Administrative Day

After our hard day at the zoo, we were dog tired on Monday.  Given the heat (it's 90-95 each day), we can't keep up the grueling pace of our London trip in 2009 and need a little bit more time for recovery.  Thus, we decided that Monday would be an "Administrative Day"--a day for doing the business that accompanies a trip of this length, a day for doing cleaning and laundry and a day for generally not having to  be somewhere. While we all agree on the general need for an administrative day, there is a divergence of opinion on exactly how it should be observed.  Dad believes we all ought to get out of bed and get busy with the "administrative" part; other members of the family see this day as a day to stay in bed half the day and recover. To solve this divide, Dad went sightseeing the morning, resulting in everyone else missing the architectural treasures of Francisco di Ripa, S. Maria del'Orto and Santa Cecilia.  Beautiful, ancient and filled with art treasures, these are special places which bring out a deep sense of spirituality--of the sort that one DOESN'T get looking at the back of one's eyelids!  By noon, we all seemed to be moving again.  We visited the rental office to enlist some help in my endless quest to recover my lost luggage--now missing for 7 days but said to be floating around in a delivery van somewhere in Rome.  We also had to arrange transportation to Florence this weekend to meet the family of our new exchange student, Enrico, and we had to figure out a couple of other things.  While the day did nothing for checking off our "list of famous sites we need to see", it had it's own educational opportunities.  Watching the a city crew try to organize themselves to pick up the giant pile of trash that has been building up on our street corner was fun.  When the group of ten finally quit yelling at other, most of the trash was gone (definitely not all, but in Rome, the trash is NEVER gone.)  The main thing left was a printed piece of paper sternly warning against depositing trash in this area.  Fifteen minutes later trash started reappearing under the sign. Speaking of trash, we had to have a tutorial from the rental office yesterday on how to dispose of ours.  Italian trash rules are taken very seriously here, and are so complicated that even the rental agency can only vaguely explain them.  (It doesn't help that they changed on July 1.)  Basically, you have to sort your organic waste, glass, paper and aluminum (but not other metal), cardboard and all other into separate bins.  Each of these requires a separate colored bag.  Each must be put downstairs for collection on a different day, and they must be deposited in the lobby between the hours of 7 and 8:30 a.m. and not before or after, in which case the trash might be collected--if the trash man appears, if someone buzzes the trash man and his helper in, and if you have sorted everything EXACTLY right.  If your sorting is off--as ours apparently was--someone will helpfully climb two flights of stairs and put your bags bag at your front doorstep.  After attempting unsuccessfully to navigate the trash disposal system, I finally walked the trash to the piazza to dump in the common trash sorting area--only to find that the garbage center is only available during strictly defined hours--hours so tightly enforced that all the cans are gathered and REMOVED before and after trash collection times.  I observed the times and made another trip the next morning, only to be interrogated by a trash man concerned about the potential for inadequate sorting. Fortunately, we passed his scrutiny, and I was allowed to proceed to the trash area.  I couldn't find a bin for paper and asked the garbage Nazi what I should do.  "Just toss it into one of the other bins," was his reply.  It's just another example of the Italian psyche:  It's the MAKING of rules that matters, not so much the enforcement!  In addition to garbage adventures, there were a couple of other cool things today.  I watched a street worker building a cobblestone street. That was fascinating.  Basically, the worker dug a hole and filled it with slightly damp mortar.  He then use a hammer to pound the tapered end of a stone about 4 inches by 4 inches and five inches long into the mortar bed.  The whole thing was finished off with a top coat of mortar.  Simple but efficient, and definitely built to last.  Not unusually for Italy, this entire project required one mason to lay the stone and approximately three other workers:  one to give instructions, one to visit with the neighbors living near the pothole and one whose job seemed to be to feed the hose from its reel to the mason mixing his mortar.   Efficiency is not this country's strong suit!  We ended the day with evening vespers at S. Maria Trastevere.  The girls were angelic, and did their best to follow the Italian language service in the prayer book and fully participate.  Dinner was pizza at a local restaurant, titled "Rich Salad place."