Bologna: A Beginning

Barely a week here and it feels like longer. It's been a few days of heavy overstimulation, trying to take in everything everywhere I go and look at every face and memorize every street corner so that I can get more familiar with this place. I've been here since the evening of the 24th when Gio, Giovanni's housemate, picked me up at the airport.

At my stopover in Munich I was really feeling nauseated, emotionally only (thank goodness, I can handle breakdowns but other kinds of nausea require could cause less repressable kinds of trouble). A few days before leaving I began to wonder why I had decided to study abroad and if I couldn't just forget the whole thing and go back to Santa Cruz in a month's time. The feeling escalated and peaked in Munich, and I'm glad that I resisted it until I got to Europe. There wasn't going to be any turning back at that point....

Gradually, under the care of my most gracious temporary host Gio, the emotional nausea passed and I decided things were going to be okay.

I've realized a couple of things while being here, even as brief as my stay has been so far. First, I'm living in my first real city. Well, maybe Berkeley is a city, but this is four times the size of Berkeley and five times if you count the student population. 100,000 students are enrolled here, incredibly. They're all still sort of on vacation but trickling back to Bologna pian piano as they say. (It's the oldest university in the West, by the way! Everyone likes to remind us that repeatedly.) And cities are so dirty! Or this one is. And not dirty like trash everywhere, but just touching things, walking around in sandals, I always want to scrub my feet. At Santa Cruz, I take naps as soon as I come home, wearing whatever I have been wearing all day. Here, I need to change completely, no grimy jeans are going on my cozy sheets. I am realizing how clean anything green makes things feel. There is very little green anything here, except for two parks. I want to take a shower every time I come home since I get around by foot alone. I guess 1,000 years of human inhabitance leads to a bit of buildup...

Another thing I've realized is that my big question is why in the hell I chose Italy, and why, for the past four years, I've been an italophile, as my mom called me once. That's why I called this blog Ma perche Italia?, which means "why Italy?" Maybe after a year of living here I'll either purge myself of this strange fixation on a place I had no ties to or I'll at least be able to understand that question.

So far, I've socialized at an Irish pub (the only place to find really a lot of beer, so they say, not that that's what I was after) and I've been to a festival in a nearby city called Ferrara. The festival was stellar: lots of food and a artists selling the jewelry that they had made or performing their talent. There was a really long line for one woman with a little sign that said "I'll look into your eyes and read what's on your heart" and for one euro, she would write a tiny verse of poetry for anyone. I saw people on unicycles juggling fire and a local Italian Celtic band whose members were all sporting dashing blue kilts.

It is lovely to be speaking Italian and there so many ways to practice, whether it's writing text messages on my newest appendage (my cellphone) or buying groceries.

Another thing I've realized is that I'm not going to have to give up all the things I was worried about having to give up....in particular, organic food. The Plenty Market, yes it's called that, is chock-full of the good stuff. And I'll conclude this first entry with a description of the heavenly mozzarella that I've been pining away for for four long years. Our reunion was a happy one, as you might expect, after four years of painful separatio. I bought two etti (some sort of random unit of measurement, lets say two cups worth, or anyway there five giant jawbreaker-sized pieces) of these beautiful pillows of mozzarella made from water buffalo milk. These gems of joy are an unblemished white and best eaten one or two days after they are made. They come from the south of Italy, especially Sicily, and those two cups worth cost me only 2.30 euro, a sum of roughly $3. They are very soft, and on the inside nearly creamy. The taste is mildly salty and flavorful, and I could have eaten them all without anything else. It so happened I ate some of them with tomatoes and basil and olive oil, also known as caprese.

Cheers to more adventure! Un brindisi alle prossime mie avventure!