Fitting in, Eating too much, and Surviving IKEA

So in the description section of this blog, I mention the world “exploration,” which, if we’re being honest, seems like a pretty lofty and pretentious word. Exploration? It’s not as if I’m a pioneer heading off to the great unknown. The cobblestones of these streets are smooth from the amount of feet that have passed over them; Bologna has been experienced by millions and I am just one of many to stroll under its porticoes every morning, breathing in that lovely combination of engine exhaust and cigarette smoke. But even though this “exploration” of mine isn’t off to somewhere distant that is completely alien to me, it is still an exploration. Not just of the city, or this country or the continent around it, but also an exploration of how I will handle taking myself out of the familiar, daily grind of America and traveling to a place where people stroll down the sidewalks slower than a wheelchair race in a retirement home.

            The “orientation” that the ECCO program provided us during the first week was, essentially, a self-guided exploration of this massive city. I’m notoriously awful at remembering street names, so I’ve been guiding myself with landmarks such as le due torre (the two towers), the cell phone store, the pharmacy, the corner where the man plays the violin, etc. Unfortunately, even those directions can be a little shaky, so I typically just follow people who know where they’re going. Every day, we’ve been venturing out into the city. The ECCO office is on the outer edge of the center of the city. It takes just about five minutes to reach the main piazza from the office, which has led to many lunches out, particularly at Osteria del’Orsa, which is my current favorite and apparently an essential component to the Bologna experience (the picture of the tagliatelle from the previous post was from that restaurant). I have now eaten there approximately…five times.  

            We’ve been divided into three groups for these next three weeks until the beginning of February, with each group studying a particular level of Italian. Every day, from 9:30 am until 1:00 pm (or 13:00, if you’re reading Italian time), we’re all in our Intensive Italian Language course. I’ve been placed in the higher level, which means I get to have Ivan Tassi as my professor. The only way I can describe Ivan is fabulous, sassy, and a simply wonderful teacher. I’m going to try to secretly videotape him as he teaches class someday, because he physically can’t keep still. He literally dances around the classroom as he lectures and he’s so interesting and intelligent. So far we’ve been learning about Italy in the 60’s and 70’s (protests are the backbone of Bologna history and culture) and the medieval ages, along with some grammar. Today we began studying opera, which was…interesting. My patience for opera is limited to listening to a few Pavarotti songs while I cook Italian food with my dad, but I guess I’m going to have to start liking it, since in a few weeks our entire program will be going to the theatre (cue fancy British accent here) to go see a 3-4 hour opera performance of Macbeth. This may sound painful, but I think it’s going to be really interesting and classy. Also, Lily and I are planning on sneaking panini/entire pizzas into our bags, so we will be well-fed and entertained. I’m actually really enjoying the language class so far, since it’s very informal and, well…we have Ivan and his dancing.

            Once February comes, we’ll all begin ECCO classes and whatever UNIBO (University of Bologna) classes we choose. I’m currently debating between Italian Medieval History, Italian Contemporary History, and Modern Italian Literature. There are actually at least twenty classes that I’d love to take (such variety!) but unfortunately it’s just not possible.

            In the meantime, I wake up and am out the door at around 9 am to walk with the other Forni (our studentato = dorm, if you remember) girls to ECCO. Along the way, we stop by Café Max, where a portly, bald man dressed every day in a crisp grey suit greets us with: “Ciao ragazze!” or, more recently, “Ciao bimbe!” We’ve been going to his café for the past two weeks or so and the other day we had such a wonderful experience! We walked into the tiny bar, squeezing past disgruntled Italians clutching their little espresso cups, and “our guy” immediately knew our order: five cappuccino’s (or as he says, “cappuch”) and each of our pastry orders. He remembered everything. Café Max is officially our place to go in the morning before class to grab some breakfast. We didn’t know the man’s name so we decided to call him Umberto just because, but we recently discovered that (surprise!) his name is Max. I plan on calling him Umberto regardless.

