Rome, as promised

I never finished my story about Rome.

The second and third day of my trip were significantly better than the first. I left the hostel early Saturday morning to walk to meet Virginia. We spent the day touring the city Virginia style - perfect. Espresso and cornetto (croissant) as the first thing. An open air flea market in the rain. A walking tour of her favorite cathedrals. Across town to Vatican City, where I saw San Pedro and the Swiss Guard and everything else. I didn't go inside, which maybe I regret a little tiny bit. No Sistine Chapel. But I don't really regret it, because I had a wonderful day laughing and reminiscing with Virginia. We went to a restaurant owned by her friend for a fantastic lunch buffet. Exhausted, we hiked it to her beautiful apartment in a wealthy area built up in the 1920s.

At any point I expected to head back to the hostel for the night. I would meet up with the Australians, I hoped, and pretend that I enjoyed myself as I tagged along on their nightlife tour. At the last minute, however, plans changed and I followed the Dao where it led me. Virginia and her husband took me to a dinner party with their group of intimate friends - all rich Roman socialites. One family owns a chain of shoe stores, one runs the restaurant, one couple were both famous models, Virginia's husband himself is a city architect. Not the elite, but definitely wealthy and happy to be in Roma. They welcomed me with warm friendliness like I hadn't seen even in Milan. They teased me for living in Milano, saying "that's not Italy. you must come to the south" and promising to introduce me to their single sons, all doctors and lawyers or their counterpart. We were served by a Filippino girl. I wondered if it is weird for Virginia, a Filippino herself, to be on the other side of society from most of her countrymates. In Milan I saw a lot of Filippinos working as nannies for the youngest of children and the oldest of grandparents. Virginia is in her element, however, and perfectly poised as she relaxes with her eight best friends.

I loved it, but I was the one who fell asleep on the couch at the ungodly hour of midnight. Virginia says that if you are the first to leave one of their dinner parties, they all talk about you after you've gone, but there was no saving me after two nights without significant sleep.

They let me sleep in their daughter's bed - lofted a few feet from the ceiling and graffitied with all her friends' names and love notes.

There was a hail storm that night, but I slept right through it.

The next morning I shared a coffee with Paul's mother who lives inside her room in the small apartment. The streets were full of inches of hail piled up like autumn leaves in the gutters and curbs. Virginia and I adventured to the Capitoline museum, where some of the most famous Roman, Etruscan, and Italian art is held. We saw the ruins buried forty feet under the current street level. We saw Nero, and Marcus Aurelius, and Romulus and Remus sucking the wolf's teat, and some of the best trompe l'oeil sculpture I've ever seen. I again, like in Florence, saw in person the works I've learned about.

Greek pottery - We learned the difference of black on red versus red on black, but it all looked the same in the textbook photographs until I could get my nose a few inches from the clay and see the scraped away bits and the painted on bits and truly relish their delicate beauty.

Humanist sculpture - I never fully understood what it meant for art to be humanist, how the Roman was revived in the Renaissance and the intervening Medieval art was truly different. In a hall of sculpture, however, where I could feel (even without touching) each muscle fiber and twitch of flesh carved into the marble, it all made sense. The importance of the human body - and the human mind attached to it - impressed itself upon me intensely. A slide in art class cannot convince the viewer of the time and effort it takes to wrestle a human form out of solid rock. In real life, however, you understand that what deserves this much time, attention, effort, expense - that reflects what is important to the ones creating, funding, and viewing the work.

Museums quickly overwhelm me. By the end I was ready to leave and find a bar for a cappuccino. Perfect.

A final tour of - oh shoot, i can't remember the name of the famous squares we visited - anyway, all the sites you are supposed to see in Rome. She took me to her favorite street, where all the artists live (the rich artists who've made it big). She used to tutor in English the modern aristocrat who owns most of the street. I loved seeing the pride she had in her own city. The day rendered me speechless, and I'm afraid Virginia misunderstood it as disinterest, but I tried to show her the rapture on my face.

Back again at Virginia's, we watched a football match on tv. It was Rome playing (I don't know against whom) and when they scored, we could open the windows and hear the cheers erupt from the stadium a mere kilometer away.

Paul gave me Grappa to try, which I am embarrassed to say I didn't like at all. I suppose my palette is not yet that refined.

Just as the night was turning dark, we went out in the car - Paul, Virginia, and Alison their daughter - for a driving tour of Rome. They wanted to hit the sights that weren't seen by most tourists because they could only be accessed by car. We went up to a mountain over the city and saw the view of the city. There was a peephole in the gate, through which St. Peters glowed like a golden diamond in a cerulean evening sky. The Garden of Oranges. Smaller, older cathedrals where I could see the simplicity that makes the famous ones ornate by comparison. They treated me so well.

Driving around the Coliseum in their car, I was happy.

Finally we went to a little (and expensive) Italian restaurant where they treated me to a final Roman meal before dropping me at the train station. I waited a few hours in the station before finally catching my 1130 train home.

Mushroom of the Day

Did I ever share this one? This is the balcony of my apartment.

Not Quite Gregory Peck

I took the overnight train to Rome. It was the cheapest, and also afforded me the most time in the city. I left after my last class Thursday night and caught the 11:20 train.

The train originates from Milan, so it was sitting in the station well in advance of departure time. I bought my ticket, said goodbye to Valentina, and climbed aboard. This time I knew to look for my reserved seat. When I went to Bologna, I didn’t have a reserved (prenotato) spot, so I had settled in to an empty spot only to skitter out of it one stop later to let the person holding the correct ticket sit. I spent that ride on a jump seat in the corridor, which was acceptable for two hours, but not for eight to Rome!

Another woman boarded the same carriage as me, and we made our way in the dark to the same box. She said something to me that I didn’t catch, so I just smiled and settled into seat number 63. She pulled out a massive camera and started taking pictures of the platform out the window. I wanted to talk to her, ask her about photography, reveal that I was a kindred soul, but nervousness about speaking Italian kept me silent. I had that internal battle: Get over yourself! Who cares if you aren’t fluent; just speak! For all I knew, she spoke excellent English. That wasn’t uncommon, and her mannerism suggested education.

She put her camera away.

It was very cold on the train, and dark. I hoped that once the time for departure came, some heat would come on. I settled into my winter layers and watched the steam swirl out of my mouth into the box. The only light was from the platform outside.

Finally something fell into place and it was the right time to talk.

“Dove vai?” I asked. “A Roma?”

-Yes, to Rome.

-Me too.

-I usually don’t take this train. I usually take a faster one. I don’t like this one because it’s dodgy. The people are more “schifo.” There are “giapese.”

“Giapese?” I repeated, not understanding the word.

She looked at me differently then. “Non sei italiana?”

-No, American.

She attempted her English. “Bad person. Persons. Bad Persons.”

“Ho capito.” -I understand.

It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment to worry about taking the cheapest train, one that went overnight and took twice as long as the faster Eurostar trains. Of course anyone who had the money would avoid it. The difference to the faster train was only about 20, 25 euros. I looked out the box at watched the people passing. It was either indicative of the night gloom or the class of people, but everyone who passed had dark skin.

Italians are racist. Even my friends will explain very carefully the problems of people from Morocco, Egypt, Africa, Turkey, and so on. Some think the Africans are the worst. Others the Egyptians. There are a lot of legal and illegal immigrants here seeking profitable work or asylum from a hostile government. One coworker explained to me that since the numbers of immigrants have increased in the past years, safety has decreased. She has put iron bars over her windows for fear of robbery. Over and over I hear the words, “Be careful.” In the business English course I teach we discussed the merits versus problems of immigration. The more xenophobic of the group said that immigration was bad, caused problems, and should be more restricted. The middle road said that people should be able to come work for only a brief time before taking the ideas they’ve learned back to their own countries. The most liberal said that immigrants were acceptable because they filled the job gap, taking the jobs that educated Italians didn’t want. The opening topic had asked, “Does immigration help Italy learn new things that will help the country in a more global world?” Not one in the class caught the idea that immigrants might actually bring something of value, something unattainable in any other way, to the country. Immigrants are either to be tolerated or restricted, never embraced.

