Our postman was kind of grumpy and never returned our greetings.
BOO!
We have a new postman!
YAY!
He won’t bring us any mail.
BOO!
It does seem that Italy is conspiring to give us every frustrating experience we’ve ever read or heard about. Crummy mail service? Oh come on, that news is so old it’s no longer true. Italian mail service has improved considerably, even in the few years we’ve been here.
Except for packages. If someone sends you a package from outside the EU, heaven forbid, you are likely to be asked to pay twice the contents’ value in duty.
And except for when a new postman takes over the route.
We haven’t received a piece of mail in almost three weeks. The Captain went to the Post Office and was told they couldn’t help him. But the nice woman there gave him the phone number of the Capo della Squadra Rapallo. He told Louis that probably there just hadn’t been any mail for us, because “I’ve checked your bin and there’s nothing there for you.”
Rosa across the street sings a different song. “The postman doesn’t know where your box is,” she explained. Gee, the kids that put firecrackers in it last week didn’t have any trouble finding it – maybe he could ask them. Or maybe he could ask Rosa; or his boss at the Post Office; or, a novel idea, the man who delivered the mail until three weeks ago. If he was a particularly enterprising person he could get off his scooter and look down the stairs that lead to our house. There he would see it, proudly green and red, and mounted as close to the road as possible – our mailbox! (Because we live below the road there is no street-level place to hang a mailbox.)
I hear you saying, “Well, maybe you really don’t have any mail. You don’t get very much, do you?”
You’re right, we get precious little – the odd billet doux from the IRS, perhaps a stray check or bill, and the envelope with a pair of CD’s in it that friends sent a while ago from the States which we’ve not yet seen. It’s not much, but we’d rather like the chance to look at it ourselves.
The Captain is irritated. He is about one day away from disgruntlement. He is going to lie in wait for the post man and lead him by the nose to our box.
Meanwhile, we kind of wonder what may have happened to our mail…
An Ex-Expatriate 
Very funny!
I voted!
thanks, pal!
Haha. I have really enjoyed your blog so far! I just had to comment on this one because I too have had quite a few adventures with the Poste Italiane and the courier service 🙂
I’ve now bookmarked your blog and am looking forward to reading your updates!
Thank you! If you want you can subscribe to an rss feed for my blog, or ask for e-mail notification when there’s a new post… as there will be shortly about Q-8 gas station – grrrrrr! Thanks for reading and for your nice comment.
Ha! What Giovanni says is spot on. I love it when the MotH goes into “breaking balls” – theirs, not his – mode.
Btw, we didn’t have to pay that extra 55€ for not purchasing more trashbags in the previous years. We do, however, need to buy some every year from now on to lessen the headaches at the comune.
What a nuisance – the trashbag imbroglio, I mean. It’s bad enough we have to pay .05 each for a plastic bag at the market, which we can use as a trash bag. Too bad there isn’t someway to use a net bag for garbage the way we can for groceries… or, or, how about a reusable bag that’s treated with something inside that repels the contents so it could be emptied into the casonetta, rinsed and reused? C’mon, chemists, get with it!
Re Giovanni – I’m still debating whether or not to finish reading any more sentences that begin, “The problem with you…” What do you think? Should I? ha ha.
Ms Farfalle, the problem with you is that you are too sympathetic and too tolerant with the postman. At the beginning they had shoes, then they asked for a bycicle, after the bycicle they wanted a scooter, yesterday my postgirl came by car.
At least she came…
Soooo true – our family in Italy have warned us time and again how notoriously unreliable their mail is! They all prefer courier service – but that gets a bit pricey for regular mailable items!
Bonnie(valentinoswife)
Well, in fact the mail has become much, much more reliable, and much faster, too. In fact, we no longer wonder ‘if’ something will arrive, and we seldom wonder ‘when’ – it’s a system that has been fixed and that works, except for a few little glitches, like the one we’re experiencing.