This was a trip of its own. When you’re checking into an Airbnb, you want to respect the host’s time and not show up too early or too late. Check-in and checkout times are pretty similar to a hotel’s, but there’s nobody just waiting around at a desk in a lobby for you, so you want to arrange your time with some caution and consideration built in.

I left the booking of my train tickets a bit too late, and found that I couldn’t get a train or a but out of Rimini early enough to put me in Rimini at a decent hour, so I was a bit on the spot. The same proved true for catching a bus to Bologna – both were all booked up. Eventually, I found a shuttle bus from Rimini to the Bologna Airport, but it cost me 25€ instead of the 10.50€ that the train would have for that part of the trip. I finally pieced together a city bus to the Rimini station where I could catch the shuttle, then a city bus in Bologna from the airport to the train station, where the train would take me to Prato station in Florence where I could transfer to the train for Arezzo, which stops in Figline Valdarno, where a short hike of a bit over 1km on fairly level terrain would get me to my Airbnb. It looked like I had enough time between all the connections, but a late bus and a misread of which busses went where I needed to go meant a late bus transfer between the airport and the train station. To make a long story short, 10 minutes cost me an hour, and I ended up arriving by train at 20:30 instead of 19:30, which put me on the doorstep at 9pm. Oh well.

The co-host here is Leo. Born in Congo, he left there at age 4, moved to Italy, then to England, France, and back to Italy. He’s also been to the USA and to Montreal, so he’s fluent in one of the Congolese languages in addition to English, French, Italian, and I don’t know what else. His fiancee only speaks French, a Congolese language, and some Italian. Also resident here is a refugee from Ukraine, who works remotely for an Israeli marketing company. She’s fluent in English and of course Ukrainian, as well as I believe some Hebrew and is learning Italian as well. Both her father and her husband are in the army now, so it’s obviously a stressful season for her.

I guess we’re a pretty mixed bunch, but that makes for some good conversation. I’ve explained the limitations of my French, which you have to realize is French-Canadian spoken with an English accent and spoken to people who find unaccented Canadian French to be a bit of an amusing accent to start with. That, and my grade-10 French has gotten pretty rusty by now, considering I wasn’t very good at it back then either. My Ukrainian is even more limited, but that’s less of a necessity.

Leo was a chef at one time and is determined not only to not let me starve, but to make sure I’m not eating “bullshit,” which is pretty much the only thing I know how to cook. The apartment generally has fallen into a bit of disrepair particularly where the plumbing is concerned, but my room is nice and clean with a decent-sized balcony with a table and 2 chairs, and double doors opening onto it, so I can sit outdoors about 6-8′ away from the bed. I’m on the 5th floor (counting up from 0, so that’s the 6th floor in North America) so there’s a bit of a view of the hills in the distance, overtop of the tile roofs.