With Mel still feeling sick and gloomy skies outside, we decided to ditch our trip to Florence. We dropped my sister’s friend at the station and wandered into the now familiar coop (the local supermarket). While the coop has a decent range for such a small town, it presents a number of challenges. Firstly there is the language barrier (we seemed to be the only people who spoke English). Then there is the problem of finding what you’re looking for. There’s the weird scanner system, member’s only isles, 8 items or less isles, bagging and weighing your own fruit and vegetables, etc, etc. Of course we had no idea of how any of this stuff worked. The staff who spoke no English (or didn’t want to) had little or no patience for us, and even seemed to act as if we shouldn’t have been there. Needless to say, trips to the Coop became a necessary evil throughout the week in Tuscany.

My sister and I returned from the Coop with some more food and beer. By now my parents had left for their day trip to Siena and Mel was still resting in bed. Without any decent weather to go out by the pool, my sister and I faced a quiet, uneventful day at the villa. In the end we returned to the Coop and bought a DVD to watch!