Adventures in the Italian Language 4

"Non ho capito"

The literal translation of this phrase is "I didn't understand." Italians use it a lot and, when you're a foreigner making shaky attempts to speak the language, it can be quite disconcerting. It took me a while to figure out that it's also used to mean "I didn't hear you," and when someone says it to you it doesn't mean your Italian was crap, it just means you need to repeat what you said.

This kind of thing is useful to keep in mind more generally when you're speaking a foreign language. Mistakes and misunderstandings happen for all kinds of reasons and often it's as much to do with the other person as it is to do with you!

Nostalgia

I got nostalgic today. I had an appointment with my old doctor and I met up with my old flatmate for coffee, which involved me getting the bus into Edinburgh from my parents' house, walking from Princes Street to the area where I used to live, visiting my old flat to pick up some post and finally driving past the school where I used to teach on the way home.

I noticed several things about Edinburgh.

I noticed the gentleness of the rolling hills outside it, so different from the harsh outlines of the Alps.

I noticed the sense of calm. Even in Princes Street in the middle of the sales, people said sorry when they bumped into you and nobody tried to run you over if you dared to attempt to cross the road.

I noticed the sense of history. Italy has a fascinating history too, but even strolling in Rome or sitting in the arena in Verona, it's never seemed so palpable to me. Edinburgh's history is my history and I learned it on the spot, being led down the Royal Mile by teachers in a time so distant it might as well be history itself.

And I noticed how beautiful the city is, as the sun sets and darkness falls over the trees, the spires and the hills. It brought back so many memories of a time when I felt very settled in a city that was truly home.

And, in fact, I never really meant to leave. I moved to Milan partly because of my seemingly inplacable language learning, foreign culture experiencing itch and partly because so many elements of my settled Edinburgh life either came to a natural end or came crashing down around my ears, depending on whether you want to be melodramatic about it or not.

Now I find myself in the opposite situation, with the itch being at least partially appeased for the time being, looking to the future and wondering what will happen if and when I take that same decision in reverse. The curse of loving foreign things is that you will always leave a little bit of yourself somewhere far away.

What reassured me today was the thought that as well as the people, there is a place that's worth coming home to.

Adventures in the Italian Language 3

Inspired by Jennie en France, I've been spending my Christmas holiday doing online language tutorials. (Christmas is not very exciting in my family. And Jennie, if you're reading this, your site is fantastic!)

Today I tested my level in Italian on the BBC website and then found their list of "cool Italian" phrases. It reminded me of one of my favourite slang expressions in Italian: che gnocco/a! Referring to an Italian man or woman as a kind of potato dumpling means, for some reason, that you find him or her very attractive.

Another one I liked was "limonare", which apparently means "to snog with passion." Something to do with puckering up your lips, perhaps.

And finally, I learned that a "scambio di lingua," which I have asked for several times in my search for foreign language conversation partners, has another, more literal meaning.

Banking Part 2

I arrived back in the UK on Saturday. I had very little money in my wallet so I went to the nearest cash machine, and took out some money. They didn't charge me because it wasn't my own bank. They didn't charge me because it was the weekend. Getting my own money from the cash machine was free.

While I was at the cash machine, I topped up my phone credit. This was not one of a limited number of transactions that I could carry out at the cash machine over a 3 month period. The phone company did not charge me £3 for the privilege of buying a service from their company. It was free.

Then I made a phone call. When I had finished, the phone automatically told me how much credit I had left. None of my money had been eaten by the invisible monster that secretly ate 30 euros of internet credit in Italy.

Then today I went to the bank again. Despite the fact that it was Monday and despite the fact that it was lunch time, the bank was open. Ten minutes and one signature later, I had deposited my euros in my current account. The ease of the operation left me smiling almost as much as the exchange rate.

Banking

I went to the bank on Friday afternoon with 2 friends. When we arrived in Italy, we opened introductory accounts with them and, although they knew in advance that we were coming, it took 4 hours fot ten people to open accounts and none of the staff seemed to know what traveller's cheques were or how to pay them into an account. Their inefficiency, coupled with the fact that the bank is only open for about 5 hours a day, only one of which is in the afternoon, had put me off going back even though they never sent me the credit card that I asked for and which I probably paid for. (A credit card is pretty much a necessity in Italy because bancomat cards don't have card numbers and so you can't use them to shop online).

On Friday, however, we had to go because our free "Welcome" accounts were about to expire and we had to face up to the cruel, complicated world of Italian bank charges.

In the UK, bank charges are what you pay if you go over your overdraft limit or a cheque bounces. In Italy, you pay to have the account, be given a bancomat card, be given a credit card, be issued with statements and for the privilege of withdrawing money from the cash machine. If you use a cash machine from another bank, it costs 1.50 euros every time. You pay for something called a "bollo" every month, but despite the bank manager's lengthy explanation of what a "bollo" is, I am none the wiser. The word translates as "stamp" but I have no idea what they are stamping. Their feet, perhaps.

This time, it took an hour and a half for the three of us to choose and open our new accounts and for the bank manager to try to convince us to open some kind of savings account that pays a paltry 2% interest (which is nevertheless infinitely more than the 0% I get on my new current account). It wasn't a bad experience. I discovered that my Italian was good enough to cope with the intricacies of the banking system and the manager was friendly, patient and helpful. He even shared his Christmas chocolates with us and gave us a free calendar. Even with the best customer service in the world, however, there is no getting around the fact that banking in Italy is far more complicated, expensive and time-consuming than it needs to be and I hope I don't need to go back for a long time!

In Which I Attempt to go to Austria and End Up in Turin

The 8th of December is a public holiday in Italy. It is St Ambrogio's Day (St Ambrogio is the saint of Milan) and also the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. (I read an interesting article in the newspaper about exactly what was and was not immaculate about the conception, but I'll save that for another post.)

My friend and I decided about 6 weeks ago that we wanted to take advantage of the long weekend to go to the Christmas markets in Austria or Bavaria. We initially wanted to go to Salzburg, as both of us have also had long and passionate relationships with The Sound of Music but we decided that was too far away and decided to aim for Innsbruck instead.
Our Innsbruck plans were thwarted by the lady at the train station being incapable of selling me the ticket that I wanted (and which I knew existed from the automatic ticket machines and the internet). In the course of half an hour, she sold me the wrong one twice and I eventually gave up.

Our next idea was to go to Trento, which is not far from the German speaking part of Italy and also apparently has a good market, but my friend was ill for three days and we decided it was too far away for a day trip and chose to go to Turin instead.

We assumed that the market would be near the centre of Turin and relatively easy to find, but when we arrived, there was no sign of it. We walked around the centre admiring the beautiful buildings, the river and the glimpses of the mountains at the end of every street and eventually asked somebody where it was. She told us that it was quite far out of town, too far to walk, and said that we would need to get a tram there. By this time, we were hungry, so we had lunch and then confirmed with the people at the restaurant where we needed to go.

It turned out to be only five stops on the tram and not very far away at all, but when we arrived at the square, all we could see was an ordinary market with a few stalls selling scruffy Christmas decorations in among the clothes pegs and multipacks of batteries. We asked one of the stall holders if this was actually the Christmas market and she said that it was.

A little disappointed, we headed back into town. As we were strolling among the shops, we stumbled upon the tourist office and went in to ask about the market. The woman told us that it was more or less exactly where we had just been. I was on the point of giving up, but my friend, an avid Christmas market shopper persuaded me to try one more time. We walked back to the original market and made our way past the scruffy ironmongery stalls. Then we saw a few scabby Christmas trees and a flea market that was thronged with people. Forcing our way through the crowds, in what seemed to be the back streets of the dodgy bit of Turin, we finally spotted wooden chalets and Christmas lights and smelled the perfume of mulled wine wafting towards us. We had found it!

The market was incredibly busy, despite being so well hidden, but we managed to find four Christmas presents between us, drink some mulled wine, taste grappa at the grappa stall, and get some free samples of incredibly delicious Turin chocolate called Gianduiotto, which is basically very, very nice praline.

I liked Turin a lot. It was like Milan in that it was a busy, cosmopolitan city but it was somehow just that little bit prettier. More than anything, Milan lacks hills, a river or a beach and you never really get a view or feel like you can see the edge of it. Turin has a river running through it and beautiful views and luckily is less than two hours away on the train!

Where Am I Now?

