Easter Monday Barbecue

On Monday afternoon, I discovered what everybody in Milan does if they can't get out of the city does on a sunny bank holiday Monday: they have a barbecue at the Bosco in Città.

The Bosco in Città is a kind of a park on the edge of the city. There's an old farmhouse-type building, some woodland and a lake. It's quite pretty but you never quite forget the dodgy things that might or might not be going on in the bushes as you take your Sunday afternoon stroll there.

In preparation for a long, hot summer, my friends J and L had invested in a barbecue and they invited me and another friend, R, to its inauguration ceremony. While I moved to Italy on a plane, J and L hired a van, and they have an impressive selection of picnic equipment, including a hamper, a rug and a cool box that is also a radio. The three of us lugged it all on the bus out to the park.

We thought that we had prepared pretty well, but relatively, we were were totally underequipped. The park was heaving with people and they all had far bigger barbecues than we did. Some had chairs and tables. Some were eating lasagne. Some of them even had gazebos. The whole atmosphere was a bit like a music festival, except that the only music was some annoying bloke with bongo drums.

We were a bit taken aback at first but we quickly got into the spirit of it. We lit our charcoal and allowed it to smoulder. We drank wine from plastic tumblers as we waited for our burgers to blacken. We tried not to let our little barbecue suffer from an inferiority complex.

Then, in one final monent of glory (or one desperate attempt to drown out the bongo drums), we turned up the volume on the cool box radio and sang along to Bohemian Rhapsody. J insisted that the people next to us were laughing with us and not at us. She might have been right.

The whole experience seemed, as R said as soon as she arrived, completely and utterly chav-tastic. But then five o'clock came, and almost with one accord, people began to pack away their things. They put their rubbish in black bags, piled it up next to the bins and left the park clean and tidy, ready for the next bank holiday Monday.

Camping in Liguria

Mr A and I started planning our Easter holiday camping trip weeks ago, not long after we came back from skiing. We knew where we wanted to go, had decided what we needed and just needed to do one big shopping trip to buy some equipment before we left. Somehow, though, we still managed to leave in an incredible rush, with our departure punctuated by conversations like:

Me: “Do you have a towel?”
Him: “Yes. Did you remember a sleeping bag?”
Me: “Oooops! No!”

Despite the rush, though, we actually did manage to remember pretty much everything we needed and the only major problem was our bed. We had bought an inflatable mattress and a friend had lent us a battery operated pump to blow it up which had a mains adaptor and one to plug into the cigarette lighter in the car. After we had been driving for about an hour and a half, Mr A said, “Do you want to start charging the pump up now?” I reached for the box and read the instructions. “Charge the pump for eight hours before use.” Oh dear.

In our defence, I had never seen one of these pumps before and Mr A had only ever had one which could be used at the same time as it was charging, but ours was clearly marked with dire warnings about what would happen if we tried to do that. Luckily, the people at the campsite were really nice and let us use a pump of theirs. It was enormous and made a huge amount of noise but appeared to do the trick.

Unfortunately, it turned out that all our efforts were in vain because the mattress deflated in the middle of the night and we woke up at 4am lying on hard, stony ground with strange pockets of air remaining around our ears. On the second night, the same thing happened and on the third night we bought a new mattress and finally had a good night's sleep.

We stayed at the Acqua Dolce campsite in Lévanto. It was quiet, clean, had great showers and was almost entirely inhabited by Germans with camper vans and deluxe tents who obviously knew exactly how to live this kind of lifestyle and could be seen in the mornings doing housework in the camper vans and in the evenings sitting outside on folding chairs and tables with table cloths drinking wine and eating dinner. We felt a little bit out of place with our little tent and our failure to organise adequate bedding for ourselves.

Our main reason for staying in Lévanto was to visit the Cinque Terre, 5 little villages propped on the edges of towering cliffs and linked by a coastal path.

