Back from Bulgaria

Hi there!

Well, if you read my other blog, you already know that I have returned from my three-week trip to Bulgaria on "other business." If not, well, I'm back.

Things have piled up some, and this will be a short report. The best news is that the work continued in my absence, although one of the contractors took a week of vacation. The pool is structurally complete, but there is still alot of earthwork to be done around it before it's finished. That is supposed to begin this week! Wow!

As for the ADSL situation, we're at 8 calls and still waiting...

More later on!

Ciao for now,

Craig

ADSL and other alphabetic maladies... Part 2

Hi there!

This is the second tirade against bureaucracy, Italian style, identified by alphabet soup. This version is the dot-IT jungle.

As you most likely have discovered, we have a website called www.TenutaCollicello.com which is the basis for this Blog. Since we are located in Italy, we thought it would be nice to have www.TenutaCollicello.it, even though we would only use it to redirect misguided souls to the dot-com website. This is the story of our dot-it adventure…

04 April. On 4 April, I found an on-line advertisement for a hosting organisation in Italy that featured (surprise?) dot-it domains. I won’t mention the name of the organisation, since they really did try to help. I registered www.tenutacollicello.it in the name of the company of the same name, registered and located in Italy. My wife, the managing director of the company was listed as such, and I was listed as the responsible website manager. The payment was made (and accepted) on-line by credit card.

05 April. The next day, the website was placed on the web with an “under construction” sign, and the hosting organisation sent an invoice on-line.

09 April. On this day we received a notice that we needed to register with the appropriate dot-it authority that we were running out of time.

10 April. I responded by asking what exactly it was that we needed to do. The host organisation responded that there was an on-line form that we needed to fill out, called (abbreviated) the LAR. We sent the form, appropriately filled out (we thought), and faxed it to the number in the e-mail. After that, no news…

28 June. Out of the blue, we received a letter from the authority that said that the time limit on our application had expired – that certain items in the LAR were inconsistent with entries in the technical module. Also, the address used (in Italian in the accepted Italian format of postal code, city, neighbourhood, street address) in the LAR for the registration address did not conform to the format 'street:', 'city:', 'stateOrProvince:', 'postalCode:', 'countryCode:'

03 July: One week later, after we had talked to the host organisation by phone and corrected the entry and sent it again to the fax number, we received the same form letter, but this time, it was the address of the company that was wrong (same format problem).

05 July. After another phone call with the hosting organisation, I responded with an e-mail showing the postal address and the physical address of the company (these are not the same, the office address is different from the physical address).

The same day, I received a second form letter that complained that the name of the person who had applied for the registration was not the same as the web administrator. It also said that the address format of the seat of the company was incorrect.

07 July. I responded to the above by email again. This time, I was so frustrated that I really didn’t care whether they accepted the changes or not.

13 July. We received an e-mail notice that our application had expired.

We received a second e-mail notice that our application had expired from the hosting organisation.

Guess what? I don’t care! We don’t need it and I only expect more bureaucratic red tape in the future. For those who are interested (and have the intestinal fortitude to go through all the red tape), www.tenutacollicello.it is again available.

Ciao for now!

Craig

Hot weather!

Hello again!

I'm on a business trip to Bulgaria, but I still have access to the weather in Italy. I can see that it has been really hot the past few days - 35-36°C (mid-90's F) to 42°C (well over 100°F). The positive part is that the nights have been and continue to be cool, around 13-20°C (55-70°F). This kind of weather has two advantages. One is that the low temperatures at night tend to keep the humidity low, so that the high daytime temperatures don't seem so uncomfortable. The other advantage is that the big solid house at the Tenuta cools down at night, and stays cool during the day. Natural air conditioning! The pool will help next month when it's finished, and I expect to make good use of it!

Ciao...

Craig

ADSL and other alphabet illnesses

Hi there!

Well, I’m in the throes of trying to get ADSL installed at the Tenuta. First some history…

1. We have ADSL at the shop in Marsciano (see www.LaMaisondYvette.com for more information about the shop), but it took us two months to get it installed to start with. What we ordered initially (I was skeptical) was a pay-by-volume arrangement with the provider, Wind, a subsidiary of Telecom Italia. After it was installed, the system didn’t work. Surprise? Well, we tried the Wind telephone help line (190 – free but never free, if you know what I mean), and after about three hours on the phone, they eventually said they would send someone to look at the installation. About two weeks later, someone showed up (Wind uses contractors for this kind of work). They spent about an hour, and could not find what the problem was. Since the rule is, after an hour, we pay for the repair and it’s not cheap, it was getting a little ticklish. They finally found the problem in a small junction box that the original installers never opened. Luckily, at the 58-minute mark. Finally, ADSL worked!

