Salty in the AM!

Did you know that Italians had timers in their mouths? Me either. But it's my latest discovery. There are blocks of time in the day reserved for savory, sour, salty and blocks of time reserved for sweet. Any correctly raised Italian has this feature, but they must have grown up in Italy to acquire it. And be careful too.

They are quick to notice when this divine order is interrupted. Sure, it varies slightly from the south to the north, considering that meal times in the north span from about 8 am to 9 pm, and those in the south roughly from 10 am to 11 pm. Consider that I prepared myself a frittata around 9 am one morning, which is roughly an omelet with fewer ingredients (onions and zucchini and eggs, plus parmesan). As people meandered into the kitchen for their morning coffee with cookies and a cigarette, I went on about my business. As sleepy as they were (there are five others who live in this house with me, let's say two of them were up), their acute noses and mouth timers told them something was awry. They sidled up to me curiously and tried to hide their grimaces as they verifired what their sensory organs were telling them was true: SALTY for breakfast!! Salty in the AM alert! Salty in the AM alert! Salty comes only after 1 pm! (Which allows Italians to eat cookies for breakfast, an act of pure barbary if you ask me!)

I made a pumpkin pie this weekend at Giovanni's house, and his family said they like it. His cousin suggested that it would work better as an antipasto than as a desert because of the sweet/savory contrast because the crust had no sugar and she perceived it immediately.

It's 10:35 in the morning and I'm about to go heat up some lasagne for lunch because I have a 3 hour class ahead of me. Hopefully no one comes into the kitchen...

Discorso italiano

Well as they say, I'm sotto esame...the test is tomorrow so what better time than to clean my bathroom, put away my clothes, check my email, and update THE BLOG than this?

It's November already. I guess someday I'll stop being flabbergasted at the way time keeps passing, but not yet. Still fully flabbergasted.

My exam is in art history, Giotto, gothic architecture, the beginning of the Renaissance, etc. One nice feature of the class is that we're taking field trips as much as we spend time in the classroom, so we're also getting a tour of Bologna's art history and comparing it with the trends of greater Italy and the rest of Europe. Not a bad way to study art history, if it really must be studied.

I think I've slid into a phase of really enjoying being here. On the one hand, it feels pretty normal, just as if I've finally adjusted to a routine change of place (not crossing political/linguistic/geographical borders). On the other, I realize that there are genuine differences between my life here and that in Santa Cruz...I'm still of course Robyn, which means I take studying really seriously and freak out regularly about not understanding everything and not being perfect, but I find it easier to be social here. Perhaps I finally became the mysterious and interesting exchange student whose company I always pursue at home, but I think social norms are very different between university students at home and those here. Eating is a sacred ritual for example, that, if occasionally observed with Italians, can really compose a completely fulfilling social life. For me, it's enough in fact. I've yet to hit all of the bars in Bologna or see the inside of any disco club, but I'm content spending long hours on many courses and rich, undulating, comfortable conversation that mirrors the food in its quality.

I have spent all of my entries thus far criticizing various aspects of my experience and what I perceive as Italian culture, but I do deeply respect what I like to call the Italian gift for rhetoric and discourse. There is no subject too mundane to transform into a vivid conversation peppered with opinions and conjectures and decisive conclusions. And given my linguistic background with the esteemed Jim McCloskey, I can sit back and enjoy what he recognizes as verbal stroking...this professor of mine at Santa Cruz has voiced the opinion that language is used largely for the purpose of joking, social interaction, social connection, rather than comunication in the information-transmitting sense of the word. I like this idea. And if social interaction contributes to health, I think that rather than Mediterranean cuisine, language and conversation contribute in extraordinary ways to the general health of the Italian population. After all, studies show that Italians are among the healthiest in Europe, and let me just say that it's certainly not the smoking that's keeping them beautiful.

I've been making a concerted effort to spend more time with Italians after a particularly English-intensive bout that I spent a few weeks ago...after all, I already know that language. I'm not really here to speak it, and THE BLOG keeps me from getting rusty, naturally.

I went to a graduation party last week for a housemate. The graduations consist of presenting a 50 to 80 page thesis to a panel of professors in your department who you probably don't know, after which you are told your grade for your thesis. Then everyone else who presented to the panel on that particular day crowds into the examination room with friends and family and the overall grade for their degree is announced in front of everyone, and they are pronounced a graduate in X field. We came back to the house for cocktails (we recently had a new housemate move in who's an aspiring professional bartender and is training with Giovanni's housemate at the Drink Factory, a bartending school :)) and later meandered, all 35 of us, to an upscale restaurant for antipasti, two main courses, a dessert, and neverending wine. It's questionable whether I'll come back having passed any classes here. But I'll definitely have a new cookbook full of recipes on my mental bookshelf.