I'm a big fan of coastal paths and this was one of the best that I'd ever been on, even if they did charge us 5 euros each to walk along it. If you start at the first village, Monterosso, the walk takes about 5 hours and you can stop for ice cream, focaccia and a laze in the sun at the villages, which are no more than an hour and a half's walk away from each other. Being hardcore, however, we decided to start our walk at Lévanto, which added on an extra 2 ½ hours of walking over a very steep hill but was worth it just for the sense of achievement.

On the second day, we drove to Portovenere, which is near La Spezia, a big port, and at the tip of the Golfo dei Poeti, which gets its name from all the poets that it has inspired. Byron even has his own cave there.

We were totally lazy that day and just wandered around the village and stopped for lunch and ice cream. We ate testaroli, which is like a big pancake that you cut up and eat with sauce. Ours was with pesto, which is another Ligurian speciality.

On our last day, we went back to the Cinque Terre and took the boat between the five villages. The boat was nice, but we both agreed that we appreciated the villages more when we had to walk to get to them!

Mamma Mia!

Because I saw mia mamma at the weekend and it was lovely. She arrived on Friday afternoon and, after a cup of tea and a chat, we did some mother and daughter bonding in Esselunga by discussing the ridiculous price of fruit and vegetables and the merits over mushroom versus meat filled ravioli.

On Saturday, we went to the market, where the stallholders tended to assume that she was the one doing the shopping (because what Italian ragazza would pretend to know more that her mother?) and bought vine tomatoes, cheese and strawberries that all truly lived up to expectation when we ate them for lunch later.

Then we went into town and visited the Duomo. I hadn't been there for about 4 years and climbing up to the roof retained all of its magic. You can walk all over the main roof, getting a vertiginous close up view of the statues surveying the cityscape on their pedestals, and peer down on the piazza below from behind the filigree stonework of the facade. The inside of the cathedral is something of a disappointment afterwards. On a dull day, it's dark and the light is almost greenish, making it hard to believe that the exterior is so light and airy.

By the time we'd visited the cathedral, the rain was truly raining, so after a walk past the designer shops, we headed home. We went out for a meal that night and it was a true Italian experience, with delicious food and small children running around and hitting Mr A. in the back whenever they got bored of waiting for their next course. I'm all for children being taken to restaurants, but surely when they start physically assaulting complete strangers it's time to either tell them off or take them home?

We had planned to go to Lake Como on Sunday but it was raining, so we ended up going to the Triennale design museum instead. This place is incredibly expensive, with entry being 8 euros for each exhibition, so if you wanted to see all of it it would cost you about 32 euros. I also found the labelling of some of the exhibits frustrating because they often just said what the things were made of and who made them without explaining why they were special enough to be in a museum. I enjoyed it much more once I stopped reading the labels and just looked at the exhibits themselves, as there are lots that most people would immediately recognise and some that I even have at home. I've found this often with museums: I tend to read too much and look too little, so maybe it's me that needs to change.

Mum left early on Monday morning and I felt kind of sad as I watched her go. I haven't missed home much since I've been here but seeing her reminded me how new everything here is and how far away some of the things that really matter are. So sorry to all the people that I'm bad at keeping in touch with (having no phone line and rubbish internet doesn't help) and I promise to come and visit soon!

The Power of Words?

There is an advert all over the Milan metro at the moment which shows a woman's coat and legs and bears the slogan “Stilisti, go home.”

The non-English speaking world is plastered with examples of writers who fail to realise that their words may have a double meaning which they never intended to use. (One of my favourites is a sports shop in France called Athlete's Foot.) Given that the advert, which is for the home improvements store Leroy Merlin, is by Saatchi and Saatchi, however, I suspect that the use of this emotive phrase is not accidental and is intented to be provocative in the same way as the recent adverts for a clothing company showing two woman being sexually dominated at a roadside by two armed policemen.

