thewills'wanderings

We drove from France to Italy through yet another amazing European tunnel. I think it was about 4kms long. It’s amazing to emerge from the tunnel and find yourself in a different country. Quite soon we could see a difference between France and Italy. The gardens aren’t so manicured and everything is just a bit rough around the edges. Our first stop was a supermarket to get some supplies. Here we learnt how seriously the Italians take their siesta. It was 2.30pm and the huge supermarket complex was completely deserted. We thought maybe it was a national holiday but then read on the door that it’s closed everyday from 12-2.45pm. We all wondered about the staff in these big stores. Are they all snoozing out the back or do they go home? Imagine the Warehouse or PaknSave closing down everyday for 3 hours? Quite funny.

When we finally got in to do our shopping I had great fun buying lots of yummy pasta and more cheese and pesto…….ah I’m missing it already. Of course, we have it all in NZ, it’s just the volume of it here and how cheap it is.

We drove to Turin, a city in northern Italy and found a campsite for the night. We decided to only stay in Italy for 2 nights which was a bit sad but we wanted to head to Switzerland and had to make some tough choices. So we camped in Turin at a proper campground which had quite a few permanent residents. The girls ended up playing soccer with 2 Italian boys in the evening which was cool. We decided to head into Turin the next day by bus and get a feel for an Italian city. What a difference from France. We caught a tram and got off in the centre of the city. An older Italiian woman came up to us when we got off and held my arm and spoke constantly in Italian obviously commenting on the girls and how many there are and how beautiful they are. It reminded us of being in Asia. We stumbled upon a bustling local market which was fantastic. Again, very much like Asia. Vendors yelling and people haggling, lots of food and the usual marketware. What amazed us was how cheap it was. We got a few things we needed(and some we didn’t). If we didn’t have such weight restrictions flying back to London it would have been tempting to to buy a bit more. We found that market actually cheaper than some of the Asian ones we visited.

We wandered around town and found a pizza restaurant for lunch and then a Gelato after that! Yum! Everyone was fading so we decided to make our way back to our campground which was a bit of a mission. A really friendly woman who couldn’t speak English took it on herself to help us and actually got off the tram we were on and lead us across the road to a different stop and figured out how to get us to our campground. Fortunately, a young Italian who could speak English came to our rescue. In our short time in Italy we found people really warm and friendly, very different from France.

Our next stop was an Italian town close to the Swiss border where we camped at another paid campground. It’s a bit harder to free camp in Italy from what we could figure. We spent the next morning at the supermarket again stocking up on supplies for Switzerland to avoid the high food costs there. Our camper fridge was chocker with lots of yummy food which kept us going a while. Tim gets a bit stressed about how much time we seem to spend supermarket shopping but it’s so much fun! It does take a while though, when you’re trying to figure out what you’re actually buying!

The drive into Switzerland was amazing. This time we went on a train through a tunnel. Yes, the whole camper! We drove onto a train and then the train took us through the tunnel. It was a bit dicey getting onto the train, really narrow, a few scrapes on the mirrors!!
We emerged in Switzerland and made our way to Matterhorn country!!

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 11th, 2009 at 6:45 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.