            Another bit of exciting news: I’ve signed up for a gym! Along with a few of the other American girls, I decided that with all this pasta and bread and pizza and wine, I probably needed some exercise besides the casual and approximate six to ten kilometers I walk every day around town. The gym is wonderful. It’s also, unfortunately, about two kilometers away from my dorm, but that’s just part of the workout. There, I get the satisfaction of seeing Italian men’s jaws drop as Lily, our varsity swimmer in the group, casually runs five kilometers and lift weights for over an hour while they struggle to keep up a brisk pace on the treadmill. I have yet to reach this level of intensity, but I’m working on it. We’ve also been making friends with the Italian employees there, to the point where we have actually gone out with Chiara and Davide on the weekends. I think they see us as their little crowd of pet Americans, but it’s fine: they gave us a student discount, and that’s all that matters. Another plus is that the showers at the gym are gorgeous and really big—much bigger than our showers in the apartments. We’ve started to go to the gym just so that at the end of our workout, we can shower someplace that is slightly larger than my pantry.

            I must say that Bologna is surprisingly diverse. My memories of Italy were that of a rather homogeneous population, along with a smaller number of immigrants in the larger cities. However, Bologna has a lot of people from all over the world: Albania, many many countries in Africa, India, Pakistan…the list goes on and on. I even met a man from Bangladesh who owns a grocery store just a few yards away from my dorm and really enjoys speaking his native language with me, despite the fact that I don’t understand a word of it. He got really excited when he realized I wasn’t Italian and as I paid for my bottle of milk and bag of apples, we had a brief moment of mutual, shared fascination in our displacement from our home countries. I could almost hear it in the urgency of his voice as he told me, in Bangladesh, to please visit his store again: I’m not from here either.

            I stick out, clearly. I’m five foot nine, have blonde hair, and am wearing a North Face jacket (albeit a rather stylish one). When one of my roommates and her friends were in the kitchen chatting about boys, I overheard my housemate describing a particularly tall boy. When asked how tall, exactly, my housemate shrugged and then said, “Well, he’s taller than Daniela…” The fact that I’m being used as a measuring stick against freakishly-tall Italian boys also indicates that I am not blending in as easily as I think.

             While other outsiders like my Bangladesh friend welcome the chance to hear us speak English, a lot of Bologna natives are surprisingly frustrated with imperfect Italian; if any of us seem to struggle at all with a sentence, or maybe if we use incorrect grammar, they shake their heads and set their mouths in a thin, grim line, claiming to not understand us. I love and hate this at the same time. I understand that not everyone will be accommodating, as some Italians don’t speak English and don’t have the patience to deal with your poorly-structured sentence. And although it can sometimes be somewhat jarring to be faced with such hostility when simply asking for directions, I feel like I’m getting a pretty accurate portrayal of Italy in these constant, daily rejections, as it forces me to speak and improve my Italian far more so than I would have done in a city such as Florence or Rome, where American tourism is the foundation of the economy.

            As a random side-note: I successfully cleaned our apartment this past Friday. Italians are extremely concerned with cleaning, to the point where you feel as if at any moment, there’s going to be a pollen apocalypse. Our apartment schedule has someone different cleaning on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. So I’ll clean once a week on Friday. My mother is dancing with joy right now, I’m sure. As someone who is relatively neat but not obsessed with scrubbing bidets, I’m less-than-pleased. But the good news is that I survived my first apartment cleaning! Along with Marta’s help, of course. What would I do without her? Just the other night, she made about fifty cream-puffs from scratch and offered them to Sami (another American girl) and I and promised more sweets this past Saturday, as it was her birthday. She is basically my Italian mother for the semester and I love it.

            Speaking of food (as I will be doing often these next few months), Friday we had our first cooking class! Our instructor is an extremely sweet Italian woman named Rita who runs her own café downtown and is willing to cook for about 20 loud American girls every week or so in her own apartment, which is beautiful and has the most spectacular kitchen you could ever imagine. We made polenta, which I had never had before, as our pasta dish. Essentially, you boil flour in salted water. This makes a pasty sort of…well, I’m not entirely sure what it was. Check out the photo below! It was definitely delicious. We had ragu sauce with it, which was amazing, and then we had some sort of meat and vegetables for the second course. And then tiramisu! Which I was so excited about eating that I almost didn’t take a picture of it before I devoured it.  I’m really excited to learn to cook this semester—I fully intend to return to the States an Italian chef.

