Caos, confusione, bordello, casino

The above words all refer to a very Italian range of situations.  The rough translation is chaos, but that doesn't quite capture it.  It is not a very complex linguistic theory that a language has words that correspond to aspects of its culture, so in this case Italian has at least four words to refer to something that English can't properly capture.  The words can refer to general disorganisation of a person or group, or to a big traffic jam, or to an argument, or other things.  Well, literally 'bordello' and 'casino' actually mean 'brothel', so literally speaking they're going round saying 'what brothel!'.  Looking at the colloquial use, though, there seems to be a kind of essence in all of these situations that is so quintessentially Italian, at least to my foreign and stereotypical eyes.

People seem to take some pleasure in it, and I must admit that I'm thinking and writing about it with some fondness: much as I don't particularly think it's the way to live your life it is kind of endearing when it's a feature of your host culture.  A good example was when I was in the car in Catania.  My friend was driving, and despite moaning about 'what bordello, what confusione', he sounded his horn at every, and i mean every opportunity.  When I asked why, he said 'because we're in Catania'.  He explained that in theory you're not meant to sound your horn in the centre, but in practice people often actually break their horns from overuse.

Another example was my students talking excitedly about a school trip, again to Catania, that we went on this Tuesday.  They were trying to say that they're going to go and 'make confusione… Laura how do we say that in English?'.  They meant they were going to hang out and mess about and be silly… maybe I'm not that articulate, or maybe I'm right that it's difficult to quite capture.  They were right though - we went to the theatre, and I've never known such a participative audience.  It was only 'Waiting for Godot', hardly a lively and participative play, but they were shouting out and clapping along absolutely whenever they could.

For a Brit, every sense of these words is counter-intuitive, but although I do on occasion want them to shush (in lessons would be nice), it is quite fun.

The Sweetest Students

I shouldn’t have favourite classes, but there are definitely ones that I look forward to.  5A on a Tuesday morning is very firmly in that category, they are a bright, conscientious and enthusiastic class who I love teaching.  Today I was around 3 minutes late to their lesson because I’d been disorganised photocopying worksheets, and the other teacher had gone ahead of me to the classroom.  In her presence and my absence the students had got antsy, and when I came in they actually cheered a bit, and laughed and smiled.  It was one of the nicest welcomes into a room I’ve had in my life.

I have a bit of a sniffly cold at the moment and my voice was cracking a little through the lesson and I was feeling a bit grotty and sorry for myself, so I asked them to not make me raise my voice, and they were absolutely wonderful to me.  I just stood at the front and looked at them when I wanted them to stop their activity, and they shushed each other and listened to me.

Though this is a particularly extreme example, I realise more than ever that I am incredibly lucky to have polite and kind students.  It’s a two-way process of course, and they would have none of this respect for me if I didn’t think they were fairly wonderful in return, but I came out of that lesson feeling like I’ve been landed, through no merit of my own, into the best school ever.

Normality

It’s amazing how quickly things become routine.  I’ve been here nearly 7 weeks now, but this is only the fourth week at school, and it all feels so much like normal life.  I know most of my classes now, though some of them I haven’t taught that much yet.  I teach in two schools.  In the Liceo Classico I teach every class but one, so when I walk around the small school everybody knows me.  The Liceo Artistico is quite a lot bigger and I teach only 5 classes.  I say ‘only’ with reluctance because it brings my running total up 14, so that’s about 350 students.  That means that most people aged 14-18 around Modica town centre recognise me, but remembering all of them is absolutely impossible.  

So it’s normal life.  That means the honeymoon period is over, the kids are pretty used to me now and generally aren’t totally astounded to see me, which to be honest is a massive relief.  Though standing at the front and running the lesson doesn’t faze me, I was keen for the incessant centre-of-attention/fascination phase to pass as quickly as possible.

Normal life also means I can generally get by in Modica.  I’m moderately used to adapting to new cities, and for me success is 

1. being able to go to the supermarket and to your workplace/studyplace effortlessly (e.g. not to get lost every day, difficult when you’re me), 
2. having a minimum of two favourite cafes where the staff recognise you
3. encountering a fairly low frequency of problems you don’t know how to solve

I’m not completely lost here, I know my way round and it’s very much the place where I live now, not just a place where I’ve landed or am just passing through.

Normal life unfortunately means the odd bad morning.  Nothing that won’t be mostly better by the evening and totally forgotten by the next day, but something like a bad lesson with unparticipative teenagers who can’t understand English, rainy weather and running out of cooking gas, all on inadequate sleep.  Just ordinary everyday things.  If you’re in a really nice town doing a really nice job in a country you’re completely in love with, most days are good days, but the point is that this isn’t a holiday; it’s actually my actual life at the moment.

