Living in San Giorgio di Pesaro and Kingston

The Christmas lights are on in San Giorgio. Unfortunately no one had donated a Christmas tree this year but the commune have been creative and have used strings of lights to create a Christmas tree shape. Although simple it does look quite good. The other Christmas decoration is the crib. It is made from metal figures which were sculpted by a local artist some time ago and donated to the commune. They are unfortunately rather dark and do not stand out. To make them more noticeable they have been dressed in plastic bags of various colours. This obviously teaches us about the value of recycling but it doesn’t add much to the crib looking good.

A few weeks after making the road beside our house one way with traffic having to come down the road, there was been a complete change of plan. Now the no entry sign has been turned round and traffic can go up the road. Not sure why this has happened or whether it could change again.

In the last week the Marche area has started to go Digital. We woke up last Wednesday to discover that the analogue signal had been switched off and we were left with a television screen full of static. Fortunately we had already bought our digital box and plugging it in we had 12 channels available to us. Unfortunately Rai 1,2, 3 (equivilent of bbc 1, 2, 3) were terrible as the picture was continually breaking up. The other channels were better but there were no mediaset channels available. Talking to people in the village we discovered that we were not the only ones having limited channels and quality. Two days and a lot of moaning later we resynchronised the tv and this time we got about 30 channels downloaded including mediaset but still poor reception on some of the channels including Rai. Another two days later we resynchronised again and we now have about 40 channels and the picture quality is good.