Tuesday 13th of September 2011

Another rest day of sorts. Initially it felt cooler than the previous day so I was thinking of riding to the gelateria (ice cream shop) in Feltre as a bit of a recovery ride as it would be relatively flat there and back but by 11am the temperatures had picked up again and it was as hot as yesterday on the balcony. On the bike it would have been too bad as you get the air rushing past to cool you down but I was having second thoughts so I opened up the laptop and study book and carried on with that while listening to some music on the headphones, interspersed with a little TV here and there. It's been interesting to see day and night time italian TV shows and contrast the ones on terrestrial with those on satellite (SKY). On both there is an abundance of dead people throughout the day and night. The italians clearly like their giallo (yellow - mysteries) and they import them mostly from the US but also UK, namely Miss Marple and I think it was Inspector Barnaby (Mid-summer Murders?). Add to this CSI and the usual police detective stories and it adds up to a lot of dead people. Similar to what I noticed when I was in Florida there is a lot of violence and particularly shootings during day time TV. The U.S. also was notable for it's lack of swearing and nudity almost all the time on terrestrial TV. A prime example of this was being able to watch Robocop 2 while in Florida in the middle of the afternoon. All violence and sexual suggestion removed but not one death by shooting removed. My language skills aren't up to spotting the swearing on italian TV but I could hear Gordon Ramsey's foul mouth fairly often on the dubbed version of his kitchen nightmares programme. Satellite was pretty similar in the main but with more U.S. series and only half as many channels as it looked as there were often +1 and +2 versions. They were pretty handy actually as you could go to dinner and watch the remainder of the programme an hour later. Terrestrial TV seems to have lost its risqué evening shows as far as I could tell. Satellite seems to have picked up on it though and has the empowering women assassins series that I've forgotten the name of and a unintentionally funny 'sexed up' version of CSI.

I was planning to head off in the morning so it would be the last time I would get to see Chiara so I headed off to Feltre about 5pm for aperitivi with her. We talked for a while drinking our Spritz as we did so. Eventually it was time to head back to the B+B and leave Chiara to get ready for work tomorrow - the new school year had started and already talk was of waiting for the next break - in the true teacher mould in that is what they all do wherever they teach and whatever they teach around the world.

Once back I chilled out a bit and then when it had cooled down a bit I packed the car except for a few essentials. Sonia the lady who ran the B+B wasn't going to be around in the morning so I said thank you and especially to her mum for sorting out my washing and feeding me at lunch time. It should have been an early night but Incredibles was on one channel and Good Will Hunting on another one so it wasn't that early in the end.