Posted on 06/05/2007 12:31:07 PM PDT by Sleeping Beauty
The article doesn’t say that you have to pay to sit down at the seating provided by the restaurants. And it’s not cheap. I was dead tired when I got to St. Mark’s Square several years ago, but I wouldn’t sit down in the designated seats. You can’t sit anywhere in the little shops in Italy without paying for the pleasure. I wanted a cup of coffee one morning in Florence and wondered why everyone drinking their coffee—Italians and tourists alike—were standing up, bunched around the cash register, making it hard to order mine. It cost 1 euro for a cup of coffee; 3 euros for the privilege of drinking it sitting down. We learned to order food and look for another place to eat it. I think this is probably trying to get back at tourists who are trying to avoid their costs of sitting down.
I resented it too when I was there. And it affected the way I ate over there. I ate very light breakfasts and lunches, then ate a normal dinner, but nothing more. I bought water to drink in the day. We always tried to eat somewhere at least once during the day and later at dinner that had public facilities. The lady I was with ate a lot more and was always rushing for facilities. She paid a lot, too. She watched one woman—a local—whose small child had to go to the bathroom. She didn’t have the changed needed and the child just went standing there because she couldn’t wait. It’s a horrible system.
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