The scary thing is, I find myself adopting their attitude a little bit. Not much—I am not reverting to a more primitive mindset—but as I learned in Romania, sometimes these stereotypes are based in merit. (How sad I was to discover that the large majority of gypsies actually are thieves, beggars, and terrible trespassers of human rights.) And if the darker skinned people are generally of lower class and ostracized by broader society, are not those the very people who turn to less respectable behavior, either to get what they lack or as a self-fulfilling prophecy? It’s a sad fact of life that our natural instinct is to stereotype, a vestigial reflex from the days when the world was significantly more dangerous than it is today and such generalization saved lives. For example, when one lion has an appetite, it’s best to assume that all that race are voracious man-eaters. If one man of ------- nationality heckles me so much that I have to run away in fear, isn’t the safest thing to assume that anyone from the same culture may feel the same prerogative? Oh, this is a huge topic that I cannot enter into too deeply here… On the other hand, I love the chance to listen to all the African languages that one can hear on the metro, or Italian spoken with that chocolate-song African accent.

Back to the narrative. The hour grew closer to departure and people started to enter the train. The Italian girl and I talked about her photography; that is, she talked and I listened, with a few halting questions. She is trying to break into the Milanese art world, though I didn’t have the language to ask about her success so far or how she went about it. The conversation turned to art and the respective benefits of Renaissance versus Modern art. Soon our box was full, and it turned out that she didn’t have the prenotazione, so the ticket-holder booted her from the seat and she left to find a different location. She looked at me wistfully as she left.

“Ciao.” Her voice carried a tone in that one word that said: “Well, it was a nice idea while it lasted. Now we both have to brave the schifos on this train without the tiny safe friendship we have found in each other.”

“Ciao.” I wished it had occurred to me to say, “Mi dispiace,” which translates as “I’m sorry” but really means “It displeases me.” English speakers tend to overuse the phrase in cases where an Italian would say a form of “Excuse me” instead. Judging from the TV and movies I watch, “mi dispiace” is hardly used.

I intentionally did not look to determine the skin tone of my new cabinmates nor let their maleness bother me. There was one other woman, presumably Italian, asleep in the far corner, but without her I might have been tempted to change seats. I used to not be so nervous about these matters, but a few events of late have made me more cautious.

No matter. I arrived safely (and dry-mouthed) in Rome just as the sun was coming up the next morning. Sleeping on a train is a lot like sleeping on a plane: nearly impossible. A train is worse, however, for although the legroom is severely restricted in both cases, in a plane you face only the back of the next chair instead of the legs of the opposite person. I’m sure I kicked the man across the compartment from me. More than once, most likely.

I checked in at the Hostel, and could see immediately that it didn’t hold a candle to the one in Florence, but there was potential. No one was about at that hour in the morning, so I chose a bed and then planned my route for the day. Off I went on my adventure, alone.

It was raining.

Maybe I can blame my malcontent on the rain or the shoddy sleep from the night before, but in truth I think I must blame it on loneliness. The novelty of travel has worn off. I am always lonely. Being lonely during the week used to be okay because I had the weekends and travel! exploration! to fulfill me, but the fiasco of Modena and Bologna went a long way in exhausting that energy in me. Here I was in Rome, the city of cities, the one that is on everyone’s list, the epicenter of the world as it once stood, and I completely lacked interest. I wandered towards the first destination on my map and took a detour when the Coliseum rose up on my left. The Coliseum! The ancient Roman Forums! How sad it made my heart to see the ruins as just more ruins, a few stones left bound together by slowly disintegrating mortar. The stone carvings on the grand arches melted off in the rain, ever so slowly, as they have been melting off for the last two thousand years.

I pretended, hoping that I could fool myself into a spark of happiness. Usually it works this way. I wasn’t sad, nor depressed, nor UNhappy, particularly, just not… happy. Not as excited as I would like to be when in Rome. After a few pounding rain showers had drenched me, the waterproofing on my skicoat was starting to fail and the puddles crept up my pant legs, I went back to the hostel. It was only about three thirty, but I was done. Maybe after a nap, some dry clothes, and curling up in the hostel, I would meet some fellow travelers (please please please, I begged) and be refreshed to paint the town at night.

The hostel didn’t fail me. On the common shelf I found a Jasper Fforde, the author recently recommended to me by Stuart in Florence. It was tucked in right next to Rob Bell’s Purple Elvis. Small world, this. I tucked into the book and a margarine roll packed from home with equal appetite, curled up in a chair in the front hallway, there not being a common room.

A Swedish guy checked in during the afternoon, and I smiled with hope and friendliness, but he merely mumbled “Hi” and then locked himself into his room. As the afternoon progressed, however, people started to congregate. Eventually I entered into conversation with the deskie, his friend, and another guy who was a brand new deskie in the lodge. Two Aussies also checked in, but then they left just the two of them, so my optimism of also including them was dashed.

The new deskie was from Manchester, and I could barely understand him when he talked. At first I had difficulty placing his brogue because it sounded to my untuned ear sometimes Australian, sometimes Irish, Welsh, and so on. If he were one of my students, I would be correcting him every few words. He was a right lad at that, and the more his adventures unfolded, the less I thought of him. A wanderer, like me, whose travels have taken him to Spain and even the same city in Romania where I lived, Timisoara. I thought he was late twenties, but soon he revealed to be the same age as me, within a few months. He described life in Oldham, his home near Manchester. The second most violent city in Great Britain, after some backwater in Scotland, he thought. Impossible to go to a night in the pub without engaging in a brutal street fight at the end of it. Beer was only served in plastic because the glass kept getting smashed into people’s faces.

“I would never go whiv a girl from me’ome town,” he said. “Because every one of ‘em ‘as ‘ad ten a me friends’ cocks in ‘er mouff.”

“I would never go whiv a foreign girl,” he said. “Because it’s no’ right, you know? I mean, when you’re layin’ in bed af’er, wha’ ‘o you say?”

“I’m no’ racist,” he said. “But—”

—and for the next three hours I had to listen to his bigotry as he delineated which people have less value and why. My pleas to change the subject only diverted him for a few minutes at a time.

When he lived in Spain he made his money as a meathead. He went to apartments filled with squatters and threatened to bash their heads in if they didn’t vacate the premises. For this he collected fat commissions from the owners and real estate agents who could rerent the property with the deadbeats gone. When he lived in Romania he had all his drinks paid for him by his pickpocket friends who thought nothing of dropping stolen cash on a house round. His rich local girlfriend footed the rest of the bill, but he left her and the country because, as he said, “It never works ou’, you know?”

A lad, a cad, a chav.

He started talking about something (I hardly knew what; I was trying not to listen because I could feel that his words were poison). “It don’ bovver me none,” he says. “It don’ bovver me.”

Ha! Just like the chavs on YouTube. “I ain’t bovvered,” they say. So at the end of the day I was culturally enriched afterall. I hav’ met me a right well chav. (Don’t call him that to his face though, for heaven’s sake.)

“All me relatives ha’ been inside,” he said, and he drops enough hints about his past that I don’t care to ask or piece together the gaps. Clearly he is in trouble, and in debt, but not to the government, to friends. He’s running from ex-girlfriends smattered across the continent and creditors who prefer smashing his face in to charging higher interest rates.

Most recently he was vivisected by a meat cleaver.

