Happy New Year!

It's 2013!  This year we sell our UK home and make the move to Italy!  We only started talking about it during our September visit, then found our property the same week, completed the purchase a few days before Christmas and have builders starting this week!  Are we lucky or stupidly impulsive that things are moving so quickly?!

There are some things that are so very different in Italy, I wonder how we'll adjust.  I'm not too worried about the language or the slower pace of life, but the women I know look fantastic all the time!  One recently told me it's the norm for women young and old to have a hairdresser come to their house to blow dry their hair every week!  I couldn't believe it but she does, her mother does, her mother-in-law, her sisters-in-law and so on.  I haven't figured out how they stay so slim eating all that pasta and cheese, but I have at least solved the mystery of the glossy tumbling curls!  Plus, having read that Italian men like their women to wear heels at all times, I'm yet to see my friends in flip flops or sandals, but then I'm already taller than half the men, so I'm not sure if I ought to tower any higher!

So, in a nutshell, while my inner snob thinks how lovely to be surrounded by such well-presented and classically fashionable ladies (chav chic hasn't reached Puglia yet!) my inner slob panics that I may re-inforce all their preconceptions of British fashion with my hair blasted with a hairdryer, last season's jeans and virtually flat cowboy boots!
Oh the shame!

tough guy + fur-trimmed purple puffa!

P.S. Even the men wear tighter and more colourful clothes than I wear - a gay friend confided that his gaydar has real problems when it encounters "Europeans"!














P.P.S. Reassuring: whatever differences in our appearances, we're all the same underneath!