lunedì 24 novembre 2008

Lugano

I went to Switzerland on Sunday. For the day. Or, more precisely, for the afternoon.
We were originally planning to go to Lake Maggiore but by the time we got around to leaving it was too late for that, so we picked a random place off the map and, despite having neither passports nor Swiss money, we headed for the border. (I met some people who went to Lugano by accident once. They got on the bus on the shores of Lake Como, missed their stop, wondered why their passports got checked and only realised what had happened when they ended up in an incredibly clean town that was full of banks and shops selling cuckoo clocks.)


When we got there, we went for a walk by the lake, admired Rolexes in the windows of the incredibly expensive shops (Lugano is like Milan for people who are too exclusive to face the plebs and pollution), ate pizza, thought about getting the very long funicular up one of the mountains, decided it was too long to wait and too expensive and drove up the mountain, and went for another walk.










Once again, the pictures really don't do it justice, but hey, I can go back any time I want...

sabato 22 novembre 2008

A Taste of Village Life

I had afternoon tea with a mayor yesterday. This sounds very grand but in fact it wasn't really. In 24 years of living in Britain, I don't think I ever met a mayor. In Italy, where I have spent a sum total of around 5 months, I've met three or four. It seems that every small town or “frazione” (a smaller town outside of a small town) has its pwn mayor and if you have anything at all to do with the local community, the chances are you will meet him or her.

Yesterday, it happened like this. We went to visit a toy museum, which is about an hour from Milan on the bus. In the morning, we had a tour of the museum and in the afternoon the children did a toy-making workshop. The whole place was housed in what looked like an old farmhouse. The mayor and her husband lived in part of the farmhouse and, while the children were being entertained by the workshop leaders, they invited us for coffee. Coffee turned out to also include a large fruit tart, which none of us was going to say no to. (I'm not a big fan of pastry normally but in Italy, the base of a tart is made with something more like shortbread. Mmmmm.) We sat on their old floral sofas, looking out at the chickens running around the garden and discussed everything from toy collecting in a camper van to immigration and multiculturalism.

Before we left, they showed us this pillar, which marks the official starting point for the village's La Befana, who is something like the Italian equivalent of Babushka, except that she's a witch, and she goes on her travels on Epiphany. Unlike the Father Christmas story, which requires Mr Claus to use magic to do a tour of the entire world in one evening, La Befana is very practical. This Befana, Befana number 6, is one of many and is presumably only responsible for a certain, carefully delineated area (which she nevertheless gets around on a flying broomstick).










We left feeling like we'd had an authentically Italian experience and dreaming of leaving Milan for a small village equipped with a shop, post office and its very own witch.

martedì 18 novembre 2008

Do You Speak the Lingo?

One of the things that never ceases to amaze me here, is the number of my colleagues, including people who have been in Milan for several years, who don't speak Italian. Not in the sense of not being completely fluent, but in the sense of being scared to say three words in public, because they've never bothered to learn. It is actually possible to live like this. These people work in an English speaking environment, make friends with people from work, and find an Italian speaker at work to help them out when they need to do something important like fix a gas leak, set up their telephone line or go to hospital.

There are several things that I find sad about this. The first is that it's actually possible to do this. It's not just anglophones who go all over the world expecting people to speak English to them, it's people from all over Europe. I've even had Italians ask me why I want to learn Italian. And all this in a country with an incredibly rich history and culture, a passion for talking and a language that is both beautiful and relatively easy to learn. God bless the French and their linguistic protectionism.

The second sad thing is that I feel sorry for these people. They live in an amazing, crazy complex and difficult country and they don't understand most of what's going on around them.

The last thing that I feel sad about is that I feel sorry for myself. I feel like I'm torn between spending time with friends from work, who I really like, and making the effort to go out, meet Italians and learn the language, which is what I came here to do. It's like two different worlds, and sometimes I wish they would just mix a little bit more easily.

This is something that I feel strongly about and I would really like to know what other people think. So here is my question: if you lived in Italy, how much would it take to make you learn Italian?

