We’ve got 3 saturdays, 3 sundays, 3 mondays, 3 tuesdays, 2 wednesdays, 2 tuesdays, 2 thursdays and 2 fridays to go until we move back to the United States of America onto the North American continent and away from Europe, Italy and Vicenza. Which after more than 2 years is a little weird. It’s like coming into the last week of college or highschool all over again.
Goodbyes are always hard. I usually deal with them by practically ignoring them. I say goodbye and I say I’ll miss you but, I’ve never been good at the teary or prolonged part and it just seems somehow less final to me to just say a simple goodbye and go. That’s me. I have trouble feeling really sorry at the goodbye because somehow to me it seems like a negation of the relationship itself. I figure that friendships are precious and no matter how short or long they last because of the circumstances of life they are still beautiful things. That in a way the time itself, the time that you had, is marred by long goodbyes that seem to show a need to say that it was sure that the relationship would stay the same forever. It is that way for most relationships and then for those that are most important you will do all you can to see them again to continue to be apart of their life so when you say goodbye it is always certain that it is just for a time. That is my rationale at least for my own behaviour although really it is probably just a way to let myself follow my own inclinations …..
I have found that my ideas of this run counter to the culture here in Italy. I do not feel just in assuming either that things or people will remain unchanged or that any particular change is final. What I have found here is that people assume constancy, believe in the possiblity of immutablity …. and tend to feel that to be transient is in a way to be a traitor. So it’s hard to make friendships because they know that as a foriegner you will probably leave someday. Even harder in a way are those who do allow you to be friends that you eventually do have to say goodbye to.
We’ve been saying goodbye for the last three weeks to different sets of people and really it’s hard …. mostly for me it is hard to watch their faces get a little harder, like their eyes are saying “You see! You are leaving. I shouldn’t have trusted you because now I have to say goodbye, better not to have been friends and not have to say goodbye in this way.” Then their lips say: “Allora Arrivederci! perchè voi partite, vero? Tornate agli Stati Uniti per sempre.” (So Till we see eachother again! Because you guys are leaving, right? Your going back to the United States forever.) At that point watching their eyes and listening to their words I feel truly sad. Not because I’m convinced that we will never come back to Italy. In fact I am rather more convinced that anything is possible. But to watch them feel hurt because I couldn’t stay for a life time hurts. At the same time it makes me want to protest….
I’ve now completed my research into popular music in Italy and have found a couple that I like (after the inauspicious start it turned out ok after all). First thing I found is that artists seem to have more longevity here so the same artists are popular for decades in a row.
The ones I found that I now want to buy their music:
Tiziano Ferro, good music in the ballad type genre. One of his songs has been on the radio constantly for a year because it was in a really popular movie but, he’s also got some really fun quirky stuff as well like “Raffella è mia” which is about a guy who wins a date from a Italian Vana White in a TV contest.
Ligabue, for all I can tell has been popular since 1985 or so but, he really is good with words. Again ballad type.
Neffa, the only italian rap star that I really like! Had a cool video last year with a girl walking around with a mirror around her neck.
Negramaro, Matt says that they are far to Emo for his taste but, I get a kick out of them. Very angry music. You have to have music for every mood though, right
In the next week we are doing three different and rather (us) labor intensive things with the church here in Vicenza. It’s kind of like our last BIG hurrah before we go home (there will be lots of little hurrahs afterward I’m sure). There is a women’s day, a conference and last but not least a youth retreat.
What’s occupying my attention at the moment is the youth retreat. My job is come up with the games and intro icebreakers. The theme is love so we (matt and I) kind of decided coporately that the icebreaker was going to be literary analysis of pop songs that talk about the subject so as to discuss healthy and godly approaches to love vs. unhealthy and ungodly ones….. though I am not for the life of me going to come near saying the words literary or analysis at the retreat, that would be swift and unmerciful suicide. Without those two words added in though I’m kind of hoping it will go over alright. In order to do it though I am having to do research into the current popular songs in Italy.
AGGGGGG!
Ok so to do my research I figured the best way would be to watch All Music, the Italian Mtv alternative.
This morning…..found lots of infomercials …… and they were all the same infomercial! I don’t know if they have them in the US right now but apparently the only infomercial on Italian television right now is the wiggly butt infomercial. Seriously the whole time the infomercial is going the screen is full of butts, old people butts, female model butts, male model butts, the salesmens butt and they are all wiggling, constantly! The machine is supposed to be a exercise thingy I think but, what it seems to do most effectively is make one do a very exagerated maybe fastforwarded version of the twist or something that makes every fat molecule that you have jiggle kind of softly but, rapidly.
After getting far to ingrossed in butt jiggling I finally managed to resist my morbid fascination and change the channel…ok so now I have All Music I think… but wait …. is this really a music video? A four minute music video completely made up of bad camcorder footage of a guys studio focusing most frequently on the number of nobs are on his sound boards! Next video…now I’m watching guy that dances like my husband when he’s making fun of people who can’t dance and this guy is doing it in all seriousness and he can’t even seem to clap to the beat of his own song!
