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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (7936)	9/14/2003 1:07:27 PM
From: greenspirit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793817

Funny you should ask! Oh the stories I could tell you here... Compared to the U.S. it's dismal. Electricity goes out about 4 times a week for up to 12 hours at a pop, you cannot drink the water (they say the iron level is too high), and it took a couple of months to get my phone service hooked up. Additionally, there are very few jacks in the house, and bare in mind, this is a very modern home comparatively. Very few Italians (at least here in Sardinia), have a clothes dryer. Now, imagine having three young American raised kids (who dump clothes at the drop of a hat), and having to hang their clothes out to dry? No exaggeration, my wife probably averaged 2 loads a day back in the states. No wonder Italians have so few children! :) It's circa 1950 Boston all over again.... We did purchase a dryer (with no small effort), and it runs off this device called a bombala. There was no room for it, so we stuffed it on top of our clothes washer to make it fit in the bathroom. The stove also runs off a bombola. It's basically the same as using an outside barbecue propane tank inside the home. Everyone uses these things here. Brand new stoves and dryers with bombola hook-ups are expensive too. GE, Maytag or Kenmore could crush the competition here. We are talking cheap with a capital C. Oh, and here's another little tidbit. Just like many outside barbecues the little clicker on the stove which starts the fire, breaks all the time. And you can't find one of those extendo-butane lighters anywhere. So, visualize this, ladies are crammed into these little 2 foot by 9 foot kitchens still bending over the stove with a match and tossing the damn thing in to get things going! On the bright side, at least I have ADSL for 60 bucks a month with unlimited access. :)