At the lovely farmhouse in Tuscany, Italy
The unforgettable experience of trying to take a shower in this narrow, unheated Italian farmhouse bathroom aches to be forgotten, but first, I need to purge myself of the trauma by writing this down.
Expecting to spend a couple of restful weeks up here in the beautiful pastoral Tuscany hills farmhouse, the first thing I wanted to do was have a relaxing hot shower after our arduous first day of driving in Italy in our rental car to get here from Florence. We got lost a lot as usual.
Laura, our attractive, friendly landlady, did gently warn us during the initial tour of our new digs, "Some guests have a little difficulty with water coming under the shower and onto the floor. Just sop it up with a towel." I thought little about this till it was my turn alone in the bathroom.
Then I saw it. This folded up contraption against the bathroom wall which pulled out like a large kiddy toy into a square screen that sort of held together most of the time. This was called 'the shower!'
Now to TAKE the shower was another matter. The water was hot only briefly. The meager soap bar had no holder and spent most of its time slithering on to the floor. The shower head had to be hand held, which was tricky when trying to soap up -- that is, if you could bend over to get the soap bar off the floor without buckling in the shower box as you banged into the side with your butt. It was a fiasco. No relaxation here. Rather it was a race to see who got out first - the hot water or me. Usually the water won.
Then there was the matter of the sink faucet. It had this unique, annoying way of spraying cold water over my blouse instead of in the sink. Oh, and the water (usually cold) from the miniscule shower stream mostly ended up soaking the bathroom floor (Laura was right!) which then had to be sopped up with our few and far between off-white bath towels. Usually, most towels stayed soaked, like most of our clothes, because there was nothing to dry them with during these damp, cold and mostly sunless days.
We attempted another Laundromat visit. Jim had been forced to wear shorts for the last three days while waiting for his only long pants to dry. They're not doing it!
Well, that's enough for the bathroom, except I haven't had the guts to wash my hair yet. Thank goodness I bought a hair dryer for at least I can dry my half-shampooed head if need be. I bought an Italian hair curler for when I wanted to look real spiffy, but it broke on the second day.
However, the lighting in the bathroom was quite dim, which was probably just as well considering how scruffy I felt and surely must have looked during those days. But who really gives a fig, right! By the way, we inadvertently picked up someone's bag of real figs at the natural food store the other day. Good, but not juicy. I like juicy. That's it for the bathroom. I feel better now.
The end
