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.
OK, First I want you to send me some of that Tiramisu and one of those cappuches. And a picture of Umberto, yeah - I want to get to know that guy as I'll be seeing him too when I visit. Also, have you found my bicicletta shop yet? Glad to see you are so happy sweetie.
ReplyDeleteI guess next blog you'll talk about how you study in the afternoons? :)
work hard, play hard, have fun, and live big
Love Dad (Papa)