Brown bread and beer
Before we set out on the long stroll to Italy we took the precaution of bringing 32Kgs of granary flour out to Italy in the car. Much of today has been spent breathing in the delightful aroma of either freshly cooking or freshly baked bread. Much of this evening has been spent sleeping off the effects of eating vast quantities of this delightful comestible, a delight denied to us for five months.
We have started to look at the statistics we have gathered over the last months and we have been delighted to see that we have spent far less money than we thought that we would. We are trying to get the August photos organised and onto the site plus, I have been looking at cleaning up the daily strolls and making them available for download as GPX.
The temperature has dropped like a stone here and snow has arrived on the mountains to the north, causing problems on the roads. We went out for a stroll this afternoon in the wind and rain and met an elderly friend who said that she had had to light a fire in order to keep warm. She had a good look at Janet’s thick fleece and felt the collar saying the Italian equivalent of ‘That’s all right, you will be warm enough in that!’
TV in Italy is much the same as the UK, in fact you can watch Midsummer Murders if you like, or the American detective series plus lots of other familiar stuff, dubbed into Italian of course, so people sound a bit strange. The odd thing is that the actors’ body language appears to change as well so that they look Italian. Unfortunately, Dr Who is not on the RAI menu and the glorious BBC prevents downloads of TV programmes to foreigners like us. I have had to resort to covert means to persuade the BBC that I live in London. If successful I can watch Dr Who tomorrow.
I have acquired a bottle of homemade grappa which tastes very nice indeed which will see me gently to sleep tonight.
An afternoon stroll around the lake
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Hi Mike – glad to hear you are relaxing and baking at the same time! We use ukivpn for internet access to iplayer, ITV etc – about 5euros a month and you can watch coronation street back to back! This is the link http://www.ukivpn.com/ if your other covert method fails! Stu
Thanks for the tip off! I am using the incredible TunnelBear but one only gets 500Mb free. If one tweets once a month, saying that TunnelBear is ace, then this increases to 1.5Gb. I need to see how much we need the thing before I dig deep into my retired person’s emaciated wallet .
We watch the TV in Italian but Dr Who is our weakness and it is not available on terrestrial Italian TV. I think that we have the iPlayer thing working but the proof will be when we settle down with the beer and other munchies and switch on.
Do you use skype? I have been toying with setting that up as well.
Walker and whovian… great! Anyway you can watch Doctor Who and BBC using: FilmOn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FilmOn
It seems to be totally legal, it is also on Appstore and my Englis teacher suggested me to use this service (I do not have tv)
And, by the way, I can’t stand to hear “Dottore chi?” instead of “Doctor Who?” 🙂
Thanks very much for the tip off Sonia. I will try it tomorrow as I have missed a few episodes.
You’re welcome! Thanks to FilmOn I followed the first episode of the new DW’s season while I was walking in Crete. A wifi connection is enough (and we booked a place with this facility just for that evening 😀 ). I have read other articles about FilmOn and, yes, it is legal: some channels had not agreed to be in, the channels in streaming are less and if you want HD version or some programs or movies you must pay a subscription.
BTW, next DW episode will be on Christmas! They had released just 5 episodes till last Saturday, now there is a stop. So you will have plenty of time to recover the first part of the new season.