A serendipitous day

We just got back from two weeks in our beloved Italy, and there’s one day in particular that I wanted to share with you.

It was Saturday, smack in the middle of the trip, when we were leaving the apartment in Deruta that we’d stayed in the first week, to go up to Tuscany to stay at an agriturismo near the coast. My friend Bjørn who lives in Florence but was visiting Denmark had sent the keys to his apartment to our apartment in Deruta, but it hadn’t shown up yet, and we had to leave early. What to do?

The plan was to write a note to the next tenants to ask them to call us, and to leave a prestamped envelope for them to forward the keys to us in. So we drove down to find somewhere to buy an envelope and some stamps, and thankfully Caroline noticed the post office, which supposedly would sell those items.

But when we got there, she got the clever idea of asking a postal worker when the mail would be delivered. With our broken Italian and their broken English it was very tricky, but then one of them asked us for the name and address on the envelope, went in, found it, and simply handed it to us. Amazing! She’d just saved us hours of concern and effort.

We felt pretty elated as we went on to our next task: To retrieve our 2-year old daughter’s hat which we thought she might have dumped in the supermarket the day before. We looked around but couldn’t see it, so we got in line, and again tried to explain on our broken Italian what we were looking for. The lady at the counter thought we were looking to buy a hat, and none of the bystanders could help.

But then who enters the door but our very own postal lady from before, who had apparently just gotten to the supermarket as one of the first stops on her route delivering mail. While the supermarket lady went looking for the hat, the postal lady explained that while she didn’t speak english, she understood it pretty well. Lucky us, because a minute later the supermarket lady came back with Flora’s hat.

We felt very lucky that morning. We felt like that postal worker was our guardian angel. Had we arrived just 10 minutes later to the post office, all the mail would’ve been out for delivery already. If she hadn’t been there, we’d probably have failed at both of our tasks.

The day actually continued to bless us with good luck. By night, after arriving in Lucca, a hotel rejected my final offer on a hotel room, which didn’t even give us much of a discount (they asked 112 EUR/night, agreed to lower to 110, I offered a final 105, which she rejected), we instead found a beautiful full apartment with kitchen and everything for exactly the same price, and which the lady at the tourist office only randomly heard about the very minute we were there.

A bunch of fun stuff happened in-between as well, and it all just added up to making this day one of the most memorable and joyful days in my life. Thank God I’m alive!