After a bumpy start to Italian bureaucracy trying to get our permesso di soggiorno, rent an apartment, buy a car, enroll the kids in school, get gas and electricity and get a carte d'identita', I was starting to feel pretty good about things. I even thought I could navigate my way through which taxes I 'needed' to pay and which ones I didn't. We weren't even that floored by our first Winter heating bill in January. I was starting to wonder why everyone talked about basic service costs being so high.
NOT ANYMORE!!
I just opened up our second Winter gas bill...
OUCH.
We have been home a lot during the day, yes, and have had the heating on at 20 degrees which we thought was reasonable. We turned it down at night to 15...surely not too extravagant when temperatures outside were below zero. And yet, we have a $1000 gas bill for two months. Now I get it.
When we moved in to our apartment we were told that we needed to go to the environmental section of the council to pay to have our rubbish removed. Renters need to pay about 600 euro a year to get their rubbish collected. The bins were downstairs and we put them out and most of the time the garbologists would collect the yellow bag for plastic on Saturday, the brown box for general rubbish on Monday and Thursday, the yellow box for paper on Wednesday and the green box for organic waste on Monday and Wednesday. Until now. I got a letter in the mail today that requires my presence at the environmental offices as soon as possible.
You might think you can hide in the red tape over here, but one way or another, they get you. There is no escaping the bureaucracy. No matter what I think of the system, the fact that they can figure out I haven't paid the bill for rubbish collection is pretty impressive. I just wish it wasn't so expensive!
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