Goodbye Brescia ...

Lake Como

Today, I left Brescia. I'm in Milan for the night and then heading to Sicily on Sunday for five days before getting back stateside. My year living and teaching in Italy has been a great experience and I am very happy with what I have done here. Some of my students assumed I would be returning next year, some asked if I would, but the eight months teaching in the vocational/professional high school were just enough for me. Will I return to Italy? I hope so. Teaching was a huge part of my year, but it was also the means to the language and cultural exchange. I would live in Italy again for these reasons, but with a different job or study.

Sunday with Roommates

As you can see from my first picture, I did get to Lake Como this week. I have been wanting to go since I studied in Parma and planned to go this year. Our roommate who left in January found a job in Como as a lawyer and we planned to visit her in May. Last Saturday when Daniela and I went to buy our tickets for the next day, the man at the ticket office told us, "ma domani, c'è sciopero" = "but tomorrow, there's a strike." We tried to ask questions about which types of trains, the hours of the strike, etc and he just looked at us and said "C'è sciopero, punto" = "There's a strike, period." How Italian. Regardless we had a nice afternoon together and went out to lunch at a new osteria. As to getting to Lake Como, I ended up getting there on my day off on Thursday. Although not without difficulty. I bought a normal ticket to Milan and tried to buy my ticket from Milan to Como while I was still in Brescia. The machine told me that the tickets were sold out. Well, you do need a reservation for this type of train however I know that you can buy a ticket without a seat and just stand on the train. The machine wouldn't give me the ticket. Once I got to Milan, I asked someone if I could buy a ticket to stand, because there were no more seats. Well, if the machine gives you the ticket, you can buy it, yes. Well, the machine is not giving me the ticket, so how can I buy one? I went to the ticket office and again he told me that he would gladly let me pay for a ticket without a seat but the machine wouldn't let him do it. Any way you could override that? I bought a ticket for the train two hours later but went to the platform for the earlier one and asked if I could get on since I couldn't buy a ticket without a seat, so I bought a ticket for the later train. "Well you can't, but I'll let you." There ended up being plenty of free seats. The train was a replacement and so none of the seats matched the reservations, for example there was no car 7 on this particular train. Instead of working it out, they just decided to "sell out" all the other tickets. Again, how Italian. 

Once in Como, I took the boat ride along the lake to Bellagio and back. Each way took two hours of relaxing on the water. It was beautiful, although I unfortunately did not see George Clooney or his house.

I always imagined George Clooney's house would look like this

One of the private lessons I do here in Italy is with two retired teachers who study English as a hobby and meet with me once a week for an hour of conversation. After our final lesson, they asked where I'll be next year and what I'll be doing. The honest answer is that I just don't know. With plenty of ideas, I have nothing concrete in mind. They wanted to know if I'd be back in Brescia or not and the argument ensued. She'll probably come back to Italy, just not Brescia. But, why would she come back to Italy instead of going to another European country? Well, she'll want to explore more areas in Italy first as opposed to going elsewhere. Annamaria's argument was that not another country in the whole world has as much variety as Italy. You cannot just have an experience in the north, because all regions of Italy are a new world, like another country. We see this the best in the dialects spoken throughout the Italian boot. In fact, before the unification of Italy, Italians in the north could not understand those in the south. Television shows taught Italians the Italian language. That is how different these languages were that they learned Italian through television shows meant to teach them the national language. Not only are there other regions to see, but various dialects to learn. So far I've lived in Emilia Romagna and Lombardia, that leaves 18 more regions to go. So don't worry Italy, I'll be back :)

I hope you've enjoyed my blog as I've been in Brescia. I shall write another to tell you all about Sicily but it may or may not get out before I return home depending on the internet my last day in Milan. Thanks for reading!

Travels

I'd like to take a blog to share with you some travels taken in the past couple of months, mainly in pictures. For Easter, my parents and sister came to visit and we went to the Cinque Terre, Florence and ended up in Brescia during their stay.

