I scanned the line of buses that had just arrived at the stop through my too-big designer rip off sunglasses that let me pass for Italian when I wear them. 14C pulled up, probably late although in nine months of taking it I never bothered to check the schedule, and I pushed through the tiny doors en masse. I rode the 14C once a week, every Thursday afternoon, but every time it was hard, my stomach got nervous though I tried to keep my stoic “I don’t want anyone to bother me or think I’m foreign,” bus face.
The nervousness continued as I walked up that hill from the bus stop to Villa Lorenzi, not because it was steep but because of what awaited me there. Today would be especially hard, and because it was my last visit it made me remember my first. I had only been in Italy for a month and had been assigned to a volunteering job here, an after school-type program for kids who come from troubled families. That first day I walked in, pretending to be confident, I felt so out of place, my Italian was still broken at times and I learned that understanding a professor’s lecture in perfect academic Italian and understanding a group of ten adolescent Florentine boys with thick accents were two very different things.
One boy immediately stuck by me, the smallest—Ivan, wanting to sit by me at lunch and asking me if I had a boyfriend before trying to sneak in some kisses on my cheek, he seemed crushed when I told him ten years was a little too much of an age difference for me. I couldn’t say a word out loud in front of everyone I tried hard to concentrate on the conversations spinning around me but only got frustrated at the few sporadic words I would catch. “Why weren’t the other adults helping me?” I thought, “can’t they see that I’m completely lost here?” I had to remind myself painfully that this is what I’d been wanting this whole time, to get out of the tourist center of Florence, to have people treat me like I did understand Italian, not special because I’m American. I stayed silent at lunch and every time one of the boys would venture out to ask me a question I could only smile back—I didn’t understand a thing.
Not being able to use my words, I got the respect from the rest of the boys on the soccer field, they aren’t used to seeing girls who know how to play a sport and when I was able to steal the ball from Alessio, the token show-off and ball hog, and then make a goal, they were in shock, “Che Forza Margherita!” I helped Alessio that day with his English and math during study time and was immediately struck with the drawbacks of the Italian school system, Alessio didn’t understand a word of English when I said them in my American accent, but when I spoke them like he did, thickly covered in Italian pronunciation, he knew it all.
As I left that day I could count the number of words I had spoken all afternoon on one hand, had had my grammar corrected by a thirteen year old when I did speak, and found out I was a terrible English tutor. Nontheless on the bus ride back into town I couldn’t help but feel elationi at having made it through five hours of a completely foreign experience, and the names and faces of the boys filed through my head: Alessio, Mohammed, Daniele, Michele, Peter, Marco, and Ivan. I already knew somehow that I would get attached, even if I could never understand a word they said, and every week felt like a battle I had to fight wholeheartedly just to make it back to the bus.
Today I walk into lunch and the boys say “Ciao,” though they all pretend that they don’t care to see me, except Ivan who says “Margaret! Vieni qui! Come stai?” Margaret! Come here, how have you been?, then continues to ask excitedly how my mother is, how my boyfriend is, and how school is going. I understand now the conversations at lunchtime, I have gotten used to the Florentine accent and even pick it up by accident at times, breathing in my c’s as if they are h’s. A few weeks ago I turned and smacked Mohammed when I heard him cursing and Andrea, one of my colleagues, laughed at us. “Capisci molto più adesso.” You understand a lot more now.
At playtime out at the campino, I was playing a soccer game with Mohammed and Alessio that I didn’t understand the rules to, just going where they told me to. I glanced at my watch and saw that it said six, time to catch the 14C for the last time. Andrea noticed me idle away from the game, and leave the campino only to stand watching the boys as they played. “È difficile di andare via, non?” It’s hard to leave, huh? He called Alessio over to say goodbye to me, he yelled “Ciao!” at me, barely glancing my direction before sprinting back to his game. Andrea assured me that that’s just how they say goodbye, but I already knew that, I don’t like goodbyes either. I walked down that big hill from Villa Lorenzi and hid the tears in my eyes behind my too-big fake sunglasses, on my way to catch the 14C.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Tempo Italiano
Italians run late, they just do. My entire nine months here I have been trying to figure out if this is due simply to a more relaxed nature, less living by appointments and palm pilots and rigid schedules than the American lifestyle I am used to, or in fact if their perception of time is just skewed. Lately I have been more prone to answer with the latter, although I may be on the verge of discovering a method to this seeming neglect for tempo.
