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Recent developments

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Recently we got our residency, meaning we can get a car. This was great news we had already chosen a car it is a Volvo XC 40 but we wanted it to be petrol because most cities in Europe are banning diesel cars. One garage in Bari had 2 petrol cars in stock before we got our residency, so we thought since no one in the South of Italy wants petrol cars, there will at least be one left in the garage. When we got there it turned out that both had been sold in those two weeks time, but there was one available in Bologna and they were going to bring it over. The car arrived Monday, but they still have to put a tow-bar on the car which will take up to 2 days and they arrange for the registration of the car - this takes at least another day.  If all goes well, we should be able to pick it up next Saturday.  Our container has arrived in Italy, but not at the final port yet.  It is currently in Calabria, but it will be going to Naples (Naples Italy - not Florida of course) an...

A nice break

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2 weeks back we thought of what we could do this weekend, so we decided we wanted to check out the beaches here. We started looking for nice beaches near us but every time my mom found one I´d google it and it would say something bad about that beach.  Most beaches are overcrowded in July and August.  Italians love to go to the beach apparently. Eventually we found one an hour and a half away. When we got to the parking lot we still had to walk around 25 minuets until we got to the beach.  I soon discovered that the beaches here are the exact opposite than they are in Alabama.  Instead of white sand, they were rocky beaches but at the same time this was actually really cool, because if you had enough courage to jump from the rocks into the water you would cool off immediately.  It took me some time to build up the courage to jump from the rocks, but once I had overcome my fear, it was pretty neat. There were rocks in the water as well and it was painful to stand...

The hassle

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A couple of weeks back we decided that the residency was taking a bit too long. The reason for that is we don't have a car, but if we want to buy a car we have to have residency, so we went to the Town Hall of Ostuni ( the city we live in ) and asked what they still needed for our residency. The lady there was really mean and then she said we needed an Italian bank account so we went to a bank and asked for a bank account and we put some money on there. We went back to the same lady and then she said that we needed to buy a stamp. We asked her what else we needed and then she gave us a list of things needed for residency. We had every thing on there except the stamp. They sell these in tabaccherias, which are a lot like gas station stores. We went there and bought one, but buy the time we got back the Town Hall of Ostuni was closed ! We went back the very next morning and gave her every thing on the list.   Once she saw all of that she said you need health care as well. This w...

First weeks of Puglia - house hunting

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On Friday June 14th at 3:45 pm I left for Puglia. From Pensacola, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia then to Rome, Italy and another last flight from Rome to Brindisi. The flight from Atlanta to Rome is a really long flight, about 10 to 12 hours. Luckily I got about 3 hours of sleep on this plane. It is very important that you sleep on the plane because there is a 7 hours difference, so when I left it was 3:45 pm and when I arrived in Puglia the local time was 3:45 pm but in my head it was 6:45 am meaning I should be asleep, so first thing you want to do is sleep, but if you do this your jet lag will get worse, so you have to stay awake until it is a descent time to go to bed it is very hard but it isn't impossible. By 5 pm we finally arrived at our temporary house.  We will be staying here until end of September and after that we can rent it month per month. We are very lucky that we found this house because most vacation houses and hotels were all booked because a lot of tourists come o...