“The bloke who di’ me in with the cleaver were black,” he said. “But I don’ hol’ it against all black people. I got me lotsa black friends a’home.”

He moved to Rome for no reason accept to escape whatever he wanted to escape in Manchester. After two days he’s decided he doesn’t like Rome and the next day he’s going back to Spain to see if he can start up his meathead job again.

“Goo’ money in it, ain’t there tho? An’ bloody fun.”

I think he’s so used to charming girls (he was built like Daniel Craig) that he had no idea the expanse of the grimace I was making inside. Only my starvation for people of any sort, especially native English speakers, even his sort of busted English, made me tolerate him at all. We went back to the hostel and found the Australians playing cards in the hall. We all shared a few beers. Italian beers are all 66cl (that is, a deuce) and Birra Moretti is not half bad. The Australians were young, part of a large party of classmates all spread out across the continent, weaving their ways back and forth where the wind blew them. They invited me to join them and several more friends coming into town the next day for a wild night on the town. It sounded great to me. Perfect. Anything to avoid spending a night alone and bored in the hostel.

When the cute Australian with the tongue piercing started discussing drug cocktails with the Manchester chav, which eventually turned to a debate on the best methods by which to sell cocaine, I knew I was out of my element. Fortunately no one actually had any chemicals in their possession, or I might have lost my party to the white lady instead of simply the fatigue of three in the morning after three, no four, pints of beer.

Thank goodness the chav didn’t come on any stronger. Not because I might have acquiesced, but because I didn’t want to make things complicated. When his conversation started drifting towards the merits of one-night stands in his home town, I saw my avenue.

“Funny,” I said. “My friends at home don’t do that. We don’t sleep with a person just for one time. It’s not how we roll, I guess.”

“Pi’y,” he said. “I miss it. Just ki’ing.” He used that one a lot: just kidding. As if that absolved him for the unsavory fact he’d just revealed about himself. As a preface, “I’m not racist, but…” and the siffix, “just kidding.” All his bases were covered (but none of mine, thank you very much. It’s not how I roll.)

Within a few seconds, “You must be tired.”

“Yup. Good night.” There was no question he was getting nothing and the night was over.

…to be continued…

Mushroom of the Day

fungus in the foreground; roman ruins in the back

Mushroom of the Day

This tiny speciman was in the paving stones at a monastery in Bergamo, Italy.

Victorians, Post-modern architecture, Ikea, and Kung Fu. Not a bad night, if I do say so myself.

Tonight we went to a bar in Corso Sempione, near the park in Milan. The bar was an Indian bar, and it was beautiful, with elaborately carved wooden doors and golden pictures of elephants on the walls. We sat in a red, turquoise and blue tent to take our drinks. I wanted to order something off the “Indian Drinks” menu, but they had run out of the Indian liquor, so I ordered a Long Island Iced Tea instead. I am constantly ordering mixed drinks even though I know I don’t like them. I much prefer beer. Anyway, it wasn’t bad.

The night was that perfect temperature where it’s cold but not too cold. It felt like the wind was blowing warmer air into the night, but Federico tells me it’s going to snow. Tomorrow night we are going to the Chinese restaurant and wouldn’t it be perfect if it were snowing. I chatter along in Italian, pausing now and then to let Valentina help me with vocabulary. I know my grammar is awful, and I use that to my advantage in telling bizarre jokes. The jokes don’t have to be funny, but because I am clearly poking fun at my own ineptitude, everyone enjoys the comedic relief.

The area around Corso Sempione was built during the same time as the park and the aquarium, during that wonderful late-Victoria era that I love so much. The houses drip with an art nouveau sensibility—square and tall and with tall, narrow windows. The period has been associated with a stiff collar and stiff upper lip, but in the details of these houses we can see the truth of the aesthetic. The ornate window irons are not so formal and symmetrical as the Elizabethan, or even early Victorian, periods. Today we insist that ornamentation like this is formal, stodgy even, but there was a time when oriental rugs harkened to lush opium dens and hedonistic harems rather than our grandmother’s parlor. The patterns are inspired by leaves and vines, wrought into man-made materials, as if the wild lustfulness of nature could be captured in the windows and ushered into the house.

The Victorians planted aspens throughout their cities, planted rolling parks in the midst of their new industrial centers and populated them with quaking trees. Aspens may be planted in rows, but they nevertheless grow in a twisted dance. Their leaves may look like plate gold, but they twist and spin and show all their colors, colors which are reflected in the speckled smooth bark of their trunks.

Last weekend I went to Bologna and in the park were fantastic ferocious statues from the same period. There were two of lions and their prey. One showed the lion, his phallic tail stretching straight up behind him, snarling over the great body of a bull beneath him. The other showed a lion (phallic tail long-since broken away) battling a serpent with evil teeth over the victory of a massive mountain goat. Half the snake’s head had crumbled, but a full set of iron teeth remained. The other two statues were of busty mermaids in sensual, homoerotic (can we use that word for women?) poses, looking like stone representations straight from a Mucha painting. Their hair swirled around their nipples and the fullness of their flesh. Everything was pockmarked and vaguely green with a pervasive fungal life form.

In Parco Sempione is the Aquarium, built in 1906, with the hippo’s head spouting water into a tiled pool with poi fish and lily pads. The decorative tile around the perimeter of the building echoes the sensibility of the posh neighborhood it was built for.

I eat up the ornamentation, I who usually snub my nose at formal decoration. But the details here reveal whimsy. The artistry and revelry, which we now assume the Victorians brutally repressed, is revealed at every corner. Here, for example, is a fence in which every rung ends at a different height in a fantastical curlicue. Here is a white box of a mansion with a fantastic balcony busting with great drooping plants like it’s a portal to a tropical world. Even the lower level sports marvelous germanium plants—that red blossom that I once associated with domesticity, thanks mostly to New England watercolors, but now I see as a wild red-headed vixen in the midst of a grey city.

If I were in Grand Rapids, I would host a party. Art Nouveau Party, I would call it.

“Come celebrate those twenty years (give or take a decade on either end) from 1890-1910. Come dressed as your favorite buxom Greek goddess (if Mucha is your preference) or as your friendly Victorian couple on holiday (if Talouse Latrec is more your style). Come as Sarah Bernhardt or Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Come as a Baudelaire adventurer, eagerly conquering in the name of England, God, or Science. Come as a Bohemian, emerging from the darker alleyways of Paris or Prague. Come celebrate that, for the first time in human history, we have money to spend. Come pour green into your drink, whatever it may be, and pretend it’s absinthe. Come commune with those people who pretend to be sober at work and keep their private lives hidden behind tall, thin, iron-barred windows. Come and make merry, for tonight the show must go on.”

That’s what I would say.

We drove away from the neighborhood of dreams and on through the city. The last beautiful thing I saw out my window was the porticoed Italian mansion with Michelangelo’s great horse rearing on copper legs in front.

Then we passed the stadium, which looks like a monument to communist-era architecture. An unwitting monument, the type that thinks it protests cement soviet blocs by using cement to make turrets instead. Great round, striped turrets that were either parking garages or nothing at all except a pitiful post-modern attempt at design.

“When was this built?” I asked.

“The early nineties, I think.”

Of course. I had guessed a few years earlier, before the fall of the wall, but the early nineties were the same. The cement of cities was upheld as gritty reality. That proletariat, industrial glorification is so communist in origin, yet there we were as “free western countries” promoting the exact same aesthetic. It makes me shudder as much as the green-tinted glass, brick and exposed metal beam omnipresent CAD-program aesthetic of today. In 2002, my high school was featured in an architectural magazine for it’s cutting-edge design. The library which faces the entrance drive is reminiscent of a lantern shape, green oxidized exposed metal making up the bone structure for the large glass windows and ligaments of brick. By the time I left college in 2008, every new bank, hospital and office park in Grand Rapids utilized the exact same idea. Puke.

