we’ve continued our lives here in Tuscany. Hopefully you’ll get the posts about the following weeks soon and we could keep up with the blog.

On Monday we went straight from work to Castiglion Fiorentino – it was the last day of BiancoAzzurra and we wanted to see some happening, too, instead of just medieval marketplace like last time. Noora saw a woman carrying a crossbow and that instance she knew she had to have one too. As our first thing we checked the marketplace for nice things and Noora fell in love with a tiara straight away and had to have it. The girl with nice hand-made earrings on sale was there, too, even though many booths had changed. We chatted for a while and asked where we could find an ATM and she offered to come and show us. We changed phone numbers in case we’d meet again or at least we could chat every now and then.

After getting some more money we decided to have pork sandwich and enjoyed a show with pyrotechnics and snakes. Unfortunately we couldn’t get a picture with the boa and some guy spilled red wine over Siru’s new skirt. After sandwiches Noora went and bought a crossbow, got bit carried away and bought a regular bow, too. From a distance we heard Cornalusa, which is apparently a Portuguese band with a guitar, a drum and two bagpipes, and decided to go nearer to listen. We were so tired that we decided to leave for home instead of staying for the fireworks at midnight, but since Noora couldn’t dive and wasn’t paying attention to the road we got a bit lost. We ended up near Arezzo and actually saw women standing by the road with stay-ups and fishnet stockings – we made a quick U-turn and navigated back to the right track.

Our dear neighbor insisted on inviting us over for a dinner on Tuesday. He served us delicious pasta with shrimps with antipasti straight from top class restaurants – bread with fish egg, butter and lemon skin. As the main course we had fish with almonds and raisins sided with sage seasoned potatoes. We had really nice evening and we promised to return the favor someday. On Wednesday we thought we’d have an ice cream in Foiano with Tiia, but afterwards we ended up having pizza and wine in Il Tempio in Pozzo. Finally on Thursday we paid back to our neighbor and made a cake with banana filling and fudge topping. We weren’t so lucky trying to do the topping though; the first lot didn’t work out at all and the second lot ended up looking stone-hard toffee. Fortunately we could save the latter lot and the cake came out really good.

On Friday we had a thorough cleaning in our home since we were about to leave to Rome on Sunday – it’s always nicer to come back to a clean house. We had promised to clean the pool on Sunday morning, but eventually we ended up running back and forth with payment issues. We were running a bit late, but luckily we managed to buy and stamp our tickets and jump into the right train. Next few hours we travelled back to Rome through Italy and once there we bought ourselves metro tickets and found our way to our apartment. The apartment was a positive surprise; it was really close to the metro station in a good neighborhood and it was quite neat. By the time we were a bit hungry and sleepy, so we took out a pizza from a restaurant nearby (capricciosa and pumpkin flowers & sardines) and after eating went to straight to sleep.

Almost all of the apartments in our agriturismo are named after local animals – Lepre (the hare), Upupa (kind of a woodpecker), Gazza (the magpie) and Istrice (the porcupine). This week we finally managed to get a good look at Upupa the bird. We had seen it before, but didn’t realize it because its’ feathers on the head weren’t up.

On Monday we had another wine tasting with yet another bunch of cyclists. We actually met a man from Sicily who was there the first time and were greeted Italian style – with kisses. That was also the first occasion where we could make flower arrangements and they turned up pretty good. Our beloved Dutch people really continued to have the dinners every single night and serving to them was always a real pleasure – we apparently had the same kind of twisted sense of humor and there was lots of laugh during these late evenings.

On Thursday we finally had the opportunity and the time to meet Tiia – we were first in contact on the weekend we went to Venice. Since my phone decided to stop working then and freak people out plus the fact that we had had lots of work on our hands, we hadn’t managed to meet earlier. Tiia was actually picking up her employer’s parents from our agriturismo when we first met and decided to go to Pozzo for a pizza the very same night. When we came back home we saw a fox cub, which jumped in front of us from the dark, looked at us startled and jumped back into the pitch black night. 

On Saturday we headed for Passignano in Perugia for a really nice disco named La Villa – completely outdoors nightclub with lots of different types of music. There was actually Latino music and Noora was asked to dance by a stranger that turned up to be a great dancer. We got to visit the VIP lounge, too, and the night was really fun – we went to sleep at around 05.30. Not so nicely Noora got her items stolen – including a camera and drivers license. We had had some plans for going to either Monte San Savino or Castiglion Fiorentino or to both with Tiia, but at 10 am we just rolled in our beds and looked at each other and had to apologize to Tiia for not being able to get out of bed. That’s actually pretty much everything we did that day; watched Desperate Housewives and ate in bed. We went out for half an hour and then had a quick ice cream at Foiano, but then we returned home and back to bed.

Let’s just say that now we know what the fox does say.