New home

                             

                    

                    

          

                            

      

It is now one week exactly since I moved into my new abode. It is really quite nice- larger than my Notting Hill pad, and quite 'bourgeois' including a crystal chandelier and soffiti affrescati - or painted ceilings, which is a Sienese speciality. 

I am eating my supper in front of the telly- it helps with the Italian, and I am immersing myself. I have not spoken anything else apart from a few phone calls to London, Sweden, Berlin and Mali in the last week. 

I am watching a nature programme about adorable brown bears in Kamchatka... it reminds me of my Keita- he loved nature programmes. I miss him so much.

This Italian experience, although similar in some ways to the beginning of my new life in Djenne in so far as I know no one here, and I knew no one in Djenne, is nevertheless much different. This is Europe. No one really talks to one here if one is a stranger. In Djenne, the entire population who were involved in tourism- guides, souvenir peddlers etc., threw themselves at me and I had to fend them off. The rest of the Djenne population kept themselves quite aloof, but I know them now. I wonder how long it will take to build up some sort of net work of friends here?

But just at the moment that is not an urgent consideration- because tomorrow I will go to Florence airport and meet my cousin Pelle and his wife Nanni, who have been so important in my life for so many reasons. They will stay for a week and we will look at different properties, have dinners in lovely trattorias and aperitivos in the Campo...And soon afterwards, I am expecting  the next instalment of visiting friends, so I am not exactly complaining!

Here is a neighbour, as yet unknown to me, walking past: