martedì 30 settembre 2008

Tocati!


As I explained at the beginning of yesterday's sermon, I went to Verona at the weekend to see my friends there and go to the annual Tocati festival. "Tocati" is local dialect for "tocca a te" or "it's your turn" and the festival is all about traditional street games. Every year, as well as the Italian games, they invite another country to share its traditions, and this year that country was Scotland.




Unfortunately we missed the caber tossing and the back arm wrestling (we saw the wrestlers heading for the bar a couple of hours before their show and they never came back), but the boys had a turn on the go-karts and played with some old-fashioned spinning tops, which you launch with an underarm throw using a string - pretty exciting when the tops are weighted and have metal spikes on the bottom of them! We also saw some kids being taught to play conkers:


Guess which of these guys was actually Italian!


I have never heard this game called anything other than "conkers" but the guy running the show claimed that it was called "cheggers" and that "conkers" was the English name. He was from the West Coast though, so when he said "England" he probably meant anywhere east of Harthill service station.

After that, we had typical food from the region for dinner (I had pasta with a duck sauce) and then headed to the Piazza dei Signori, which had been renamed for the occasion:






Here, Scottish musicians ranging from a harp and cello duo to the Milngavie pipe band played to an enthusiastic crowd as Dante Alghieri looked on:





Finally, on Sunday morning, we waited for a very long time in a queue and eventually got to paddle down a short stretch of the river Adige in a rubber dinghy.





What a great weekend!

domenica 28 settembre 2008

A Sunday Lesson

I've just got back from fair Verona, which, instead of being populated by warring nobility and star-cross'd lovers as one would normally expect, was full of large Scottish men in kilts, brandishing tree-trunks and bagpipes in their enormous, hairy arms. As I mentioned before, this weekend was the annual “Tocati” festival of street games, and Scotland was the guest of honour, and I was staying with my friends there. I'll write more about the festival when I've uploaded the pictures from my camera, but for now, I want to write about something that I've been thinking about since yesterday evening.

One of the things that interests me a lot here is the way that Italians treat their children. I actually find myself observing this everywhere. Poor people in Scotland scream at them and bribe them with sweets, while Morningside mummies are ridiculously reasonable with their terrible two-year-olds. In France, kids are expected to behave like mini-adults, while I noticed several times in Ireland that they got treated just like, well, children. And everybody knows that Italians love their children to bits, spoil them a bit too much and do their sons' washing until a suitable girl can be found to do it for them, right? Well...

I met a child at the weekend who was pretty badly behaved. He was rude, loud and generally naughty and neither his mum nor any of the other adults we were with told him off or did anything about it. In fact, most of the other adults were being really nice and pretty indulgent with him, talking away and telling him what a great kid he was. At this point, it was really tempting to judge the child (he's horrible) the mother (she obviously lets him get away with murder, and Italians in general (so they do spoil their children, and look at what can happen!).
What I later found out, though, was that this boy's dad had recently died of cancer, not long after his little sister was born. Suddenly it was clear that there was every excuse for him to be a bit naughty and every excuse for his poor mum not to be picking him up for every little thing and every reason for people to be extra nice to him.

So, the lesson in all of this is seems to be: don't judge (or at least, not too soon), don't generalise (or at least, not too much) and always give people a chance to show their good side. It sounds obvious written down like that, but it's so easy to do the opposite, particularly when you're abroad. How many British people, for example, are convinced that the French are rude, judging solely by the people that they've met at supermarket checkouts and at the ticket office in the train station?

The reason for the parentheses, however, is that judging and generalising, in some contexts, are necessary, useful, and sometimes downright entertaining. So if I do it in the future, please don't...umm...judge me. There is a reason. And if you would like to disagree, that's what the comments box is for!

I think this next bit comes under the category of “entertaining”.

I wrote last time that I was a little bit disappointed that my only “foreign” experience last week was eating meatballs in Ikea. I forgot to mention, however, that sitting across from us in the cafe, perched on a minimalist plastic Swedish stool, also eating a plateful of meatballs, dressed in a grey and white habit, was a nun. Surely that counts as an authentically Italian experience?

venerdì 26 settembre 2008

The Best Laid Plans

On Sunday night, this is what my plan for my week looked like (apart from normal work):

Monday: meet my landlord and sign the lease for my flat
Tuesday: go to Ikea, buy ridiculous amounts of stuff for the flat and eat Swedish meatballs
Wednesday: go to work meeting, home for tea and then to choir practice
Thursday: stroll around town with an Italian friend and go to aperitivo for French speakers
Friday: use stuff from Ikea to bake Scottish cakes for my friends in Verona
Saturday: go to visit friends in Verona for Scottish street games festival

After I got messed around by a few people in true Italian style, messed around a few people in true Italian style (are national stereotypes true or do we just see what we expect to see?) and caught another infectious disease (stomach pain, a high temperature this time and a strong feeling of being about to vomit) from my lovely children, this is what I actually did:

Monday: stayed in and organised the house
Tuesday: went to Ikea, failed to find most of the things I wanted to buy but did get some candles and eat some lovely Swedish meatballs
Wednesday: felt really sick and spent the evening watching TV in bed with my eyes shut and a new plastic bucket from Ikea beside me
Thursday: went into town to sign my lease and ate ice-cream* for dinner because it's easy to digest :-), then came home and surfed the net
Friday: baked things to take to Verona using makeshift equipment not bought in Ikea, now writing this blog and watching the news.