Milan:
Jenn and I started in Milan for a night and the morning they arrived, we went to see the "Cenacolo Vinciano" or Leonardo da Vinci's "Last Supper" at the Santa Maria della Grazie church in Milan. You must have a reservation in advance to see his masterpiece which occupies an entire wall of the Dominican order's "mess hall." This version captures the moment after Jesus announces that one of his disciples will betray him and expresses the reactions of the disciples. Sorry, no photographs allowed.

Cinque Terre:
The Cinque Terre are becoming more and more popular as a tourist destination. It even made Rick Steve's Europe book as one of the top spots in Italy. Cinque Terre translates to "Five Lands" in English and describes five small cities along the Italian Riviera in the region of Liguria. The National Park of the Cinque Terre gives tourists a range of easy, moderate and difficult paths to hike between the five towns of Monterosso, Vernazza, Corniglia, Manarola and Riomaggiore [and even smaller mountain towns among these]. There is also a small train that runs among the towns in case you do not want to walk the whole way. From Monterosso to Riomaggiore, the hike takes about five hours.

View of Monterosso from Path

View of Vernazza from Path

Unfortunately, the path between Corniglia and Manarola [the most beautiful from what I remember when I did it four years ago] was closed due to landslides. When we took the boat along the water from Riomaggiore to Monterosso after our hike, at least we saw that the path was completely impassable.

Impassable landslide

Our Hotel in Monterosso

"Il Gigante" or "The Giant" on the Monterosso beach

In front of our hotel

The shortest path along the hike is from Riomaggiore to Manarola and only takes 15 to 20 minutes. It is called "Via dell'amore" or "Path of Love." If you remember from a previous blog, I shared the tradition of attaching locks to bridges and throwing the keys into the water. The Via dell'amore is full, full, full of locks! Everywhere! Compare these two images from my first trip to Cinque Terre in the summer of 2007 and just now in the spring of 2011:

Entrance to the Via dell'amore

Locks added!

Locks!

Florence:
We were in Florence for Easter Sunday and went to the Duomo to see the "Scoppio del Carro" or the "Explosion of the Cart." A decorated cart processes to a spot between the Duomo and the Baptistery with a blessed flame where a white dove somehow lights the cart and it explodes into a fireworks show. Florentine families march in the procession with the traditional dress of their houses and perform a flag show before the lighting of the cart which will bring luck for the year to the city.

Duomo and Bell Tower in Florence

Flag Show

Cart before Explosion

Look at it go!

Good Luck

Otherwise in Florence we saw pretty much everything. We went to Piazza della Signoria, della Repubblica, Dante's house, Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, the churches of Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella, Piazzale Michelangelo and San Miniato al Monte, the Accademia to see Michelangelo's David and Slaves and the Uffizi gallery.

View of Ponte Vecchio from our hotel

Pisa:
We spent a morning in Pisa at the "Campo dei miracoli" or the "Field of Miracles" with the Cathedral, Baptistery and Leaning Tower ... just to marvel.

That is one leaning tower ...

Or is it being pushed ...

Parco Giardino Sigurtà:

On the first of May, Abby, another assistant and I went to a Park/Garden near Lake Garda, walked around, had a picnic and laid in the sun. 

Mantova:

One Sunday I took a day-trip to Mantova, a city in Lombardy surrounded by lakes. I visited the Palazzo Ducale owned by the Gonzaga family and walked to their summer palace, Palazzo Te. Their family invoked Olympus, the home of the Gods, and the labyrinth to their name and so the Palazzo Ducale is full of both. One ceiling [no pictures allowed] had a labyrinth with the expression "Forse che sì, forse che no" written throughout. "Maybe yes, maybe no."

Palazzo Ducale, Mantova

Lago Superiore, Mantova

Lake Iseo:

When you think of what there is to do in Brescia, there's not too much to the city itself. In the province, there are three lakes: Lake Garda, Iseo and Idro. I visited Lake Iseo last week when I didn't have any classes one day. There is a large island in the center called Montisola and two smaller islands around it.