Take school for example, at the University of Florence classes are run on what was explained to me as the “University quarter-hour schedule,” meaning if your class is supposed to be from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. this really means you have fifteen minutes of leeway on either end of the class. The Professor will arrive anywhere up to fifteen minutes late and will dismiss class anytime within the last fifteen minutes. This scheduled tardiness exists within the realm of school, but in other realms it is less regimented, waiters may take half an hour to bring you your check, a friend might show up twenty minutes late to an appointment without a word of excuse, and buses, trains and planes have no real use for such banal things as schedules.
It is not only quarters of hours here and there that Italians dismiss as unimportant but this lacksadaisacal nature bleeds even into months and years. Their entire University system, for example, is based on modules of semesters that make up “three years” of study. You take approximately seven classes a year, and then will have a month, sometimes even two, to “study” before you take your exams between modules. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand what happens when a college student is given two months off of school to follow a self-regimented study plan, and the result is that hardly anyone passes their first time around, but then are able to continue taking the exam during every exam period during their time at University, which somehow seems to stretch mysteriously from three years to five, seven, and sometimes more.
The Italian vocabulary is even telling of this strange vortex of time. Bambini, or as we would say, babies, are considered anywhere from newborn children to teenagers, while ragazzi, or children, are mostly college age students or anyone under thirty. Looking at the maturation process of Italian culture these terms seem intuitive, when people live at home through their college years, don’t get married until their mid thirties, and hardly ever have children anymore, not only are they referred to by a younger sounding word, they just are younger. As an American I came to Italy as a twenty year old, almost self-sufficient, college student, I live in my own apartment, hold down a job, and am considered an adult in most arenas of life. The moment I arrived in Italy I was immediately struck by the tendency for baristas or shopkeepers to refer to me as a bambina, “Who are they kidding?” I would think, offended to not be referred to formally as an adult. But as the time has passed I have slowly began to internalize the Italian culture and clock, realizing that their perceptions of me may not be so wrong, they just reflect a different set of priorities.
Earlier in the year we had an appointment with the Police Chief to get fingerprinted and registered as foreigners living in Italy for our visas. We arrived to the appointment over a half hour late and were then told to wait another fifteen minutes for the Chief to be ready for us. On the other hand, I went to my second Fiorentina soccer game today and left my house at noon to make it to the three o’clock match hours early with the rest of the Florentine population in order to ensure our good seats. Most people don’t marry until much later in life, but the common term to use instead of boyfriend or girlfriend to refer to your significant other is fidanzato, or fiancée. Apparently too Italians love, like soccer, is serious enough to speed up time for. Certain things are worthy of their time, others aren’t. Time to them is a precious thing, not to be wasted sitting in line at the police station, but to be spent cheering your home team on to victory during their team warm-ups, or over a five hour Sunday lunch with your family and “fiancée” that you met two weeks ago.
The Italian retardation of time as it applies not only to everyday living but to the entire life process may make me a bambina for a while longer, but it also seems to draw out adulthood, and old age into something that is lasting, something to look forward to as a phase of life instead of the end of all. Just walk into any café in Florence and count the number of people over the age of seventy who aren’t locked away in nursing homes or shunned out of society, but still actively discussing politics with their waiter, taking afternoon walks around the city and enjoying an evening glass of wine and aperitif before heading home for a 9 p.m. dinner.
It may be nice to get a coffee in under five minutes and have an appointment with a teacher that actually shows up on time when I make it back to America, but for now I’ll enjoy my newfound twenty-one year old infancy, and hope the rest can last just as long.
Take school for example, at the University of Florence classes are run on what was explained to me as the “University quarter-hour schedule,” meaning if your class is supposed to be from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. this really means you have fifteen minutes of leeway on either end of the class. The Professor will arrive anywhere up to fifteen minutes late and will dismiss class anytime within the last fifteen minutes. This scheduled tardiness exists within the realm of school, but in other realms it is less regimented, waiters may take half an hour to bring you your check, a friend might show up twenty minutes late to an appointment without a word of excuse, and buses, trains and planes have no real use for such banal things as schedules.
It is not only quarters of hours here and there that Italians dismiss as unimportant but this lacksadaisacal nature bleeds even into months and years. Their entire University system, for example, is based on modules of semesters that make up “three years” of study. You take approximately seven classes a year, and then will have a month, sometimes even two, to “study” before you take your exams between modules. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand what happens when a college student is given two months off of school to follow a self-regimented study plan, and the result is that hardly anyone passes their first time around, but then are able to continue taking the exam during every exam period during their time at University, which somehow seems to stretch mysteriously from three years to five, seven, and sometimes more.