It appears that eating meatballs in Ikea has been as close as I've got to experiencing continental European culture in the past 5 days.

* From Chocolat, a cafe/gelateria near Piazza Cadorna, that everybody should visit at least once in their lives.

lunedì 22 settembre 2008

On a Mountain High






After my tranquil day recovering from the cold on Saturday, Sunday was the day of my big adventure. I joined a mountaineering club a couple of weeks after I got here and I'd been looking forward to the first trip ever since. We climbed the Cima della Crocetta, which is in the Gran Paradiso park in Piemonte, about 2.5 hours drive from Milan.


The club is organised differently from the ones I know at home. People meet at set points across the city to get on a full size coach and everybody does the same walk, which is usually organised by two people. While that makes it difficult to enjoy the vast solitude of the mountains, for me it was really nice because I got to meet lots of new people, all of whom were friendly and most of whom were men with names beginning with L (seriously: I met 2 Lucas, 2 Lorenzos and either a Luigi or a Ludovico, I can't remember). It also really reminded me how great it is to be able to speak Italian living here: although there were a couple of people who could have chatted in English if I had needed them to, it was much, much easier to get to know people and feel like one of the group. Without understanding Italian, I doubt I would even have got past the website to signing up for the group!


The walk itself was pretty tough. We climbed about 1250 very steep metres and, although we only really stopped for lunch and one break, it took about 8 hours. I felt really tired and a bit dizzy towards the top, but I think it was because it was about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and I had hardly eaten anything since breakfast at 5. I thought I would feel really stiff today, but in fact I was fine, so I can't be as unfit as I thought I was!


And apart from that, I think the pictures tell the story better than words can!

sabato 20 settembre 2008

The Fourth Post

I mentioned in my post last weekend that the weather has started to get colder and it feels as though autumn has arrived. While it's still over 20 degrees when the sun is shining, the drop in temperatures nevertheless seems to have provoked the appearance of the cold in everybody I work with.

The Italian body is particularly sensitive to environmental changes. Italians catch cold by standing in draughts and die if they go into the swimming pool after eating, so it's hardly surprising that most of the people I've been surrounded by for the past week have had sore throats and runny noses. I finally succumbed somewhere around 6 o'clock on Thursday, when the germs made their presence known somewhere around my tonsils and by Friday night I was curled up on the sofa drinking mint syrup made up with hot water (the closest I could find to my normal cold remedy of hot Robinson's). I would highly recommend it, firstly because it tastes good even when your tastebuds are covered in gunk, and secondly because I'm convinced it cured me: I had a great sleep and my cold has now moved to my chest. This kind of progress would normally take at least a week for me.

Anyway, the main reason for sharing that delightful story was to explain the fact that I have had a properly domesticated Saturday this weekend. In the morning, I did some laundry and then went over to my friend's to help her explain to her cleaning lady why she didn't want her to come any more. (The real reason is that the lady is a tad overzealous and possibly completely crazy but she's also the porter in the building, so we had to find a more diplomatic explanation in case she started hiding the mail).

In the afternoon, I met another friend in town. We went to a famous panzerotti shop to get lunch and ate it sitting on the steps of a church in a square full of other people also eating panzerotti from the famous shop. I'd never had panzerotti before. They're a kind of fried pizza, which sounds like something only one of the more dubious Scottish chippies could make up, but they're actually really nice – like a melted cheese sandwich with a coating a bit like a savoury doughnut. Not healthy, but tasty! After that we were planning to go to an art exhibition but it turned out that it wasn't open, so we went shoe shopping instead. People who know my shoe-shopping woes will understand how difficult it is for me in a country like Italy, where the shoes are beautiful but designed for people who have tiny feet and never have to walk anywhere, but I finally found a nice pair of ankle boots in a sale for 30 euros.

This evening I've been cleaning and surfing the net in my beautiful flat and feeling very at home. Buona domenica a tutti!

giovedì 18 settembre 2008

Daily Life, Daily Diet

Apparently hearing about the lecherous Milanese public transport system and my fear of invoking the devil by crossing myself backwards has not been enough for some readers, who want to know what I actually do all day, so here goes.

I get out of bed sometime before seven and, in true Italian style, pump myself full of caffeine (high-quality home-brewed espresso) and sugar (jam-filled croissants, custard- filled croissants, nutella filled croissants...) and go to work. To save everyone's sanity, let's skip over that and just say that the people are lovely and so are the cafeteria lunches, which have 3 or 4 courses, including pasta, meat or cheese with vegetables, dessert and fruit.

I leave work at about five and go home, often stopping off on the way to pick up some local cherry tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, watermelon or a bottle of red Bardolino DOC.On Wednesday nights, I've been going to sing in a choir, where we're rehearsing 2 pieces of church music for concerts in November and December. Most other nights, I stay in and watch the news on TV (in an attempt to understand the Italians' view of their society) or read my book, which is Inglese by Beppe Severgnini and is an Italian journalist's take on the Brits (in an attempt to understand the Italians' view of our society).