So about this point I give up on the television at least for the morning and go to computer to look up the top ten list in Italy to see if there are any Italian language songs or even English songs of the simple kind that do not have metaphor or double entendre I would have to explain for the kids to know what it means… (for that reason I’m sorry but, I can’t use “Shut up and Drive”? … just learned of the songs existence today by the way… because who really wants to explain the metaphor of a car for a women’s body to a bunch of teenagers …. don’t want to go there. As an aside: this is a major problem. The other day we went to one of the 8 year old girls from the churches ballet recital, she and her class of all 7 and 8 year old girls pranced around to the tune of “I’m a Barbie Girl in a Barbie World”. I’m sorry but there is just a multitude of wrongness there. Who really wants to explain to their parents what it really means.)
Ok so I got back to the search to discover…… Number One on the charts…… Eros Ramozzotti “Non Siamo Soli” or We’re Not Alone and guess who got onto the video? None other than Ricky Martin! He somehow managed to come back from pop star death to feature prominently in a top charting Italian song. By this time I’m really doubting my capacity to continue the search. But I will trudge forward through the multitude of 80s bands (including the Pooh, which I swear were all wearing tupeés at there concert though I guess the video could have been playing with the light) to find the perfect songs.
My family came to visit us about a week ago! It was fantastic, though now our 2 person apartment seem quite a bit quieter after being inundated with 4 more people for a week and a half. It was very fun though because we had saved up all these things to do with them. You know when you don’t go do the things that there are to do in the town you live in until people come to visit. Well that is what we did and it turned out great. First there was a flurry of food….there are so many good cheeses and wines and salami objects that are to expensive and heavy for everyday that are perfect to eat when there is company and no one is thinking about dieting or staying in shape.
Good food you need to try if you come to the Veneto:
Sopresa di Schio with or without garlic
Asiago cheese…all types very old to very young
Seafood if you are by the sea
and white sparkling wines!
The biggest food hit though was chocolates from our local chocolate store where they make them in the back and sell them with coffee out front….passion fruit chocolate is the best ever! (it melts in your mouth like who knows what softly caressing your taste buds into submission until you are so satisfied you cannot even contemplate eating another piece because the satisfaction would morph into painful ectasy! and yes they really are that good)
Besides the food we went to see a lot of the things we’d saved up, wanting to go see them but, putting it off based on we live here laziness. It was good to see the places, it was good to be a tourist for a week but, in some ways it drove home the fact that we are only in Italy for two more months.
While seeing Soave castle with it’s perfectly kept ramparts that give you a sweeping view of the valley, (a castle we pass every time we get on the highway and that I’ve been wanting to go see since April) was amazing it also meant that that untied up end wasn’t loose any more it was done. In some ways it felt like the store of undone things was part of our reassurance that we actually lived here and as people that live here we can always go look at it later. Soave and the museums in Vicenza itself were more like that for me. Riva del Garda and Sirmione and Aquileia were less so because they are further away I think.
So now we’ve showed off our church and our life to someone else outside of ourselves that will be apart of our life after we leave Vicenza. That part of it was really satisfying because without it when you get back you have this uncanny feeling that in everyone elses eyes you were just missing for 2 years not actually living a real life while you were gone, just gone, dormant somehow. Now that my family has seen my life I feel less like leaving is an approaching doom for my memories of being here though I do feel like it is more certain that we are leaving now.
Filed under: Italy
They’ve been protesting outside my window for the last year. You probably have heard very little about it, but the United States wants to expand the army base in Vicenza. They want to expand onto the old unused airport here so that they can fly in and out of Vicenza itself. Once the expansion is done the base will be a grand total of 1 full mile square instead of half of one. You probably haven’t heard, but I have. About once a month or so I run into a group of people banging pots, most often right outside my apartment, wearing protest flags and sometimes yelling. So I am well aware that there is a section of the population of Vicenza that doesn’t want the base to be expanded and ignoring their opinion the government that they voted in to say no to the US army said yes anyway. Now there is alot of confusion, one of the women at church told me that they were protesting because they thought that America would keep nuclear weapons in Vicenza if they enlarged the base and so everyone was scared because if they got bombed and there were nuclear bombs here then it would be bad or a friend of ours who is sympathetic took us by the base to show us that it was right to protest because the base would be gynormous if it was expanded (4 city blocks instead of 2 on the outskirts of town! Really….they don’t have any idea how big bases can get). So yeah a lot of confusion, but there really are good reasons for the protest. In a lot of ways I sympathise. A government that doesn’t do what you think is important and to me the vastly more troublesome problem of an incredibly corrupt government should be protested against. But everytime I see them banging pots I can’t help thinking that there must be something more useful they could be doing with their time. Most of the protests happen at or around community functions like park dinners or concerts. The protest today happened around a food and culture celebration planned by the city, so instead of freely going and tasting good cheese and wine the rest of the city stays home to avoid the protesters and gets angrier and angrier because of the annoyance. Not more sympathetic. I have what Matt calls a fairly anglo saxon mindset of this kind of thing. If what I’m doing doesn’t have the benefit of being effective I don’t want to do it. To me you protest by calling your senator and representative so much that they can’t work because they’re phone lines are blocked or you go sit in their office or in government offices, if you protest you protest in front of where the officials responsible will see you and have to deal with you or where you will get the most media coverage. Not where you will be the most irritating to your neighbors. I always want to yell at them <I CAN’T HELP YOU! I CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT! WHY ARE YOU PROTESTING HERE?