Mamma mia said there'd be days like this

Flip-flops don’t flip much when the part between the toes breaks. They just sit there on the road and look at you (fruitlessly trying to convince them they want to go along with your feet at the very moment when they have freed themselves forever from bondage) smugly. Flop.

So, since you’re a ten-minute walk from home and trying to get to language class on time and have already tried sticking the between-toe part back into the hole it came out of and it just kept flopping, you pick it up and thank God you like to walk barefoot anyway and are almost to class and do your best to look elegant and nonchalant and not-American, because even if this could happen to anybody the raised eyebrows that lady was muttering probably impute this unfortunate incident to your nationality. I suppose the middle-part (what is it called, anyway?) doesn’t come out of Prada heels.

Have no fear. When I got to class I discovered that I had a safety pin in my purse, which, yes, was enough to hold it together. My Spanish classmate tells me that the name for safety pins in her language is “un-lose-ables.” I’m jealous of Spanish. Only we have musical chairs, and they only have “the chair game,” so there.

Trevor and Rhonda needed to get their codici fiscali today, so we made our way to the agenzia entrate, open 8:30-12:30 M-F, 2:30-4:30 T Th, and didn’t get there until about 4 Thur. It’s the one office where I haven’t ever had to wait long. But the employees were obviously ready for the day to be done. After I explained that we wanted to get numbers for Trevor and Rhonda and their three children (5), the woman at the front desk gave me three numbers. “That will be enough.” So Trevor’s number was called and we ran back to desk number 9 to start his paperwork. Then sure enough—tac! (which is Italian for something happening suddenly) Rhonda’s number was called. No problem—it was at desk number 8. Got her started—tac! The number for the three boys. At desk 7. So Rhonda gave me the passports and I passed them to the agent, who was clearly annoyed (but not necessarily at us). The man running the number system asked if he was ready for a new one. “Does it look like I’m not helping anybody over here?” he asked. “He’s matto,” he told us, and waved his hand expressively. “How do you say ‘matto’ in American?” “Crazy,” I said. “Oh, yeah, that’s right.”

So from there we went to the anagrafe, which is where you can get residency after you get a permesso di soggiorno from the questura after you apply for it at the post office. The post office is behind everything, and so everything is behind.

But they needed a residency permit now—we think—to be able to pick up their stuff which is arriving in July, and can’t wait three months at a minimum to get their permessi before applying for residency. So the very kind lady was telling us how once they had applied for the permessi they could apply for residency if they had these other documents, but one of them was one I’d never heard of or seen and she said they should be able to get it when they apply for the permessi but what kind of permessi were they? Religious workers? Hmmm. That might be different then, but we’d have to find out from the questura.

And then I loaned them my internet key, and went to recharge it and found out that I owed 8 euros even though I haven’t been using it (and couldn’t because I didn’t recharge it) because I didn’t deactivate it (which is free, as is reactivating) and so I had to pay 8 euros for that plus 9 euros to use it for a month which comes to 20 euros. How’s that? Math’s not my strong suit, but even I can figure out that 9+8 is less than 20. Ah, but you can only pay in blocks of 5 and 10.

New flip-flops might have to wait.