2. THE HAIR

This one wins catastrophe of the week. In the stupidity of youth (and yes, that is the lame excuse I using! ... in fact its worked pretty well up to now) I had the final straw last weekend when a girl in a shop mistook me for being Russian (yes! how insulting! – especially as that implies so much more that just a nationality in Italy (if you know what I mean), but its really not so strange considering the ratio of Russian to Australian girls in Italy would be hugely in the Russian favour,), I put it down to the blonde hair and white skin, white skin- there’s really not much I can do about it(considering all that time on the Greek islands did bupkis), but blonde hair- ‘ah ha!’ I thought, now there’s something I can change! OHHHH big big mistake, Sure I changed it all right, I changed it from Blonde to Green (who knew brown hair dye would do that!) to Grey (bad brown with blonde don’t mix!) and finally back to blonde!

LIFE LESSON: Tampering with hair that is already good with dye from the supermarket is a recipe for disaster!

COST OF LESSON: (Includes 4 packets of dye from the supermarket and two hairdresser visits!) wait for it folks . . . . €150 and with the current exchange rate you really don’t want to know what that is in AU$!!! Trust me don’t do the conversion!

LANGUAGE LESSON: I now know without thinking all the vocab. to say that ‘‘I am stupid and stuffed up perfectly good hair, HELP, PLEASE!!!!’’ And it turned out that now one thought I was Russian all the hairdressers and all the other clients in the hairdressers at the time all thought I was English (true!).

3.THE DIDGERIDOO

For all who don’t know on this trip to Italy I decided to take my didgeridoo, one my brother and I bought when we went to the Northern Territory. I took it to a dinner party and it was highly amusing, especially as I brought it out at 12pm when every one was very ‘happy’. Out of 12 at the dinner 1 could make a sound, and 12/12 could make a spitting slobbering noise whilst covering it spit- needless to say it under went a thorough disinfecting! And 2/12 didn’t even know what the hell it was (but the were Mexican so all is forgiven)

4.THE WEDDING PREPERATIONS
(and yes I can hear you - NOT MY WEDDING!!!)

The wedding of one of Dani’s friends has been the bane of my week, as finding some thing to wear is not so easy when the whole place is full of fussy Italians who don’t let anything that isn’t ‘designer’ touch there skin. Ok, so exaggeration! But seriously this is a day wedding and I packed only cocktail dresses!
I leant this week that apparently the rule for dressing for a day wedding in Italy is something like this: -
a. totally black is out
b. ‘classic’ is in
c. anything designer is 10/10 (and 11/10 if its an Italian designer)
d. the balance between looking ‘classic’ but yet looking a little different is very (very very ) thin!
e. maybe the biggest rule that was firmly bestowed on me was that under so circumstances what so ever are you able to out dress the bride. Which originally I didn’t think would be so easy considering its ‘Lady in big white dress (with little girls carrying it) with done-up hair and large white veil’ VS ‘little tight red dress’ but apparently that dress was completely unacceptable and may provide a distraction to the giving of the vows!

Will post pictures next blog of the final choice!