Anyway, as it happens, my landlord has just this second come to check the cooking gas and headed out to get a new ‘bombola’ - what’s that called?  A big metal can/bottle/thing of gas.  And tomorrow I have just one lesson, and it’s one of my really good classes, and it’s not till midday, so it looks like I’ll have a nice lie-in and tomorrow will be a good day.

Ps. I’m not writing this blog for praise, but thank you so very much for the kind complements you people have given me, each one has made my day.

The day off

It’s my long-awaited day off.  As I only have 12 hours a week contact time, I really should get at least one, probably two days off, but organising my timetable is an uphill struggle so what with one thing and another I didn’t have one last week.  Italians don’t even have a proper weekend - they make up for every day being a half day (8am-1.30pm) by having school and work on a Saturday.

I’ve been so looking forward to this.  I went to a bar and drank wine with Laura last night, slept till midday, and had a granita with cream and a croissant with cream for a late breakfast in the bar where I am now - effectively two desserts for breakfast, but it's okay because I'm on holiday in Sicily.  I work really hard at my job, but the amazing thing is that when I get some time off it’s like a real holiday.  Yes, the sun is shining too.  Wonderous.

The fun of being new

It’s a weird thing being new.  This is the third time I’ve arrived on my own in a place I didn’t know, and the only real way to move forward from it is to say yes to every social event that’s offered to you.  I only reflected on it today, when I nearly went to a wedding, that this policy can leave you with an unusual set of anecdotes.

I met my friend Laura on the street two weeks after arriving in Modica.  She’s working as an au pair for a lovely family, and was with the au pair mum and two children.  I heard her English accent and we very excitedly exchanged numbers, and the mum invited me to a dinner at theirs later that week.  Cue amazing Italian dinner, celebrating the father’s birthday, in a garden that overlooks the whole town.  Turns out they like sailing.  I’m actually quite scared of boats, even more sailing, and have never really felt it was the pastime for me.  However, they were going on a sailing boat that weekend, would I like to come?  Yes I would.  Incidentally, I discovered that it was actually how I’d like to spend all of the Sundays for the rest of my life please, it was absolutely stunning.

I went into school, and of course the English mother tongue speaker is an exciting and useful novelty.  Can I come look after someone’s two little girls sometime?  Can I speak English to someone’s little boy?  Can I give private lessons to someone’s 17-year-old son?  Yes, I guess so.  None of these have come to anything yet, but I think they will.  Today was a new one - would I possibly run an English conversation class in the afternoons for the other teachers at the school?  This seems a bit of a responsibility: I, as an untrained teacher, am proving my abilities to a roomful of my colleagues and employers.  It’s fine though, I think it’ll be fun.  I also got invited to have a pizza sometime with some of my older students.  They’ve just come back from the trip of a lifetime in London, where they were specially selected to do a course, and they’re feeling very England-sick.

The terrible thing is that I’ve agreed to go to the gym with one of my fellow English teachers.  I probably will follow it through if she mentions it again because you never know what turns out to be good, but... a gym.  It doesn’t fill me with joy.

Yesterday I got a message from Laura, ‘I just got us invited to a wedding’.  RIght, what?  Her au-pair family runs a B&B and Laura had got chatting to a guest, who turns out was getting married the next day.  Would she like to come?  Oh wow, erm... well yes!  She checked it was okay to bring a friend, and we were ready to go at 4.30pm today.  Turns out that the groom didn’t seem to have communicated to anyone else that we were invited, and had already disappeared off to the church.  After being stared at a bit (read: a lot) by the guests (and the bride), we ducked out in order to avoid further embarrassment.  On a sidenote, this surely isn’t a promising sign of a communicative marriage.  It was when we were standing in our nice dresses in the small streets of a small town in Southern Sicily, being gawked at by anyone who passed, that I realised it was a fairly bizarre situation.  We both thought it was quite funny really, and went to get a consolatory gelato instead, where an old man (like 75 or so, no teeth) asked me for my number.

I walked Laura to her language school and ended up signing up and learning kitchen vocabulary, very handy.  Met a really nice Polish girl and promised that we should go out for drinks sometime, maybe tomorrow.

Yesterday I went for a drink with that lovely school secretary I mentioned in a previous post.  She enthusiastically chatted on about some day trips she can take me on, and I nodded along.  She is sweet.

I know that not all of these things will come to anything, but it’s fun to open your mind to anything at all and just look for every opportunity you can find.  Laura and I are trying to decide whether to go to tennis school or not... the adverts say they do a free trial.

