Realtà

 It was a completely normal day, on the surface. I woke up, I drove to work, I worked, I drove home, I spent time with my boyfriend and I went to bed. But nothing about it felt “normal” in the traditional sense… in fact, everything about it felt fresh, new and extraordinary. Being in Italy continues to hold me in awe.

To begin, I woke up at the luxurious hour of 9:00am. This was improved by the fact that when I woke up, Gio was there, because his school schedule has him out of bed at 6:30 most mornings. After an appropriate amount of coccole, e poi latte e biscotti, Gio had to get studying and I eased my way into the day with some yoga. I headed off to work at the reasonable hour of noon, which is where the snuggles and biscuits end and reality sets in. Most immediately, the reality of driving.

Driving in Italy is an adventure… especially driving almost 60km along a highway around Naples, one of the most notoriously chaotic cities for driving in Europe. People here definitely follow a different set of road-rules than we do in Canada. For such relaxed people at all other times of the day, everyone seems to be a damn hurry whilst driving. Perhaps this is to balance out their otherwise laissez-faire attitude.

Being a timid driver simply does not work in Italy. When merging, changing lanes or going onto a highway, what I would consider an unsafe distance to try to get in front of a car is oftentimes the only distance you have to work with… so you GO GO GO and assume that whoever is racing up behind you sees you and will slow down (just enough) or jerk into the next lane to not lose speed (a far more likely scenario). I am still timid by Italian standards, which is usually okay because people have no problem passing me. Whether it’s in a left turn bay or lined-up in a big row of traffic, certain drivers will simply dip around me (and the entire line of traffic, perché no?), into the oncoming traffic lane, to get ahead. This is a daily, if not quarter-hourly, occurrence.

Another thing that I noticed while driving and being a passenger is that another Italian stereotype holds true even while driving – Italians do talk with their hands, at all times. Even while driving a manual shift and talking on their cell phone. To me it looks like multitasking to the extreme but to an Italian it’s just second nature. While driving with my boss last week, he was telling a wild story and had equally wild hand gestures to match the story and therefore, he was lightly swerving all over the road. Anyone in Canada would have thought he was drunk. This happened to me again while driving myself to Pozzuoli. A car in front of me was swerving all over two lanes of the highway and I thought to myself “it’s 12pm and he’s drunk already!?” But no, upon further inspection, I saw a lively conversation taking place between the passenger and the driver, complete with the necessary hand gestures.

In my two solo drives to Pozzuoli and back, I’ve gained confidence – and a new-found love in my good friend, Signor TomTom, who tells me where to go so I don’t have to drive and figure out the directions at the same time. I also picked up Giovanni from his University earlier this week, which is conveniently on the way from Pozzuoli back to Caserta, and only requires three terrifying minutes of Naples city driving, which I could manage. Being able to “swing by” Federico II University to pick up Gio is a thrilling concept to me!

The second reality that faced me that day was the reality of my new job – teaching English. I had been given: five low-level students for five consecutive hours for four classes in the span of two weeks. I have some experience teaching English, but very casual conversation-based and summer camp experience. I have no certification. However, by this day, it was my second class with the students and having survived the first, I felt more at ease, just like I did with driving. I was given no direction about the class at all (except that they are supposed to “speak”) and the woman in charge didn’t even show up that day, so I had to wander around the school finding a kind Italian teacher to help me make some photocopies. The lesson wasn’t perfect and the students were a bit difficult and tired at times, but all in all, it was a success. We had fun and I had them speaking in English as much as I could. Five hours of speaking for a low-level language student is a feat in and of itself.

The third reality that faced me at the end of the day was coming home. After the drive back, Gio was waiting for me at home, having just finished his own productive day of exam studying. Both exhausted, we decided to go for a passeggiata around Caserta and talk about our days. We stopped at a café and enjoyed prosecco and antipasti. This moment was the culmination of a successful and very real day. We weren’t on vacation, we weren’t on exchange in Belgium, we weren’t visiting one another in our respective cities… we both had a full, busy, and rewarding day that started wonderfully and finished in the best way possible –  together, drinking aperitivi and eating antipasti.

