Foggy Gondolas

This weekend I went to Venice with my roommates, one of whom owns an apartment on the lagoon. The apartment has a garden. I didn't even know that people in Venice got to have actual gardens (since they already have so much great stuff), but Lucia's garden was beautiful. She also has three cats who live in Venice in her garden, and we brought one of them home on the train with us, back to Bologna. People like to stare at you if you're lugging a fluorescent pink cat carrier that emits howls of misery. The train ride was an extremely pleasant two hours. Little did we know that Timi would not stop crying in Bologna, either - he has a toothache. His wailing is pathetic and annoying at the same time (tomorrow he goes to the vet).


Anyway, Venice was beautiful, and as you can see it was very foggy - very atmospheric. We went to a show of Picasso's work (Antibes) that was great. Lots of painted serving platters and bulls. There was also a pop-art exhibit in the same museum, featuring a wax statue of Hitler kneeling in a corner. According to Lucia it's very famous.

Anna and I got to partake Venetian nightlife, which basically consisted of going from hidden bar to hidden bar and having a drink and a meatball at each place. After three such trips we realized that this was going to be our dinner, and after some panicked negotiation managed to get everyone interested in eating a real meal. We went to a Mexican restaurant - I did not know that Italy had such things - that served tzatziki sauce with its burritos. I tried to convince Anna that it wasn't Mexican food, since they don't have Mexican food in England either (and I know that as a Northeasterner I don't know what real Mexican food is, but I know better than these people).

Last night I went to a very interesting show: a version of a French play put on by a group of kids living in a juvenile detention center (I have no idea what the politically correct term is). The kids rewrote the play, made the costumes and set, and were amazing - they sang, danced, performed acrobatics, played musical instruments, rapped, and acted excellently. There was something almost overwhelming about seeing them perform so well within the detention center itself - we passed through more than one security checkpoint to get to the theater. They actually had doors made out of metal bars. Even more eerie was the fact that everyone performed in masks - only afterwards, during the applause, I realized how young they all were. It was heartbreaking, as trite as that sounds. According to Allegra, Lara's friend, who was the stage manager, most of the kids are the children of immigrants and they got in trouble for theft or drug possession. Surprise surprise, Italy's systemic failures aren't so different from ours at all. Though it did make me wonder if the US government allocates any money for writing and performing arts for incarcerated children.

On a happier note, this is for my fellow cat lovers: One of Lucia's cats, in Venice. Her name is Nina.
Sorry, I had to do it.

Translating cranberries

Happy Thanksgiving weekend. To celebrate my first Thanksgiving outside the US, I've eaten lots all week. And I went to a dinner party on Tuesday night, which I'll use as an excuse to talk about the food here (and how very good it is). This dinner party was held by Piero, who works with two of my office mates. He has a house in the country with cats, dogs, and lots of nature. It's beautiful.

The dinner was held honor of mushrooms that Piero picked in Sardinia in October. Apparently Sardinia is a good place to pick mushrooms, though October is the end of the mushroom season. Luckily, one of our other co-workers has some sort of degree in mushrooms and is the head of the mushroom committee in Bologna (this is apparently a big deal). While climbing the mountains of central Sardinia Piero called this guy on his cell phone for mushroom-picking advice.

There were about seven people at the dinner, give or take Piero's 18 month old son. I was the only attendee with verbal skills who was under the age of 45. At around 7:45 pm we began with platters of cured meat. And bread. And cheese. Vittorio, another office mate, brought bread and wild boar prosciutto, both of which he made at home (!!). Piero also gave us plates of homemade picked olives, onions, and eggplant. My vinegar-loving sister would've gone to heaven. We also had pate, hot pepper spread, sauteed mushrooms on toast, and some other meat spread made of chopped . . . something. About an hour passed and we were still on the appetizers, all made by Piero (with exception of the wild boar business).

Once we had eaten as much as we could, we moved onto the main course, which was pasta with a mushroom sauce made from the aforementioned Sardinian mushrooms (and some milk, garlic, and bacon), made by Piero. This was good. I thought we were nearing the end, but I was wrong. Next came four kinds of cheese and four jams: onion/orange, fig, mint, and orange mustard. Piero made these at home as well.

