Today was set aside to rest some, we knew the weather forecast was calling for rain for most of the morning. We both slept in, but I got up around 8:00 AM to have coffee from the machine that was provided with the accommodations, and to work on the blog post from yesterday, as well as some pictures. It was not raining at first, but that did not last long, it rained pretty heavily on and off for most of the morning. Overnight, we had a little episode with water leaking around one of the air conditioners in the kitchen area from the patio above, so we had put a pan out last night after we first saw it from yesterday evening’s hard rain.
This morning, I saw another puddle on the floor near the refrigerator, and thought we had another different leak last night. Unfortunately, it was not a leak from the roof, we had inadvertently turned off a switch that ran the refrigerator when we were trying to find lights and power plugs in the kitchen last night. Angelo had not told us not to turn off the first two wall switches in a group of four, and that one of those supplied power to the refrigerator, and the other was power to the stove, and the oven. We have a master switch that is run by a special key, so that when we leave and remove the key from the wall, all of the power is off except for the refrigerator switch. However, we never knew about the switch that apparently powered the always need to be left on outlet for the refrigerator.
The water puddle on the floor was from the defrosting of the small freezer and the refrigerator was not cold inside. We had put our leftover food from last night in the refrigerator when we got home, but had not noticed the light did not turn on when we opened it. I immediately put all the food in the freezer, it was still cold, but not freezing, and I figured out the switch issue to get the refrigerator back on. Then I cleaned up the water on the floor. Eventually, the refrigerator cooled down, and I took the food from the freezer, it was nice and cold by now, and I put the now cold food back into the refrigerator. We were not sure if we would eat the leftovers later or not, not knowing if they had gotten spoiled. The other food we had purchased yesterday was sealed, so we were less concerned about it.
I also spent some time this morning trying to determine if our Avis Rental Car had actually been turned in as promised. We had never gotten a confirmation email, so I was worried someone was using the car while it was still under my rental contract. I tried to look for a customer service number online, but when I called, and finally got someone who spoke English, they were only customer service for new rentals, not returns. I then tried to call the local office at the Rome Termini Station, but no one ever picked up, and after about twenty rings, the phone would disconnect. I tired this several times, but got nowhere.
I then tried to submit the rental contract number via the Avis Italian website to get a copy of the return receipt, but was given some instruction in Italian that had to be translated via Google Translate. It told me that the receipt would not be available until 36 hours after the car was returned, and that amount of time had not yet elapsed since the day we returned the car. If it was still not “returned” it would even be longer before a receipt was available. I even checked my CapitalOne account for the charges, and they had not yet hit my account, even as pending, adding to my doubt that the car had really been returned when we dropped it off. I was getting nowhere fast, so I gave up. This is the follow up to yesterday’s post on dropping off the rental car and the “manual receipt”. NOTE: Unfortunately, there is a lot more to this story, but we did not figure it all out until we got back home.
Finally Some Sun in Positano
The weather started to clear up, so we got our late showers and ate some of our leftover pizza and calzone for lunch. We had to heat it in a frying pan on the stove, we could not get the oven to work, even after figuring out the second wall switch. We did verify that the second switch did turn the power on to the stove. There was one loose knob on the oven that controlled something, it was all symbols that made no sense, but nothing we did, even turning on the separate temperature knob, made the oven get hot.
We had decided the food was probably OK, and since we were heating it up, maybe that would kill any bacteria from the food not being refrigerated the entire time. We sent a text to Angelo about the oven, and after a while, as we were getting ready to venture out into the town, he showed up to look it over, and try to fix the loose knob that that apparently controlled turning the oven on.
We left Angelo to his task of repairing the oven and we headed out to go to the central part of Positano, quite a walk down a lot of stairs. The weather had mostly cleared, and the sun was now shining. From our room, according to Angelo, it was supposedly about 450 steps down to the beach on the Mediterranean Sea. We did not have to walk down all those initially to get to the shopping area, but eventually wanted to make it to the beach. Not all of it was steps, some was just downward inclined walkways. Everything here is either uphill or downhill, not much is flat.