Montisola, Lake Iseo

From Montisola

Villa on another island San Paolo;
rumored to be bought by George Clooney

The Importance of Speaking English

Italians see English everyday in their lives. They see English on signs and slogans, watch dubbed movies, listen to American music and wear clothing with English writing they don't understand. I was at a bar with some Italian friends and an old American song came on. I concentrated for a moment to try and remember the name of the artist and they asked me if I understood the lyrics. Well, yes. Of course I understand the lyrics, I speak English. They were so jealous! I've always taken for granted having English as my native language. This year has really taught me some appreciation when I've tried to explain expressions or slang that doesn't exist in another language or culture. American pop culture is global pop culture and it's spread and emulated all over the world. I think it's a little hard for us to imagine the importance of speaking English.

Last week, I continued a lesson with movie titles and taglines. Movies titles [as other things] are not translated exactly into Italian. The same words might not have the same meaning. My best example is "Home Alone." In Italian, the title is "Mamma, ho perso l'aero" aka "Mom, I missed the plane." Yes, if you missed the plane you might subsequently be home alone ... but regardless the titles are different and so it made for a good lesson where my kids had to understand the titles of a dozen American films and find the tagline and equivalent Italian title. One of my kids asked if they change the titles when they translate Italian films into English. I felt kind of bad because I had only heard of a handful of Italian classics before I moved here. We don't see foreign films on a regular basis and so I believe most Italian films are not even translated into English. We also don't usually listen to foreign music on a regular basis so I didn't know their famous singers like they knew mine. It's not an equal exchange. As Americans, we're not exposed to other languages and cultures as much. We don't have the same necessity and so we have a completely different frame of mind.

As self-righteous as it sounds, English is the common language people of different origins use to communicate. When I take the bus in the morning, I hear various immigrants in Italy on the phone in native languages and English words and expressions mixed in there, especially numbers and time expressions. When one of my private lesson students went to Barcelona with his class for a school trip, he told me that he lost his jacket at a club. He was arguing with the bouncers to try and find the jacket and didn't do this in Italian or Spanish but in English. I would have thought that they would succeed in understanding each other in their romance languages [as I spoke in Italian in Barcelona for example while ordering in restaurants], but it was easier for them to communicate in English. It was more likely that they would understand speaking in a common foreign language than one speaking Italian or Spanish. Most of my best students in English are immigrants who learned English before coming to Italy and/or had to use it before learning Italian or other languages to get by.

Although the importance of speaking English in our globalized world is obvious to non-native speakers, there also exists a kind of stigma with the skill. My foreign students tend to be isolated because they speak English and because of the way they speak English. As I've written in other blogs about my school and education in Italy, my students stay in the same classroom with the same classmates all day long. They don't change classes and have the option to take a course at a higher level of English in their regular curriculum. Most of my classes have a low level of speaking skills with a few high-flyers. My Italian friends might be jealous of me, but they are also college students earning degrees at universities. Instead, the students at my school resent the discrepancy in their speaking skills. Even more, my foreign students have strong accents [mostly coming from North African countries] and while they might speak fluently, they are hard to understand by the other students and teachers alike. At the beginning of the year a student arrived from Ghana and couldn't speak a word of Italian. Unfortunately, his English teacher couldn't understand him either. With some difficulty I was able to understand his English. Overall I think an American accent is the most liberal, because in the end our country came from many linguistic backgrounds to form our pronunciation and way of speaking. More than being a native English speaker, I am grateful for my American English which allows me to understand the variations in accents, Italian or foreign, pretty well. It really depends on the class. Some high-flyers raise the level of the class with their skills and interests, others are excluded and discouraged from speaking. Thankfully, the extra English oral exam preparation course I taught gave participating students an environment to learn and appreciate their interests. In the end, the constant reminder of English as a necessary international language for work and travel forces Italians to learn it, maybe resent it, and sometimes embrace it.