After this we moved onto the dessert, which was a frozen cake made out of sour cherry jam and gelato. Keep in mind that with every new course, three or four bottles of wine were opened. Three hours had passed. Finally, at 11 pm, we had our after-dinner drinks - blackberry grappa, which was so strong that it made my throat close. In case you were wondering, Piero also made the grappa. I have requested cooking lessons.

Everyone was very intrigued by Thanksgiving, and wanted to know what it was that we used to stuff the bird. It was incredible to them that some people actually make the stuffing outside the bird - in that case, can you still call it stuffing? (According to them, no, you can't.) I tried to explain the Thanksgiving menu, but got stumped on cranberries. There aren't any cranberries in Italy (except, as I later discovered, at Ikea). Eventually we agreed that the only thing anyone knew about cranberries was the Irish band by that name - the one from the mid-90s. So, as far as my dinner companions know, my mother's recipe for stuffing goes something like this: "bread, celery, onion, walnuts, apples, olive oil, and . . . something from that Irish band." (Mom, I know that's incorrect anyway, but I couldn't remember the exact recipe.) I will try to find some cranberries for them when I'm home for Christmas.


Last night I made a dinner for my roommates to commemorate Thanksgiving. No turkey, because turkeys aren't sold here. Lucia told me that it's because Italian ovens are too small for turkeys, and then she opened her arms to represent the girth of a turkey. Anna and I tried to explain that turkeys are not four feet wide, but she didn't believe us. Anyway, to obtain a turkey you have to reserve it from the butcher first, which I like because it implies (in my head, at least) that the butcher will send out a hunting party for you. This is probably not true.

Thanks to Nilgun for my bidet explanation! Italians laugh about bidets too - last night Lucia's mother called to tell her that she was out to dinner with a high school friend last week. And this woman, now a university professor, has beautiful curly hair. Lucia's mother complimented her on it, and her old friend told her that she spends fifteen minutes every morning at the bidet, with ice cold water. She's not washing her head in it, though. But she claims that this makes her hair beautiful. Go figure.

Lunchtime Lessons

After some harassment by my small readership, I've decided to post a little description of what I do at work - please keep in mind that I don't even know what I'm doing yet, so things are a little bit patchy.



I have what's called a formative apprenticeship at Coop Italia, which is one of the largest cooperatives in Italy. It runs a series of supermarkets and "hyper"-markets (where you can buy everything, as in Wal-mart) where it sells many goods that are marked with the Coop label. I'm not sure how the cooperative part works, exactly, but I do know that they work very hard to embrace ethical business initiatives, which is why I'm here. They're also trying to follow the British co-op example by expanding into cell phones and other such things.

As an apprentice, I'm here to learn from them, do general go-fer things as all 22 year olds must, and provide a connection between Coop Italia and Social Accountability International, the labor standard NGO that I worked for in NYC. The building holds 200+ people who do everything from label designing to monitoring dessert production. Who knows what else. So far I've done lots of reading about the history of Coop and of ethical business in Italy. I've translated articles and I've had meetings with people who work in the field of my apprenticeship. I think that my supervisors are going to start steering me towards work on Coop's stance on immigration, which is what I'm really interested in. They're currently embroiled in some issues with migrant tomato pickers in the south - apparently, certain tomatoes, for certain uses, are too soft to be picked by machines, which is where undocumented, exploited immigrants come in. (The story is familiar, but the tomato part - only in Italy.)

The really surreal thing about working here is the surplus of Coop-labeled food in every office. This week I've been eating a lot of cookies for babies (imprinted with ducks and sheep). I also like the food at the lunch room, but unfortunately there's a rift between myself and the serving ladies - it took me two weeks to understand that there are rules concerning lunch, and they are very frustrated. At the beginning I thought that you could take whatever you wanted from the lunch line - but that was because I am a greedy American. In fact, you only get one primi (first course: pasta, soup) and one secondi (second course: meat, vegetables, salad, cheese), and you'd better take one of each or you'll end up hungry. It was very confusing to me, in the beginning, that I couldn't skip the pasta and have the salad and the cheese. But being yelled at in a semi-foreign language in front of the entire lunch line and cafeteria will teach anyone the rules. (And if you want to know what the cafeteria itself is like, imagine your high school lunch room. You know - standing in the middle of a big room full of people, holding a tray, trying to find someone to sit with. Except in this case I don't really know anyone and I'm a little slow on the small-talk.)