Until next time...

Inno ai formaggi italiani

I love cheese. I think that's one thing Italy has going for it. I rant and rave about things that irk me about Italy often with my American friends...sounds like such a bad traveling habit, especially as Americans. But I guess I do it in defense of my own identity as an American which has only exposed it's timid head now that I am here. I remember Giovanni telling me when he was in California that he never thought twice about being Italian before living in the US, after which it really became part of his identity, or had to be while he was living there.

There are a lot of Italians who refer to the US in a knowing way, just as there are Americans who are certain that they can categorize Italians, Jamaicans, Japanese people, and so forth. I think it's comforting to feel certain that we understand some unknown corner of the world, to be able to put a label there and not think much further beyond that in day to day affairs. But when confronted with the Italians who explain to us, coming from the US, that you see there is just so much culture in Italy, and really it's the best country in the world in terms of art history, and really there's a different notion of tradition here, and a different concept of family here. We understand you, US citizens, we accept you, and we forgive you, but look around and know that you have stepped into a country with real history, real culture, and real cuisine. Not all of them give me this impression, but I hear snatches of these thoughts on tours, in classes, from friends. It has pushed me to reconsider the idea of American culture, and I believe that we do have culture, and it differs between northern California and southern California, the East and West coasts, the South and the North, between rural areas and urban centers, but it exists!

But I won't complain about the cheese here. There's mozzarella di bufala, which I've described in detail already. There's stracchino, a gooey, white cheese that doesn't float my boat. It's better version is squacquerone, great with arugula on piadinas, a flat bread like a tortilla that gets folded in half and filled with deliciousness. There's robiola, a soft cheese similar to whipped cream cheese with a simple, fresh flavor. There's also fontina and caciotta and provola and gorgonzola (gross!) and regular mozzarella and emmenthal (Swiss) and parmigiano and grana and pecorino and fresh ricotta and aged ricotta. And there are more that I have yet to discover!

Giovanni is back in Italy! He arrived Monday and we went to see Ben Harper in concert that very night. I liked Ben Harper before, but I confirmed my love for him by seeing his performance. He changes that scary mob mentality that sometimes emerges at concerts to positive energy with his great lyrics and his stage presence and his message. It's great to have Giovanni back because I'm speaking more Italian than ever and because he makes great piadinas and because, well, he's my boyfriend and I like him.

My classes are marching onward in a scary direction. I still can't imagine myself articulating even one intelligent sentence about the lectures I've seen so far at the oral exam. I have until December to change that to 15 minutes worth of intelligent, original, and informed sentences in Italian. Minchia!! I don't know how that will happen.

I'm getting up at the buttcrack of dawn to go swimming outside of the city tomorrow. Until next time...

Clothed in Santa Cruz = Stranger in a Strange Land

I realized exactly what it's like to be here. It's like wearing my clothes while watching the naked run for the first rain at Santa Cruz. Even though I've always learned that wearing clothes is what is normal, it only took 20 minutes of watching the naked run freshman year to start feeling out of place, embarrassed because all my parts were covered, like a disgusting member of the bourgeoisie in a society where being clothed is a sign of privilege or unjust acquisition of wealth. That's a little what it's like to be here, knowing so certainly that I'm normal and that this place is foreign but everyday seeing that a huge majority of Italians think that they are normal and slowly, frighteningly, beginning to feel like I'm the foreigner and that this place is normal but I'm the one out of place.

Sometimes I really like Italians in general and other times they all (really the whole country of them) annoy me. Then I realize that what this year is doing for me is making me unable to think of Italians as a set anymore. I can't really think of Americans like that, having known so many of so many different political, social, personal, sexual, economic persuasions. Italians will become impossible to categorize anymore.

Classes have started. I wanted to go home on Monday morning after my first class...home to Santa Cruz to just pick up where I left off there. I panicked. I will have to use different strategies to perform well this year than at home, like studying for example, and living comfortably knowing that I don't understand a great percentage of what I'm hearing. I tried out contemporary italian lit, dialectology, comparative constitional law, and applied linguistics. Today is the patron saint of Bologna day (San Petronio) so I have a day of leisure this first week. Tomorrow the search for classes continues.

Luckily I am making a lot of American friends. I thought I would resist that tendency to gather with my own people abroad so I could push myself to integrate and assimilate. But I think resisting would deprive me of the valuable experience of making friends abroad with really interesting people. My anxieties and reflections and experiences take on depth and new layers when shared with other young Americans who are also here. Granted, I am lucky to already have Italian friends, so the transition into living here has been relatively a smooth one.