We visited several stores in the main shopping area of Positano, not looking for anything in particular, but enjoying looking at all of the hand painted ceramic. We could not fathom buying one of the large round table tops, and having it shipped to the USA. Just the purchase itself was quite expensive, one could only imagine the shipping cost for that heavy of an item.
We continued our walk down to the Mediterranean Sea, and on the way to the beach, we passed by the largest church in Positano, The Church of Santa Maria Assunta. It was really pretty inside, and we looked for a Mass schedule, knowing we wanted to go to Mass tomorrow night, which was Saturday.
The schedule indicated there was a Mass on Saturday evening at 7:30 PM. There was also a church very close to our apartment, much easier to get to, but we could not decipher the schedule the first evening we passed by there on the way to dinner. The schedule looked like it was for several churches in Positano, but it was all in Italian, and we were not sure. From research before the trip, we did not think the church by us had a Saturday evening Mass, but the information on the internet is not always up to date. This church was quite a walk from our apartment, but now we knew it definitely had a Saturday evening Mass.
We eventually made it down to the beach, and took several photos since it was now nice and sunny after the morning rain. The beach is all volcanic sand, so it is a dark grey in color. The sea was quite rough, the swells were large, and that had shut down the ferry boats coming to Positano, it was too rough to load and unload people at the unprotected dock. There were a few people swimming, and Stephanie felt the water and said it was not that cold, but the beach at the surf line was quite rocky, consisting of small pebbles, and it was also steep and difficult to walk on. There were a few people out sunbathing.
We walked over to the ferry dock to inquire about tickets for the ferry tomorrow since we were planning on taking the ferry over to the island of Capri. The lady suggested we make reservations, with no charge to us until tomorrow when we pick up the tickets for the 9:15 AM ferry. For some reason, they were not selling tickets for 9:00 AM ferry, which was the first ferry time on the schedule. Maybe they were concerned about the weather first thing in the morning. We made the reservation, and were told to show up at least 30 minutes beforehand to purchase the tickets. I think they want to know as early as possible who is actually purchasing reserved tickets so they can release the tickets to someone else if you are a no show.
After that, we took a few more photos, stopped by a few restaurants to check their menus, and headed back up to the shopping area. We visited several more ceramic stores and bought another Christmas ornament for our collection of travel ornaments. We purchased it from a store where the man helping us pointed out how to tell if the ceramic was made and painted by hand or by a machine. He brought over several pieces of the same design, an no two were alike because they were all made by hand. We actually liked a small ceramic lemon tree, but we were afraid it was too much to carry home with all of our other items we already had purchased. It was not that big, but would probably be a little bulky after it was wrapped for protection. It would cost Euro 30.00 to ship it home, so we are deciding if we get it shipped or try to get it home ourselves. It was only Euro 55.00 to purchase, so an additional 30.00 for shipping is a little bit much for the total cost. Just think of the cost to ship home an entire table top…….
It had suddenly started to get cloudy again, and we thought about taking the Internal Positano Shuttle back up the mountain to our room, since it looked like more rain. The shuttle bus stop was right in the center of town, and all of the buses originated here, so it was easy to find. We had already stopped at a Tobacchi Store (Tobacco in the US) to purchase the bus tickets, which are cheaper in advance than on the bus, and don’t require exact change to purchase at the store. We really wanted to look around some more after having been inside all morning, so we headed to a few more stores, skipping the bus. About the time we left the second store, it started to drizzle, so we headed back to the bus stop just in time to catch the next one going uphill. It was a slow ride initially, there was a lot of traffic, but we soon turned off the main road and the traffic eased. It was difficult to see out of the bus to know where we were to signal the bus to stop at our stop, which was the Bar Internazionale. We actually got off one stop early with some other folks, but we actually made it walking up to our real stop before the bus, which was now stuck in traffic.
