At the Barber's Shop

I've always thought that if I ever decide to change careers, I would like to be a freelance interpreter. I have a friend who does this job and she has interpreted everywhere from at meetings about politics with the German chancellor to meetings about tractors in fields with two farmers. Every so often here in Milan, I find myself acting as somebody's informal interpreter and never is it more stressful than when Mr A decides that he needs a haircut.

The first time we went, he ended up more or less with a shorter version of his previous haircut, but he wasn't too impressed with his experience in a mixed salon, so this time we went to a proper barber's shop. You could tell it was a proper barber's shop because it was furnished with an ancient leather sofa, lots of wooden furniture and two of those chairs that hold you up off the ground and make you feel like a six year old again. All over the shop there were “no smoking” signs and yet the place reeked of cigarettes, and the barber himself was impressively portly and disconcertingly bald. An old man who was waiting for a shave kindly let Mr A go first, probably because he sensed the potential entertainment in the situation.

Mr A sat down in the chair and I explained what he wanted. (“Like this but shorter and take a bit more off the back.”) The barber got to work and began to chat to us about where we were from, whether we liked Italy etc. After hearing that we were British, he pointed out a wobble in Mr A's fringe and said, “The last time you had a haircut, was it in England or Italy?” When we replied that it had been in Italy, he said, “And was the hairdresser Italian or Chinese?” Despite the fact that we said that he had been Italian, the barber then insisted that he was going to give Mr A “a proper Italian haircut.”

And to give him his due, he did. He got out a comb that looked none too clean, combed Mr A's hair and then proceeded to give him a haircut that was very short, but perfectly done, with the hair perfectly trimmed and shaped around the ears. For a man's haircut, it took a long time. Or maybe it just felt like that because I was watching the hair get shorter and shorter, and Mr A's voice was getting quieter and quieter and I was terrified that he didn't like it and that this was somehow all my fault for not explaining properly. At the same time, however, I was carrying on a conversation with the barber about how good the food was in Puglia and all the places in Italy that we had visited. He finished the whole thing off with a cut-throat razor, repeatedly saying “ferma, ferma!” (“stay still, stay still!”), which Mr A appeared to understand without my help.

Then it was time for the moment of truth. Mr A stood up and, as the barber disappeared into the back shop, I asked Mr A, “Do you like it?” To my huge relief, he smiled, shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes.” Then the barber reappeared and before we could pay him and leave, the old man who was watching insisted that I gave him a kiss. Not that I objected to that, because with his short, “proper Italian” haircut, Mr A looked very like a star from a very old but classic movie. And luckily, when we got home, a bit of gel brought his look back into the 21^st century and the interpreter didn't get the sack.

The City of Ham and Cheese

I have been in Italy at least once a year for the past five years of my life. I've been on a gondola in Venice and a scooter in Rome. I've eaten pizza in Naples and been cheated in Salerno. I've been to Verona and Mantua and Trento and Turin. But, until last weekend, I had never been to Parma, supposedly the town with the highest standard of living in Italy, and certainly with the best ham and cheese. And anybody who has known me for any length of time knows that ham and cheese are very important to me.

In the interest of having a restful weekend, we took the train to Parma. Driving can be stressful for Mr A because he has to avoid the maniacs on the motorway and for me because I take my responsibilities of paying the road tolls, calling the other drivers morons and waving like the queen at people who stare at Mr A's British car very seriously. Taking the train was a great idea, apart from the fact that we had a very long walk in the heat to our hotel, which according to the booking website was “centrally located” but turned out to be on the wrong side of the motorway from the centre of town.

That aside, we really did have a restful weekend. On Saturday morning we had a little bit of excitement when Mr A tried to buy a pair of sunglasses from a market stall and the vendor was very persistent, following us and trying to convince Mr A while at the same time running away from the police. We had lunch on the terrace of a cafe, where I had what must be the pinnacle of ham and cheese sandwiches and Mr A had a roasted vegetable panino with parmesan cheese.