A couple of surprising things have happened to me recently.

The first was when I took my shoes to be repaired. I had been putting it off for weeks, partly because, Milan being the world's capital for expensive shoes, I was a) embarrassed to take my £15 pound pair from New Look in and b) convinced that it would be hideously expensive and because I couldn't be bothered with the hassle of going and then having to go back to collect them. Eventually, however, having superglued my trousers to my leg in the process of trying to repair my second-last pair of decent shoes at home, I decided to go and get it done. I took them to the cobbler at the supermarket where I often shop and he asked me if I was doing shopping there or if I would prefer to come back another day. I had a couple of things to get, so I asked how long it would take and he said twenty minutes. I went off and did my shopping, then went back ten minutes later, convinced that I was going to have to wait another half an hour, which I didn't really have time for. The shoes were done. I paid the very reasonable price (6 euros) and congratulated the man on his speedy service. He replied, “Any time you need to bring something in, I'm here.” Italians? Inefficient?

The second thing happened when I was getting off the tram today. Trams and buses in Italy have entrance doors and exit doors, but normally nobody pays a blind bit of notice to the signs. Today, however, as I tried to dodge the crowd of people and prams at the exit door and sneak out the entrance, I was gently reprimanded by a woman trying to get on, who told me, “Questa è l'entrata.”

By this time I was starting to wonder if I had somehow been teleported over the border into Switzerland in my sleep. Then I tried to get into the department store and couldn't get past a couple having an extremely vocal argument in the door about whether they were going in or not, saw a dog in not just a quilted tartan jacket but a designer label hoodie (I kid you not) and felt reassured to be back in Italy.

An Adventure

It snowed last Friday in Milan. Big flakes were falling all day and the city looked very pretty. By Saturday, however, it was just pouring with rain and by Sunday it seemed to have mostly dried up, so a friend and I set off in his car for a walk by one of the lakes, hoping to see the snow still lying on the mountains. We didn't have a map, so we decided to rely on my friend's trusty TomTom.

The TomTom got us most of the way there, but as we left the main road and wended our way through small towns with narrow streets and one-way systems, she decided to abandon us. Eventually, we found the right road, a twisting, single-track road up a very steep hill. To make the experience a little bit hairier, there were racing cars coming down in the opposite direction. They weren't actually racing, as far as we could tell, but they were certainly driving more fearlessly even than the average Italian.

As we got further up, heavy rain began to fall. Then the rain turned to snow. The cars were still coming, the bends were getting tighter and the tyres were losing their grip. On the biggest bends there were groups of locals cheering on the racing cars, or any other driver stupid enough to go past. With nowhere to turn round, we had no choice but to go on, hoping that there would be a better road down the other side of the mountain. At one point, with the car stopped and hugging the cliff above us, we saw one of the racing cars skid and do a 90 degree turn so that its length spanned the whole width of the road. With the help of three people, the driver was just able to turn it round and carry on.

Eventually we arrived at the top of the hill, where there was a car park and a few people standing around. I got out of the car, hoping that they could tell us a better way down but they said the road ahead was closed. The only way down was the way we had come up, so off we went.

After our own little skid on the way down, I admitted to my friend that I was scared. Really scared.

“We'll be fine,” he said. “The car's built for it.”

We continued on our perilous way, with my friend inching the car around the hairpin bends and me muttering prayers of thanks every time we made it in one piece. Finally, we got to the bottom.

We stopped the car and checked the tyres, then drove on. It was only once we hit the motor way that my friend finally breathed a deep breath and said, “That was really, really scary.”
Never had the Italian Autostrada seemed such a safe and comforting place to be.

Smoking Ban?

On Saturday night, we went to a place called La Toscana to celebrate a friend's birthday. It was pouring with rain, but even so, we were able to sit outside in the bar behind the restaurant. I'm pretty sure that the reason that you can do this in Italy is the smoking ban. Italy was one of the first countries to ban smoking in indoor public places but the combination of millions of smokers and the Italian penchant for disregarding the rules means that bar owners have just put up tents in their beer gardens where, technically, you are outside and therefore allowed to smoke. The ban doesn't seem to have had any effect on the number of smokers in the country so all that happens is that you end up either being roasted by a patio heater or shivering from the draughts as well as breathing in clouds of second-hand smoke.