Vancouver is lovely, but there is no way to duplicate the feeling of that day in my own city. I was being challenged by doing “normal things” but with the added elements of being in a different country, speaking a different language and having to decode different ways of driving and working. The fact that this was indeed a normal day made the day extraordinary. 

Comments or questions welcome! I'd love to hear from you, too!

Adjustments

August 11 2006: I think I have fallen in love with Roma... when we got off the train bright and early, I couldn't even believe the sights I was seeing. I was awe-struck. Here we were at 6:30am... driving from the station... with some of the world's oldest and most monumental sights just passing us by... (Written in my travel journal on my first day, ever, in Italy.)

Before I left Canada, while procrastinating for exams, I took the time to go through my travel journal that I wrote in religiously during my first journey through Europe, straight after high school. I had some pretty strong impressions of Italy from the moment we first arrived. A dear friend and I had spent the night making friends with a fellow traveller on a night train from Nice to Rome and arrived in Rome groggy and exhilarated. We made a lot of oblivious-tourist mistakes during that first trip of ours to Italy. I feel incredible that five years after I wrote those words I would be making a trip to Rome for work.

I arrived in Rome the other day about 4 hours early for my workshop to become an examiner for English language exams because I wanted to retrace the tourist steps I had taken in 2006 and then again in 2008. I wanted to do this for nostalgia, to see if I could remember the way and because, when in Rome… it’s hard to resist being a wide-eyed tourist!

It’s always different to be in a country to live versus being a tourist. I think Italy has one of the biggest dichotomies between “tourism Italy” and “la vita quotidiana.” Or maybe I am feeling this way because when I was in Belgium I was living in the student-bubble and when I was in France I was living with expats. Whatever the reason, the experience that I have just begun feels the most authentic… and the most challenging.

Let me preface the proceeding anecdotes with this assurance: every challenge that I am facing in Italy, I am beyond happy to face. Granted, in the heat of some of the more trying moments, I want to pull my hair out, but in the end, living in Caserta is exactly where I want to be right now. Gio and I are still in the “I can’t believe you are in front of me” phase. I have traded spending time alone in my room in Vancouver talking to someone across the world for constant and intense Italian interactions, not just with Gio but with his entire family who all lives under one roof. I am still getting used to the idea that Gio and I won’t be ripped apart again by thousands of kilometers.

I feel extremely lucky to land in a foreign country with a whole support network who is not only here for me, but who has already sorted out the vast majority some of life’s most difficult issues, such as a job and a way to get to said job (Senore fiat cinquecento!) Knowing people here allows me to do things like bypass a room full of mostly North Africans trying to sort out their citizenship and go straight into the office of a friend of a friend who tells me exactly what to do in less than 10 minutes and to come back if I need more help.  Italy is a country which revolves around nepotism and social obligations, therefore having connections here is vital. I’m in a privileged position.

That being said, the social obligation dance here in Italy is going to take some practice. There are so many steps to learn and at the moment I’m feeling at a loss in certain situations. In many occasions my lack of fluent Italian is a hindrance but in other occasions it blatantly displays my naïveté to the social norms and therefore (I hope) some of my behaviours are more easily excused.  A good example of this happened in Rome, when my workshop ran (of course) overtime. My boss came to meet me in Rome (for reasons still unknown to me, but I am assuming it had something to do with this social dance that I’m still figuring out) and while I was rushing out of the meeting he was standing there talking on the phone. I told his friend (still not sure who she was, either!) that we really needed to go catch our train and we were feeling really anxious. There was no clear response to my clearly distressed (panicked) face and gesticulations, so my colleague and I just ran off and took a taxi to the Termini station. When my boss casually showed up at Termini about fifteen minutes after us, he seemed annoyed and told me that he made the trek to Rome for me. The start of our train ride was extremely awkward. I felt really bad about running off but really annoyed and confused because I didn’t know what the protocol was, and I wasn’t about to miss my train to find out. I talked to my colleague about it, who’s from England and has been living in Italy for almost seven years, and she still wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was either. She was pretty sure that what we did was rude, though. In the end, because of my rudimentary Italian, I simply apologized for “being too nervous in Rome” which was about all I knew how to explain. He seemed content with this. I think I’m in the clear because he bought me a pineapple juice afterwards.

