Back in the Fold

A long delay in blogging! I’m back in Bologna, with not much changed except the weather. The days are a little longer, but I’ve glimpsed the sun once in the past seven days. Below is a photo of the fog in Milan on the morning of my arrival. On the plane from the US, everyone was literally silent as the pilot began to land; we couldn’t even see the wings of the plane. However, everything proceeded safely, and after my Milan-Bologna flight was cancelled I enjoyed the bizarre logic of Alitalia (which hired a bus to take the place of the plane – only one bus, despite the fact that it had about half the seats of the aircraft and maybe one quarter of the luggage space).

By the way, Italian bus drivers are really skillful. I’ve been riding buses for weeks now and almost every day I gape out the window as the bus misses a person, car, or scooter by inches. No accidents, though. At first I thought the drivers were just lucky, but they must know the dimensions of their buses down to the centimeter.

My return to Bologna has been uneventful. I have given out primarily peanut butter related gifts (crunchy, smooth, Reese’s pieces, peanut butter cups). Peanut butter is an interesting thing to give Italians, many of whom seem to have very particular opinions about flavor and food. For example, breakfast should be sweet pastries or bread with jam, almost always, and eggs are not a breakfast food (American breakfast is the thing I miss most when I’m here). If your plate holds more than one food, eat every thing separately in turn and don’t take bites of each alternately. Once eating my salad and pasta simultaneously at lunch, I was told that I ate like a Japanese or German person (??). If other people think you don’t eat enough or, at least, enough of the “correct” things, you’ll be told. Repeatedly. Not drinking coffee, of course, is seen as appalling and literally impossible – so is drinking coffee with milk after the morning is over. So is tea without lemon. You cannot touch food while giving it to someone else, with some appetizer exceptions, and produce must be extremely clean. I have seen people go to amazing pains to make sure that they don’t touch food with their hands. At the coffee shop near Coop Italia, the baristas wash the lemon before cutting it, and then they wash the slice of lemon again before putting it into my tea (if only I liked tea with lemon). I have yet to see a single person put an un-peeled piece of fruit in his or her mouth. My coworkers are amazing fruit peelers. Of course, these are generalizations that I’m making after spending time with a teeny-tiny fraction of the Italian populace, and may be completely unfounded, but still - I can’t imagine what they think of my manners. I really can’t resist eating different foods together, either.

Anyway, because of peanut butter’s taste, it is regarded with curiosity by those of my coworkers who haven’t tried it before. Vittorio took a peanut butter cup home with him, he told me, and prepared to eat it in the car during his drive (there’s a ton of traffic in the city at night). He was ready for something sweet, and, he says, almost spit it out when he realized that it was “so salty”. In fact, it was saltier than it was sweet, and barely a candy at all. This exchange is probably one of the most strangely surprising ones that I’ve had here. I can understand having cultural misunderstandings over so many things – politics, social class, appearance, racism, immigration, you name it. But I have never in my life thought of peanut butter as a salty food. It’s sweet! In my opinion, peanut butter itself, non-peanut-butter-cupped, is practically a candy. And it makes sense that taste buds would be cultural. What surprises me even more is my own surprise – the fact that the taste of peanut butter is so ingrained into my brain that I can’t even taste it objectively.

Actually – in regards to the above paragraph about Italians and food preferences – I can say for certain that although these particularities can be extremely baffling to an outsider, they aren’t shared by everyone. Case in point: an exchange I overheard between a Coop Italia manager (Franco) and his secretary (Chiara) on Wednesday.
Franco: Do we have any candy?
Chiara: Yes. [She gets a bag of hard candy for him and gives him a piece.]
Franco: [After a moment.] Ugh! What’s wrong with this?
Chiara: What do you mean?
Franco: It’s sweet! It’s sugary!
Chiara: [After staring open-mouthed.] I’m sorry, have you ever had candy before? Isn’t sugar the whole point?
Franco: This is terrible! It’s sugary! [This was repeated several times.]
Chiara: I don’t know what to tell you! That’s what candy’s like.
Franco: Don’t we have any good candy? I hate this!
Chiara gives up at this point and goes back to work. Franco finishes the candy.

And, on second thought, Reese’s pieces are starting to taste pretty salty.