On our part, we are impressed if someone speaks fluently in another language, but do we require it? I went to London this past weekend and although I saw plenty of foreigners, every sign I saw was in English. I'm sure that when I go home in a few weeks, I'll notice less foreigners and see and hear less foreign languages. I can't help but be a bit disappointed that we lack the importance of speaking and learning other languages and cultures and I wonder how we would approach the rest of the world if this were different. Could we learn to embrace it?

Here are some photos from London:

Tower of London

Tower Bridge

We did the various touristy things like the Tower of London, a sightseeing bus ride, lunch at Harrod's, the Dirty Dancing musical, Victoria and Albert Museum and Hyde Park. We also just spent time just exploring the neighborhoods of the city and walking around places like Portobello Road and meeting a friend for tea in Camden Town with whom I studied in Paris. Of course, we had to stop by London's throwback to Harry Potter at Platform 9 3/4: 

King's Cross Station

Westminster Abbey and Big Ben

Missing Buses

Piazza Repubblica, Brescia

“I don’t think the problem is that you miss buses, I think it’s that you try to catch them.” As we were traveling to Viareggio for Carnevale way back when in March, Abby responded this way to my lament about always missing buses in Brescia. My city is large enough to have an extensive bus system, in which I can take a variety of combinations to arrive to school in the morning. Yet, their bus stops are all located in slightly different places so I couldn't just wait at one stop for any bus. Instead for the past seven months, I've felt like a GPS constantly recalculating my route as I've run around to different bus stops checking the times and routes of the buses. Even more, it's really just a game of luck because buses are usually timed for around every 15 minutes but then they can be 10 to 15 minutes late ... in sum, Abby had a good point.

As the weather became nicer, I started to bring a book with me everywhere. So while waiting for a bus to school, to a private lesson, to home, I no longer worried about missing the bus. Instead, I knew that I would most likely miss the bus. I actually planned on missing the bus and so brought a book to read while I waited. I no longer told my private lessons that I would be there at 4 pm. I'll be there around 3:45 to 4:15 pm, depending on the bus. When I met an American working here as a nanny and we scheduled a lunch, she asked if 1 pm worked. I said, yes 1 pm ... plus or minus 10 - 15 minutes. Her response? Italian time! Sounds good to me. The best part is that no one minds. There is no urgency in planning or organizing things, letting someone know something last minute is completely normal.

Americans are always in a rush. We schedule a million things to do immediately and actually expect to get them done. This is probably the biggest lesson I've had to learn here. Patience. There is just no urgency here. When the bus or the train arrives, it arrives. It's a cultural difference but also I think a way to approach a cultural exchange. You'll drive yourself crazy if you try to impose your expectations in a culture where they do not exist. Which reminds me of the next big lesson: Acceptance. Last year at a seminar on university policy, one of the Jesuits Father Jack explained this concept with the example of Villanova University. They believe that caffeine is damaging and so they don’t sell it on their campus. Well, this is a problem because Father Jack drinks a lot of coffee. Does he really have the right to demand that the university sell coffee because he doesn’t agree with their judgment on caffeine? No! But what is to stop him from making a 10-cup pot of coffee himself while visiting the campus? Nothing! You don’t have to participate in something you don’t believe in, but you can’t demand your customs every where you go, just because you’re there. 

Sometimes I felt like "missing buses" would be a good way to describe my life here. Even if I arrived at the correct minute on the schedule, I was always just a step or two behind and I missed the bus. Then my American mind worked overtime to figure out what other bus I could possibly take to not be late for my classes or responsibilities. I may think ahead to organize plans for my life, but I can't expect others here to do the same. What would happen if I walked into a class 5 minutes late because I missed the bus, absolutely nothing. I may feel too responsible to be late, but in fact the other teachers are late all the time. 

Since my gym membership ran out at the end of April, I decided to only take the bus this month to where I can't walk. So I don't think I'll be trying to catch buses much anymore. But when I do, patience and acceptance have to come through - so it's not about catching or missing buses but taking then whenever they come.