We wandered around the town for a little while before what turned out to be the long walk to the hotel. Apart from the fact that our non smoking room was equipped with two ashtrays and smelled of cigarettes, it was worth the walk. We had a lovely big room with a nice bathroom and, to Mr A's delight, a TV with one English channel. The best thing about it, though, was having breakfast on a huge terrace in 25 degree sunshine.

Everybody told us that the point of visiting Parma is really to eat, so we did. We walked back into town from the hotel and, after exploring the centre a little bit, sat down in the square under the impressive clock tower for a delicious aperitivo served in tiny dishes and watched the well-dressed world go by.

For dinner, I had filled pasta in a butter and parmesan sauce and Mr A had asparagus risotto that was also loaded with parmesan. We're going to try recreating it at home this weekend with the cheese that we bought. 

On Sunday, we managed to be a little bit cultured and visited the cathedral. All the paintings have been restored and it has a gorgeous octagonal dome with a painting of Mary's ascension on it. The work was controversial at the time because Mary, as seen from below in her billowing dress, does not look pious or dignified, but more as if she has been swept away by the wind, and today, even to someone with very little knowledge of art like me, it still stands out as different from your normal religious painting.

We had a lovely walk in the Parco Ducale, where we watched terrapins swimming around the pond and had a glass of Malvasia wine in the cafe. I'm not usually a big fan of sparkling white wine but this one had a lovely delicate flavour that matched the setting among the spring greenery perfectly.

We finished our visit to Parma with a classic regional dish: a board of ham, salami and cheese served with fresh crusty bread and a glass of local wine, then sat in the park in the sunshine. Parma is a great place because it's quite a small town where you can wander around and sit and relax without being hassled, but at the same time it has a university and seemed to have a fairly large immigrant population, so it was still quite lively and interesting to visit. 

This blog probably gives the impression that I spend a lot of my time in Italy sitting around eating and drinking. Often, this is true. Eating, drinking and visiting churches is what you do in Italy. In my own defence, though, I would like to point out that I weighed myself last week and I was actually 3 kilos lighter than I was when I arrived in Milan in August, so my lifestyle may sound indulgent but it appears to be doing me good. Admittedly, I haven't quite dared to step on the scales since last weekend...

Paris, je t'aime

I was in Paris the other day experiencing inverted culture shock. (Obviously, I didn't go just for that, but I thought it would be interesting to blog about.) Inverted culture shock is a term that I've invented  to describe what happens when you go to a foreign country not from your own country but from an even more foreign country and you are surprised by all the wrong things.  Inverted culture shock is when you are British, you go to Paris and you are surprised by the freezing cold weather, the cleanliness and lack of dog dirt at your feet, and the politeness and caution of the drivers. You probably have to live in Milan for a while to understand it.*

I also got into an argument with a French person and, for the first time in my life, actually won it. It happened like this.

My colleagues and I were having dinner in a somewhat posh hotel and decided to share a bottle of wine to go with our meal. The guy who ordered it said the name, pointed to it on the menu and, as we were having a bit of banter with the waiter, jokingly added "le moins cher".  The waiter brought the bottle from the cellar, showed it to us, the guy tasted it and we drank it with our meal. It was only when the bill arrived that we realised that this wine was clearly not "le moins cher". It was significantly more "cher" than the one that we had ordered. The waiter, when we pointed out the mistake said, "Yes, but that's the one that you drank." 

He disappeared into the background and we had a whispered conversation in agonies of British embarrassment. Should we say any more or just pay the money and be annoyed about it? 

It seemed that most people were inclined to shut up and pay up when the waiter came back, but something got into me and I found myself saying, "We did tell you which one we wanted quite clearly twice," to which the waiter responded, "Yes, but I showed you what you were drinking and you drank it." 

I said, "Yes, we made a mistake, but you made more of a mistake than we did," and eventually he agreed that he had made a mistake and charged us for the bottle that we had asked for.