The cynical part of me suspects that this is what happens every time the Italian tries to solve a problem by imposing its will on an unwilling people. It creates new problems without solving the old one.

Christmas Market

Someone pointed out to me today that I haven't posted anything on here for over a week, and, that given my normal addiction to blogging, some of my readers might be getting worried. Fear not, for I have simply been going in search of exciting and exhilarating experiences, the better to entertain you, dear readers. I also got bogged down writing a very long and thought-provoking post which I might publish later, but for now, here are some updates.

Last Saturday I went to L'Artigiano in Fiera, which is an enormous market at the exhibition centre where you can buy products from all around the world. There are 10 different sections and over 2000 stalls. We were there for over 3 hours and didn't even see half of it.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy it that much because I thought it would be crowded and far too expensive but in fact it was really good fun. A lot of the prices were similar to in the shops and you could sample things as you went round. I got a ridiculous amount of cheese, some Normandy cider for my next crepe party, Stroopwaffeln from Holland, a couple of Christmas presents and some socks, as well as admiring furniture, paintings and belly-dancing outfits from afar. There were thousands of people there, but the place was so big that it didn't matter. But then, this is Milan, and the one thing you can do better here than anywhere else is go shopping!

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...

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.

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.

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.

What I Love About Italy Is...(#2)

...Autumn in the mountains. The trees turning yellow and brown against the blue sky. The smell of the fallen leaves. The dramatic silhouettes of the mountains against the bright sunlight. The pretty stone paths. Eating amazing food on the terrance of a rifugio. Drinking wine at lunch time. Sunbathing in October. Good company. Waterfalls. Shiny chestnuts. Weird rock formations high, high up in the sky...

...signs that tell you exactly where lunch is coming from...

On days like this, I think I could stay in Italy forever.

What I Love About Italy Is...

The carrier bags. Those lovely stiff paper ones with string handles that make you feel like you've been shopping in a designer boutique, even although Zara and Promod give them out for free.

The best ones, of course, are the ones that actually come from designer boutiques. Not that I shop in designer boutiques, but I acquire the bags second hand where I can.

This morning, I was desperately wondering where I could find some paper to wrap a few presents. Wrapping paper is one of these things that are hard to find in a foreign country and I didn't get any yesterday when the shops were open. You can imagine my delight this morning, therefore, when I opened the door of my flat's carrier bag cupboard (these things are ubiquitous) to discover that my predecessor had left me dozens of gorgeous paper bags, all folded neatly and ready to be used to conceal my disorganisation in preparing my presents. (This was a huge improvement on my last flat, where the ancient supermarket carriers had been semi-devoured by the nest-building mice.)

So if the relevant friends are reading this, I have to admit to you that your present did not come from an extremely upmarket Italian department store...but the carrier bag did.

Travel Tips Update

http://www.sncf.com/ and http://www.trenitalia.it/ will quote you different prices. You should check both, even if it takes you hours because the SNCF website is the slowest page to load IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

And my honeymoon period with Trenitalia is now officially over too. They refused to accept my (correct) bank card details 3 times and are now demanding 5 different documents to prove that I am me before they will ever accept that bank card on their site again.

So right now I have a one way ticket to Paris and neither site is letting me buy a ticket home.

Things could be worse :-)

Being Poetic

Milan is not a city that has a reputation for being stunningly attractive. A few of the buildings are, but often you have to go looking for the beauty which are often hidden in someone's courtyard or blocked from view by traffic and tram wires. Today, however, I found some of it by accident.

It might have been to do with the the aperitivo I had with my colleagues after work today or the fact that it was Friday. Whatever. After Aperitivo number 1, I went into the centre of town to meet a friend for Aperitivo number 2. I got off the metro at Pagano and walked up to the Piazza Sempione. Unlike in Zona San Siro, the houses were decorated with carved stone balconies instead of satellite dishes. For once, the perfume of the fallen leaves was stronger than the traffic fumes. I breathed in the fresh night air and felt good about life.

The Air that we Breathe

Ever since I had the cold a few weeks ago, I've had a slight cough that I can't gt rid of. It seems that I'm the lucky one.

One of my colleauges has pneumonia.

