"Che cosa significano le campane?" - "What do the bells mean?"

And I don't mean the bell family - they're pretty simple to understand.

I mean the bells that chime 48 times a day here. Every 15 minutes, they tell us the time. Two tones - the first tells us the hour, and the second tells us the quarter hour. So three dings and a dong means 3:15, and five dings and three dongs means 5:45. That much I have figured out. I haven't quite figured out the other chimes. At noon on some days, we get a melody that can go on for a couple of minutes. I guess it just means "yay, it's lunch time, then I get a 2 hour nap!", which is how people seem to spend the afternoon here. Then there is the more cryptic 25 dings and 25 dongs.. maybe it's calling us to one of the 15 churches within walking distance, or maybe it means someone is getting married or buried or baptised. There does not seem to be a nice handy google-translate type program for bells, so for now I am in the dark on this. Sorry. I know you were hoping for an answer, but it will have to wait until I remember to ask a local. (which may be never!)

We had our first house guests last week, James and Rachel Pinske. I used to work with James's sister at Forest Protection, and I had met him and his wife a few times in Victoria. James and Rachel have been touring Europe for about 5 months, and decided to spend some time in Italy before going to Cairo, then home. So we invited them to come stay for a couple of days. The day they arrived, we took them on a mini-walking tour of Perugia's historical centre. The mini tour wrapped up at the Irish Pub where we each had a few (or several) beer. The next day we went to Assisi - I was moving a little slowly, as I tend to do 'the day after', and it was a pretty cool day. Assisi felt like a completely different town this time - I think there was only us and one other bus tour in the whole town! We found some really nice art shops, and found a place that made an amazing sandwich on fresh rosemary flat bread. He even brought out Rick Steve's book to show us where his sandwiches are mentioned! It was delicious, and kept us going until we got home for dinner. It was fun to have some Canadians around for a bit. We drank beer and played cards, and they left in the pouring rain one morning... They're probably drying out in Cairo now!

Terry and I thought about going on a walking tour last weekend, but we figured this one (like the other one we went on last week) would be all in Italian, so we thought we'd just follow an itinerary from our book. Headed up to centro and forgot the book! So we had a nice pizza, then went to the tour place. They told us that the guide spoke english, so we joined up. (this one wasn't free!) and she tried.. but of course, she couldn't translate everything, or the tour would have been twice as long. So we got the briefs in between sights. But they gave us a pretty good tour book, so maybe we'll do it again on our own and look up each sight as we go! We have taken a few pictures around town, and posted them on facebook if you want to have a look.

Well, that's all for now. Hope everyone is having a great autumn (or spring, if you're on the bottom half of the world!) Monday we begin Italian lessons - we all signed up. I think the next few days we will be trying to get Meryck on a normal schedule, where he wakes up before the sun sets!