This kind of exchange always leaves me with my heart beating a little bit faster and feeling very embarrassed. The waiter, on the other hand, was clearly unscathed. He brought us the (reduced) bill cheerfully and, when we went to collect our room keys from him later,  said jokingly and with a huge smile on his face, "Your rooms are tents in the garden. They're the cheapest ones!"

Oh to be French and to be able to argue and not care!

* Emma at Life, Lavoro and Luca claims that the French are also scruffy dressers. I wouldn't go that far. Yet.

May Day

In Italy, unlike in the UK,  an important date is an important date. Be it the liberation of their country from fascism or the immaculate conception, Italians like to celebrate anniversaries on the proper day and as a result, a public holiday can fall on any day of the week. If that happens to be a Saturday, too bad, but if it's a Tuesday or a Thursday, you're in luck, because you can take the Monday or Friday off and make a "ponte" (bridge) to the weekend. 

This year, the 1st May fell on a Friday and so tonight is the end of a lovely long weekend.  On Friday, I had some work to do at home, so I spent the day alternating between the sofa and the bedroom, laptop in tow, until 6pm, when I finally got out of my pyjamas (yes Mum, I am a little bit ashamed!) and went out for aperitivo with Mr A.  My friend was arriving from Scotland at 8.30, so we figured we could have a drink and then get the metro to the train station to meet her off the airport bus. 

Unfortunately, when we eventually wandered to the metro station, the doors were locked. No metro. So we went to the tram stop. No tram in sight. A passer-by told us that they had stopped at 8 o'clock. Italy being Italy, and May 1st being a workers' holiday, the workers were not working and public transport was not running. I later saw a poster explaining that on May 1st, all public transport would be running not the normal service and not the Saturday, Sunday or holiday service, but a special reduced version of the holiday service. They were taking the occasion seriously. (Apparently there was also a big parade in town where they were throwing glass bottles but I was still safe at home in my pyjamas at that point.)

Luckily Mr A offered to pick my friend up from the station in the car, and to be honest the lack of transport seemed perfectly reasonable to me. I did laugh, though, when I found out that almost all the shops which are normally shut on a Sunday were open today, presumably to make up for all the trading that that they missed when their workers were on holiday.

Winning and Losing in the Great Umbrella Game

People from Northern Europe tend to assume that Italy is sunny. Recently, at least in Milan, this has not been the case. The rain has been pouring down for about a week now, with only odd breaks in between torrents to fool us into thinking that summer might actually be coming.

One of the consequences of this is that there are numerous opportunities to participate in The Great Umbrella Game.

Like most things in Italy, The Great Umbrella Game is not organised. Rather, it occurs naturally on rainy days as a result of a combination of Italian habits, social behaviours and survival instincts.

This is what happens. If you go to a bar or a restaurant on a rainy night, you leave your umbrella in a pile, or, in more upmarket places, an umbrella stand at the door of the establishment. At the end of the evening, you go and retrieve an umbrella from the same place. What makes all of this interesting is that the chances of you retrieving the same umbrella as you left are slim. It is more than likely that somebody else has already taken your umbrella.

The first time this happened to me, I exchanged a new umbrella that I had bought from a street vendor for three euros with a handle that didn't work perfectly but that nevertheless kept the rain out for one with broken spokes that I threw in the bin somewhere on the way home. Last night, however, I discovered that somebody had taken my dilapidated green brolly and left me one that at first glance seemed similar but that on handling turned out to be in perfect condition and significantly more solid than the one I had lost.

Last night, at least, I was a winner in the game.

In Which I Fall for the Oldest Trick in the Book

I had a long day yesterday. I got up at four o'clock in the morning, was travelling for most of the day and arrived back at the Stazione Centrale at half past eleven at night. Mr. A was coming to pick me up in the car, but my bus got in early, so I had to wait for him outside the station in the area where the airport buses arrive.