Friday nights are a little bit different though. A few people from work usually go to the bar to enjoy some aperitivi. This word is often translated as "happy hour", but that couldn't be more of a mistranslation. Instead of getting 2 Smirnoff Ice for the price of one, you pay a couple of euros more for your drink and get access to an entire buffet meal in return. Most places charge 7-10 euros for this, but there's a bar near the school that only charges 4, and their menu includes cocktails, meaning that I can have a mojito and my tea for less than the price of a vodka and coke in some of the more expensive places at home.

I've spent my weekends in Milan so far and been to see the town with friends from work or an Italian friend of a friend who lives here. I've also discovered 2 good rollerblading parks, although the only other rollerbladers I've seen have been men in their sixties, and been cultured and visited Santa Maria delle Grazie, which is the church where The Last Supper is.

I usually manage to fit in a couple of gelati during the weekend too, and I've discovered at least three new favourite flavours. I wonder how long it will be before it gets to cold for Italians to eat ice cream without believing they'll get ill. A long time, I hope

Autumn and TV

It's Sunday afternoon. It's been raining on and off all weekend and yesterday night, for the first time since I arrived here, I felt cold going out in the evening without a jumper. I'm not a fan of the rain, but it is a relief to be able to get my British clothes out of the wardrobe and to not be faced with the flip-flops versus nice but uncomfortable shoes dilemma every time I leave the house. (A five year old pointed to my feet the other day and said, “We only wear these shoes at the swimming pool.” I told her that actually we wear them whenever we want to because they're comfortable. Hopefully an important lesson in cultural differences was learned by both of us.) Not wearing flip-flops will mean that I can get back to walking at normal speed and it will be nice to stop taking buses and trams everywhere because it's too hot to move.On a couple of evenings this week, I've stayed in to experience the delights of Italian TV. For at least three nights in a row at prime time on Rai Uno (the closest channel there is to BBC1), the Miss Italia contest has been broadcast to the nation. Hundreds of girls in eighties – style lycra swimsuits with sequins on them sit on benches with perma-smiles on their faces and are brought out in groups of three to talk to the presenter while the public votes for their favourite. In each group, one is always attractive but a bit too interesting looking, one is pretty but not quite as pretty as the third, who is obviously going to win. Slightly overweight men from the audience ask the girls questions and media scandals such as the size 12 Miss Emilia-Romagna being told to lose weight are counteracted by deep thoughts from the girls such as “it doesn't matter what size you are. Beauty comes from within.” Every so often, the TV camera does a toe-to-head shot of the girl being interviewed, resting for a moment on a trembling foot in a gold stiletto sandal and on other essential aspects of the girl's body before coming to rest on her pristine but ever so slightly nervous smile at the end. While all of this gets tedious about halfway through the second contestant's interview, I've come to the conclusion that it's still one step above Big Brother on the ladder of quality television, if only because the contestants don't revel in being foul-mouthed and at least attempt to come across as nice people.After two nights of Miss Italia, you can imagine my surprise when I turned on the TV on Saturday morning to be confronted not with girls in bikinis but with men in ecclesiastical robes. It appears that when the Italian public is not judging its daughters on the brightness of their smile and the political correctness of their opinions, they like important Masses to be brought directly to their living rooms. The contrast in the programmes couldn't have been greater. Listening to the Pope's French being dubbed into the calmest-sounding Italian I have ever heard and to the singing of the thousands of people who had gathered in Paris to hear him was incredibly soothing and I listened to pretty much the whole broadcast. If I can get over my fear of crossing myself the wrong way round and standing at the wrong moment, I might even go to Mass some Sunday.

Love Story

I first fell in love at the age of twenty - one, somewhere in the middle of Eaglesham moor at a time in the morning when no civilised person should have been there. It was January and my boyfriend of the time and I, members of the Ryanair generation and yet to become familiar with the term "carbon footprint", were driving to Prestwick airport to catch a 99p early morning flight to Milan in order to fill the dead days of January with some Italian culture.A few hours later, I fell in love all over again. Milan, as promised by my cynical guide book, was grey, dirty and, much of the time, as empty as the floorspace of the designer shops that lined its streets. And yet I loved it. I spoke my ten-week-old, learned-in-evening-class Italian and people smiled and understood. Nobody spoke back in English and nobody seemed to look down at our scruffy, British student clothing. We climbed to the roof of the cathedral and saw pairs of pigeons in love. We drank the world's best coffee and discovered Nutella filled croissants. He was delighted by the cannons at the fort in the old town of Bergamo, while I admired the view of the Alps that stretched out hazily into the distance.My relationship with that boyfriend didn't last, but the one that I began with Italy grew and grew. For the guidebooks, Milan may not be the real Italy, but for me, that holiday was enough. I wanted to come back. And back. And back.Now, after several years of summer flirtations, I have come back for a year. I have taken a job here in Milan and I intend to experience Italy to the full. It may well be the biggest test our relationship will ever face, but it will survive, and this blog will be our story.