Festival of the tulips

We were luckily enough to visit the Tulip Festival at Castiglione dei Logo which is half hr drive from Cetona. The streets are decorated with tulips petals and windows display tulips in various ways. There was street entertainment with marching bands, marching girls, people dressed in period clothing, floats made with tulips and much more. Thousands of people attended although the numbers seemed to build much later in the day. The town is on a lake which was very smooth with a few sailing boats sitting on it. Not much wind to get them moving fast.

We were driven to the festival by Linda and her husband which was very kind of them as it would have taken us a few hours to get there without a car. Food could be purchased in the tents erected and Caesar and I filled in our food order and lined up. There were two lines to tables with a guy at a computer and one with a cash register. We seemed to be in the slow line and the reason for this was explained by a guy speaking Italian. He managed to convey that our line has old people who were slow at the computer and the other line had young people who were fast. I looked and he was right. I was much amused by his laughter and it made the wait more enjoyable as we tried to communicate without knowing each others language.

Meanwhile Cliff and Linda had found a table which had 4 other people on it. Cliff was getting a lecture from a lady about what he had ordered (pork chop). Italians are very strict about what they think is appropriate at any time. There was a mix up with the table numbers but it got sorted and we ended up with an extra meal of fish. Each couple had ordered a bottle of wine but the guy next to Cliff was telling him he shouldn't drink until the meal comes. Of course we ignored that and he ended up giving us his bottle of mineral water as he was concerned for our health.

We had such a good time sitting in the shade eating and drinking while trying to understand the women opposite me. We had to go through Caesar to translate but some we could understand.
It felt like we were part of one big party and very Italian.