As another colleague said when he heard, the only people who get pneumonia are the very young, the very old, people with AIDS and people who live in Milan.

A Travel Tip

After many frustrating hours on the internet, I have discovered the following useful fact.

If you want to travel from Italy to anywhere in France, or from France to Italy, do your research at http://www.trenitalia.it/ . While the SNCF site will only tell you about the 2 trains a day that run from Paris direct to Milan at times that no sane person would want to travel, Trenitalia gives you all the options, including journeys with changes in Switzerland and Germany. Even more bizzarely, on the Italian site, you can research journeys from Milan to cities in France other than Paris, while the SNCF appears to believe that no foreigner wants to go anywhere other the capital.

So take heart, mes amis de la France profonde: Paris may be too self-absorbed to acknowledge your existence, but the big hearted Italians still care. Un abbraccio a tutti!

Going off the Rails

Seven people were injured when two trams crashed in Milan yesterday. Given the speed that the trams go at, this is quite an an achievement on the part of Lady Misfortune.

Trams and trains in Italy travel on binari or rotaie. When they come off, however, they are “deragliati”, which sounds a lot like “derailed” and was probably borrowed from English when the Brits were still better at running trains than the Italians.

My other new piece of vocabulary from yesterday was “pidocchio”.

Head louse.

I don't think I've got them yet and apparently there's a new kind of tablet you can take that makes your scalp unattractive to the wee beasties (it's not April, so it can't be a joke). Fingers crossed!

Adventures in the Italian Language

I have studied French for 11 years and lived in France for two years. Although I would describe my French as very fluent, I am only just capable of completing an “easy” crossword (as long as the book had answers in the back). I was very chuffed, therefore, when I realised the other day that there are already several things in Italian that I know at least two words for and I'm starting a list, partly so that I can boast about it and partly because, a few years down the line, it may help me to do crosswords as I lounge in a deckchair in my luxury Italian villa.


La cima/vetta – the top of a mountain (An insight into what I spend a lot of time doing?)
Sei matto/sei pazzo – you're crazy
Mi stufo/mi scoccio – I'm bored (Hopefully no insights into my life here!)

Some of my other new favourite words and phrases are:

Un riccio – a hedgehog, but also a chestnut shell

Mi vesto cipolla – I dress like an onion (ie with layers!)

"Sono un sacco di posers" (a quote from a friend) - “un sacco di” means “a sackful” or a lot. There is no word for “posers” in Italian, despite the fact that the country so desperately needs one.

On The Other Side Of The Mountains

I learned a new Italian word the other day: oltralpe, meaning "on the other side of the Alps" and, in the article that I was reading, referring to France.

In France, a similar expression used to refer to Britain is "outre - Manche" or "on the other side of the channel". An English equivalent might be "on the continent" but, while the English expression generally refers to a glamorous place where the people have exotic quirks like drinking tea with lemon and driving on the wrong side of the road, I have long harboured the suspicion that "outre - Manche" implies something more along the lines of "beyond the pale", with the only worse geographical slur being "outre Atlantique", but this might just be down to the contexts I've encountered the expression in. Any Francophones care to comment?

Anyway, as well as taking delight in my own cleverness at figuring out the meaning of oltralpe, the cynical, twisted part of me was quite pleased to discover that maybe, just maybe, the Italians harbour a similar "us and them" attitude towards the French.

More on this later, if my dear readers on the other side of the mountains will promise not to be offended...

Como

Having spent most of yesterday feeling grumpy, lonely and even a little homesick, I had a really good sleep last night, woke up this morning to find sun streaming in the window and four friends who were prepared to go on a day trip to Como.


We got there just in time to eat lunch outside in the glorious sunshine

and then took the funicular up a (proper) hill to Brunate, where there were spectacular views of the lake far, far, far below.

This was the mechanism that hauled us up the hill.

Then we took a boat trip around the lake and attempted to spot George Clooney before getting fabulous ice cream and heading back to the train station.

The final experience of our day out in pensioners' paradise was the discovery of a species that I had never seen before in this part of Italy: the Ned. Dressed in squint baseball caps and wearing skull and crossbones wristbands, they spent the journey back to the outskirts of Milan throwing McDonald's wrappers out of the train window. I wonder if some joker put them there to stop me feeling homesick...