The contrary of that situation, where my simple Italian seems to be sufficient (for the moment), is the on-going linguistic and cultural battle with Gio’s nonna. She’s an incredibly sweet lady but I am finding it very hard to communicate with her for multiple reasons. First of all, she doesn’t hear well. Second of all, she seems to be unable to understand 95% of what I say (even when I know I am saying it correctly!). Third of all, she doesn’t leave the house hardly at all, so she is very curious about what is going on inside the house. It’s hard to satisfy the curiosity of someone who can’t hear or understand you. As I was running around in the morning to leave for an 8-hour journey to Cervia to invigilate an English competition for schoolchildren, the nonna was talking at me and clearly distressed about where I was going and when I would be back. I tried to tell her “Vado a lavoro. Lavoro a Cervia per tre giorni. Devo mangiare e poi devo andare!” but she wasn’t having any of it. I basically had to leave the house while she was yelling after me. I had to phone Gio to tell him to phone her and tell her what was going on. Communication problems tend to intensify when in a hurry…

The adjustments to life here in Italy have only just begun. I haven’t even gotten into the adjustments required for working in Italy but that will have to wait until next time!


On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir à perdre de vue, d'abord et longtemps, tout rivage. (Gide)

Stay tuned and post comments or questions! 

Heart Athletics

The heart is figuratively as much of a muscle as it is literally. In the span of a lifetime the heart goes through a similar journey as that of an athlete. Of course, not all of us are athletes (myself included in this category), just as not all of us are heart-athletes (a category which I definitely fit in to). As I near the finish line of my personal heart marathon, I am looking back on what my heart has been through over the past year…

To begin, the image of my heart as an athlete came to me the other night in a moment of clarity; today my heart feels stronger, fuller, and if possible, bigger. Two years ago, my heart was akin to a 90-pound weakling that had sand kicked at it’s face on the beach. Injured and seriously out of shape, my heart was also doing the emotional equivalent of spending every day at home eating snacks on the couch while watching daytime TV.

When I met Gio over one year ago, my heart was, at first, comically reluctant to get back into shape. It had been using the equivalent of serious, but healed, sports injury as an excuse to never get off the couch again. It was also very nervous about falling flat on it’s face again and wanted to avoid such embarrassment.  Gio took it upon himself start off as my personal heart trainer, not fully realizing at first that he chose a reluctant couch-potato as his client. However, he was committed to getting my heart back in shape and he never gave up. As with any personal trainer, the key is “demonstrate and motivate!”

Gio’s perseverance paid off and my heart started to make some progress. Actually, after the typical resistance to any new regime, my heart started to really enjoy stretching it’s legs. This new routine was unlike any other exercise my heart had tried before. Soon, my heart was craving the chemicals produced by heart-athletics just as athletes start to crave the endorphins of exercise.

Fully addicted to the rush of falling in love, my heart was able to stand a mini-marathon in July when Gio and I were apart for a month while I was working France. It was a good test to see if we were up to the challenge that was soon to befall us. Together again in August, my heart was able to stretch, grab a glass of water and recharge before the real marathon began.

September came and we tried to start off on a steady pace with our hearts running the same route thousands of kilometers apart. The terrain was new and my heart was unstable and a bit off balance, especially after the first leg. Unable to bear the whole first leg of the run, I took a shortcut by going to Italy in October. Sometimes shortcuts are necessary and in this case, it was the wisest decision possible. In December we had our official half-way break and enjoyed the success of having made it thus far. Since then, we have had 101 days of marathon-distance to tackle. It hasn’t been easy, but the finish line is tantalizingly close. I can taste the victory already… I feel joyous and exalted for having made it. It is a true feat and I am very proud. My heart is pumping so hard and it feels about ready to burst. I’ve never felt my heart so strong, yet in such need of a good rest.

