Woke up at 3 and decided to follow the Trump v Harris US presidential debate on the Guardian website. I could have watched the live feed but I didn’t want to wake Simon. Plus reading it feels less confronting, even if it’s live, especially when I’m nervous.
I’m cautiously optimistic that it was a success for Harris, certainly she didn’t appear to screw it up. Trump was his usual unhinged self but that doesn’t seem to put off his legions of supporters, God knows why. Possibly the best news was that Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala straight afterwards.
The resort we are staying in doesn’t do a buffet breakfast, they just give you the vaguest menu you could imagine, and you just seem to have to guess what they might be able to provide you with. One thing they definitely didn’t have was marmite, or any variant thereof. The server was absolutely mystified and more than a little horrified when I tried the Google translation of “yeast extract spread” on her. Never mind.
We said goodbye to our travel companions and then it was off to the airport.
As I sit in my easyjet window seat (originally Simon’s but unfortunately I was ahead of him as we boarded so it was easier if I just took it and he sat in the middle), I’m thinking of any other thoughts I have about Sardinia.
We only spent time in the furthest Northern ten percent of the island which I understand is not representative of the rest at all. I believe the rest is quite poor, and it must also have a lot of sheep because Simon’s reporting of the Wikipedia entry says that Sardinia has one of the highest concentrations of sheep in the world.
I never heard anyone speak in Sardinian, only in Italian, but I saw quite a few signs with very strange looking names and words so I wonder if that’s what that language was. Maybe it’s spoken more in the rest of the island, or maybe amongst themselves.
The island really only does tourism in Summer, the airlines don’t even fly there from the UK at any other time of year. They have four ski fields but it’s not big business, most people just seem to not work for the rest of the year. It’s also a blue zone, containing one of the world’s highest concentrations of centenarians, we could never work out why. My vote was for the high fish intake, but they also eat more standard healthy Mediterranean fare like olive oil and tomatoes, and there seemed to be less smoking than elsewhere in Europe. Maybe it’s just the low stress from working so little?
The toilets in the restaurant of our last posh hotel were marked as signori and signore, basically gentlemen and ladies, but there was no translation and no pictures such as figures wearing dresses or trousers, to help guide the non native speaker.
Challenging. Mind you, they were both identical toilets so I would question the need to gender them at all. I went to one restaurant bathroom during the week where there was a queue outside the womens while the men’s cubicle – absolutely identical – stood empty. There were gasps of horror as they watched me go in, but it was mad to wait. The lady in front of me in the queue was hopping from foot to foot and she wasn’t even next in line. Crazy.
We have an apartment booked in Milan for several days, a chance to relax and live a cheaper lifestyle than would suit either our recent travel companions or the ones we’re catching up with in a couple of weeks time. We have expensive renovations to finance after all.
Simon has booked an absolutely enormous car for us for our trip around Northern Italy, a diesel Citroën SUV. I was extremely skeptical when I saw it at the airport but he tells me that everything smaller only came in a manual. I’m just glad I’m not driving.