Getting used to hills

.no chance of not getting used to them here!

Yesterdays ride was a serious type training effort intervals, hill efforts etc:

from Feltre to Valdobbidene.

Consequently today's ride was more touristy than serious training, but since it's impossible to avoid hills.........and when you take the wrong road and then go half way round the Dolomites to get there,,,,,,,I think it  was an 80 minute uphill slog to get there and about 15 minutes to get home (the short more direct way).


My destination was the Historical Bike Museum and my total favourite exhibit was the military bike complete with sword, which gave me a mental picture of soldiers busily spinning while wildly swinging and cutting

and finally some statues are there for obvious reasons...others........???

re the olympics as seen by Italians...I'm now a reluctant expert in fencing and synchronised diving!

Viva la dfferenza!

I guess part of the life experiences one gains from travelling is dealing with the differences between how one's own country mnages a situation and how others do.

These past few days I've been head butting the Italian banking system.  I needed to place a 400 euro deposit in an Italian lady's bank account as deposit for a house I've rented for the World   Masters Games in Turin next year (the games are in Turin, my house is in the country outside of the city).

Anyhoooo firstly I  tried to send the money to her via the internet but there wasn't the option for an international transfer on the system I'm working with (tablet/android)...I'm not sure if this woud be different if were on a laptop using windows.  Whatever...it was not possible.

OKAY...so I'm here in the same country as her, I'll go into a bank  with the 400 euros in my hand and deposit in her acoount..can't be hard............famous last words.......

First of all I had to physically get into the bank and thank god I'm not obese...not sure how they ever manage it as this is what one has to do:

• Push green button
• small door opens
• step inside very small cubicle
• door behind you shuts
• everything pauses while you are scanned for weapons
• door in front of you opens
• you are free to walk into the bank

leaving the bank is the same in reverse.

ok so I'm in the bank where there is one teller only and I have to wait while the three people in front of me have extremely long and complicated transactions with animated conversations.  I suspect they are discussing their friends, gossiping etc but eventually with steam coming out of my ears I get to the counter and tell the teller (tee hee) what I want.

BUT non e' possibile signora.

  So at this point despite having my passport at the ready and the request for the deposit, the correct numbers AND the money in my hand, I discover I can't do it because of at least 2 reasons...one is that I don't have a permenant address in  Italy and the second is that I can't prove how I came to have 400 euros ready to pay the account. Well that's not entirely correct but if I really wanted to do it I'd have to go to magistrate and swear an oath to ..blah blah blah

Eventually the problem is solved via my sister in England, but the lesson is learned and this is a situation where one poor innocent foreigner gets wound up in the bureacracy that has had to be developed to prevent less scrupulous people moving money around for nefarious reasons.

I wanted to take a photo of the bank doors...but decided not to risk it....maybe on a Sunday arvo when no one is around.

Moving day

From Follina to Feltre.
The owners of my BnB were very kind inletting me stay until 2pm...I had hoped to watch the RR on tv but both the Italian and German progs I cld get weren,t giving it much time....twitter was much better.
I squeezed in a 90 min ride trying in vain to find WW1 memorials..plenty of signs up but clearly I haven,t the code or whatever 'cos I can never find whatever it is the sign is pointing to!

The drive from Follina to Feltre was spectacular,  must return to take pix.  The weather was very humid for the drive and so I got out of the car with shorts wet in a somewhat suspicious pattern!

I found the school easily enough thank you GPS and when I met up with someone from the school .?name I discovered my appartment was only a 3 minute walk away.  BUT and there's always a BUT...first I had to get my car through this:

From the other end:

and this is my car and my apartment..1st floor +balcony.  Good size, but I have a sneaky feeling I'm going to be sharing although I had asked not to share.

All absolutely fantastic...apart from the church bells..how come I always get places near churches?!

Todays ride was for exploration as well as fitness and as luck would have it I got both...somehow I lucked onto THE popular training route in the area.....squads a plenty plus a squillion solos. I crossed the River Piave 3 times, the first on a wooden single lane bridge while trying to follow signs for a WW1 museum...on arriving at the other end of the bridge there was a T junctiion but no further signs for the museum. I eventually found someone to ask only to discover that after the bridge one turned left and it was about 5km along that road!! Doh! Anyhooo...on the map below its at point B...point A being Follina where I was staying for the 3 days days prior.