Love Story Part 2

If the story of my time in Italy is to be likened to the story of a relationship, I think that we have reached the point where you move in with a man and realise that the fact that he leaves dirty dishes all over the house and doesn't know how to clean the toilet, both of which you were perfectly aware of before, actually starts to bother you. Having made the commitment, however, you either live with it or find ways round it.

To be fair to the Beautiful Country, most of what's annoying me at the moment has more to do with living in Milan. Sitting on a boat on Lake Como last weekend, I was actually pretty happy to be in Italy. Mostly, I'm tired of having a smoker's cough from breathing in traffic fumes, depressed by the rubbish and the graffiti and fed up with the rain. (In my rose-tinted vision of Scotland, it's never raining!)

The other thing that's annoying me is having no internet connection at home. I finally told the guy who sold me my modem that, having tried everything (apart from reinstalling Windows as he so helpfully suggested) I wanted to return it and get my money back. As soon as I said this, he was suddenly happy to try again with another modem, which he was supposed to bring round at 5 o'clock on Thursday. Thursday came and I left work early to be home on time. I made myself a cup of coffee and waited. Then I read my book. Then I watched TV. Then I had a nap for half an hour. Finally, at half past six, I phoned him to find out where he was.

“I was just about to phone you. I'm sorry for being late. I've just been to the Wind shop and they have no more modems until Friday or maybe Monday. They say that sometimes, just very occasionally, because the 7.2 Mbps modems are so new, there are some little problems, so we change, OK?”

Yeah, yeah, whatever. If I publish a post on Monday, you'll know he wasn't talking out of his arse.

domenica 2 novembre 2008

On the Other Side of the Alps

I've just spent my October holiday (and a whole lot of money) on a trip to France by train. After eight weeks of working and making the most of being in Milan at the same time, it was wonderful to be on the train and have time (nineteen hours to be precise) to read, do crosswords and indulge in extended periods of pensiveness while watching the landscape go by. What I love about taking the train is that the travel becomes as much part of the trip as actually being at the destination.

I had taken the train from Paris to Milan a couple of times before, but never from Milan to Paris. I don't know whether it was the direction of the journey, the weather, or just my state of mind, but the scenery on this trip was much more impressive than I remembered. The train goes across the Lombardy plains, which were totally flat and covered in mist, then into more hilly country, plunges into tunnels and comes out on the other side where you get stunning views of the French Alps. Then the mountains turn into hills and gradually flat farmland, at which point I think I fell asleep and woke up in Paris. What surprised me was how different it was on the other side of the border. The landscape seemed gentler, less dramatic and somehow very...French.

Another thing that surprised me was the border checks, even though they've happened every time I've taken that train. At the first stop on the French side of the border, the police got on the train and checked everybody's documents. I've never understood why they do this, because France and Italy are both Schengen countries and nobody checks your ID card when you go from France to Germany or Luxembourg but the controls are really thorough. On the way back, there were customs officers checking people's bags and on the way there, somebody actually got made to leave the train because they didn't have documents. I was lucky I had my passport – you're supposed to carry ID at all times in Italy but I often don't and I just happened to put it in my bag in case I needed it.

I didn't actually stay in Paris. I just walked over the bridge from the Gare de Lyon to the Gare d'Austerlitz, noticing the Seine flowing langorously beneath me and the chilly air of northern Europe clinging to my cheeks, and took the RER to St Quentin where my friend lives. This friend was my first French friend. We used to go to the swimming pool together, swim and chat for an hour, and then convince ourselves that we'd earned indulgent meals afterwards. I've always appreciated the fact that she was so nice to me, even when, with all the noise of the pool, my ears full of water and my poor quality French, I could only understand about half of what she said.

I spent 2 nights at her house, mostly doing girly things like shopping at watching chick flicks, and playing with her one year old baby. Thanks to 3 of my friends who live in France having babies within 6 months of one another, I now do a great line in bilingual baby talk, which is really easy to practise because it's perfectly acceptable to say the same thing over and over and over again. What I loved about most about the whole trip, in fact, was the way that I didn't feel like a tourist in France. I felt at home.