> The other day rather than the normal pot bangers there was a group of people that were collecting signatures for what they called V-Day or approxiamately in Italian F—- you government day. It seemed ridiculous because they were cheerily singing on guitar a song that went <F— you, F—- you, F—- you oh government> in a rather Simon and Garfunkely manner. I asked later that day what was going on and found out it was anything but, ridiculous. The signatures were for passing a law to change the current regulations of parliment that effectively protect any and all corrupt politicians from any sort of prosecution during or after office, to limit the amount of time prime ministers can stay in office (Berlusconi had an 8 year consecutive term and is now trying to get his position back and the current Prime Minister Prodi was prime minister before Berlusconi as well as after him and it can go on like that forever currently) and it was also in favour of free speech (Italy is said to be one of the only western nations that effectively does not have free speech… the form prime minister, Berlusconi again, owns most of the TV channels that aren’t run by the government and you have to get permission from the government to publish as much as a mass mailing, if you don’t have the permit already good luck getting one). Apparently in Italy if enough of the population signs something like this the populace itself can purpose a new law or reform that must be brought before the parliment. Now this kind of protest I could get into! Reasoned and a chance of being effective! This was as far as I can tell an exception to the rule though. Most of the time the Italians seem really rather pessimistic about what really can change or happen about their ability to make a difference. They seem to make up for this pessimism however in a throughly whole hearted belief that they need to make their opinion known. So they seem to protest for protestings sake not to change things. It’s like if they yell enough then they can’t be held responsible and can say < well you know I was against that when that happened> not because they really want or believe they can change things. A good for instance for me is that they spend alot of time and energy making their opinion known about the death penalty or racism in the United States something they can do little or nothing about in reality and do very little to recitfy inequalities or problems in their own system or in their own cities. It’s like the having of the opinion saves them not what they do about it. This does have it’s advantages as a country. You can have very heated debate and still never come to violence. You can disagree incredibly strongly with your neighbor but relish the arguement amicalbly along with the coffee you drink every morning together. Really on an interpersonal level it is very handy. Even though they don’t like your opinions or your government or your religion they can still be your friend and talk to you. Its refreshing at that level, debate is possible and there are no real forbidden subjects at the dinner table and no hard feelings really even if the arguement gets bad and loud. On a governmental level it doesn’t work very well though. It means you almost never get down to business.
I had to go to the doctor today. It’s really quite and interesting experience here. This particular doctor is in her office 4 hours a day and everyone comes and gets a number because you can’t make appointments. Literally, you take a number like if you were in the supermarket deli line and then you wait. Well you don’t actually have to wait there in the office. I went home and set up this blog for an hour. Then I went shopping. Then I sat and waited…anyway. It was fairly confusing trying to figure out the system when we first moved to Vicenza. Me: “Hello, I’d like to make an appointment for sometime next week is there a time available?” Doctor:”I’m sorry why did you call this number?” Me: “Because it was the number they gave me at the insurance office for my doctor. Why?” Doctor:”You don’t make appointments at my office. Just show up. Don’t call this number again please.” Me:”oh…ok.” One of the strangest phone conversations I’ve ever had. The confusion itself aside I have had a less than amazing experience with doctors and the health system here in Italy. Which is interesting because the other day I was surfing the net and found that Italy has the world’s 2nd best health system according to the World Health Organization. I surfed for a little longer though and found that the vast majority of italians agree with me rather than the World Health Organization. Only 20% of italians are satisfied with their own health system whereas the US system even with all of it’s issues still manages to satisfy over 50% of the people it serves (see “The Public Versus The World Health Organization On Health System Performance” by Robert J. Blendon, Minah Kim and John M. Benson) All facts that you probably didn’t need to know, but that satisfy my inner need for objectivity. There are two major factors that I think have influenced my own opinion of the health system in Italy. First of all I think it must be really, really, I mean terribly hard to bottom out as a doctor in Italy once you set up practice. People may transfer away from you but, the state will just hand you more, so incompetent or rather recalcitrant doctors remain in their positions as long as they want and they don’t have to make a good impression on their patients. And if you’re lucky enough (like me) to be new (like me again) and you don’t know which docs have a bad reputation you get to meet them quite often. The other factor is the lack of record keeping. There are no records kept in doctor’s offices ever, anywhere in the country as far as I can tell. Coming from a system where the moment you step into any doctor’s office even to get cold medicine they make a record of your entire medical history and take all your vital statistics it is extremely unnerving to be in a place where the doctors apparently never care about records of this kind or even a record of your visit. If you get an x-ray done at the hospital guess what happens to it……it goes home with the patient. What if you get a kidney scan or a blood test done…it goes home with the patient. And that’s that. No stacks of files in back rooms keeping copies of all the tests and all the diagnosis’s of all the patients they’ve ever seen. No files, no copies, and no clerks. I guess it saves money.
