In addition to settling into a daily routine here, we are also figuring out a weekly routine.
On weekdays, we generally stay in the village unless there is a need to run an errand elsewhere. Chad has his work during the week, and I have my pastimes. We take several walks a day, and I do additional exploring by myself to take photos and plan curated walks to show Chad the little details that I find around town such as these:
this bench is built onto the side of a house
the stand for these plants says “the garden costs less than a therapist (and there are also tomatoes)”
I noticed these little flowers growing out of a structural support under a balcony
a close-up of the flowers
One of the fun weekly events is the open-air market which takes place on Wednesday mornings. There are vendors which have household goods such as kitchen gear (pots, pans, cheese graters, knives, etc), shoes, and linens, but there are also two food vendors – a pescivendolo (seafood vendor) and a fruttivendolo (fruits and vegetables vendor). The local butcher doesn’t sell seafood, so we make it a point of going to the pescivendolo on Wednesday morning to get seafood. The sea coast is only 30 minutes away by car, so the seafood from the pescivendolo is so very fresh. In fact, some of the little creatures are still moving around as we are trying to figure out what to buy for lunch. Yum!
a view of the kitchenwares vendor at the weekly market
the fruit and vegetable vendor at the local market
the pescivendolo at the weekly market
We also recently learned that there is a fruttivendolo truck which comes on Thursdays and a cheese guy who comes on Saturday mornings. This reminds me of the bakery vendor who came to Chad’s ancestral village, Monteferrante, on a weekly basis when we were visiting there. These vendors come to the small villages for a couple of hours and then go to the next village. This means that small and tiny villages can get fresh goods on a regular basis, even if they don’t have a proper grocery store or bakery.
Chad waiting in line to get bread from the mobile bread vendor in 2018
Another exciting thing in our week is remembering which day is which trash day. Trash day is six days a week, but every day has a different purpose so you can’t just put your trash out willy-nilly. Each type of trash has its own assigned day. We got this trash schedule from the town hall:
The trash calendar starts with Monday (lunedi) and sorts the trash as follows: umido (wet “humid”/organic waste), carta (paper, cardboard), plastica (plastic), secco (dry trash and non-recyclables), vetro (glass) alluminio (aluminum)
In addition to all of this, Friday is typically the day for laundry and house-cleaning for us.
our laundry day – European houses don’t typically have clothes dryers, so your balcony has a clothes line
We keep the weekend open for running errands in the bigger cities of Termoli or Campobasso, sighting-seeing in the region, or visiting family. For example, today we went to Campobasso to purchase some things, and tomorrow we will go to Monteferrante to have lunch with some of Chad’s family.
And on that note, stay tuned for some highlights from this week.