The biggest piece of luck is that next weekend Feltre has a Palio..like in Sienna..horse, races, flags the whole shebang....lucky lucky lucky

Random Musings

Prosecco country..vineyards to the left, right, in front and behind

• If the really real reason for stopping on a slogging looong uphill is to take a photo...it doesn't count as a stop...right? 
• When in Italy, how do you tell if a driver is foreign?  they stop at pedestrian crossings, indicate which way they're planning on turning and vaguely keep to the speed limit.
• As above regarding a cyclist?...they go out in the siesta time ie 1230-1600..it's hot, but the roads are quiet.

The bike's BB is now quiet...not totally but almost.  The TT bike has finally been unpacked and is currently with the bike shop being pimped..ie brake, gears and saddle height being tweaked...the saddle is a major problem for me..once the bolts are loosened you have to give the saddle a good belt to make it move and I just don't have the explosive power to do that.

All I need now is to find a bike shop with a box for my return trip as I've ditched the bike bag..it would never survive another encounter with baggage handlers..the decathlon shop near Treviso that I'd been banking on has closed down.

This was the third of these signs proesting plastic bottles.  What I fail to comprehend is why people here buy mega large amounts of bottled water when tap water is drinkable
Tomorrow I move from Follina to Feltre for a 2 week stay attending an Italian language school there.  I'm lucky enough to have a scholarship for 1 of the weeks, so that lessens the financial load a bit.  Map: A is where I am today, B where I will be tomorrow:

This pix below might look to be just a lump of old moss covered stone, but it's actually the remains of a gun emplacement from 1917. Italy had suffered a major defeat in what is now Slovenia at the hands of the Austro Hungarian army with the help of the Germans. By the time the armies got to this point I think the German army had left the others to it and finally the Italians managed to stop the retreat and had begun to regain the area they'd just lost. There is a museum at Vittorio Veneto that i will try and visit, but in any case there are many villages here that are called "........da Battaglia" indicating the location of a battle, so if I don't get to the museum, I can visit these villages which also have displays.

and finally final:

•  I've been in Italy for 2 weeks and if I have to eat any more pasta I might have to get feral! (the culture absorption bit seems to have failed) 
• I keep being asked if I'm German which is certainly different from last year when everyone assumed I was English.  However, given the finacial problems between Germany and Italy (and Greece of course) it's perhaps not a good thing to be thought a German right here and right now.

Ahhhh..finally a quiet moment or two

while I wait for the bottom bracket of my bicycle to be mended...hopefully..although since it's a brand they've not seen before (Lightning) it's possible they can't mend it.

Assorted pix from Follino nr Vittorio Veneto..

Roman Cloisters

I love old moss covered bridges

This fire is in the dining room of my BnB..not just for show either, they use it for heat and to cook on during the winter

and finally this is one of the reasons I have to travel to Italy and Austria!...It would save me heaps of $$$ if some firm would produce coffee flavoured yoghurt in Oz!

Assorted pix from my stay near Rome

Sperlonga is a seaside spot where Tiberius had his summer home. These pix are of the fresh water ponds he created/had created right next to the sea which are/were actually a fish farm

Nemi..a small town on the edge of a volcanic lake. Caligula had a pretend navy here and we visited the museum where the remains of the ships were on view. They had been excavated fairly intact in 1940 but subsequently were burnt down

Really really old Roman road complete with ruts where wheels have worn the stone down. The Appian Way is where Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves after the 3rd Servile War (of Spartacus fame)

Rome to the dolomites

a 7 hour drive mostly on the autostrada with one of those  interesting GPS designed final run arounds...up and over a mountain with 6 or 7 switchbacks to finally get me to my destination and consequently leaving me with little idea of where I went or the general layout of the area.

 When I got over the lump  I joined the main road again...doh!

One of my priorities when I'm OS is to get a decent sun tan (politically incorrect of course but who gives a proverbial)....anyhow I now have a VERY tanned left arm from the drive!..rest of me will just have to catch up later...could always drive back and sorta even it up;-)

pix will follow..gotta dive out to the shop to get something to nuke feral mozzies with.....