I visited Genova and saw my very first Italian friend Cecilia this past weekend, with whom I spent the summer in Italy four years ago. Genova is on the sea, and no cars or vespas go into the historical city center. The air is actually breathable, and the coastal terrain gives the city a rolling, uplifted feeling. It's the birthplace of pesto and focaccia and Columbus (though I'm reading a book right now Lies My Teacher Told Me, which calls into question Columbus' genovese roots. It says letters he wrote show that he didn't speak Italian well even when writing to people from Genova. "Some historians believe he was Jewish, a converso, or convert to Christianity, probably from Spain." (James Loewen, p. 54)) I didn't take many pictures, but I will return!

Now I'm off to celebrate the great personage that was San Petronio...uh, who? Food, people, Piazza Maggiore, yay!

The City

I have been thinking lately what a difference there is between life in the city and life outside of it. Ironically, I just had the most positive, non-city-like experience this morning, to counter all the expected negatives that are here like smog and overstimulation and no trees.

I saw the doctor this morning, but I didn't have to go to the doctor's office. It was a real live house call! I woke up yesterday morning with a stiff neck and any wrong move triggered a painful seizing up of all the muscles. (I never believed in the so-called colpo d'aria, a supposedly dangerous phenomenon that happens when you let in a draft, involving stiff muscles, cold, flu, sore throat. It means a "blast of air" more or less, but they act like they were hit by a train when they experience un colpo d'aria. As if a nice cool breeze could have malicious intentions....)

Instant karma for all the heckling I've done to Giovanni for coming from a wimpy culture. I walked around town like Frankenstein yesterday hoping that after a night of rest I'd be ready to run this morning. E invece no! This morning the muscles seized every few minutes and I decided I had to call the doctor because I couldn't figure out how else to deal with this probably minor problem that was unbearable. Dr. Williams is an American doctor, and helps lots of foreign students. What a relief it was to know the the doctor was on his way and I could eat breakfast and stay comfortable while I waited.

After all of this psychologically painful adjusting to "city life", I must say I never expected to experience a real house call by a doctor ever in my life. In fact, it makes me want to stop eating my apple a day so as not to keep the doctor away.

Despite this anomalous experience, I have been adjusting to city life in all of its smoggy, frenetic manifestations, sometimes with difficulty. I realize that every time I go out, I sort of need a wall of defense: sunglasses, a stony stare straight ahead, a keen eye for vomit, feces, urine, or spilled alcohol, and agility to dodge vespas, tiny but speedy cars, and to navigate through elderly women loaded down with groceries, impeccably dressed business types, women in high heels, and cigarettes hanging from every third hand. I am used to space and the smiling courtesy of strangers and feeling clean after a walk downtown. Bologna, in fact, is rather clean. There is not much trash for a place that seems to have been built for people to interact socially in a million ways all day long, and presumably create trash. They say it is cleaned every day (like most cities, I suppose) in the wee hours of the morning.

In fact, it is rather enchanting in terms of social life, and is becoming moreso as the initial feeling of overstimulation from seeing too many faces and hearing too much noise fades. In fact, Bologna has 38 kilometers (about 24 miles) of porticos. These are structures supported by columns that cover the sidewalk and offer shade from the sun, shelter from the rain, and generous sidewalk space for idle chatting, asking for directions, or eating. The map of Bologna looks like a funky bicycle wheel, with one large spoke cutting it in half (via dell'Indipendenza) and many other streets spreading like rays from somewhere in the middle to the outer boundary of the city. The tire, in this analogy, is the series of road that circles the city and actually used to be a wall for protection from the so-called barbarians.

As I venture down the stairs from my fifth story apartment, I go out with the intention of getting lost so that I can find myself by getting oriented again. Every street seems to end up in the center of the city, so with little skill I usually get found as quickly as I get lost.

As part of the intensive language course that I'm taking, I went on an excursion to see the remains of an Etruscan city, complete with an acropolis to worship the gods, a necropolis to bury the dead, and a sewer system. From there, we traveled to a small town between Bologna and Florence called Monte Sole, the site of one of many village massacres by the Nazi and Fascist forces during World War II in an attempt to eliminate partisans without having to figure out who was a partisan. Our guide, Francesco Pirini, who walked us up a paved road through oak trees and blackberry bushes, was a survivor of the massacre, and lost everyone in his family but his sister. We saw the remains of his bombed out church and the cemetery where the occupiers lined all the townspeople up to be killed. His message wasn't surprising but it was clear: Non fare la guerra. Don't make war.

Peace.

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!