A Dull Day

Summer is officially over in Milan. I know this because the communal central heating in my building has been switched on. I don't know if the date for this happening is fixed by law (it wouldn't surprise me) or decided by the resident's association of the building but whatever, a couple of days ago it was 23 degrees outside and the radiators were becoming tepid. I noticed this, hoped that they would get properly warm once the weather actually got cold and having no control over the situation, thought no more about it. Today, however, it's actually cold and, because I didn't realise that the warmth in the flat was coming from the radiators and not the glorious sunshine, I went out with only a thin jacket and ended up buying a cheap cardigan in H&M because I was so cold.

I didn't have definite plans for today, but, having spent most of last weekend working, I was looking forward to this weekend. Waking up this morning, I thought about all the possibilities for the day: shopping in town and coffee with friends, a trip to Lake Como, a visit to a nearby monastery or going Pavia, a pretty town not far from Milan. I texted a couple of friends to see if they wanted to meet up, then, feeling optimistic, headed into town to look at a couple of promising shoe shops that I saw last week.

As usual, I did not find shoes that I could actually wear for a whole day in any of the shoe shops.

Friend no 1 phoned to say that she was in bed with a hangover and would need several hours to recover.

Friend no 2 texted to say she had already gone off on a day trip with some other friends.

Tired of the crowds and brash consumerism of Milan, I decided to go to the monastery and the pretty town for the afternoon. Unfortunately, when I got to Lambrate station, I discovered that the Trenitalia website had lied to me and that the train had left 2 minutes before I got there. The next one wasn't for an hour and I was in no mood to wait.

Lambrate station is near the edge of central Milan, not far from the city bypass and not particularly near anything that you would want to see. The only vaguely interesting thing in the area was the Parco Lambro, the one big park in Milan that I hadn't yet been to, so I decided to go there.

I walked through some not very pretty streets in the direction of the park, stopping to buy some cold pizza from a grumpy woman in a bakery on the way. It was further than I thought and all I was hoping was that it wouldn't turn out to be some gravelly wasteland populated by dog dirt and men in trench coats.

The entrance didn't look to scary and so I proceeded deeper into the park.
It was then that saw it.



A hill!

It was the first one I'd seen in Milan and I think it may be one of only two in the whole city. Almost worth travelling 15 metro stops for. Unfortunately, it had some dodgy looking guys sitting near the top of it, so I decided not to climb it just then and carried on through the park instead. With it being officially winter and everything, it was pretty empty. Most of the people I saw were guys out running and the only women I saw were accompanied by big dogs. If I'm going to feel safe and satisfy my need for green spaces in Milan, it looks as if I'm going to need either a sex change or an Alsatian.

The park has a river running through it, the Lambro, and it would all be very nice if the river didn't smell like a drain and have grey foam floating on it. I walked around for a bit, then went back to the hill. The dodgy guys had gone, so I climbed to the top of it and took a picture of the view from the top.



Then it started to rain, so I climbed back down the hill and came home.

The End

La Cucina Inglese

For the past two weeks, I have been leading an English conversation group, which is made up of diverse, interesting and well-educated people. This week's group included an older gentleman who had lived in England and spoke "rather good English". You can tell that he was older (not quite elderly) from the fact that he used the word "rather" in conversation. I describe him as a gentleman because when I asked for his opinion of British cuisine, he first asked, "What kind of answer do you want?" and because on being told that I wanted an honest answer, he replied that it was sometimes very good.

He then said, "What I liked the most was the eggs. You can eat eggs every day in England."

Now, I have spent a long time trying to explain British/Scottish food to foreigners. I often tell them that we have nice roast meat and delicious baking for afternoon tea. Recently, I have started mentioning to Italians that our butter is better than theirs. I think I will add the story of the old man and the eggs to my armoury.

I also mentioned to the group that, because I work in an English language establishment, I also have trouble finding opportunities to speak English in Milan, especially as all the Italians I meet want to practise their English. The same gentleman told me, "You should insist on Italian. Tell them that they have to pay for English." My opinion exactly, but having heard it from such a nice, well-mannered gentleman, I will now have the confidence to put it into practice.

When a Girl is Tired of the Metro...

