Living in San Giorgio di Pesaro and Kingston

You know you are getting old when not much post arrives for you but when it does it’s an invitation to take part in a colon cancer screening programme. This programme on the prevention of colon cancer is being offered to all men and women from 50 to 69 in the Marche.

You are getting old when you have to go to a chiropidist to get your feet looked at. It Italy it is more complicated as you can go to either a Callista or a Podologo. The callista looks at things such as corns and bunions, the podologo looks at the whole food. As I had some hardened skin on the sole of my foot I decided to go to a podologo in Fano. She cut off the hard skin, charged me 20 euros and  suggested that after a bath I use a pumice stone on my foot. The last time I saw a pumice stone was in my granny’s bathroom – am I getting old?

250 kilos of olives

Bill (in flat cap and coat) and Pam waiting for the olives to be processed

Olives being poured into the hopper

With very variable weather over the last few weeks we decided to take the benefit of a couple of dry days at the weekend to harvest our olives. After two good harvests we were expecting a poor year but we were wrong. Using some cheap immigrant Scottish labour i.e. John Roscoe we harvested over 250 kilos of olives.

At 9.00 on Tuesday we arrived at the mill and emptied our olives into the large plastic containers. From there they were weighed and then put into a hopper to be cleaned of any leaves, washed and then crushed.  We hung around with all the other farmers until our olives were in the hopper and then went for a coffee. We returned a couple of hours later to 30 litres of oil waiting for us.

Immigration is a big political and social issue here in the Marche. A report published this week says that there are now 5 million immigrants in italy – almost 7% of the population. In the Marche emigrants form 10% of the population.

In 2002 there were 54,000 emigrants in the Marche. In 2009 there were 131,000 and 2009 155,000. The data also shows that 55% of the emigrants are from Europe primarily Romania and Albania, 25% from Africa, 14% from Asia and 7% from South America.

Here in San Giorgio we have emigrants from Poland, Ukraine, Albania, Morocco and last but not least from England and Northern Ireland.

Occasionally we receive a postcard that is worth keeping. We have a very select collection of cards with couples. The ones we really like are framed and put on the bathroom wall. The current card sent to us by Erica and Thomas from Munich falls into the “framed and hung on the bathroom wall” category.

Not sure if they choose it because we are beginning to look like the two men or because our dress sense was becoming similar to theirs – Bill does like to wear hats! Or do Erica and Thomas go in for cross-cultural dressing when they go back to Munich?

Every household in the Marche has been, or is being given a leaflet about their water supply. This is an attempt to encourage people to use tap water instead of buying bottled water.

Italy leads the world in the amount of bottled water drunk per person. In 1989 it was 47 litres per person and by 2006 it had risen to 194 litres per person. This meant that in 2006 12 billion litres of bottled water were drunk. The production of plastic bottles meant the emission of about 910,000 tons of CO2 into the environment.

A litre of tap water costs 0.0017 cents while a litre of bottled water costs 30 cents. This means an average family will spend 250 euros on bottled water but only 1.60 euros if they drink from the tap.

And the tap water is safe to drink according to the leaflet. The tap water, by law, has to be treated but leaving a jug of water to rest for a couple of hours in the fridge will improve the taste of the water.

Went for our weekly shop to the “Iper Co-op”. Bought some groceries plus 3 cyclamen at 1.59 each. Went to the check out where we handed over our member’s card.

The women asked if we could pass her the 3 cyclamen first. She told us that for to-day only there was 20% of one “non-food” item of your choice. “Didn’t you see the notice?” she asked. “No” we replied. “Che peccato (what a shame)” she said “The offer is for today only. I bought a new washing machine this morning but all I can give you is 20% of one of the cyclamen”.

So we got a cyclamen for 1.29 euros. 

Watching channel 5 this morning they had a report on the Chilean miners getting to the surface. There was a round of applause from the television audience.

Then the presentor mentioned the fact that the miners had to wear sunglasses to protect their eyes after spending so much time underground. She then added that the sunglasses were made in Italy and so Italy had made its contribution to the rescue and called for another round of applause.

Getting from San Giorgio across to Florence or to Rome by car is a pain. It takes so long as for a lot of the journey you are on single lane roads going over the Appenines where overtaking the lorries having to use the same route is dangerous. Twenty years ago they started to build a dual carriageway from Fano to Grosseto on the other coast. Work got so far and the stopped. Now the governors of Marche, Tuscany and Umbria have started to campaign for the road to be finished. A few weeks ago they held a well publicised sit-in in one of the tunnels. Since then they have been meeting the relevant ministers and insisting that they will continue to keep the issue in the public eye.

Who knows,perhaps in a few years we may be able to get to Sienna for coffee, Florence for lunch and home for tea.

An iphone survey from an application called “what country” discovered that the words used to describe the UK are tea, weird sense of humour, football hooligans and rain. For Germany the words are beer, discipline and autobans. For Italy the words are pizza, mafia, pasta, scooters. The minister of tourism has passed the matter to her legal department to find out if it is possible to sue iphone for the slander. She prefers to think of Italy in terms of history, culture and style.

We asked Mike and Judy who are on holiday with us at the moment what words they would use to descibe Italy. Mike went for pasta, wine football, sun. Judy went for pasta, Italian men, wine, and again Italian men.

SPQR were the initials used by the Romans for “Senatus Populusque Romanus”. Bossi is the leader of the Lega Nord a political party in government with Silvio Berlusconi but with the aim of creating a state called “Padania” in the north of Italy.

Italians, particularly the Romans, have been up in arms recently when Bossi, supposedly making a joke in Public, said that for the people of Lombardy the letters SPQR stood for “Sono Porci Questi Romani”  i.e. “They are pigs these Romans”. The people of Rome did  not see the joke.