Early Evening
Well, the day started out fine.
I had arranged to meet Sara Stevenson and her daughter Caroline in front of Santa Maria degli Angeli at noon. Sara is an old friend of Bridget's whom I met in Austin this past March. She and her husband Richard were instant compadres. Since she is about to start Italian lessons in Perugia (about 15 miles away), it seemed like a no-brainer to get together for lunch.
I got to the church early so that I could sit outside and watch the tour groups go in. I know from past experience that these are precisely the types of people I like to shoot. They're usually animated in one way or the other - excited, tired, irritable, engaged, whatever. Today, several tour groups showed up simultaneously, each distinguished by a different colored hat. Some were in red, others yellow or blue. There was also a group with armbands that were part of some kind of service that was about to take place. This group include a number of old men who (without any irony intended) were missing an arm.
At pretty much the stroke of noon Sara showed up. She has a wonderful energy so we pretty much jumped into a conversation the second she got there. Sara needed to get who Caroline was down the street at the laundromat. Since my favorite pasticceria is across the street from this, it seemed the logical place to meet up as soon as they finished folding their laundry.
We sat around for at least an hour-and-a-half. Not surprisingly, a portion of the conversation was about Bridget and I. I certainly enjoyed the chance to catch them up on what was going on. They had already gotten some of it from Bridget via email, but it was fun to talk about it from my perspective. By the time they had to leave we were having a good enough time to arrange to do it again tomorrow. Perugia is a quick hop by train so we figured to meet around noon and hang out.
After they left, it was my turn to do the laundry. I went back to my room and started to pull the dirty clothes out of my suitcase.
That's when the day went south.
I bent over to pick up the clothes and my back went out. It's always the simplest and therefore most unpredictable things that cause it to go. Once it was nothing more than reaching for a spoonful of sugar to put in my coffee. Today, as soon as I started to get up, I knew this was not going to be one of those that just goes away.
Sometimes, walking it out is the best solution. Having to get the laundry done, I decided to carry on. I walked the block to the lavanderia and hoped for the best.
When I got there, I found that I needed to get change. The change machine accepts 5s and 10s, but the smallest I had was a 20. This meant going back over the pasticceria, getting something so that I could break the bill, then going back to the lavanderia to get the coins that I needed. There I was confronted by an intensely fickle machine that kept spitting back the bills instead of making change. I just kept feeding them back into the machine in the hope that I would win the showdown. I did. It eventually gave me what I needed. I then had to put the coins into the central money machine that controls all the washers and dryers. Now, no matter what one Euro piece I put in, it spit it back at me. I kept trying until eventually I either found the machine's sweet spot, or it gave up fighting me.
A few minutes later, a Polish woman came into the lavanderia. Confused by the same system, she turned to ask me how it worked. In Polish. I simply could not convince her that I did not speak Polish. She kept spitting out a string of questions then looked to me for answers. Eventually - inevitably, really - I took her money and set up her laundry for her. At least now I was more patient with the change machine and better equipped to handle the sweet spot of the other. The one thing that I could not help her with was the temperature control on the machine. I kept using hand gestures to try to get her to understand that she needed to adjust this herself since I had no idea if she wanted it hot or cold. Finally, she arbitrarily pushed the button to 6, the hottest setting, and pressed the start button.
About ten minutes later, she got up and walked over to the machine. She watched her comforter going round and round for a moment. She then pressed her hand against the door and recoiled. She turned to me and let out another stream of Polish. When it must have been clear to her that I had no idea what she was saying, she touched the glass door then pulled her hand back and blew on it. She did this a number of times until she finally conveyed the idea that the water was too hot. We both tried readjusting it, but the machine would not allow a change in mid-cycle. She looked like someone had just eaten her puppy. She went back to her chair, put her head in her hand, and started mumbling in Polish. I really didn't want to know what she was saying since my guess is that she thought I was somehow to blame for this predicament.
A few minutes later, her wash was ready. She ran to the machine, yanked out the comforter and inspected it. Fortunately, it looked like the hot water did it no real damage. Relieved, she transferred it to a dryer, put in her money and was about to turn it on. I put my hand out to stop her. I checked the heat on the dial and saw that it was set at 90 Celsius. This is very hot, and if it is one thing I know from painful past experience, you can ruin a comforter in an overheated dryer a whole hell of a lot faster than you can in a hot washer. I readjusted the heat then put the coins in for her, making sure that she had a longer drying time than usual to make up for the lower temperature. The effect of this was that I went from dog to hero faster than a Smart car goes from 1 to 2 mph. By the time I hobbled out of there she was thanking me profusely in Polish and saying the one Italian word she knew: "Buongiorno."
The walk back to the hotel told me that I was pretty much toast for the rest of the night. I had a quick call with Bridget then downloaded a book on RKO that I've been wanting to read. Other than attempting to go out for dinner, my night will be taken up with starting this book and deciding if it would be better to sleep on the floor tonight.
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