Not every heart needs to go through this, just as not everyone needs to run a marathon to be a healthy person. But the heart does need regular exercise and it needs to be healthy to take on any huge project. Perhaps heart-yoga is a good way to ease into things, for those who are alone or not up for a strenuous run. However, the end of one race doesn’t mean the end of running. It’s easy to slip out of shape without regular practice. Old age or complacence is certainly no excuse. Once a routine gets boring or uninspired, it’s time to change the route, whatever that may mean. I am officially retiring from marathon heart-runs next week, but I am excited to see what sort of exercise Italy will force my heart to adapt to. Hopefully it will be something a little less strenuous and instead something with a lot of patience and care. Such as tai chi.  

Please feel free to make comments at the end of my postings – I would love to hear other people’s opinions or experiences about anything I bring up! 

Pre-departure

Innamoratevi! Se non vi innamorate è tutto morto! Vi dovete innamorare, e diventa tutto vivo. Per essere felici dovete patire, stare male, soffrire. Non abbiate paura di soffrire: tutto il mondo soffre.(Robeto Benigni)

Language.

The end of a university degree is a time of change for anyone; for me, this change involves not only leaving school, but leaving my home, my family, my friends and my country. Not that any of this is new, as this will be my third time since 2007 moving to Europe to live for an extended period of time. However, what is new is the loss of the safety net of UBC. My elusive Bachelor's degree has loomed ominously in the background for five years, always calling me home. While this was cumbersome and limiting in the past, I was happy enough to receive this call. A Bachelor's degree seems to be a prerequisite to life these days. While I still don't quite understand this, what made sense to me was sitting in class, being spoken to in French, reading in French and attempting to make myself articulate in French writing and speaking. Not only do I have the nice ability of adding the words "BA" to my CV, but more importantly, after the letters BA I can put "French." It is a beautiful and lush language that I now fear losing because I'm not moving to France, as I was half-expecting to do a little over one year ago. I'm moving to Italy instead, where my limited language skills have been frantically put together at warp-speed throughout the past year.

Love.

After eight months of Benigni-approved suffering, the long-distance chapter of my 13000km, cross-continental, 9 hour time difference relationship is coming to a close. I would not recommend doing a long distance relationship (even to Benigni) unless you are very serious about that person on the other side of the world. It is lot of work and the rewards of that work are tragically far away. Time plays tricks on you, speeding up during the moments of togetherness and lurching to an awkward halt when life is already being dreary or difficult. That being said, it says something about any couple that has the desire to survive such intense separation. There needs to be a light at the end of the tunnel. When I left Italy in August, it wasn't even a question that I would be back as soon as I possibly could (which proved to be especially true after finding a cheap flight for a whirlwind visit in October!) My life is in Italy, so long as Gio is there. 
As I recently told Gio, I'm ready for a new challenge. This long-distance nonsense is getting real boring. Well, if it's a challenge I want, it's a challenge I will have! Yes, I am gallivanting off to one of the most luxuriously romantic countries in the entire world, but no, I will not be gazing into Gio's eyes under soft moonlit twilight for the rest of my days. Unfortunately. 

Life.

Life still goes on. Gio still has a Masters to complete and I have to be doing something with my time whilst living in a household of hard-working Italians. So, as soon as I arrive I will be frantically re-learning how to drive a stick-shift (thank goodness for my six-month stint of driving small children around the Alps!) so that I can go to work the following week as a language instructor.
Leaving Canada will be emotional, our reunion will be incredible and the new challenges will be plentiful. It's a lot to take in. But, I feel so lucky to be embarking on something so exciting. If I had told myself back on February 2^nd 2010 that I would be moving to Italy to be with the Italian guy I just met in the navy-blue "Why lie…?" sweatshirt, I might not have believed it. 
But it did happen. (Magnolia)