On a happier note, the oranges here are amazing. Because they're Sicilian. And Bologna has put up its Christmas decorations, which are very happy and festive, and in true Italian fashion there is absolutely no continuity from street to street.

And a quick anecdote about shopping at the Coop supermarkets: this weekend I saw one of the best gadgets of all time. It works like this: you become a member of the Coop and get a little card, like you would for any supermarket in the States. When you get to the supermarket, you swipe your card at the entrance and you're given a personal scanner that says "Ciao!" to you. You also get a few shopping bags. As you travel around the supermarket, you swipe your purchases as you go, and the little gadget records them. You fill up your bags as you put things into your cart. At the end, you get in line and hand your scanner to the person at the cash register. He or she records the amount, you pay, and you leave. I may be a geek, but that is pretty damn amazing.

Happy almost-Thanksgiving. More about work when I know more myself.

Homebound

My wonderful new apartment, which is more like a house, is comprised of three inhabitants, two cats, and now me. Lucia (Riedi) and Massimo (Bracchitta) own the place. She's completing a joint degree in law and notary (I have no idea why, but in Italy becoming a notary is much more rigorous than in the US, and it takes 6 years to get through the schooling) and he is a regional manager for an insurance company. Massimo told me that he wrote a book about Jews and Baptists in Europe, and he published ten copies. Soon, he says, one of these copies will be mine, as a housewarming present. (Whenever I learn strange things like this I always wonder how much is being lost through the language barrier.) Anyway, Lucia and Massimo are both 33. There's also Anna, who's 20. She's English. She heads to France at the end of January, and I'll get her beautiful room then - it has a terrace and a persimmon tree right outside the window. For now I'm all the way downstairs, in a huge half-basement room that (fingers crossed) will be very nice and cosy once I'm done with it.

I woke up this morning to the most amazing fog - it was the thickest I've ever seen, even in the middle of the city. It even had a smell - very damp and sort of musty. (For some reason it reminded me of a museum, but I couldn't think of which one.) Apparently in the countryside it gets so bad that it's difficult to move around outside. In the car with Lara, on the way to work, I felt very grateful that she knows the way so well. Otherwise we would've gotten lost or killed. And unlike the fog I've seen before, which seemed like a morning-dew type of thing, this actually got worse as the day went on. It's just starting to clear up a little, at 9:00 pm.

Now that I've hit the two-week mark, many pressing questions have emerged and I'd appreciate some answers if anyone has them. The most confounding thing is the bidet. I can't believe that something that is so ubiquitous here - even in public bathrooms! - is something that's never seen in the US. And yes, I do know what it's for, but I still don't understand how exactly it fits into the average Italian's daily routine. It doesn't help that last week one of my coworkers commented that it's strange that Americans shower so much instead of using a bidet. Then I became really confused. Is a bidet a shower substitute? A shower companion? Do people actually use it in public bathrooms? Are Americans perceived as dirty because we don't use them, at least culturally? Can anyone explain this? (Feel free to email me with the answer. But other people might want to know.)

Pig Feet

After seeing 14 apartments I can safely say that the housing market in Bologna is scarier than that in New York City. Potential roommates have ranged from a piano-playing Moroccan barber to a middle-aged female textbook copywriter. And what about the elementary school teacher with an “intolerance” for dairy, the Sardinian sister-engineers, the chain-smoking trio of girls dressed in head-to-toe black (their yapping dog was black too), or the astrophysicist who told me that I didn’t need a window? I’ve almost recovered from the disappointment that ensued after I was rejected by a boy who made me read a page of rules before leaving the apartment: no laundry at night, no cooking with the kitchen door open, always open the bathroom window during and after a poop (well, that wasn’t directly stated, but it’s basically what he said). Let’s not talk about the students who wanted me to pay 500 Euro per month to sleep on their sticky floor. But, now I’m crossing my fingers that all goes well with my favorite, the law student from Venice. She has a cat. (I was hoping for a cat.)

If you ever find yourself in an endless apartment search, the best thing to come out of it (other than an apartment) is a good knowledge of the city. I don’t think I could’ve found a faster way to learn the layout of Bologna. Did you know that there’s a city tax on trash? Or that there’s a transgender member of Italian Parliament? (I didn't learn that from the the apartment search.)

A few days ago I had roasted chestnuts for the first time. They're sold on the street here, all over the place, and you get them in a little paper bag with its own special trash receptacle for the shells. I've heard nuts referred to as meaty before, and chestnuts actually are very meat-like. Yum. I'm not becoming a vegetarian anytime soon.