Tiramisu'!

Polenta con ragu'

            On Saturday we took a historical tour of Bologna, which really was just a tour of the two famous churches of the many churches in the city: La Basilica di San Petronio and La Basilica di Santo Stefano. San Petronio is HUGE and gothic and at one point was going to be larger than the Vatican, but the pope got competitive and bought all the surrounding buildings so that the people of Bologna wouldn’t expand San Petronio any further than it was. Santo Stefano was the first Christian church in Bologna and it is in a quiet little piazza with “pre-romanico” architecture, as Ivan would say. It is actually composed of seven inter-connected churches that are much more rustic and simple than San Petronio and I liked it much more. San Petronio was an overload of senses, while Santo Stefano was quiet and old, with simple courtyards that used to be the Temple of Idris, before the Christians came and renovated. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures within San Petronio, so I only have pictures of Santo Stefano, which you can see below.

            On Saturday night, my Italian roommate Marta had her birthday party in our apartment! She was making pizza and baking cakes and all sorts of other sweets all day in preparation. About five of her friends came over, along with Viola (my roommate) and Viola’s friend who is also from Albania and also happens to be named Viola. I have been calling my roommate Viola-Uno (One) and her friend Viola-Due (Two) whenever the two of them are in the same room, just to keep them straight (I’m hoping that before the end of this semester, I’ll be able to convince my parents to send me The Cat in the Hat and Thing One and Thing Two t-shirts for them). The kitchen was packed with yelling Italians, bottles of wine, pizza, music from my computer, and camera flashes. It was really nice meeting other Italians my age and goofing around with Viola-Uno and Viola-Due, who I’ve become really close to. We ended up playing Italian Pictionary, which was kind of difficult because I had some issues understanding all of the words (and drawing them—I am artistically challenged) and the Italians were pretty drunk and yelling loudly about Berlusconi. Guido, the portiere (a combination of a super, an RA, and a doorman), actually came upstairs to yell at us because of the noise complaints but the girls charmed him with a glass of wine and a piece of cake.

Viola-Due, Marta (the birthday girl!), Viola-Uno (my roommate) and me :)

            On Sunday I went on my first trip to IKEA, which was life-changing. We ate lunch in the café there because let’s be honest: how many other times am I going to eat mashed potatoes this semester? I was so overwhelmed with the classiness of IKEA and its immense size. I mean, really. I didn’t even know that much furniture existed. I bought new sheets (because mine were about 40 years old and had stains all over them), a duvet and a duvet comforter (because the radiator in my room is basically there for decoration and serves no purpose other than to leak on the floor), a new pillow (because I’m not a fan of sleeping on something that feels like a solid rock), and slippers! This may seem extravagant, but I can assure you that after one night in my new bed (I love my duvet so much that I have named her Sally), all of it was completely necessary. I am so cozy right now, snuggled up between layers of feathers and quilts and a mug of tea beside me (they have English Breakfast tea here—who knew?). I was afraid I’d never make it back to Forni, since the line to get on the IKEA bus had enough palpable tension buzzing around that it made me feel like I was taking part in the Hunger Games, about to fight to the death for that one seat in the back of the bus. I actually started boxing people out, as if I were playing basketball. Ridiculous, I know. But Italians do not really understand the concept of a line and so I had to maintain my spot. Success! After a 25-minute busride back into town and a trek through the city back to my room in the rain, I am now the proud owner of IKEA products.

           

           

            There are a lot of plans for this upcoming semester and exciting things happening, but I feel like I’ve written enough to even make Homer yawn, so this is me signing off. I hope this epic saga of a blog post hasn’t deterred you from checking back in again soon, because more adventures are sure to come!

Ci vediamo!

Danielle

P.S.

FUN FACT OF THE DAY: My roommate informed me that my dorm used to be a psychiatric hospital. The laundry room was the morgue. I have a tentative plan to keep buying new underwear and socks for the entire semester so I never have to do laundry. Good plan, yes?

© Copyright Danielle DeSimone. 2013.