I took the metro last night. Got on at my local station, used up another journey from my “carnet”, travelled a few stops on the red line, changed onto the green line at Cadorna, knowing instinctively which direction to take, and got off at Moscova to go to the cinema.

Somewhere along the line, I realised that getting the metro was no longer exciting for me and perfect, elegiac, Chekhovian notes sounded in my ears. Metaphorically, at least.

(For those of you who didn't devote a portion of your youth to studying Russian literature, I should explain that the beauty of Chekhov's plays lies in the way he so perfectly expresses languid regret for the passage of time and the feeling that nothing ever happens, even when people are going around shooting each other.)

So why was this happening to me, at the age of 26, somewhere under the busy, buzzing metropolis of Milan?

Because for me, sad as it may seem, underground trains should mean excitement. They belong to the great cities of the world. For me, the smell of Paris is not Chanel No 5, it's the scent of the stale air that wafts into your nostrils as you descend into the Metro. When I first went to France in 2002, I took the Eurostar and heaved my suitcases on to the Underground to be whirled across London, passing under boroughs and districts whose names I only normally encountered in the Times. Mastery of the French language was signalled by my ability to pronounce Barbès-Rochechouart without hesitating and experience of France's capital by knowing instinctively that Ligne 4 goes from the Porte de Clignancourt to the Porte d'Orleans. Being a jaded Metro traveller was symbolic of becoming too used to being abroad.

And to some extent, this is true. My first experiences of Italy, although coloured by breathtaking scenery, wonderful, kindly nuns, exquisite cuisine and crazy drivers, were somehow not as novel my first experiences of France. I supposed by then I'd already learned how to be a foreigner. Most of the people I went out last night with were students who were having, had just had or were about to have that “first time abroad” experience and I was a tiny bit jealous. Moving to Milan has been a lot like moving to a new city in the UK, apart from the fact that if I make a special effort, I can go out and speak Italian to some people. Aside from the fact that I now gesture manically when I speak, I don't think this year will change me the way my first year in France will. It's a little bit sad that that rite of passage is, well, past.

Anyway, before I start sounding like a dead, melancholy Russian playwright, I should say that the film (Burn After Reading) was excellent and so was the live comedy duo that took the place of the trailers(!). They were two guys from London taking the piss out of Italians and Brits travelling in Italy. The only joke I can remember that makes sense out of context was “the traffic lights in Milan are only there for decoration” but if I go and see the full live show I'll tell you some more!

The Anti Cheese-Post

Now that the empty bottles of DOC wine are starting to build up in my recycling pile, I am embarking on a new avenue in my exploration of the gastronomical pleasures of Italy: cheese.

This, however, is not a post about cheese. Instead, to pre-empt the feelings of intense jealousy that you will no doubt feel when I do post endless lyrical paragraphs about the delights of all things caseic (I had to do a reverse dictionary search to find that word – isn't the internet amazing?), this is a post about Italian butter.

Which is pallid, insipid, bland, colourless, flavourless, looks like lard and doesn't even have salt in it to make up for the lack of any other flavour.

Two weeks ago, I made a batch of shortbread to take to Verona, using ordinary supermarket butter. It's still in a box in my cupboard. I couldn't even bring myself to eat it myself, never mind give it to my friends as an example of fine Scottish cuisine. It's that bad.

Today I went to the supermarket and paid 2.87 euros for a packet of Lurpack lightly salted. Visitors to Milan, don't bring me baked beans or Marmite. Bring me Kerrygold.

Italians don't eat much butter. I don't know if this is because the butter is bad, or if they don't bother to make the butter good because they don't eat much of it.

Or maybe they just keep all their good dairy products for making cheese :-)

Mammone, Mammone

The worst thing that I've ever heard my dad say about the Scots is that we are the only nation that actually aims to live up to the stereotype of itself. (This is actually not a very terrible thing to say, given that all through our childhoods, every time he drove us over the border to visit my lovely English granny and aunties in the pretty town where he grew up, he had to put up with us making rude comments about how the air smelled bad now that we were in ENG-LAND.)

I suspect that my father is probably right.