2. After about three or four weeks (even before the first bill arrived), I found that we would be better off with a flat-rate arrangement. No change of provider, just a switch in accounting, right? Well, that’s what we thought, and innocently called 190, and after only about 35-40 minutes, the job was done. We thought. Then the ADSL stopped working. Why? Call 190 again. “Oh, the service will be disconnected until the new ADSL connection is installed.”
“Installed?”
“Yes, they have to change things in the switch room.”
“When will that be done?”
“Well, it shouldn’t take more than a week or two.”
“And what do we do for an Internet connection in the mean time?”
“Well, I guess you could use our analog dialup?”
Two and a half months later, it finally worked. Sort of.
What we discovered is that the Wind ADSL systems in Marsciano apparently are not the greatest. From noon to about 3 in the afternoon, the access speed was faster using the old analog dialup. And again from about 5:30 to 7:30 in the afternoon, the same.

3. About nine months later, we opened a new shop in the Old Town of Marsciano, and told Wind to please install ADSL there as well.
Mmm.
After about six weeks, the installers came. They installed the physical equipment, but I was not able to try out the installation before they left. They seemed to be in a hurry to leave.
Mmm.
I tried for about five weeks to get the ADSL there to work, without success. I spent five continuous hours on the phone with 190 technical people.
They insisted that it was functional.
I could not get a signal.
After about a year, we called Wind and told them to take their equipment (a wireless modem) out and disconnect the service. They said that it would cost €100 to terminate the contract. We said we would think it over.
This has gone on for almost 18 months now.
We’ve decided that we’re going to close the shop now (not enough business to support the expenses), so I first said, “this is the opportunity to get ADSL installed at the house in San Biagio della Valle!”
We called 190, and they said “no problem, we’ll send someone out next week!”
That was a month ago.
We’re still waiting…

4. Last week, we discovered a different system, using a direct broadcast system (not satellite but with an antenna) from Perugia. Sort of like terrestrian digital TV. Our neighbor (our ONLY neighbor, we really are out in the countryside) got it installed, and he says it works just fine! He also said he had to call about 28 times before the people finally came and installed it… Sound familiar?
Anyway, now we will try this in parallel with Wind. It will be interesting to see what’s installed first! Oh, we’re at call number 4 and counting…

Will keep you informed!

Ciao for now…

Craig

P.S. One of our goals at Tenuta Collicello is to keep you isolated from such typical Italian red tape!

Activities today

Hi there!

It’s 9:20pm (Friday) and I’m sitting outside with my laptop, watching the sky get dark. The weather was nice today – 30°C (86°F) with a nice breeze – but the house was full of workers for the terrace and walls outside and also for the plumbing and the radiators. I supervised and read and slept a little. The three major projects at this point are completing the tiles on the terrace, completing the colored concrete for the exterior walls (where there are no native stones), installing the remaining radiators and sanitary equipment, and installing piping for the future solar heating collectors. All this should be finished by the end of next week, just in time for the pool people to start their work – they say two weeks start to finish. I don’t believe that! Well, maybe for the pool itself, but we need water(!), landscaping around it, furniture, etc.

Just to prove that I don’t believe it, I’m traveling to Bulgaria to look after my business there next week. For about 2½ weeks. We’ll see at the end of July!

I don’t know if you know what they are (at least by the English name) but I just found a small (about 2 cm = less than 1 inch long) light tan praying mantis in the garden. It’s the first one I’ve seen in Italy. I remember the first one I ever saw when I was about 13 or 14 in North Carolina. I was climbing on a railway boxcar at the place where my mother worked, and as I got to the top, there was a big (about 10 cm = 2½ inch long) bright green one looking me right in the eye. I wasn’t afraid (much) but he sure startled me! They are good in the garden, because they eat other insects that damage plants. Needless to say, I returned him (her?), the tan one here in Italy, to the garden unharmed.

Ciao for now…

Craig

Introduction

Hi there!

This is the first entry on the new blog for Tenuta Collicello. What is Tenuta Collicello? Well, it’s a few different things. Primarily, and as the subject of this blog, it’s a brand new Bed & Breakfast working towards Country Inn outside a village called San Biagio della Valle, about 15km (10 miles) southwest of Perugia, in central Italy. As things go along, you’ll discover various things about the B&B business (and business in general) in Italy, about the countryside where we’re located, about who we are and where we come from (and where we’re going?), plus a number of other maybe not-so-related things. As is usual with blogs, we welcome comments and participation, although we retain the right to control what goes up on the blog from 3rd parties.

If you get interested in coming to visit us, please take a look at http://Tenuta.info, which is a short address redirect to the main website at www.TenutaCollicello.com. There, you will find many things about our new operation, and about some of the other things we do as well.

My sign-off will usually be “ciao for now…” What you need to understand (if you don’t already) is that “ciao” in Italian (pronounced “chow”) is like “aloha” in Hawaiian; it means “hello” as well as “goodbye”, so you can say “ciao!” when you see a friend (it is rather personal, you don’t say “ciao” to just anybody), and again when you part. So,

Ciao for now…

Craig