Since arriving in Italy I have visited my first Ikea. This experience would be almost exactly the same anywhere in the world, but I had to come to Italy to finally discover the joy of mass-produced homeware fashion. At least here is something we can’t blame on the Americans. The Swedes are to blame, although we can always point to Ford or McDonalds as the originators of the cookie cutter model that has been applied so ubiquitously. Many thoughts (probably not original ones) ran through my head as I followed the school of shoppers through the store’s current. Is Ikea bad? Is it wrong to have our aesthetic handed to us on a plate? I found myself attracted to many things in that store. Was I attracted because Ikea has hit on the common current aesthetic and now offers it to us at affordable prices? Or has Ikea in fact /created/ this aesthetic, which has pilfered into my brain because it’s on tv and in my friends’ houses? If Ikea didn’t create it, then some other designer did. Is there a problem with that? Is a designer for Ikea no less an artist? Must everyone create their own living aesthetic instead of picking and choosing from those offered commercially? Is it even possible to live outside of a commercial identity?

As I said, these aren’t original questions, but there they were in my head. I have an itch when it comes to aesthetic tyranny. We can’t escape it. What the stores tell us to like, we like. At least those chains like Ikea, Pottery Barn or Anthropologie (oooh, I love their aesthetic) have an intentional aesthetic. At least there is recognition of the artistry of life. What’s worse is the tyranny of aesthetic that we experience every day without even being aware: the color and font choices in advertisements, for example, affect how we think and view the world. Advertisements, at their core, are intended to manipulate. Thus, for the last 100 years (since the period I have already exalted), our social aesthetic has been moved forward primarily by manipulation, sometimes really shitty manipulation at that.

I suppose that for this reason, someone has argued that the impressionists were truly the only artists unaffected by manipulation. Prior to that, it was religious purposes. Afterwards, it was the bas-cultural trends. I’m sure I don’t agree with this at all, but whatever. It’s something to think about.

After the bar in Milan we drove to Andrea’s house and watched Kung Fu Panda. I think there must have been a drug in my Long Island Iced Tea, because I felt sloshy-headed yet somehow hyper-attuned to everything. The daoist philosophy shining in the movie was reassuring, even if it was a cartoon.

As I’m applying for internships and jobs back in the States, I find a lot of solace in stoicism. By non-resistance, my path will take its natural course. By trusting in God, I know that He will bring me to the right place. By working hard to follow every opportunity that seems good, not getting too attached to any particular one, and leaving decision-making until the time when decisions must be made, I can balance fierce excitement about my potential futures with calm reassurance that what will be will be.

And all these thoughts thanks to an Iced Tea. I wonder what the Indian liquor would have done?

Some Top Choice Awards

My current favorite breakfast: Gorgonzola dolce and honey on toast and a double espresso.

My current favorite appetizer: Artichoke tapenade and Monte Veronese cheese on bread accompanied by Green olives (hold the pimento) and Italian red wine.

My current favorite fruit: Artisan pear served with a butter syrup.

My current favorite city in Italy: Florence. Not very original, I know, but I simply had so much fun there. And it was beautiful. And I felt such a strong artistic spirit there, something that is just… missing… in Milan. Turin is in second place, by the way. The Slow Food movement has captured my attention – especially when enjoyed in the city that founded Martini, solid chocolate, the chocolate-hazelnut combo, and (drum roll please) TicTacs.

My current favorite pastime: trying to make other people jealous, apparently. My cousin called me out on this – but then consented me bragging rights since I am, afterall, living in Italy. I mean, why am I here if not to earn bragging rights, vero? Ok, so this would all be worth it even if Facebook and blogs didn’t exist, even if I could tell nobody about my experiences, ever; but spreading the joy of my current experience sure helps. ^_^

I think I want to go to a disco on Friday. I was going to go to Rome this weekend, but Valy and I rearranged my schedule so that I can go to the English Dinner on Saturday and Rome some other weekend. That’s the last major city to check off my list. There are still a lot of places I would like to see and explore, of course, but I simply /have/ to see Rome.

How to make Pumpkin Pie from Scatch. In Italy.

1. Brag to all your friends about how yummy pumpkin pie is. Get roped into making some for the Halloween party.
2. Explain to everyone three times that pumpkin pie is indeed a sweet and cannot be served as a main course.
3. Buy zucca from the store. “Zucca” is the translation of “pumpkin,” so even though it’s a different shape (and green on the outside), assume it will come out just fine. Don’t expect to find it in a can.
4. Removed the seeds from the quartered zucca. Try not to fling them all over your apartment in the process.
5. Boil or bake the zucca until the flesh comes off the skin easily. Remove the skin when cool enough to handle.
6. Puree the cooked zucca with a fork until it is a uniform, smooth consistency. Set aside.
7. They don’t sell pie crust in Italy, so you must make it from flour and margarine. Find a recipe online and follow it as best as you can. It’s surprisingly easy, and fun to get your hands into.
8. Put the finished dough into the fridge. Spend an hour picking pie dough bits off the rug. Next time don’t let it be quite so much fun.
9. The next day, you are ready to make the pie. You will need: zucca puree, pie dough, pie pan, sugar, egg, evaporated milk, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice.
10. Set the oven to 400 degrees F. This is probably 215 degrees Celsius.
11. Roll out the pie dough. If you don’t have a rolling pin, a wine bottle (preferably empty) works fine. Use plenty of flour to keep it from sticking. Sneak tastes of the dough.
12. There are no pie pans in Italy with angled sides. A torte or cake pan with 90 degree sides will suffice. Carefully transfer the crust to the pan and flatten it down. Using your thumb, flute the edges attractively.
13. Mix the filling.
14. There’s no evaporated milk in Italy. You can make it by preparing powdered milk using fresh milk instead of water. If you don’t know this, thicken some cream with flour and let it simmer a while until it gets to roughly the right consistency. Do this ahead of time so it is cool when you are ready to make the pie.
15. There’s no allspice or powdered ginger either. Substitute cloves. Don’t worry if you have to grind the cloves yourself; just pick out the largest pieces and use the finer ones in your mix.
16. Relish the chance to grate fresh nutmeg instead of using stale powder from a shaker.
17. Stir everything into the zucca and then pour it into the crust.
18. Bake 15 minutes, then reduce temperature to 350 degrees F (175C?) for another 45-60 minutes.
19. Serve chilled. Don’t worry if the crust flops; that’s because there wasn’t an angled pie pan. Don’t worry if it comes out a rather nuclear greenish-orangeish-yellowish color; it will still taste delicious.
20. Explain to everyone three times that no, this is not pumpkin cake. Because it has a crust, we call it pie.
21. Note that it does not pair well with Tiramisu.
22. Enjoy! Happy Halloween!

Mushroooom

I love outdoor markets. They are so normal here. Nothing special. One on every corner. Love it!

Recently I have been up to everything.

A brief overview:

Last weekend I went to Florence. It was a fantastic trip: excellent to get out of the rain into some sunshine, met some fun people, saw some of the most beautiful (and famous) art on earth. Did some sketching and thinking and overall it was very refreshing. Envigorating, even.

(Recently I’ve had several conversations about the merits of creating new words or spellings to better suit the meaning. Can you find the “error” in the last paragraph?)

Getting to and from Florence was a bit of an adventure, but that story will have to wait for another day.

The next day my sister arrived from London to visit me. Hooray! Of course, on that day there was a TRANSPORTATION STRIKE (sciopero) all over Italy. Karen arrived at the Central Train Station at 11, and I finally arrived three hours later (after walking, biking, bussing, and hitchhiking to get there!) at two, even though I left my house at 9:30. Then we had to walk halfway across the city to get to a working Metro station to take us home. So our first day was cut a little short.