The Italian vocabulary is even telling of this strange vortex of time. Bambini, or as we would say, babies, are considered anywhere from newborn children to teenagers, while ragazzi, or children, are mostly college age students or anyone under thirty. Looking at the maturation process of Italian culture these terms seem intuitive, when people live at home through their college years, don’t get married until their mid thirties, and hardly ever have children anymore, not only are they referred to by a younger sounding word, they just are younger. As an American I came to Italy as a twenty year old, almost self-sufficient, college student, I live in my own apartment, hold down a job, and am considered an adult in most arenas of life. The moment I arrived in Italy I was immediately struck by the tendency for baristas or shopkeepers to refer to me as a bambina, “Who are they kidding?” I would think, offended to not be referred to formally as an adult. But as the time has passed I have slowly began to internalize the Italian culture and clock, realizing that their perceptions of me may not be so wrong, they just reflect a different set of priorities.
Earlier in the year we had an appointment with the Police Chief to get fingerprinted and registered as foreigners living in Italy for our visas. We arrived to the appointment over a half hour late and were then told to wait another fifteen minutes for the Chief to be ready for us. On the other hand, I went to my second Fiorentina soccer game today and left my house at noon to make it to the three o’clock match hours early with the rest of the Florentine population in order to ensure our good seats. Most people don’t marry until much later in life, but the common term to use instead of boyfriend or girlfriend to refer to your significant other is fidanzato, or fiancée. Apparently too Italians love, like soccer, is serious enough to speed up time for. Certain things are worthy of their time, others aren’t. Time to them is a precious thing, not to be wasted sitting in line at the police station, but to be spent cheering your home team on to victory during their team warm-ups, or over a five hour Sunday lunch with your family and “fiancée” that you met two weeks ago.
The Italian retardation of time as it applies not only to everyday living but to the entire life process may make me a bambina for a while longer, but it also seems to draw out adulthood, and old age into something that is lasting, something to look forward to as a phase of life instead of the end of all. Just walk into any café in Florence and count the number of people over the age of seventy who aren’t locked away in nursing homes or shunned out of society, but still actively discussing politics with their waiter, taking afternoon walks around the city and enjoying an evening glass of wine and aperitif before heading home for a 9 p.m. dinner.
It may be nice to get a coffee in under five minutes and have an appointment with a teacher that actually shows up on time when I make it back to America, but for now I’ll enjoy my newfound twenty-one year old infancy, and hope the rest can last just as long.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Fotografie di Sardegna
Home Sweet Home, Bungalow #11.
Stumbling upon a beach on our way to the grocery store.
The Sardegnian sun.
Racing to the sunset.
Scaling rocks in search of a less windy spot.
Beautiful beachy evening.
Moving Right Along. Paris to Florence to Sardegna.
I have officially decided that my perception of time here in Italy is the most baffling experience of them all. I almost feel as if too much has happened between this blog and my last to be able to write it all. I’ll try to sum it up quickly.
Paris was a lot of fun, my best friend from home was with me, and my best friend from the program and we got to spend time with my other wonderful friend from high school who is studying there. It was five full days in Paris and they were all jam packed with museums, pastries, and walking long distances. It made me appreciate once again my knowledge of the Italian language because even after two years of high school French I felt so bad not being able to even order a baguette sandwich correctly. The experience did, however, make me remember why the French language was so beautiful, and that I may still want to pick it back up one day. My favorite museum in Paris was the Museé D’Orsay, a museum that was created out of an old railroad station and now holds one of the most incredible collections of art I have ever seen including many works by three of my favorites: Degas, Monet, and Van Gogh.
Paris was exhilarating and exciting, there is absolutely so much to do there that I can see it being a very livable city, it was shockingly modernized and globalised in comparison with Florence, reminding me of things like multi-culturalism and efficiency that just don’t exist in Italy. The weather, however was freezing cold and it rained/snowed almost every day we were there, my feet were very tired by the end of the day, and getting back home to Italy was once again a wonderful feeling.
Since then the weather in Florence has been beautiful, I’ve finished up my University of Florence course and caught up on everything I missed from my illness. Friday morning three of my closest friends and I hopped a cheap RyanAir flight to Sardegna, the island off Italy’s western coast for a much needed relaxing three days. We flew into Alghero, the city in the northwestern corner of the island, found the bungalow we had reserved at a campground, and spent three full days lying on the beach, making our own dinners, and studying for our upcoming University exams. We got back late Sunday night, sunburned but happy, and now I have two more days to finish the reading for my University Exam Thursday morning. The exam is oral, we are responsible for knowing all of the information given in class plus three books we should have read, I am still swinging back and forth between feeling completely confident and completely unprepared, but hopefully the first one will win over come Thursday morning.
