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.

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.