With this in mind, I feel well qualified to comment when I see anybody of another nationality doing the same thing. I don't know if Italians actually aspire to it or if it's just that the stereotype is so obvious and therefore easy to spot, but anyway, in the spirit of jovial national rivalry rather than serious criticism (I don't really think the air smells worse in England either) I intend post about it on the occasions when I see it.

Like this morning.

I was walking to school this morning behind a family group consisting of a boy of about 12 who obviously enjoyed his pasta, his slightly younger brother, who looked like the kind of child who is never off the football pitch, and their mother.

They were going to school. I could tell they were going to school because of their massive schoolbags, which all Italian children take to school from the age of 5 onwards. They need them to put their playpieces in.

So, the boys had these massive schoolbags.

Which the mother was carrying. I looked for broken arms, broken legs and evidence of wasting diseases, but there were none.

Enough said.

Sasso Cavallo

Yesterday I went on what was possibly the most stunning walk of my entire life. I was going to say “most beautiful” but then my national pride rose up and stopped me. I don't mind saying, though, that Italy does “stunning” better than any other country I know. I don't think the pictures even do it justice – I think I need to find the “bright sunlight” setting on my camera!

The walk was in the mountains above the Lago di Lecco, which is a branch of Lake Como. As soon as we got out of Milan, we could see the mountains in the distance, and at 7am, it was only a two hour drive.












On the way home, though, it was a different story. One thing that I find strange about Italy is the way that the most naturally beautiful bits of it are so full of people. It's as if somebody took the Highlands, put them somewhere withing commuting distance of London and added a whole lot of sunshine. (The population density of Lombardy is 372 per square kilometre, while in the Highlands, it's 8!) It's not a bad thing as such, but it takes some getting used to. In Scotland, you can come down from the mountains on Sunday evening and your biggest problem is likely to be a flock of sheep that won't get off the road. In Lombardy,you will encounter the entire population of Milan returning from their weekend retreats and have to queue for an hour to get on the motorway.

I reckon what the mountains in Italy need is more bad weather, single track roads and a whole lot of midges.

A Very Sad Post

Before my nearest and dearest start to get worried, I should say that this post is “sad” in the sense of “totally uncool”. Nothing tragic has happened to me.

While you may all have the impression that I spend my life meeting the rich and famous and enjoying the style culture of Italy's fashion capital, the truth is that I spend many of my evenings sitting at home drinking cups of Sogni d'Oro (“Sweet Dreams”) herbal tea and reading expat blogs on the internet.

(Slight tangent: it's amazing how many expatriates seem to think that that they are “expatriots”. In my experience, living in another country has the exact opposite effect: my national pride swells every time somebody tells me my country is beautiful and tears well up in my eyes whenever I hear “Scotland the Brave” used as a ringtone on somebody's mobile phone).

Anyway, one common topic in these blogs is the frustrations of using local public transport. While these frustrations can be many, so far in Milan I have experienced nothing but joy as I hop on and off buses and trams and no longer have to read the map every time I take the metro. So here's a post in celebration of public transport in Milan.

The first good thing about it is that it's frequent. Trams run past the end of my road every seven minutes at peak times and every 15 minutes on Sundays, and they go from 6am to about 1 in the morning. They even travel the whole route after seven in the evening, unlike buses in my dear home city. Metros come as often as every 2 minutes and, although I live on the less-frequented half of a fork in the line, they always seem to be going in my direction.


The second great thing is that it's cheap. In a city where renting a one bedroom flat costs 900 euros a month, a ticket, valid for 75 minutes on every kind of transport, costs one euro. For the price of a single ticket on the London underground, you can travel for two days in Milan.
So, in a country with a reputation for tax evasion, a poor economy and corrupt politicians, how do they do this?


Well, in my opinion, it may have something to do with the fact that many of the trams look like this:


If the people at ATM need to make a bit of cash, these historic vehicles may be painted to look like this:



The powers -that-were in Milan never removed their tramlines or overhead wires. The money isn't being spent on digging up the roads and putting back tracks that were there to be used a few decades ago. They haven't used their taxpayers' hard-earned cash to replace all the old trams with vehicles that look like bullet trains but still get stuck in traffic jams. Instead, they use older vehicles and run them cheaply and frequently.

Citizens of Edinburgh, read this and weep :-)

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!

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?

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.

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!

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!

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.