The latter campaign, which was very visual, caused a great deal of controversy, including complaints from the Brazilian government because it had apparently been shot in Brazil. The Leroy Merlin advert, on the other hand, is more subtle, and, given that very few people in Italy will appreciate that it is provocative in the first place, I don't realy see the point of it.

Studying Italian

A few nights ago, I decided it was time to tackle my issues with Italian pronouns head-on. Apart from the fact that I've been working my way through Clelia Boscolo's 30 day revision course Upgrade Your Italian (which is actually a very good study resource) at a rate of 19 days in about 3 years, here is why I have issues with Italian pronouns.

In Italian, as you would expect, there are direct and indirect object pronouns for each person, with different ones for singular and plural and, in some cases, gender. So if, for example, if you want someone to give you a book, you need the pronouns lo (“it”) and mi (“to me”), along with the verb dare (“to give”).

Then you need to remember that in Italian, the mi comes before the lo. Essentially, you say “Give to me it.”

To make your sentence, you need the imperative form of dare. There are two forms, and in this case you need the less common one, da'.

In Italian, when a direct object pronoun and an indirect object pronoun are used together with an imperative, the pronouns combine, as if in English you were saying “Give tomeit.”

When you combine the pronoun mi with another pronoun, it becomes me. (English equivalent: “Give tomiit”)

The pronouns also combine with the verb to make one word, which in English would be “Givetomeit.”

Finally, you need to remember that when the verb da' is combined with a pronoun, you double the initial consonant of the pronoun that follows it, giving the sentence that you actually utter: in Italian, dammelo; in English, "Givettomiit".

By this stage you will probably be too intellectually exhausted to read the book that is, finally, in your sticky hands.

Being the kind of sad person who actually enjoys knowing this kind of thing, I am eagerly awaiting the arrival of Schaum's Outlines Italian Grammar which is winging its way to me this weekend. In the meantime, however, I discovered this great website with online exercises that you can check your answers to at the click of a button, meaning that you can save all your mental energy for those delightful pronouns.

Milano for Improvers

I came to work in Italy on a temporary contract and recently had to decide whether to let it terminate in a couple of months' time or renew it for another year. After much soul-searching and some half-hearted job hunting, I decided to renew it. Aside from the job itself, which has its ups and downs like any other, there are a few things that mean that I'm not ready to leave Milan just yet.

Firstly, Mr. A is on a longer contract than me, and while we would both have considered a long distance relationship, living in the same city is definitely easier and better!

I came to Italy to learn Italian and I haven't learned enough yet. I was hoping that it would get better the way my French did when I lived in France but I guess I underestimated the value of eleven years of study versus one and a half-hearted bit. I don't speak a lot of Italian during the day because I work in a mostly anglophone environment, so although I know the most essential grammar points, I can't quite conjugate verbs and combine pronouns fast enough to be able to speak fluently and correctly at the same time. As always, I need to study some more!

I love living a bilingual life. At home, unless I get a job that requires languages, I'm always going to feel like all my knowledge is wasted. Here, I need them just for living and I like that.

While I sometimes find living in Milan depressing because so much of it is ugly and dirty, there are some incredible places not very far away. Venice, the Ligurian coast and Gran Paradiso national park are all day trips from here, while France, Austria, Germany and Switzerland are only a few hours away. When you grow up on an island, international trains seem very cool and cosmopolitan (at least in a very sad way).

Italians are fun. People claim that the Milanese are cold and stand-offish, but that's either not true or a very relative judgement. Or else I've just been lucky enough to meet the friendly ones!

So, despite the smog, the cost of living and the evil lady from Alice Mobile, I will be here for another year to document the highs, the lows and above all the endless “but why?”s of living in this crazy city.

Why is it that in Italy...

... you're supposed to wear disposable gloves to choose your fruit at the supermarket?

Do they really believe, after it's been grown on a tree, picked by a picker, packed by a packer and transported hundreds of miles on a lorry, that the dirt on my little hands will make any difference?

And don't people wash their fruit when they get home anyway?