We went for a walk this morning to visit the SNCF boutique and the pharmacie. Roger has been planning our Italy trip, and bought the tickets online last night. This morning we printed out the codes to drop into the boutique and print the tickets. There is a nifty machine there which allows us to enter our codes and get the tickets printed up without assistance from SNCF personnel. Today we hit a snag, however. The machine told us we would have to have an SNCF agent print the Italian portion of our trip. So we sat and waited a few minutes for our turn. I started out the process in French, but quickly switched to English when the agent indicated he spoke English. I can get my questions out without too much difficulty - probably not accurately as far as syntax is concerned, and perhaps tense, but I can make myself understood. The difficulty lies in understanding their responses. I sat and listened to the questions the agent asked customers previous to us, and knew I would be much better off in English. So we proceded in English and got our tickets. We leave Wednesday for Rome, then on to Pompii and other venues.
After we left the SNCF store, we walked up to a pharmacie to check our weight. Roger remembered that, in Paris, he saw a scale in a pharmacie, so we dropped into the nearest one on the way up to the SNCF store, but it didn’t have a scale. This second one did. I took off my purse, coat, and scarf and handed them over to Roger. Then I slipped off my shoes, stood on the scale and deposited 50 Eurocents. A moment later, I had a slip of paper with my weight and my height, along with my body mass index and a chart showing my ideal weight and BMI. It didn’t show my ideal height. Roger did the same and we walked out clutching our statistics.
I tried a painting from a photo of a park in Milan today, and the results were less than spectacular. It got muddy in the middle, and the entire lower third of the picture totally lacks texture. The lamp and the park bench look as if they are afterthoughts and have no dimension to them.
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