Now that I am back from Sardegna I have three and a half weeks of classes left, three weekends to spend in Florence, before finals for my other courses happen the first week of May, followed by our group trip to Sicily May 10-15, and then I will be flying home May 19th. There are six weeks sitting in front of me and I’m trying to tell myself they will be enough, but in all honesty I just can’t believe any of it.
Paris was a lot of fun, my best friend from home was with me, and my best friend from the program and we got to spend time with my other wonderful friend from high school who is studying there. It was five full days in Paris and they were all jam packed with museums, pastries, and walking long distances. It made me appreciate once again my knowledge of the Italian language because even after two years of high school French I felt so bad not being able to even order a baguette sandwich correctly. The experience did, however, make me remember why the French language was so beautiful, and that I may still want to pick it back up one day. My favorite museum in Paris was the Museé D’Orsay, a museum that was created out of an old railroad station and now holds one of the most incredible collections of art I have ever seen including many works by three of my favorites: Degas, Monet, and Van Gogh.
Paris was exhilarating and exciting, there is absolutely so much to do there that I can see it being a very livable city, it was shockingly modernized and globalised in comparison with Florence, reminding me of things like multi-culturalism and efficiency that just don’t exist in Italy. The weather, however was freezing cold and it rained/snowed almost every day we were there, my feet were very tired by the end of the day, and getting back home to Italy was once again a wonderful feeling.
Since then the weather in Florence has been beautiful, I’ve finished up my University of Florence course and caught up on everything I missed from my illness. Friday morning three of my closest friends and I hopped a cheap RyanAir flight to Sardegna, the island off Italy’s western coast for a much needed relaxing three days. We flew into Alghero, the city in the northwestern corner of the island, found the bungalow we had reserved at a campground, and spent three full days lying on the beach, making our own dinners, and studying for our upcoming University exams. We got back late Sunday night, sunburned but happy, and now I have two more days to finish the reading for my University Exam Thursday morning. The exam is oral, we are responsible for knowing all of the information given in class plus three books we should have read, I am still swinging back and forth between feeling completely confident and completely unprepared, but hopefully the first one will win over come Thursday morning.
Now that I am back from Sardegna I have three and a half weeks of classes left, three weekends to spend in Florence, before finals for my other courses happen the first week of May, followed by our group trip to Sicily May 10-15, and then I will be flying home May 19th. There are six weeks sitting in front of me and I’m trying to tell myself they will be enough, but in all honesty I just can’t believe any of it.
Parigi
Me with my Degas at Musee D'Orsay.
The clock from the railroad station that the museum used to be.
Carly, Dana, and I in front of the Arc de Triomphe.
Inside the Louvre, the building was the coolest part.
The tower, with an extremely ominous cloud behind it.
Pastry break during the rain storm.
The view of the storm after it passed from the top of the Eiffel Tower.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Photos da Ravenna
Yes, this is a mosaic.
All this too.
And this, look at the depth!
JYA Florence '07-'08. What a pretty group.
Dante's tomb.
And the days run together...
The last month has gone so quickly that it seems absolutely impossible that I am on Spring Break. Since I got back from Prague I have since: started my University of Florence class, had several wonderful visitors, taken a day trip to Ravenna, celebrated my 21st birthday, gotten laryngitis, and had midterms.
I chose to take a Linguistics course at the University of Florence this semester, after much stress about the Italian University system, scheduling conflicts, confusion about exams and modulos, and my director not being entirely sure if this course would be something too “technical” for me to understand in a foreign language, I went. And I understood almost everything, it’s a very dry subject, but it’s something I’m interested in especially since it is a General Linguistics course and therefore discusses not only the aspects of the Italian language but also compares it with English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and whatever else the professor can come up with. My exam is on April 7th, it’s an oral exam and I have no idea what to expect. We’ll see.
One of my good friends from Smith came to visit a couple weekends ago who had taken Italian with me but decided to study in Scotland this year instead and it was fabulous to have a visitor that reminded me exactly what I loved about this city. When I met her on the steps of the Duomo shortly after she arrived she gave me the hugest hug and looked at me with tears in her eyes, pointing up to the bell tower, “Maggie! Look where we are!” She reminded me of my original passion and excitement every time I saw laundry hanging outside a building, or the way the sun casts its light on a yellow building and a terra cotta roof. It was a nice reminder.