Nevertheless! The next day the transportation was back on line, and we were off to Torino for a day of Food Tourism (thanks Mom and Dad!).

A Slow Food feast, a day of sightseeing, and an authentic apperativo later, we were back on the train to Rho.

The next day we saw Milan. I was excited about getting up to the top of Il Duomo, where we went together as girls, but it was raining too hard to make the 10 Euro investment worth it. Bummer. Instead we wandered past La Scala opera house and to Castello Sforzesco. A Florentine man gave us his museum tickets, so we checked out the gallery of antique instruments. And also we went to the Aquarium.

I assume there are pictures, but all on Karen’s camera, because the batteries I bought at the euro store (yes, just like a dollar store) didn’t work even for one minute.

Today I am off to Modena and then on to Bologna for some more food tourism.

Mushroom of the Finally Updated

i don't think i've posted this one before.....

Edible one of the Day

Too bad they're so expensive - 25 Euro per kilogram

In other news, last night I had Polenta with a red wine a mushroom sauce - mushrooms hand collected by Valentina's uncle. As Valy's mother said, "Tonight, you die."

HOW TO COOK ON A BUDGET. IN ITALY.

Ingredients: What you already have in your flat. Broccoli.

1. Mince the onions. To mince is to chop as small as possible. As you ball your eyes out, regret the conspicuous absence of a food processor.

2. Put the minced onion in a pot over low heat with a small amount of olive oil. If you happen to add vinegar by mistake because your cute containers for oil and vinegar look exactly the same, nevermind because the vinegar taste will evaporate.

3. Meanwhile, mince the garlic and add it to the onion. Every kitchen on a budget must stock onions and garlic, as these provide a base of flavor for everything.

4. Cut the stalk (ie stem) off the broccoli and mince it as well. Add it to the pot. If you have a second stalk of broccoli, you must also mince and add it, no matter that your hand is getting sore from all the mincing. You are on a budget, so you must not let anything go to waste. You need those vitamins!

5. Once everything is in the pot, add a generous dose of salt, some pepper, and enough water to cover the vegetables. Let simmer until everything gets nice and mushy.

6. This will take a while, so now is the perfect time of open your delicious bottle of wine. Wine? you say, But I thought I was on a budget? Well, yes, but while in Italy there is a rule that you must drink Italian wine as often as possible. And we MUST follow the rules. Besides, at only two or three euros a bottle, even a girl on a budget can afford to treat herself now and then.

7. Stir the pot frequently. Add more water is necessary. Marvel a the delightful chartreuse color it’s turning. DON’T think about that reminds you of a drink you once had with a boy you once knew.

8. When the vegetables are sufficiently mushy, chop the crown (dark green tasty part) of the broccoli and add. You can try to mash the veggies first to get a smoother consistency, but this doesn’t work very well, gets rather messy, and as such, isn’t recommended.

9. Add half a box or less of “panne per cucinare” (cream for cooking) which is, as far as you can tell, milkfat in a 200mL tetrapack. You just added about 26grams of fat, but you don’t care, because when you’re on a diet, you need all the calories you can get. If you happen to have an open container of milk you are trying to use up, add some to the pot. Otherwise, water is sufficient.

10. If the soup is too think for your taste, add 1tablespoon of flour to some cold water or milk, whisk till dissolved, and pour into the soup.

11. Bring the soup to a boil and it’s finished. Top with parmesan cheese (no cheddar in Italy, cowboy). Pour yourself another glass of wine (Hey, they’re small). And… Buon Appetito!

and Wow.

So I'm a little behind the times, but I just noticed that Kathy Hodge actually commented on the post I made about her blog.

In celebration, here is a random mushroom link. These guys know their stuff. I'd never heard of Reishi mushrooms before. Their site not only offers links to their store but also growing techniques (including starter kits) and a wealth of articles about medicinal uses of fungi.

On the mushroom note, the other day I was in a mall and there was a big stand advertising "E Tiempo di Funghi!" Time for mushrooms, indeed, and there were flats of the most beautiful chanterelles I'd ever seen, as well as button mushrooms that looked as white as the moon. How I wished I had my camera so I could share the lovely image! I hope to find more mushrooms at the market downtown soon enough...

Pow.

**disclaimer: Usually I write about my own life in a bizarre twist of the present tense, because that's how it makes sense to me. In the following text I tried to stick to the more conventional method of story-telling -- fixing it squarely in the past tense.**

I felt a little bit of a headache spreading slowly across my shoulders, a persistent strain that was becoming common to my afternoons. It didn’t have all the tense pressure of a caffeine headache, but I thought a cup of tea might help. Give the caffeine time to settle into my deepest muscle fibers before going to the afternoon preschool class.

Caffeine is a fierce lover. Starting the morning with a cup of coffee is, as I often explained to my non-addict friends, the simplest way to ensure a good day. With caffeine I was alert, pleasant-tempered, ready to face any challenge. All coffee-drinkers know the other side of that coin, however, and collectively we shudder with fear at a day without the drug.

It was during my last year of college that I started drinking daily coffee. Initially I could overcome morning grogginess without it, especially since I usually didn’t have my first cup till almost noon. That meant I could be distracted from procuring coffee. At that time I was still a novice. I didn’t yet think of myself as a coffee-drinker, had not yet accepted the title for myself, and as yet did not always act as a responsible coffee-drinker will act: eyes on the goal.

Within a few hours of the coffee deadline, however, my body would remind me of its need. At first I could ignore a mild headache scratching at my cranium. I could push through to focus on my work. Soon enough though it would be full-on tenseness gripping my neck and shoulders, a foul temperament, and a pounding jackhammer on both temples at once. It was like a bald eagle was attached to my trapezoidals, talons dug into my nerves, screeching inside of me and out to whomever stood in my way. I had a coffee pot in my office, which was a blessing because by the time the caffeine withdrawal symptoms hit that badly, I didn’t have the gumption to drag myself to the café in the next building.

I had a twelve-thirty Spanish class during my last semester, and if I didn’t get my coffee before that class, I had an hour-long introduction to the perils of hell instead of merely a language lesson. Walking back to my office after that class felt like walking inside a snare drum, my vision skewed and even the ground underneath me warped. I only hoped that I wouldn’t pass anyone I knew who wanted to talk. Even smiling at a friend as we hurried our different directions could cause new waves of pain to crash along the sandy grit of my face.

Within minutes of finally getting the bitter brown elixir into my system, I could feel the pain evaporate, my mood lighten, and the good ole’ gung-ho return. The fierce eagle shrank away to nothing, the snare drum went off to bother someone else. I was happy! I was a new woman! I could conquer the world!

Sometimes I think I subconsciously ignored the oncoming symptoms just so I could experience their alleviation. It worked like magic.

At some point along the way things shifted to be a little scary. I don’t know when it happened, but I slowly came to realize it after several dangerous encounters.

It came to be that without coffee, even before warning bells of pain dancing across the back of my eyes told me that caffeine levels were dropping, I would lose my ability to focus. At first it was laughable, like finding myself staring at a book title trying to figure out what it said. It became quite annoying, a bruise to my pride, when it affected my ability to hold intelligent conversation. I could sit there, hanging on every word, struggling to piece the sounds together into intelligible sentence structures. Complex topics, like religion or anything academic, were lost on me without coffee as stimulus. I became to question, was my intellect dependent on a drink? Surely there was a time when I didn’t need to be caffeinated to have an opinion. But there I would stand, mouth agape, struggling to form coherent phrases about topics I knew, knew, I had opinions on.

It became a problem when it affected my driving. I nearly killed myself, and worse, several friends, because the absence of a certain chemical prevented my brain from making proper decisions and snap judgments. In my caffeine-free fog, I didn’t even realize that I wasn’t concentrating on the road.

