Visitors.... from outer Space!

I am sorry for not writing anything recently. I think I deserve to be expelled from the blogosphere. The reason is twofold: As people have noticed recently, the arrival of Fedor has decreased my number of posts significantly. This should be taken as a positive thing though! We enjoy spending time together and are busy doing many different things. Unfortunately, this does mean that the amount of time I can spend on my blog is decreased a bit...
The other reason, specific for the current long absence was an enormous number of visitors that we have had recently. I have therefore been unable to post, because visitors tend to take up quite a bit of time. But I can give an overview now of the past week or so. First, last Wednesday I made another attempt of renewing my Permission to Stay. I waited for 2 1/2 hours (the advantage of having an appointment: you wait for such a short time!), and I can return in 2 weeks, hopefully to pick up my renewed Permesso: We will see...
On Thursday, Fedor's mother, brothers and sis-in-law arrived. Wow, that is certainly a lot of people! We had a gorgeous dinner in the restaurant Antonio showed us a few weeks ago and continued on to go to the Birreria. We ended up with Fedors mother and little brother at home drinking a lot of wine. As a result of this, Friday was a rather heavy day on my account. Of course we had to show everyone the city, which we did despite the horrific weather. Unlucky people, those who came to visit us during the past week. The weather was terrible and from today on, it is sunny and warm again.... Anyways, Friday night was another eating and drinking fiesta, but I was in a significantly better state on Saturday. Good, because my parents were due to arrive in the afternoon. Waiting, waiting, waiting, but no word of them. An sms sent, but no response. A call to the hotel brings no relief. But by the time I was really getting worried, I received a phonecall of my mother saying they had arrived at their hotel. However, not without any problems on the way. Not only did their telephone not work (I had noticed that already), they also lost their way in Milan (not strange, without a map), but they also ended up with a flat tyre in the centre of Milano (deja vu!!! I had the same car with me 2 months ago and had a flat tyre too!). You can imagine they were happy to finally have reached their hotel. So I went to collect them and we made a little walk through town. At night, my parents and Fedors mother went to a lovely restaurant and ended up drinking rather copious amounts of wine and beer. Sunday, however, was a dry, reasonably nice day, so we managed to get a good look at the city. All the sights: Duomo, Galleria, Cimitero, Hightech, Brera, Castello in one day... And at night, we enjoyed another aperitivo of course. By that time we had also been joined by my friends BarD and Marlous, who arrived from Rome Sunday morning...
On Monday, I got up early to take my Father to a garage to repair his tyre. Of course, I was "lucky" enough to actually know a garage where they would be able to temporarily repair a broken tyre, having been in the same situation only 2 months ago... So after that was done, I continued to Uni, where I followed an embarrasingly bad class in Income Inequality (where it turned out that my ancient, Indian Professor really, really has no clue what he is talking about anymore... Rather unfortunate that I have spent 20 hours in his classes!!!)
At night, Bard, Marlous and I ended up in a restaurant and later a bar and got quite drunk again. This strongly (and negatively) influenced my ability to get some work done the next day, so we had the good intention not to drink much last night. We succeeded a little bit in our objective, but getting up at 6.45 this morning to make sure BarD and Marlous would make it in time to to the metro was tough. Fortunately, I could go back to bed again for another few hours afterwards. When I finally did go to Uni today, I was able to do some reasonable work. And now I got home to clean up the house a bit and enjoy one of our two nights alone... Friday, the next visitors will arrive...
Ciao,
OJ