Still breathing.

Hi again . . . this time from Bologna!

I made it here safely, with everything intact (well, at least the airline found my suitcases after it lost them). Bologna is a beautiful city: lots of cobblestones, old buildings, and fashionable people. It's in a valley, which means that there are big dark green hills on each side and deep pink sunsets at night. And, because of the big university, this place is literally full of students. Cambridge can't compete. About half the city is sort of like the NYU area - it's not technically a campus, but everyone you see there is somehow connected to the school.

Before leaving I read that Bologna is called the "red city" because the buildings are all made out of reddish stone (true) and because of its political history. And, after five days, this has to be the most liberal city I've ever seen. There are signs in the elevators telling you to take the stairs; everyone rides a bike (which you can rent for free from the city center); in much of the city center, only buses are allowed; every morning I see a new protest (Darfur, Iraq, workers' rights) being set up; at work, people grow potted plants in the stairwells of my office building. An added bonus is the cooperative where I work - because it runs a series of supermarkets, and my office-mate is in charge of dairy products, there's a huge fridge in the corner that's full of yogurt, tiramisu, and other yummy things - just help yourself (actually, as I write this, I'm eating tiramisu out of a plastic cup). My mouth dropped when I saw it. Something like that could make anyone love his or her job.

I've also had the fortune of meeting a translator here, named Lara, who has taken me under her wing a bit over the past few days. On Monday I went to her parents' 40th wedding anniversary party, which was an adventure. Lots of eating and toasting of the happy couple! Her whole extended family was extremely warm and welcoming, and fascinated by my height (as is everyone else here). Lara's cousin, Giusi, is 8 and 9/10 months pregnant with a boy, and this resulted in a long conversation about gender behavior in children (Lara and Giusi think girls are better older siblings, I remembered attempts to flush Rosa down the toilet and wasn't so sure).

This morning, I got my first on-site taste of Italian bureaucracy. As a foreigner, I have to have both a visa and a residency permit in order to live in Italy for more than 3 months. This morning I went to the Questura, the police division that does all the immigration stuff, at 8 am and waited in line with lots of impatient non-Italians for an hour and a half. And wow - that office was like a scene in a childrens' book . . . Or a cartoon. Stacks of papers to the ceiling, people yelling (both Questura agents and waiting people, since there's a huge slab of thick glass that cuts the room in half and makes it difficult to hear), babies running around crying (lots and lots of babies, because immigrant parents have to register their Italian-born children there). Naturally, since the office deals with foreigners, none of the agents speak anything but Italian, and nobody in line speaks enough Italian to communicate what they need. For about half an hour I stood behind an unfortunate Bangladeshi couple as they tried to register their newborn twins as Italian citizens. The father handed his documents through the window, the agent yelled through the glass that they were the wrong birth certificates, the twins started crying in their enormous stroller, which the mother started to roll back and forth in order to calm them down. In such a crowded room, a moving stroller can do some damage. Anyway, the whole cycle was repeated four or five times until the poor couple dragged themselves out of there to get the rest of the papers they needed. Needless to say, by the time I got to the head of the line I seriously doubted that my application would be accepted. And . . . it wasn't! Next week I'll experience the whole thing again.

Work so far hasn't been very work-related. Lots of introductions. Everyone wants to know if I have any Italian heritage, and when I say I have a grandfather from the Abruzzo, it's like a revelation. Today a man whom I barely remember meeting started telling me all kinds of facts about "my region" - there's a regional park for the preservation of bears, the capital is the name for an eagle (Aquila), etc. I gave him a blank look (Massachusetts has a bear park?) until he told me that my region was the Abruzzo. Apparently the whole American thing is forgettable.

Okay - last thing - my Italian. Improving very slowly. It's frustrating that comprehension comes so much more quickly than the ability to speak. But immersion (especially by myself) is a strange thing - for the first time in my life, I have not spoken face-to-face with an American for five days.

Finally: I have a cell phone! Here's the number: (011 39) 348-106-6245. Of course, it's not cheap to call it from the States, and it's not cheap for me to call either (it's about 70 cents a minute). But, feel free to call anytime! My incoming calls are free!

Address forthcoming . . . I hope . . .

I'd love any and all news about the elections. And I miss you all SO much.
Lots of love.