"I had the time of my life"

I am back from Italy and can truly say "I had the time of my life". Spending time w/ my BF and of course his mother made me realize how much I need to be with this man. My first days in Italy was all about business ie. job/visa inquires etc. I told my BF that I would not spend any more than 3 business days making those specific inquires. As I did not want my vacation spent in government line-ups. I will try to capture as much as possible about my trip in the next few blogs if I don't get through all of it in this post. First stop;

Immigration office-2days
As the office was only open on Tues/Thurs from 11am-1pm we didn't have much time. When we arrived there were a lot of people ahead of us as we got there at 1030amish. We took a number and didn't realize that many of the people came at 8am to collect their number. So we were basically looking at waiting the entire two hours and our chances of having to come back the next day were very high. Thank God my BF was with me because the lady in the office only spoke Italian. It also appeared that all of the immigrants also spoke Italian, which really surprised me. Anyway, at the end of it all we had no luck at the immigration office. We had a letter of job offer from a company that would provide me with work but were told that letter would not be accepted until the quotas were released. The staff had no idea when that would be. They advised us to apply for a student visa as that was the only way until the new immigration laws were passed. Here is a pics of me at the immigration office.

I realized on this trip that knowing the right people one can get things done. For the last 5 months I have been applying for a job with the American navy at their base in Vicenza. The position has been vacant since January, so you would think that they would at least provide me with an interview. We have a connection on the American base the hiring manager for the position that I have been applying for the last 5 months (what a coincidence). My BF was able to speak to her and she informed us that the only way to get a job on the base is if your Italian or American citizen. So there goes my chances of that job which was directly related to my present work in Toronto. In this case knowing the right person did not work for us. So moving right along. I then told my boyfriend that applying for a student visa would probably be the best bet. He searched on the internet for a reasonable priced non-private language school and found one not to far from his house. We then went to the school to apply and requested the letter of enrollment. The school told us that they had no problems with their students obtaining student visa to study, so we are very hopefully.

Apartment-1/2 day
Another one of those, if you know the right person things COULD work out. Once again we thought we did. Across the street from my BF's house lives this old man, a very wealthy old man. This old man owns all four units in his condo one of which he lives in and the other three he rents out. Before I arrived my BF ran into the old man who informed him that one of the units would be vacant effective May 2007. Wasn't that good news for us, of course it was. It meant we could live across the street from his mother (sniff, sniff..lol), live in a very big two bedroom apartment with two balconies, live 10mins from the centre and pay a lot less for rent. Each day I would look at our future apartment and was happy to know that in months it would be ours. I was also happy that our rent would be affordable and was happier to know that his mother's balcony/windows faced the opposite way, so there would be no peeping mamma thing happening.
Our dream for this apartment has currently been shattered because the wealthy old man has decided to keep the apartment vacant for tax purposes. He told my BF that he preferred to keep it vacant as he didn't want to pay too much taxes at the end of the year. You must understand that my BF has offered to buy this property from the wealthy old man many times but he refused to sell it now he is complaining about paying taxes. My BF believes because of his old age he might change his mind again just at the right time. In the meantime my BF will continue purposefully run into him as one of those run ins might solve our apartment issue.

Although I left without a visa, apartment, job or a hairdresser, I still had the time of my life. More to come on my trip....

A little message for my new friend, Paola. I know you read my blog and just wanted to say "get well soon".

PEACE and hair grease....