There are things that can always surprise you in life and one of the wonderful things about Umbria and Italy is the spontaneous, generous nature of the locals! Having lived previously in London where everyone very much keeps to their own business, here it can be a little overwhelming that all of your neighbours know what's happening in your life!
As I found out yesterday though, this can have it's advantages!
I have some friends over visiting for a week and we decided to pop out for a quick drink (and I promise, I only had a non-alcoholic one!) in the evening. Driving home up the hill my friends spotted a porcupine! If you've never seen one, they're actually pretty big and it's amazing to see them in real life. I rolled the car back down the hill to get a better look and ended up slipping off the road down into the ditch!!!!!!!!!
As usual when you really need a mobile there's no signal, so my friend set off up the hill to walk the 5 minutes to our house to get help. She gave me instructons to stay in the car, lock the doors and close the window. Laughing, I told her that this is Umbria and that within 2 minutes somebody would come by that I knew.
And that's exactly what happened! One of our neighbours drove up, stopped, assessed the situation, went home to get his Panda 4x4 and came back to help tow my car out the ditch. In the meantime, 2 other sets of neighbours went by, all stopped for a chat and a laugh at the crazy English woman who drove into a ditch to look at a porcupine, made sure I was OK and then went on their way.
Most embarrassing of all, the following morning I went down to the local florist to get a plant to say thank you and found that everyone in the shop already knew about the porcupine incident, thanks to the fact that the florist was one of my neighbours that saw the whole thing the previous night.
What a great end to what could have been a pretty difficult situation!
Let's colour the skies! From 29 Apr to 2nd May the skies at Castiglione del Lago at Lake Trasimeno will be full of kites of more different shapes, sizes and colours than you can imagine!