Of course, this all happened at the same time that I was suffering from Mono, and I could also feel the effects of the disease on making my thinking processes sluggish, so maybe that can be the scapegoat and the name of coffee can be cleared. Nevertheless, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision while driving a car full of friends encouraged me to finally take the last step and insist, come high tide or scurvy, on my first cup of the morning. Every morning.

So of course I’d already had my cup— espresso, to be precise, as there in my Italian flat I only had an espresso pot—but that was in the morning. It had become afternoon, the day sucked away in an English lesson and housework avoided by reading Yann Martel. There were three more English lessons to come later in the day, so a caffeine jumpstart seemed like a good idea.

Trying to stay on the conservative side, I chose to make myself a cup of tea. The last thing I needed was to need (understand me, need) a second cup every day. I liked being able to rely on a second, afternoon cup as a boost when necessary and had no desire to up the ante on my addiction. Tea could substitute as a small recharge: a burst of sugar to get me over the hump and an injection of caffeine (only half as much as a cup of coffee, I righteously reminded myself) to get me through the lessons for the rest of the day.

I put some water in my frying pan and put it over the largest burner. I had no kettle, and found that the frying pan heated water quicker than a conventional pot. It felt a little funny, though, to cook water in a frying pan for a cup of tea. The electric fuse never worked, so I lit the stove by match and left the water on high heat. Meanwhile I guiltily stole back to Life of Pi that had already replaced the mopping and scrubbing I’d promised myself I would do. One short chapter later the water was forming tiny bubbles and was ready for my tea. I poured it carefully from the wide, flat pan into my mug and let the tea bag steep. I sliced up an apple that showed signs of getting too old (I never ate enough fruit), throwing the suspicious parts into the trash under the sink. While down there I turned off the gas nozzle, since it leaked a little bit. Once, before I knew better because I’d just moved to the apartment, I left the nozzle open all day while out and returned to the place smelling quite evil. I opened all the doors and windows and spent a good hour sitting on the couch in fear of explosion.

I heard a funny click from the stove. It clicked again. It sounded like the automatic fuse, or whatever you call that thing that clicks and lights the gas on the stove. I held down the button for the fuse (that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t) and, sure enough, it clicked again. When I released it, it kept clicking at roughly three-second intervals. Just long enough that every time I thought maybe it had stopped. I turned on the gauge for the burner, but the gas was off, so nothing happened when it clicked again. I turned off the burner.

I tried to ignore the sound. Problems tend to dissipate on their own, I told myself. I put milk and sugar in my tea, not my usual practice, but this was a midafternoon snack, so why not? I spilled a little of the beige drink, being too greedy about filling the mug up to the very top. Then, as I stirred it, I spilled a little bit more.

I kept being distracted by the clicking. I tried pushing the black fuse button repeatedly, forcefully, thinking maybe it was stuck. I banged on the element and used a knife to pull the top pieces off, but the clicking continued. I thought wistfully of my book and how this horrible disruption would never let me read it and drink my tea in peace. Confounded noise! I pulled up on the black button in a last-ditch attempt to do something. To my surprise it pulled up about three inches with my momentum, exposing the mechanics underneath and—wait three seconds, just to be sure—yes! interrupted the mechanism and stopped the fuse.

I finished slicing up my apple and prepared to take my snack to the couch where Pi and his tiger awaited me. On second thought, I decided to wipe up the spilt tea before it solidified into a sugary mess. The kitchen was, afterall, the only part of the flat I had managed to actually clean that day. I grabbed a paper towel and wiped up the area around the stove where the tea had spilled. POW!

A sharp intake of breath, a snap. Did that?—yes, it just happened. A black spray of electrical char marred the white stove top. I heard the whirr of the refrigerator settling behind me. Did I blow a fuse? A real one? The light was still on, so no, everything was still working. There was no fire. I was not hurt, it seemed. I took mental stock. Was I shocked? Electrocuted? I felt the coil of my muscles fully engaged, but their tenseness could be from internal electricity rather than external. My spinal cord was apparently in working order. I looked at the paper towel in my hand and marveled how much of it was burnt in that tiniest fraction of an instant when water met current and things went Pow. I forced my elbows and shoulders to unwind, realized that only my eyes had been moving to take in the situation, and moved my head from side to side.

Can’t clean up now, I thought, leaving the remaining water to evaporate the old-fashioned way. I chuckled internally (or maybe aloud, who can tell when you live by yourself?). And I thought I needed caffeine to jumpstart my afternoon.

Lago di Como

Valy picked us up at half past ten, us being myself and Javier, a friend from Spain whom I met in California. She drives us to the train station in Rho. We check the bus schedule for busses returning to Mazzo (my neighborhood) that evening, and there are several, even on a Sunday. So far so good.

Javier lives in Varese. Well, so far he stays in Varese in a Bed and Breakfast while looking for an apartment for himself and fellow students from Spain. But assuming he can find a suitable apartment, he will be living in Varese for the next ten months. Thus he needs the train for that city.

Valentina misunderstands and thinks that I too want to go to Varese, so she asks the ticket vendor, who sells me a ticket and a return (E7,20). The train is pulling into the station at that moment, so we run to meet it and there is no time to ask questions about how to actually get to my intended destination, Como.

No matter. I can visit with Javier longer while we ride to Varese. I look out the window at the Italian scenery, but I can’t say much about it; I won’t fault the country for not being picturesque along the train line. Javier is worried about missing the stop. It doesn’t matter to me, because I don’t care about going to Varese anyway. If we miss the stop, we can wait for a return train. If we make it to Varese, I will try to transfer to Como. If there is no route to Como, I will visit Varese with Javier and be satisfied.

At the end of the day I don’t care where I go so long as I go somewhere. It’s all new to me. It’s all Italy. If I insist on being happy, then I will be happy. I refuse to be anxious. Especially when I am with a friend. So maybe neither of us speaks Italian, but with his few words and my few words, and of course our English, we can make ourselves understood and, more importantly, understand what we need to understand. I hope.

Eventually we are in Varese. Javier is proud to tell me about his little city. I know the feeling. I want visitors to Rho very badly, not because I am lonely, but because I want to show off my little town. “My” little town that I have inhabited all of one week.

The ticket vendor gets the point across to us that we must go to the other train station in order to go to Como. Javier knows where it is, so he walks me there. The ticket vendor there says to take the bus instead of the train; it’s cheaper and is already at the station.

Ok, one bus ticket to Como (E2,80). Javier and I part ways outside the bus. We make plans to travel together. I will visit him in Varese once he has an apartment. We will go skiing with Concetta and Federica once it snows. We will go to Como together another time when he is not on the apartment hunt. Etc etc. He says that if I take this bus back to Varese that day to call him, but my plan is to go from Cono directly to Rho. Or at least, more directly.

I guess the bus will take an hour. It would be easy to be nervous on a bus through tiny Italian villas getting further and further away from the one landmark I know (the station), but along the way are frequent signs pointing to Como (30 km, 23 km, etc) and the bus always turns to follow the signs. Along the way are also perfect little Italian towns. I am happy to see them, and happy to watch the change in landscape and flora as we move North. Finally, the mountains! I can glimpse their snowy caps in the distance. I can feel my heart beating with their rhythm, even from this distance and through the cloudy bus window.

I count four or more languages, plus Italian, on the bus. This also puts my mind at ease. It sure is convenient to speak English, the language of common currency.

Eventually we arrive in Como, the last stop. It took and hour and twenty minutes. My first order of business is to secure the way home. Especially since it is a Sunday, and the schedules are limited, I want to make sure I don’t miss my only chance to get home. But I’m not worried, because if there isn’t a way this afternoon, I have the address of the Hostel for E14,50 a night and I can return to Milan tomorrow. Or maybe there is another bus today back to Varese and I can stay with Javier. Or catch a train from Varese to Rho.

