Driving In Siena

We left Rome today, where we didn't have a car, and drove up to Tuscany. There, we stopped in Siena to do laundry. Ay-yi-yi! It was crazy. Finding anything here without GPS is almost impossible. Narrow, medieval, one-way streets where the signs are just on one wall of one corner so as you drive by, with crazed Italians right on your bumper, honking if you slow down, you have almost no chance to read the street name and even if you do, the map is incomplete so the odds that the street name is there is very small.

We finally found the laundromat, did our laundry and in the process of me trying to bring the car down from where we parked it in a church parking lot to the laundry map, I got directed right out of town by the one-way street signs. I then had to circle back and attack the city once again and made a mad, circuitous route through streets made for horses and pedestrians to get back to the laundromat to retrieve my wife and our laundry. When I get a chance, I'm going to grab the google map of Siena where I drove and trace the route. It was nuts.

If you ever want to know why the Italians haven't re-conquered the world, it's because they're still trying to get home from work or the store.

Driving here is like a giant game of MarioKart where everyone is Mario.