Meeting old and new friends

Early last Friday we made the 20 minute walk up the hill with one rolling suitcase to the train station at Villa Claudia for the hour ride to Roma where we had a car reserved. We managed to get out of Roma and we drove to Citta del Pieve in Umbria and met up with some friends from New Mexico who are vacationing there for 2 months. Evey was in Valerie’s Italian class in Rio Rancho and they compared their successes with mastering Italian and dealing with the locals. It was fun to meet up with some friends from our old home town here in Italy.

We then drove to the Chianti region for a party sponsored by the website, ExpatsinItaly.com. We had the opportunity to meet many of the people who assisted me in working through the details on what we needed to do in order to make this adventure of living in Italy possible. It was interesting to put some faces with names from the website forum and to share experiences in Italy from an expat perspective.

Sutri in northern Lazio

The next day was spent driving around northern Lazio to see what some of the towns would be like. We are exploring different areas to see where we might want to be long term as our current housing in Anzio is for the summer. We want to get a feel for some towns and areas firsthand to give us a better feel for the type of town we would want to live in. One thing we have learned with this trip and from Anzio is that having access to Rome within an hour means housing prices can be very high.

Monday morning we made our way back into Roma to drop-off the car, catch the train back to Anzio and made the walk back to our house in time to start at least one load of laundry to dry in the sun.