It's no surprise that I'm a little cuckoo

I'm in Italy now.  It's completely different in these little towns in Italy than it was in Paris.  In Paris I heard sirens, traffic, sirens, traffic, sirens, traffic and that's about it.  In Italy I hear tractors, bees, crickets, palm leaves clicking in the wind, roosters, church bells, and real live cuckoo birds.

Tractors.  They're everywhere.  It's time to bale hay.  And it seems like everyone has a little piece of land with grass long enough to cut, rake into stripes, let dry out and bale it.  Yesterday I was on my bike for a 35-minute uphill ride when I passed a tractor that had pulled over on the side of the road to talk to a lady outside her house.  Kind of like a golf cart in Grand Beach.

 
Bees.  Crickets.  If you think you're in a place that is silent, listen carefully.  It doesn't seem like any place is really without noise.
 
Palm leaves?  This is a favorite.  First of all, I never thought I would find a palm tree in what seems to be Northern Italy, but they're here.  I'm still not used to the idea of an old Italian farmhouse with a palm tree outside, but they're everywhere and quite nice.  Even nicer when the wind blows and the spiky leaves click together.
 

Roosters. I love them.  Why did I think they only went off in the morning?  I really thought they only cockadoodledooed in the early morning to get us out of bed.  Here they go all day.  And they seem to just be wandering the streets.  Maybe they're like cats and they don't go far from home, but if they do, they find their way back.  And every time I pass one on the road on my bike I say to myself, "Why did the chicken cross the road?"  I really do.  Do you think I'm spending too much time alone?

Church bells.  I'll never get tired of church bells.  For an atheist, I seem to spend a lot of time enjoying Italian churchyards and church bells. And in one town there are so many churches that they have scattered the bells a bit so they don't all compete.  You never really know what time it is there.  It's Italian time....it doesn't really matter. And if my phone rings at noon, I know it is someone calling to put their phone up to the bells so I can hear them in case I'm someplace where I can't.  Which is actually somewhat impossible since there are churches and bells almost everywhere. 

 

And finally, there really is a bird that says "cuckoo".  If you tell me that they also live and sing in Chicago, I'll officially call myself cuckoo for not having heard one in 46 years.  (I got a reponse to the blog about the camouflage trees that we have them in Chicago, so I'm kind of expecting the same thing about the bird.)  But how could I have missed this?  If they are in Chicago, they definitely don't tell time as well as the Italian birds because it seems like they go off every fifteen minutes here.  It's just like clockwork.  And they sound EXACTLY the same as the clock.  Exactly.  I'm in a bit of disbelief every time I hear one.  And when I try to tell whomever I'm with when I hear one about my latest discovery, it never goes so well.  I describe the clock and make the sound and they know what I'm talking about, but they don't have them anymore (we do, don't we?). When they did have cuckoo clocks they were called "orologio a cuckoo", perhaps one of the first things I can think of that sounds better in English than Italian.