A Long Week

This has been a long week. I'm glad it is almost the weekend. I so need it! I just need to have a couple days away from work. This place really is unbelievable sometimes.

Last weekend we did a quick trip up to Tuscany for the weekend. Saturday morning we went to Pisa and climbed the tower. Can you believe there was no line? Thank goodness for a nice weekend in January! We had lunch and then got a pastry at a nearby pasticceria (pastry shop). We took the train to Lucca and spent the afternoon wandering around the town. We climbed up into one of the many towers in town, and rode rented bikes around the old defense wall. We spent the night in Florence at a great place called Althea and had a great dinner at a nearby Osteria (type of restaurant). We visited the Uffizi Gallery and Accademia Museum on Sunday and took the train back to Rome. It was a fast trip, but we had a chance to visit places that we didn't get to do on the first pass through. It was really a fun trip!

Returning to work on Monday was an abrupt end to the fun. It started off in a bad way and got worse as the week went on. It really was a downhill spiral kind of week. I found myself with my workload and issues increasing by the second. The pressure I feel on a daily basis is enormous, and it is made worse dealing with people at home who have so few tasks. At home a person has 1 task that they spend 40 hours a week on. I spend 2 hours a week on each of my assigned tasks. Overwhelming? Yes. Fair? No. Especially since the view is that we are on vacation. This is life, I guess. We get the good part: spending 2 years seeing Europe. We also get the bad part: being overworked and unappreciated :)

Anyway, here is my interesting thing that happened today. We were driving to work this morning, and we were on Via Salaria, a non-highway road. We were heading out of the city, which doesn't have much traffic. Going the other direction is stopped traffic going into the city. Imagine our surprise at seeing this in the line of traffic trying to go into Rome: Just another car? I don't think so! This really is what we saw sitting in traffic, and a guy even had is head sticking out the top. My question is where were they going? You really never know what you are going to see in Rome!

That's all the excitement for now. The weekend is almost here, and I can't wait!