Day one

We woke up to our first full day in Siena at about 9:30 AM and by 11:30 we are on our way to the COOP (pronounced, we are told, “cope”), Siena’s largest supermarket, which has changed quite a bit in the last six years. Parking is all under cover but now they also have a parking garage located above the market as well as the original one on the lower level (below the store), and there are a number of other small shops scattered on the periphery of the market itself. You get the shopping cart in the garage using a 1 euro piece to unblock the cart. They also have two sizes of carts to choose from as well, and we chose the larger (double or doppia) rather than the singola (single). I just thought you should know.

Since the COOP is not open on Sundays just about everyone in central Italy was there this morning but we enjoyed the madhouse effect since we were in no hurry. In fact by the time we left about an hour or so later, the garage was half empty (or half full for you optimists) and the checkout lines were noticeably shorter as well. One small glitch however is that the COOP does not accept non-Italian credit cards – or so we learned from our cashier when we tried to use our VISA card. (In the centro storico next to UPIM, a large department store chain in Italy is a good size Conad grocery store, also part of a chain and they do take credit cards. We will come to use this one often I think.)

Before we started shopping I noticed that there was a TIM (Telecom Italia) store right there so we could purchase additional minutes for our phone (our phone uses a TIM SIM card) since the instructions given us by Telestial before we left the US did not in fact seem to work to allow us to recharge our phone’s minutes. And neither did their instructions work for changing the voice prompts to English. And speaking of Telestial they failed us yet again. After I purchased 50 euros of minutes the fellow at the store told me – through the not-so-impenetrable language barrier – that it would take about 5 minutes for the new minutes to show up when I dialed the customer service number to check on my account. Well I called about a half later, before we left the store and nothing had changed. So I went back to the TIM guy after we checked out and before we left and he told me the phone was not registered. Now before we left, Telestial had sent us a packet of information, and one was a notice that we needed to email them with a copy of my passport to register the phone, which I did and assumed everything was fine. My words to you: never assume anything when traveling. Come to find out Telestial did not register the phone.

In any case the TIM guy registered the phone for us and we are now set.

So after the COOP outing we headed home and unloaded the groceries. We got a voice mail today from FedEx with a number we need to call probably – we hope – to schedule delivery of our boxes. Good news in any event that we’ve heard from FedEx at last. But now we need a fax number for them to send us a form which we fill out, sign and fax back to them, apparently so we can arrange to get our boxes. (In fact as it turned out we only needed to fax a copy of Steve’s passport as well as the tracking numbers. We did that Monday afternoon but as of late Tuesday we have not yet heard from FedEx.)

We had dinner with Roberto Bechi at Antica Osteria Da Divo (Via Francese), a wonderful ristoranti which we discovered back in December of 1999 and which, as it turns out is Roberto’s favorite place to eat as well. We met Roberto at 7:30 and spent most of the evening going over the details of our upcoming videotape sessions of local Tuscans. The general theme here is to show a side of the Tuscany few people get a chance to see, the folks who make up this wonderful country, who are behind the shops, the stores, behind the salespeople and promotional materials and marketers, the people who are the true heart and soul of this land, who are a very real slice of the history of Tuscany.