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Published: April 4th 2013
Gelato flavour of the day: Again N/A, didn’t pass a Gelateria, damn, tomorrow will be different!
We had a mission planned for the day and that was to become self sufficient for breakfast and evening meals.
To do this we needed to buy our microwave and toaster and that was going to take locating a shopping mall and one of the big supermercados, like a Warehouse but with groceries etc.
After a very good hotel breakfast (man the warm croissants are getting a hiding in the mornings!)we set off downtown to check out what was there in the way of shopping not really expecting to find what we needed.
In our one hour walk we did find billboards advertising a mall. So we jotted down the email address and came back to the hotel to suss out its whereabouts.
As it turned out it was a mall I had investigated on the internet before we left NZ and thought that we might have been able to get to it as we drove into Pozzuoli yesterday as the location is relatively close by to the road we took south.
It would never have worked out given
the driving condition and it was also a public holiday so might not have been open. Some things here are not as you would expect back home with malls open on holidays although there were many shops trading on Good Friday in Rome when everything is closed in NZ.
We got the address of the mall and took a look at Google maps of a route suggested by the site. All of it meant nothing other than a blue line on a map from A to B.
So off we set in Cindy with Victoria doing the guidance not knowing what was ahead as far as the road and driving conditions.
The Google map had shown a route on an SS type road which is a main route but Victoria thought better and took us on a hair raising route through an outer suburb of Napoli where the drivers always and I mean always went for the gap, any road rules that there might be in this country were thrown out the window and cars parked where they liked on the narrow streets.
It was like driving in a dodgem (cars that you drove at great
speed in an enclosed track trying to hit as many others as you could) at the local fair.
The journey was 16km including many roundabouts and a cutting that had been made through a hill that was really only one way but treated as two by the locals!
BUT we got to the mall in one piece; Gretchen had pulled in the wing mirrors which had been a good idea.
The mall was vast and had an Auchan store as its anchor and so we headed to it to locate what we needed.
The electrical appliances appeared to be at the far end of the store although we w ere only guessing as the place was HUGE and the far end looked at least a kilometre away!
As we reached the other end, hey presto, there was a stand of microwaves with some on special including an LG that also had what looked like a grill and appeared to also be a convection oven. With Euro20 off the usual price of Euro89 we snapped it up. The toaster we needed was in the same area too and a good discount on the too, the BBA
V2 were buying sharp today!
Things got even better when we spotted the One Euro specials or ‘Offerato’ and pretty quickly the large trolley was filling up with beers x 6(600ml), biscuits, juice, 6x water etc etc etc.I think Gretchen was getting a bit worried on the final cost but we carried on thinking that we make this a shopping excursion that might mean we don’t have to do more for a while except for nightly dinners to be cooked in the microwave.
Travelling and different hotels often means pillows can be variable in comfort so we sussed out two pillows for ourselves and two pillow cases, made in Moldavia(more exotic sounding place than where a lot of our merchandise in NZ comes from, China).
We were on a roll with the ‘Offerato’ by now and the trolley needed some readjustment as more cheap groceries went in.
The coup of the shop had to be a white wine, Italian, at Euro1.29 or around NZ$2.00 and while I am thinking it turned out to be very good with our salad and salmon dinner later in the day. At that price a bottle a day would be cheap
drinking. We did buy more and we have noted Auchan for future wine shopping!
The only thing we didn’t find was a slicker pad to keep things cool in the chilly bag (ex Countdown) while we are travelling and if we don’t have accommodation at any time that doesn’t have a fridge in the room. It seemed a bit complicated to ask as there were no English voices that we heard amongst the milling shoppers or staff. We had intended to bring two pads from NZ but somehow they got left behind.
The bargains just got better as we thought about dinner. A kilo of cocktail tomatoes for the salad at Euro1, lettuce in a container, enough for two nights Euro 1 and so it went on.
With the trolley absolutely full to overflowing we joined a queue for the first purchase, this time around, using the travel card. Would the PIN work and would we push the right buttons when nothing was in English?
It all worked a treat with the total at just over Euro150 which included the microwave, toaster, pillows and enough food to keep us going for ages. Gretchen was amazed just
how cheap it all seemed.
The drive home was a little faster than the trip there as it was around 1pm and the locals had closed most of their shops and headed off for the afternoon siesta. Those that were on the road still wanted to play dodgems but not quite so frenetic.
After lunch of croissant (here we go again) and prosciutto and slices of emmental cheese (the way it should look with holes in it) and fruit we had a short rest and then headed out for some local sightseeing.
We had planned that it would have been good to go to the Isle of Capri but the spring weather is too changeable to know if we would get a fine day so we shall give it a miss and do Napoli city tomorrow.
This afternoon though we used Serena (GPS from home and hand held) to give us a track to Solfatara an area of thermal activity with fumeroles.It was about 2km walk and we set off under darkening skies and a threat of rain.
There is camping ground in the thermal area so we assume the locals think that there is
unlikely to be another eruption, the last being around 1130AD.We didn’t pay the entry fee as the rain was getting a little steadier, although light, and we could get a good view of the whole area just up the road from the entrance.
An interesting place not dissimilar to Whaka in Rotorua but without the geysers.
On the way home with the rain easing we passed another local attraction which appeared to be like the Coloseum.However it was closed on Tuesday’s so we had to make do with what we could see through the fence.
Before dinner in our room tonight we enjoyed two episodes of Fawlty Towers on DVD.
A change for dinner tonight to salad with Norwegian salmon slices (another Euro1 bargain) cherry tomatoes, emmental cheese (yum), tasty red capsicum, ciabattia and a bottle of wine at Euro 1.29 followed by a Skype call with Chris and Marilyn back in Alexandra brought another successful day on the BBA V2 to a close. Sleep on our new pillows was going to be treat.
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Erin
non-member comment
So Cindy Citroen is somewhat more weighed down now than she was yesterday??? Life is good with a 1.29 Euro bottle of vino :-)