The first day

*I wrote this blog on the 4th October, but couldn't post it because I had no internet*

Nobody seemed to know when I was starting work.  I went into school so many times before I went away for the training course in Rome.  I wasn’t asking that much of them, just basic things like ‘what day do i start’ and ‘do i have a timetable’, but this is Sicily and these things don’t come that simply.

My course (which was excellent) was on the 1st and 2nd October.  I explained this over and over to all concerned at the school, and explained that I would come to work on the 3rd (yesterday).  

‘No, the 3rd is a Sunday’ she said

‘No it’s not, it’s a Wednesday’

She first thought it was a language problem, after all days of the week are a bit tricky, but I insisted and she looked at the calendar.

‘Okay, pop in some time on the 3rd’

So that’s what I did yesterday, but the secretary concerned wasn’t there.  I asked in a nearby office, they didn’t know and suggested I come back today.  I turned up first thing and stood in the corridor for about a quarter of an hour because the secretary wasn’t there.  I knew that most of the English teachers are on a trip to England at the moment, so I really didn’t know whether I was starting work today or else when they come back in 10 days.

A lovely administrative lady found me and took me to her office to fix up my contract.  She’s one of these people with a heart of gold who is worried all the time that she might be doing something marginally wrong - if I’d told her I’d been expecting her to jump out the window, she would probably have apologised and thrown herself out.  She gave me a lot of help, and timidly asked me if I’d give her son English lessons.  I said yes, of course.  We had to send a few documents back to Leeds, and she was so worried that ‘UK’ wouldn’t be an adequate indication of the country it had to go to that in the end I let her write ‘Inghilterra’ on the envelope too, which calmed her fragile nerves.  What a nice lady.

At a certain point, a member of staff came to find me and said that the English teacher was waiting for me.  I said I had to finish the contract, but would be along in 5 minutes.

‘Okay, well they’re in classroom four’.  What?!  A classroom?  Today?  Right... okay.

We finished the contract, and I asked the lovely lady to walk me to the room.  She knocked, posted me inside and left.  I found myself at the front of a class of Italian teenagers.  I introduced myself to the teacher, who in turn gave the briefest of introductions to the class about who I was before taking a seat and inviting me to ‘go ahead’.  So I had to give an impromtu lesson.  I managed it, I just asked them all their names and then went through some vocab from the text book.  They were quite excited that I was there, so my job was very easy.  The lesson finished, and I walked with the teacher, and found out that we had another two lessons.  I was literally planning it minute-by-minute, I split them into groups to do little tasks, made them repeat things after me, and chatted about England.  They were great students, very welcoming and very easily amused.  I feigned some kind of authority, and they didn’t seem to notice that I had no idea what I was doing.

I went home after the three lessons and a chat with some of the staff, got changed and went out for a few errands.  I kept on seeing the students about.  The centre is small, and the vast majority of my time is spent on this same street so it’s inevitable that they’ll see me around a lot.  I’m not anonymous in this town anyway, so I guess it doesn’t make a whole load of difference.

It was a great first day, an enormous contrast to how uncertain everything was yesterday.  I’m likely to get a timetable in a couple of weeks when the other teachers come back and they can split my hours between them, but in the meantime I’m just keeping the two remaining English teachers company a lot of the time.  They both have a day off tomorrow so I do too, and then I’m doing four hours on Saturday.  She says that with two of the classes we’re doing ‘feelings’, so I am precisely one word more knowledgable than I was before about what I’ll be doing.  It’s a relief to have the ball rolling though, I’m not just waiting for it to start any more.

Familiarity

*I wrote this blog on the 2nd and 3rd October, but couldn't post it because I didn't have internet*

At around 16.00 on the 27th September 2009, my train pulled into Perugia.  I exited the station and stood there confused.  A taxi driver saw his opportunity and took me to my new address for an extremely high price.  I called my new flatmate and asked him to let me in but he was out playing football.  I sat on my suitcase and waited for him to come back.  When we went up to the flat, my room wasn’t ready.

3 years and one day later, it was with no small amount of excitement that I got off the train at Perugia.  I went up to the station-centre shuttle, put my 1 euro 50 into the slot, got my ticket, went through the barriers, up the stairs and onto the mini-metro.  After the second stop, I looked up out of the front window as the town came into view, which I knew would make me smile.  Another four minutes, I reached the centre and walked up the escalators.  I was sweaty and groggy from a long journey so was keen to keep my head down and dodge socialising for the time being, but I bumped into two people during the short walk across town, ‘Bentornata!’ - ‘Welcome back!’

My friends were waiting for me in my favourite bar, I freshened up and we headed out for aperitivo in my other favourite bar.  The fun rolled in a way that only Perugia can deliver.  I’ll drop the detail because you’ve got the picture - it was 42 hours of effortless, comfortable happiness.

