Italy - Lake Como

Throughout Italy I was essentially visiting the larger cities and spending a majority of my time living in the city and not really getting much of a feel for the country life. After a while all the cities start feeling the same and it gets quite dull! Ja feel?

So I used the website helpx.net to find a home-stay situation. The deal is pretty much that in return for me helping them out they give me a room and food. The guy who contacted me, Mark, needed help repairing his boat and immediately I had these idealistic notions of satisfying hard-work, honest living, lack of technology, sailing in clear waters blah blah. So I went to Mark's place which is situated in the small area of Grandola ed Uniti and is about 40 minutes walk from Lake Como.

Lake Como is one of the biggest lakes in Italy and it is quite beautiful. George Clooney and Madonna have villas by the water and tourists often flock there in summer. One scene in one of the Star Wars movies was filmed in one of the villas. Don't ask me which. I arrived by Lake Como then took a bus and was picked up by Mark himself to take me to the village. I skipped Milano because people had generally been describing it as a toilet. 

(GEORGE I LOVE YOU)

It was quite rural let me say from the get go. It's only really accessible by bus and bus tickets need to be purchased in advance from specific locations like cafes or bars close to the bus stops. The only problem is that Italians out this far really do take the idea of the lunch-break quite seriously. In Italian it's called a 'riposo' and it pretty much means everything shuts down from about 12pm-3pm. You want lunch? No. You want a bus ticket? No. You want to do literally anything in this town? No.

There's a grocery store there that doesn't bother opening on Sunday and is shut for 3 full hours in the day when people would probably need groceries. Hey Italy you're in a recession. Perhaps you should do more? Do Germans have this kind of lunch break? How's their economy?

Perhaps I'm over simplifying it.

(Or perhaps I'm DEAD ON)

Anyway Mark is a retired American man who spends 9 months of the year living in this nice place in Grandola ed Uniti (the other 3 are in the USA). His passion is boats and upon my arrival he was working on one boat and was preparing to bring another one to the shed. For the first 2 days or so we worked away on various parts of the boat - my responsibilities included.

- Polishing the brass on the boat

- Cleaning the shed 

- Organising the shed

- Cleaning these buoy things

- Provide witty repartee.

- Play music from my iPhone. This last one wasn't really my duty. More like an obligation... I felt... to myself... to listen ... because I wanted to.

(The boat sans sails. Didn't get around to that)

After two days however the weather turned quite dramatically sour. Mark thought it would be a good opportunity to go pick up the other boat and then work on that because we weren't sailing in the poor weather. That's when his fuel tank started leaking which resulted in him putting his car into the garage.

So this pretty much left us with absolutely nothing to do. I mean one day I polished the leather of his couches for crying out loud. Do people do that?? Here I was getting free meals and my own room and in return there just wasn't much else I could do. So we decided to cut our time together short and I flew straight to London. I wish I could say there was some kind of dramatic fight and violence but no it was just out of bad luck.

(Cloud-tastic. Lake Comoooo too mooiiiisssttt)

So here I am in London trying to get my life sorted out! The Australian police check has been processed and I'm waiting for that to arrive. I move into my room on Thursday and from there I'll be able to have mail delivered so I can get a proof of address and URGH it's hard sorting everything out.