The bus stop is at the train station. I try to decipher the posted schedule, but it’s quite complicated with strange codes and whatnot I don’t understand.

I want to ask the ticket vendor for the best route. I piece together the question in my mind. “Per andare a Rho?” I can only imagine that the grammar is atrocious, but it gets my point across. Although I can see the vendor through the curtain over the window, he does not come to help me. Obviously they want me to use the automatic ticket selling machine, but this requires that I already know where I am going. I don’t. That is, I know the “a Rho” (‘to Rho’) part, but I have no clue as to the “Per andare” (‘for going’) part. How do I get there???

An African woman starts speaking to me but soon enough it becomes evident that I have no idea what she’s saying and that I need help.

“Di dove sei?” she asks me. ‘Where are you from?’

“A Rho,” (‘To Rho’) I say, misunderstanding at first. Ah, no, I have made this mistake before. “Sono di America.”

She pauses. “You are American?” There is her beautiful African accent, like sweetened condensed milk.

“Yes,” I say, relieved. I don’t feel guilty speaking English, because Italian is also a second language for her.

“Where are you going?”

“To Rho.”

“Ah to Rho. I think that there is not a line from here to Rho. You must go to the other train station.”

That is what I suspected. “Thank you so much,” I say, using the Italian hand gestures for gratitude.

“It is nothing.”

Ok, across town to the other train station, which is the main station (or so my guidebook tells me). I tore out the three pages about Como and folded them into my purse. Now I retrieve them and use the tiny map to direct my feet to the other station.

On the way I breathe in the warm autumn sunshine. The town seems targeted for tourists, which is fine by me, because the lake is just as beautiful, the trees just as yellow, the buildings just as old, no matter how many other pairs of eyes have seem them. I’m dressed for the cooler part of the day, so in the afternoon sunshine a gelato seems like a perfect idea.

One small cone, please, half green apple and half strawberry. Oh, how perfect. There are real strawberry seeds and real bits of apple skin and real Italian flavor bursting into my mouth. Yummmmm.

Follow the map and the signs to the station. Ask again: “Per andare a Rho?” Try to make sense of the answer. I must go first to Milano Garibaldi and then change. Ok, fine. There are numbers, repeated slowly: “due, zero.”

Repeat them, just to make sure. “Due, zero?”

“Si, due, zero, otto.”

“Ah, okei – due, zero, otto. Dove sono l’orari?” ‘Ok, 2-0-8. Where are the hours (Where is the timetable)?”

For the life of me I cannot find a line “208” listed. I go back to the window.

“Non trovo la linea due-zero-otto. Per andare a Rho??”

Yes, I must go to Milano Garibaldi. But when are the hours of the train? Ahhhh, at 14:08 (Two-oh-eight). And after? 15:08. And then 16:08 and so on? Yes, yes, of course. Now I understand. And will this ticket work? Ok, thank you.

Some mental math and I think that if I take the five-oh-eight train, I will arrive in Milan with plenty of time to make the connection to Rho and arrive in time for the bus from the station to Mazzo.

Now! To exploring Como!

The city is beautiful in true Italian fashion. Meandering narrow streets, cobblestoned and lined with antique buildings. Piazzas filled with café tables and diners. Expensive shops with intriguing window displays, mostly closed (for Sunday, I assume). An impressive cathedral with only a tiny piazza before its façade, unlike the massive Piazza del Duomo in Milano. The old stone city gates and walls, outside of which stand tables with trinkets – glass jewelry, wooden cups, leather satchels, and so on. And finally, the Lake.

Everyone in the world is walking along the lake’s promenade. The Americans pretend to be European (I heard one boy comment in an absurdly Midwestern accent: “I love how the Europeans all have, like, a fashion. Americans always wear the same thing – jeans and a tee shirt.” Ugh). The Chinese teens speak Italian (As Valy tells me, all the pizzerias in Italy are now run by Chinese people). Italian children feed the ducks and swans.

My stomach is starting to twist, so out comes the crackers and jam and nutella I packed into my bag. A bench, a snack, some sunshine. I am all smiles. I feel warm and stylish (enough) in my San Fransisco jeans, my pink Benetton sweater, my dusky blue scarf.

What time is it? Four o’clock. Maybe I should have taken the four-oh-eight train instead. Oh well, too late now. Maybe I should go back the way I cam afterall, since I know that route works, at least. But no, there must be a more efficient route, even if it is via Milan. And if there is no train, I can call Federica when I arrive in Milan and stay there until the next day.

Back in the city, the evening strollers are out. It seems even on Sundays the shops open in the evening, and the streets are filling with people. The Italian sport of choice (for those who prefer crocodile to kangaroo leather, at least): window shopping. Como is a famous center of Italian silk manufacturing, but the historic silk store I want to visit is closed despite the shopping multitude.

A parade winds through town. A procession, with a section ‘Africa’ and ‘Latin America’ and I don’t know what else. Banners and robes and singing, each group in their own language. They made their way directly into the duomo. Evening mass, I suppose. The tourists took pictures. The Italians processed in a different way – only a street away, but the sound of the holy singing was drowned – to their religious house of choice. Today in Italy, the center of the Catholic world, worship is left to the foreigners and the locals shop.

As the hour comes to an end, my feet feel like I have worn holes right through them. I’ll head to the station for the train.

The train to Milano lulls me right to sleep (0 Euros; I can use the return ticket I bought that morning). If I caught it going the other way, it would take me right to Zurich. Maybe next time!

Awaken at Milano Garibaldi. Exit. Here is the train schedule. Rho, rho, rho – here it is. Ha, it’s the same train that continues to Varese. The one in the six o’clock hour doesn’t say it stops in Rho, though. What do I do now? Plus, it came on the hour, so I’ve already missed it. Is there one next hour? 17.25. No, that’s five o’clock. 19.25, here it is. Arrives Rho at 19.44. I can just make the last bus to Mazzo. No, wait, the last bus is at 18.55. Darn this twenty-four hour clock! I’m always messing it up.

I can wait over an hour for a train that goes to Rho, but then I would have to walk, unless by some stroke of bizarre fortune there is a later bus afterall. I don’t know the way, and I don’t have a map, and I don’t even know how to ask that in Italian. Following verbal directions? I would be totally lost. Maybe I should call Federica and stay in Milan. Here is a store, maybe it will sell a map.

Do you have maps? On this stand? I don’t see them. On the other side, okay. Maps maps maps. Milan, Rho. But it’s too small! I could never use this map to find my way, even if I did pay, what, 14,90 Euro! No way.

I decide to take the Metro (1 Euro). There is a bus from the stop I used before, but I will have already missed the last run, if it’s the same on Sundays as weekdays. I could risk it. I could walk from there, but I certainly don’t know the way, and I think it’s far.

Finally, here is a useable map – the map for the metro. I can actually see the roads in Rho on this one. Here is Via Amendola. If I take the Metro to the very last stop, that’s a much closer walk back to Rho. I draw the map into my little notebook, and then take a picture of it (my big brilliant idea). I can make it! I can walk.

Of course when I arrive at the stop, it’s a complete construction zone and it’s impossible to orient myself. But there was a bus stop and – thank goodness, a stroke of luck! – there is a bus coming in fifteen minutes that will take me right to my neighborhood.

When the bus comes I board it right away. The driver wants to know why I’m waiting inside the bus for the ten minutes before it departs.

I’m tired, I say. He starts talking to me more, and I must tell him I’m not Italian.