There was a grocery next to the Bar Internazionale, and we headed there to purchased a big bottle of water, a Coke Zero, and a bottle of wine. It had rained a little harder while we were on the shuttle, and then in the grocery store, so we had made the correct decision to start back home.
Our plan was to eat in tonight, cooking the remaining Pici Pasta we had purchased in Tuscany, along with the sauce, bread and cheese we bought the first day here. The rain had ceased for a bit, so we actually enjoyed a little time on our scenic outside patio until the rain started once again. The sun came out for long enough to produce a rainbow while we were enjoying the view from our patio,
We went inside and started to cook the pasta, heat the sauce, and warm the bread in our newly fixed oven. It had now started to rain hard and there was some lightning and thunder, and all of a sudden the power went out in the entire apartment. We initially thought it was due to the lightning like last night, but it appeared that the power was only out in our unit, the lights on the street and in the building across the alley were still on. We waited a while to make sure, and the power never came back on, so we knew it was just our unit. We first checked the inside power panel by the front door, and all of the breakers seemed to be on. There was some instructions in the house manual on power outages, but Angelo had not gone over any of that during his long winded orientation, just like the refrigerator switch. Nothing like skipping the really important information!
The instructions in our “house manual” said to go to the bottom of the steps at the entry and flip the switch. There was a small switch on the steps by our entry gate, but it seemed to be way too small to do anything as important as power the entire unit. It looked like a light switch, and turning it off and on did not fix the problem. We sent another text to Angelo, and his first response was that the power was out due to the storms, but we knew better. I started looking around a little more outside, and saw a panel on the wall of the house next door, it had a bright red light on it. I thought it may be for our unit, but realized it was too far away, so I looked closer at our unit and finally found our main power panel outside on the front wall. I opened it up and flipped the main breaker, and the power was restored.
We started cooking again, I had just put the pasta in the boiling water when the power went out, so it was just soaking in hot water. After about five minutes the power went out again, and once more we sent a text to Angelo. I was not happy with what was going on for the amount we had paid for this unit. Angelo advised us to turn off the two air conditioning units, but we had already done that when the power went out the first time. Apparently, for some reason, it was too much load to have two induction stove burners operating and also have the oven on.
We shut off the oven, it had already heated and we were just using it to warm our bread. We finally got the water boiling again for the still soaking pasta, and were able to heat the sauce in a separate pot without the power going off again.
Th meal turned out great despite the problems with the power. The pasta had not suffered, we still needed to cook it about 25 minutes anyway, and the sauce was nice and hot. We served up the dinner, and really enjoyed it, the sauce was really spicy, it had indicated, in Italian of course, that it contained red peppers, and it certainly was spicy. It was called Arrabbiata sauce. From Google, Arrabbiata sauce, or sugo all’arrabbiata in Italian is a spicy sauce for pasta made from garlic, tomatoes, and dried red chili peppers cooked in olive oil. The sauce originates from the Lazio region, around Rome.
We did not like the wine we had purchased at the grocery store, it was not as good as the bottle we had originally purchased at the Bar Internazionale when we had arrived, so after dinner, we went back down to the Bar Internazionale to purchase another bottle of the Ruffino Chianti. The bar was packed with men watching soccer.
We headed back up to the apartment and realized we were both getting tired, and we did not really need to open the new bottle of wine. I had some Limoncello from a small bottle that was provided as a complimentary when we checked in, and enjoyed that while working on the blog.
Stephanie turned in for the night at about 10:00 PM, and I followed suite not long afterward. It had been nice to rest a little today after being on the go for over the last two weeks. We will need to get up by 7:00 AM tomorrow to catch the 9:15 AM ferry for our day on the island of Capri. The weather forecast is for sunny skies, a northeast wind, and temperatures in the upper 60’s, perfect weather.