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Lovely atmosphere on the Piazza delle Erbe, with all the stalls being set up outside on the square and inside that incredible building called (I think: Palazzo della Ragione: the (rather sumptuous and decrepit) dwelling of reason)
The market is also the only place you can get an early cappuccino and pasta, which I did. Great sign the on the wall telling you that your not allowed to exchange your luncheon vouchers against fags !!!?.. (actually, hardly anybody smoking down here nowadays and loads of articles on health in the newspapers).
I was now all geared up to put my plans for the day to a successful fruition.

These are plan A intentions. (I had no plan B ready, which - as you will soon see - was an error):
-Find a place to do my laundry
-Locate an internet café to do update my website and do my e-mail
-Have a shave at the barber
-Get another couple of cheap T-shirts to sweat in
... and the remains of the day would have been for pleasure or cultural purposes

I should have taken the hint that things were not going to work according to plans, when - leaving the hotel for my early tasks - I was told that (contrary to my own perception of things), I was not booked for the next night and that the hotel was sold out: this was NOT going to be a plain kind of sailing sort of day.
I managed to secure a hotel room at the PILGRIM HOTEL quite easily and cheaply at the Tourist Office at the main railway station and my optimism was still flying high.
The rather meek, but terribly efficient lady at the tourist office also managed to indicate me the nearest ( and according to her : only) laundrette, plus an internet café within reach. All that while taking 20 phone calls and scribbling notes on a map for my intention.

I DID go to that laundrette. It was something like 2 metres by 3, with these machines that had huge bolts on it and endless notices explaining how to use them. Fort Knox must be looking like that. Terrifying stuff, especially when you've just been trying to find your way through concrete wasteland behind the railway station, crossing roads with cars zooming all over the place. There was one guy in there, about my age, very slim, Moroccan I would say, emptying a machine when this large African lady moves in, to give him some stick about not having put on the drying program properly.
I vaguely ask her how this place works (there might have been a hint of doubt in the way I put forward this question to her, that I didn't actually think it DID - I do own up to that - but lets face it: there you are with a 10'000 Lira note, which you will have to convert, "SOMEWHERE" - into coins, which, then, have to be put into one of these completely incomprehensible big metal boxes that will convert them into coins for use in one of the machines that will actually do the washing for you: is it a 2'000 Lira thing or a 3'000 or what else, and how many coins does that take? For anyone that has any critical remarks about the EURO: please go to this laundrette. This is university town Padova and I feel I am getting as close to metaphysics as I ever will, so: I PANIC).
The lady's answer is: It does work.
I mentally award her with a summae cum laudae in metaphysics and escape, leaving the solution for this part of my task list for later on in the day (it's called: Savon de Marseille and travels with me now)
The next aim was to update my cyber-bits: I'll skip the technical details, but will just mention that the first Web-café does not accommodate for connection on ordinary modem lines and the second one (located after another two hours) has decided to go on holidays just on that day ...

By the time you will read this, I hope I will have found another spot where I can update. Cyber-Connectivity is the biggest piece of sales talk rubbish of our times.

I now definitely think, I must do something a bit more relaxing, so I pick up my luggage at the last hotel to transfer to this pilgrimage place, a sort of mussolinian building with 200 rooms and loads of pensioners swarming about. I then have a beer at the bar opposite and enquire about getting a shave at some barber's shop.
Did you know that Monday is national-day-off for barbers in Italy? I did not.
My request also provoked a bit of an argument behind the counter whether this is a national barber thing or just a regionalistic sort of dissidence. I don't participate in the discussion, because I didn't not know at all to start with - did I - and have surrendered all claims to dabble in metaphysics in this town in the laundrette.
To get my bit of relaxation and pleasure I return to the market place where I was early this morning and do some shopping for a pick nick in the lovely shadowy square behind the "Signorie", I spotted on a quick tour around town the day before.
Porchetta, pecorino and pears and a lovely red wine form the Colline Eueganei, (if you really want to know). The bikes float by, people come and go and it's all very peaceful, after my rather frustrating morning.
The best thing to do now, after such an early rise and stressful morning is a siesta and a nice cold shower which, I decide, should me in the right sort of frame of mind for the rest of things to accomplish that day.
After washing my T-shirts and stuff in the bidet (this is cinema-verite, ragazzi) I take a trip around the shops and discover that I can buy 1 T-shirt for the price of 3 here, which, somehow looks the wrong way round to me. This is rich northern Italy, after all, and what people want to buy here is pieces of fabrics with famous producer NAMES on it. So, this looks like I'll be stuck with savon de Marseille and bidet for the near future.
There are miles of walks underneath the arcades in all sort of directions and I somehow make my way back to my pilgrim abodeby the end of the afternoon ( I forgot to tell you that is just behind the Chiesa del Santo Panettone).
The concierge seems a bit less busy with the tens of pilgrims that floated about the reception this morning, so I carefully approach him with my connectivity problem. (Obviously, the phone in the room does not have the right clip, that goes with my computer, and |'m trying to establish wether there's another machine somewhere I could use.)I do not manage to hijack his fax machine but he agrees to me having a try with my computer on one of the loose phones that hang around his desk. IT WORKS!!!!
I start to upload my site when I realise after about 10 minutes that there's a video file on there that I forgot to compress and that the whole upload will take hours. I'm sweating quite profusely, feeling embarrassed for blocking one of his phones, so I give up after all. He kindly tells me that I'm welcome to come back after 10 p.m when it would less busy and cheaper. (I eventually do that and that's where one of the updates came from)
The time before a nice dinner at the small Trattoria del Bersagliere, is spent on that incredible circular esplanade with tens of statues all over the place, which name I never got round to look up on the map (most of my time reading the town map I spent on trying to locate some house or place related to my Florentine friend Galileo, who after all, spent well over ten years here, had an illegal wife and daughter and supposedly did most of his experiments on inclined planes here. NADA!)

(I'll have to come back, this can't be right)

I'm also reminded by my mentor, that dissecting took place here in the very early stages of history. |I dissected my BIGOLI ALLE ACCIUGHE (a delight) and lamb chops with grilled RADICCHIO very heartily indeed.
And after a performance-update of my website in the hotel reception, where I managed to utter a slightly offensive remark against the creator of some of us , I said goodnight to the lovely square behind the Chiesa del Santo Panettone with a ristretto and amaro.
And so to bed ... as Samuel Pepys used to put it.

P.S. More about Padova when I got more time: will have to tell you about
-Grosse spaghetti, kleine Fisch
-The german couple that had a row at the table next to mine
-The yougaslavian family
-All the bicycles and portable phones
-The stalls with religious souvenirs & and the multiplication effect as part of the Italian culture, generally