That same weekend we took a day trip to Ravenna, our third trip with the school, and after being jaded by the last two trips, which were less than exhilarating, Ravenna came as a pleasant surprise. First of all, I saw Dante’s tomb. Even though Dante was a die-hard Florentine, when he died he asked one of his monk friends to bury him in Ravenna. Florence tried to take him back a few times, but when they came the monks had dug him up and hidden his bones somewhere else. The Florentines finally gave up and now he’s back in his original tomb, although every year a group of Florentines come and fill a lamp with Florentine olive oil that burns inside his little altar. It was beautiful and gave me such an amazing feeling to know that someone so grand in the world of literature, Italy and history ended up just like everyone else, right where I was standing. The rest of the Ravenna trip was just as moving. We were shown several different churches all filled with Ravenna’s famous mosaics. Most of Ravenna’s buildings were done during the Byzantine Empire, back before frescoes, when the art was still mostly mosaic work. These decorations are impossible to describe, they covered entire church walls and ceilings depicting groups of people, and animals, all made up of tiny 1 x 1 cm. glass tiles that were each cut by hand. Incredible.
The last three events kind of come in a mish-mash that was last week, I began getting sick last Sunday but ignored it knowing that I had mid-terms and a birthday party to look forward to, by Saturday morning after two exams and 6 days of ibuprofen and lots of water I woke up with absolutely no voice. Not wanting to miss out on my own birthday party I thought positive and went out that night anyway to a nice dinner and then a few bars for some 21st birthday drinks, needless to say the next morning my body wasn’t very happy and I spent my actual birthday in bed, without a voice. Monday I missed school for the first time and went to the doctor who prescribed a giant dose of antibiotics and to “rest my voice.” It’s been very tough and made me feel like a foreigner all over again, but I’m finally healing up and hopefully will be back to 100% by Sunday when I fly to Paris for my newest adventure.
I chose to take a Linguistics course at the University of Florence this semester, after much stress about the Italian University system, scheduling conflicts, confusion about exams and modulos, and my director not being entirely sure if this course would be something too “technical” for me to understand in a foreign language, I went. And I understood almost everything, it’s a very dry subject, but it’s something I’m interested in especially since it is a General Linguistics course and therefore discusses not only the aspects of the Italian language but also compares it with English, Spanish, French, German, Chinese, and whatever else the professor can come up with. My exam is on April 7th, it’s an oral exam and I have no idea what to expect. We’ll see.
One of my good friends from Smith came to visit a couple weekends ago who had taken Italian with me but decided to study in Scotland this year instead and it was fabulous to have a visitor that reminded me exactly what I loved about this city. When I met her on the steps of the Duomo shortly after she arrived she gave me the hugest hug and looked at me with tears in her eyes, pointing up to the bell tower, “Maggie! Look where we are!” She reminded me of my original passion and excitement every time I saw laundry hanging outside a building, or the way the sun casts its light on a yellow building and a terra cotta roof. It was a nice reminder.
That same weekend we took a day trip to Ravenna, our third trip with the school, and after being jaded by the last two trips, which were less than exhilarating, Ravenna came as a pleasant surprise. First of all, I saw Dante’s tomb. Even though Dante was a die-hard Florentine, when he died he asked one of his monk friends to bury him in Ravenna. Florence tried to take him back a few times, but when they came the monks had dug him up and hidden his bones somewhere else. The Florentines finally gave up and now he’s back in his original tomb, although every year a group of Florentines come and fill a lamp with Florentine olive oil that burns inside his little altar. It was beautiful and gave me such an amazing feeling to know that someone so grand in the world of literature, Italy and history ended up just like everyone else, right where I was standing. The rest of the Ravenna trip was just as moving. We were shown several different churches all filled with Ravenna’s famous mosaics. Most of Ravenna’s buildings were done during the Byzantine Empire, back before frescoes, when the art was still mostly mosaic work. These decorations are impossible to describe, they covered entire church walls and ceilings depicting groups of people, and animals, all made up of tiny 1 x 1 cm. glass tiles that were each cut by hand. Incredible.
The last three events kind of come in a mish-mash that was last week, I began getting sick last Sunday but ignored it knowing that I had mid-terms and a birthday party to look forward to, by Saturday morning after two exams and 6 days of ibuprofen and lots of water I woke up with absolutely no voice. Not wanting to miss out on my own birthday party I thought positive and went out that night anyway to a nice dinner and then a few bars for some 21st birthday drinks, needless to say the next morning my body wasn’t very happy and I spent my actual birthday in bed, without a voice. Monday I missed school for the first time and went to the doctor who prescribed a giant dose of antibiotics and to “rest my voice.” It’s been very tough and made me feel like a foreigner all over again, but I’m finally healing up and hopefully will be back to 100% by Sunday when I fly to Paris for my newest adventure.
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