That part of town has a bad reputation, so when a man approached me saying, "Taxi, taxi, taxi?" I made a point of saying,"No, grazie" very firmly and walking off. Unfortunately, I did have to wait for Mr A, so I stopped a little further down where one of the airport buses was getting ready to leave and there were plenty of people around and put my two bags down at my feet to wait. 

I was tired, hungry and somewhat pissed off by this stage. Then a second guy approached me and asked me where to go to catch a train. I could tell from the way he asked the question that he wasn't really looking for a train and assumed I was in for the usual, "You're not from here, where are you from, do you have a boyfriend" conversation, so I decided the best thing to do was just to give a quick answer and then ignore him and, if necessary walk away, but he pretended not to understand my answer and I had to repeat it. It was then that I heard someone on the bus banging on the window and shouting, "Put it down! Put it down!" I turned around to see one of my bags lying on the pavement a few metres away and another guy running away around the back of the bus.

In years and years of travelling in big cities in Europe, this was actually the first time that anything like this had ever happened to me. I get the "friendly" harrassment conversations all the time, but I'm usually really good at looking after my stuff. In fact, all my important things were in my handbag, which I was holding on to (although I wouldn't necessarily have noticed if the guy had tried to pick my pockets), and I think the thieves would have been pretty disappointed to open up the other bag and discover nothing but an English newspaper and the remains of my packed lunch, but what scared me was that I didn't even suspect what the two guys were doing. I was so busy expecting one kind of problem that I forgot to be open to other possibilities.

So I guess what I learned from this was: hold on to your luggage, because just watching it isn't enough, and don't ever let yourself be distracted. And I hope that if I ever see anything like this happening to anyone else, I'll be quick thinking enough to stop it as the people on the bus did for me.

Playing Tour Guide

My friend C arrived on the train from Dresden at 07.50 on Wednesday. She left at ten this morning, and in the meantime, I think we did as much as it was possible to do in three days.

On Wednesday, we visited the Duomo, the castle and the Parco Sempione and drank expensive coffee while lounging in the sun on the La Rinascente roof terrace. Walking across the piazza, we had a good laugh at the guys who approached us and said, “You want a bracelet? No? You want a husband?” We went to a local restaurant for dinner and ate pizzas that barely fitted on the table. We spoke German for most of the day, which rendered me completely incapable of saying anything in Italian, and I'm sure my concierge is now convinced that I am guilty of throwing cigarette ends out of my window into the courtyard just because I stammered so much when she asked me about it.

On Thursday, we went with Mr A and his English friend to Lake Maggiore in the pouring rain. We took some hasty photographs and then ran for cover in a restaurant and ate another pizza.



Then we went back to Milan. C and I then visited the Pinacoteca di Brera, where we wondered at the number and ugliness of the paintings of the Madonna and child and despaired over our ignorance of Christian tradition. Then I introduced her to the steepness of drinks prices in Milan and the stupendousness of aperitivo hour in the Bufala Cafe, which, as the name suggests, is all about the mozzarella.

On Friday, we went to Bergamo, resisted the temptation to use the funicular railways and instead walked all the way to the Castello, where we watched planes taking off and thunderstorms rolling in over the Alps. We also visited the botanical gardens, ate pizza somewhere along the way and bought a Polenta e Osei cake to take home. Eating polenta with whole songbirds is traditional in Bergamo but the orignal dish has been replaced with cakes that look similar but are a lot more palatable.

On Friday night we went for a drink in the Navigli, then on to Le Trottoir, a bar in the middle of a roundabout that has incredibly loud live bands and where you can dance to cheesy music until 3 am.

C and I met when we were both language assistants in Compiègne and we hadn't seen each other since I visited her in Berlin in 2004, where I “improved” my German by drinking Glühwein in August because it was all her friend had in the house apart from beer, but it felt as though nothing had changed. Having her here was fun because she made me notice all the things I've been getting used to about Italy, like the grannies sitting in cafes and yelling into mobile phones and the cars being parked in the middle of the pavement. Above all though, not everything has been easy here in Milan recently and it was nice to chat about it all with an old friend and to be reminded about all the good things about living in here.