“Oh! No speak-a English,” he says to me. He shows me how to punch the ticket (0 Euro; I already had the ticket from another day when I bought one for the wrong bus). He wants to make conversation, however broken. Another passenger boards who speaks English, so we start a strange three-way conversation. The bus departs, and the English speaker wants to know more about my stay in Italy. He is a photographer, lives in Rho but has a vacation house on Lake Como. He gives me his telephone number because he wants to take me touring. (Suspicious?)

I don’t know if I should be suspect of such friendliness. If I were Kerouac, such a meeting would be the start to a complex adventure. But the bane of female existence is the necessary suspicion of all other people, especially of all males.

“Via Amendola!” the bus driver announces, stopping at the crossroads nearest my street even though there is not a bus stand there.

“Qui?” ‘Here?’

“Si!”

I descend, shouting Grazie! to both the driver and the friendly photographer, and walk the last little way back to my apartment. My feet are especially grateful for the bus. By the time I arrive home, I am ready to drop. Leftovers and a night in front of the TV. What a day!

more longwinded proof that i am, indeed, in italy

I now have a working BBC decoder, so I have been eagerly soaking up news of the VP debate and continuing financial saga. And last night I found CSI in Italian – hooray for CSI. The episodes were from season one, so since I’d already seen them, I could follow along fine. I’ve noticed that all the dubbed Italian voices sound the same. I don’t know if they only have ten people who do all the voice-over or what, but I can tell that’s going to get pretty darn annoying.

The other day I went into the city of Milan – how absolutely drop dead gorgeous. I had to ask the nice men at the bus stop where to go, but soon enough I made it to Il Duomo via autobus and metro. I didn’t linger too long in the Piazza del Duomo. They were filming some screaming teen girls for MTV Italia (I didn’t know what they were doing at the time, but later I actually saw the footage on that channel).

I made my way through the city, soaking in the architecture and discovering gorgeous cathedrals and chapels quite unlike the famous gothic Duomo, but more to my taste. I felt so embraced by the city somehow, like I was welcome there, especially as I got away from the more touristy piazza. Tourists make me nervous, even when I am one. Actually, it’s the industry marketed at tourists that makes me nervous. I would rather be in a store where I know they only speak Italian than in one catering to foreigners where they might try to use English with me.

Later, I got thoroughly lost and had to forcibly remind myself how much I love walking through the city as my stomach grumbled and feet ached. I sat on a bench in one piazza (that is, a square – it can be anything from the grand courtyard before il duomo or the area in the middle of a traffic circle where there is a news stand and some benches). People in Milan apparently love to sit on benches. The baby and his grandmother on the other end of the bench waved and said “Ciao Signorina” to me. Lots of the requisite old Italian men sitting around and enjoying each others’ company. Lots of people reading newspapers. Lots of teenagers being, well, teenagers. And lots of dogs too (but not strays).

I should have bought a coffee or a pizza, as much for the experience as the nourishment, but I stubbornly set my mind to spend no money.

As I made my way back to the metro, beautiful business people were leaving work, and the many cafes and bars were setting up apperitivi, the Italian version of happy hour. I can’t wait to partake in that ritual.

I didn’t take any pictures while in Milan this time. I was stubbornly trying not to stick out too much. Next time I will have to just get over myself….

ITALIAN PEOPLE ARE SO NICE!

First, of course, is Valentina and her family and how nice they’ve been to me.

Next, is the simple fact that everyone seems to greet each other on the street. Not all the time, but certainly if I pass someone inside the gates of my apartment complex, we greet each other.

On the Metro, when a seat opens up, people offer it to the others around them before sitting, or insist that their friend sits. Walking around the city, I felt welcomed even though nobody said a word to me.

And another example: today I had to ask two men on the side of the street to help me find the correct bus stop to reach the Metro stop. These men were so nice that even though I could barely express myself in their language, they stopped whatever they were doing to help me figure out the correct place. One eventually called another friend to ask for the information. Then they walked me down the road to the proper place and looked at the time table with me, pointing out the next expected bus.

I don’t think that would happen in America. Not that people are unfriendly, but the person would either point out the correct place or else say something like, “I’m sorry, I don’t know.” I am really intrigued by this drop-everything-and-help-a-fellow-human attitude. I wonder if it will persist, or if I have so far gotten lucky.

Edible Mushroom of the Day

I found these gorgeous mushrooms in the supermarket that is close to my flat. You can only imagine how excited I was.

There they were, just chillin with several different varieties that we would never see in an American grocery store - maybe in a specialty shop at $15 dollars a pound. I got 500g (about a pound) for the sum total of 2 Euro!

I didn't know if there is a special way to prepare them or what, so I just cooked them with plenty of garlic and olive oil (I didn't have any butter) and some coarse salt. They were delicious, with a more mushrom flavor than the normal white button variety but not as overpowering as shitaake can be. I cooked the whole cluster, but the bottom part of the "stem" was too tough to eat, so next time I will leave it out. I still have two-thirds of the package left!

Here you can see (part of) my dinner. Delicious red wine, delicious mysterious mushrooms, and I also had some pasta and several other yummy things. I am taking good care of myself. ^_^

benvenuti a milano

It’s the end of my first full day in Milan. My apartment is beautiful, and seems very big for one person. I have two balconies, all for me. My second suitcase (my beloved backpack) arrived today, so everything is here.

After cooking dinner tonight and sipping my second glass of wine, I lit the candles I found in the flat and a stick of incense I imported from California. It already feels like home.

I taught my first English lesson today and sat in on a class with the kids I will be teaching next week. I loved both – not hard at all!

Valentina has been very helpful in getting me set up with a telephone (still not programmed), internet (haven’t received the adapter yet), directions (I got lost walking to the school), tv (BBC decoder should work by tomorrow), and groceries (the supermarket is a two minute walk). Really she, and her family, have been wonderful and I am so thankful for their help.

I already understand so much Italian, but I really need to speak it for goodness sakes! I think I have not said a single sentence in Italian yet. It runs through my mind constantly though. It’s so easy and fluid. I tried to take a nap (jetlag fighting with two or three espressos) and realized after twenty minutes that I was processing Italian grammar the whole time. I love this part of the process. I can see, too, that I have matured since (and largely because of) my experience five years ago in Romania. I am not afraid to step out of my apartment, not afraid that someone will say something to me I don’t understand, not afraid of making a huge grievous error and receiving angry foreign reprimands. (Remember the ice cream, Sarah?)

Tomorrow I will go into the city of Milan. Where I live is actually a suburb called Rho. Actually, I live in a sort of suburb of the suburb, called Mazzo di Rho. As far as I can tell, Mazzo di Rho is a small shopping center (supermarket, café, flower shop, beautician, tabaccheria, etc) and public school surrounded by apartment buildings and some houses extending out from the shopping center in rings (that’s where I live, and where the English school is). The outermost ring has a lot of industry and connects to the highway. (The lesson I taught today was in one of those companies – they sell ball bearings.) It really is a beautiful model for a tiny suburb. A nice change from my suburb of Boston, where the closest industry is the pizza shop a mile away – and another mile to anything of substance or usefulness.

The supermarket, though tiny, carries pretty much everything I could want or need. I succumbed to its temptation today and bought, aside from the essentials, several luxury items: a bottle of wine (3,49 euros, delicious), a block of cheese (called Nostrano val Lesina, 1,92 euro), and the most amazing mushrooms I have ever laid eyes on (1,99 euro, the same price as their boring old white button mushrooms). So none of those things were bank breakers, and they make me very happy, but I must remember that I am on a budget, at least until I start making money.

One more observation: supposedly all Italian people do is smoke! but I have yet to see a single Italian person smoking. Maybe that will change tomorrow when I go to the city. I’m holding my breath! (haha, pun. ok, i’m sad.)

Now I must try to sleep, even though my body and mind think it’s only seven in the evening. Hoping the two glasses of wine will help…