So I said I'd check into the landromat situation for her, and if she'd like to meet for coffee, I'd be happy to treat her. When she arrived, she said that she'd passed the link to my blog along to some of the other wives, and wondered if they could come for coffee, too. Certo! I said, and that's just what we did.
Here's a photo of the group, from left to right: Pat, Bea, Barbara, Phyllis, and me*.
* Hair disclaimer: It rained off and on that day, so in this photo, my hair appears to be straight on one side, and then there's some sort of frizz action going on with the other side. My hair does not normally do this...only for photos that I want to post on the world wide web. Sigh.
Anyway, all four women are wives of physicists who were attending the conference on Accelerators Operations (thankfully, none of them really knew what this entailed, so I didn't feel left out). After leading them astray a few times, I finally found the historic Caffè Tommaseo, and we had one of the best cups of coffee I've had in Italy. Ever. Granted, coffee at the Caffè Tommaseo costs three times the normal price, but it was worth it.
We chatted about traveling and Trieste and their families and mine, and they were all lovely, warm people. I wished I could have spent the whole morning with them and show them around the city, but my babysitting fairy godmother (a.k.a. husband) had to go back to work, leaving me with our 21-month-old son and an illegally-parked car.
In the end, the ladies ended up treating me (Grazie!), and I realized I never did give Barbara the address of a laundromat, so I hope she made it to Venice in a freshly-laundered state.
The next time there's a conference on particle accelerators, Barbara, I'll have the laundromat address ready. And the coffee's on me!