It had been nearly a month since I’d seen anyone I know.  Now, it would be a gross misrepresentation to see loneliness, nostalgia or homesickness as a notable feature of the early stage of my Sicilian experience.  However, new beginnings, for all the excitement and rewards that they do provide, are strenuous.  In Perugia, though, I could not have felt more at home.  I was surrounded by the easy company of my friends, it was great to catch up, and I laughed until my sides hurt.

After the blind happiness of the anticipation and the arrival, I found I was juggling a strange mixture of feelings.  Familiarity is comforting.  Comfort and familiarity are, I guess, two sides of the same coin.  New starts are exhilarating, challenging, unpredicable, and by their very nature unfamiliar and unsettling.  If I had wanted to, I could have spent 2012-3 back in Perugia, but the unfamiliar reaps rewards; if we get too comfortable, we stop learning.  But when I arrived in Perugia, it was like the part of me that had been working overtime to adapt to my new life breathed a sigh of relief.  I have every belief in what I’m doing in Sicily, but being in Perugia was like balm for my soul.  I relaxed fully for the first time in the month, and it was bliss.

I found leaving Perugia this time a real case of mind vs. heart.  My mind hasn’t for a moment believed I made a wrong choice in my year abroad destination, but these thoughts couldn’t touch the lump in my throat as I felt like I was being thrown out of home.

I guess the balance between comfort and change is an issue that follows us around forever.  This wasn’t a serious crisis of confidence, my craving for familiarity hasn’t been strong enough to contaminate the good thing I’ve got going with Modica, but it’s not always easy to know how much we should put ourselves out of our comfort zone.  Comfort makes us happy, but it’s dangerous: in the end it’s the new experiences that make us learn, and the it’s the learning experiences that make us most happy in the long run.  I remember very well how full of challenges my new Perugia life was three years ago and we all know how well that turned out.  But, you know, it’s really nice to spend your time with your friends and family, doing a job or a course you’re good at and living in a place you know like the back of your hand.  What I mean is that you don’t always feel like doing something really new, and it’s not like I can keep on moving to a new European city hoping it’s the best way for me to grow as a person and learn about the world.  It’s difficult to know when it’s best to stick with the good thing you’ve got going on, and when you’re getting stagnant and it’s time to change.

My plane landed in Catania, Sicily, at 16.35 on the 2nd October 2012, the airline was lucky to have made up a careless delay leaving Rome.  Upon exiting the airport, I found out there was a transport strike, but nobody could tell me whether there would be a bus to Modica or not.  I got back in the end, much later and by a roundabout route.  I felt a weary resignation to the situation rather than stress.  Arriving back to Modica, I felt relief, not just at the journey being over but because I could sleep in my own bed in my little apartment.  I drafted this post in the little bar I live next to, having been welcomed back by the waiter.  I’m writing this up after popping into school and being greeted with a load of confusion, nobody seems to know what I should be doing and everyone who deals with me is somewhere else, my mentor isn’t back till the 12th October.  I’ll explain some other time.  It’s a bit annoying, but it’s not anything I can’t handle.  It’s a fine balance, getting yourself some interesting and rewarding challenges that keep you on the end of the seat but don’t make you fall off.

Trains

Sicily doesn’t have a very well-developed rail network - trains are very slow and stations are generally outside of the centre, which makes getting around by train cumbersome and ill-advised.  However, I was going Couchsurfing to Licata the day before yesterday, and there was a direct train, which won out against four coaches.  Modica’s train station is in an unlikely location, down a small and tatty lane.  It has around four or five trains going through it every day.

There’s no bridge or underpass, so you cross the railway lines.  As I was stepping over them, an Italian teenager leant out of the window of the stationary train, and shouted, in a thick Italian accent ‘Do you speak eeeenglish?’, and his friends all laughed.  The unfortunate thing is that every passenger on the (small but packed) train apart from three was his friend - it was an enormous school party.  The train was timed to be in sync with the time that the local school finished, so this was effectively a school bus, but on rails and open to the public.  My heart sank, and I smiled weakly and went and sat on a fold-out seat in the entrance of the train wishing I was invisible when everyone looked at me.

The ticket collector came through 10 minutes later, and told me there was a seat in the carriage if I wanted it.  He guided me to the free seat, and I realised too late that it was right in the middle of the rowdy teenagers (naively expecting a free double seat).  I took my seat, feeling like an awkward 13-year-old again.  I made small talk with the girls I was sitting with whilst everyone else tried to pretend not to be listening and watching.  About half an hour in, one of the high status guys sat across from me and broke the tension by asking me my name, where I was from and why I was there.  Everyone else broke the pretense, gave into their curiosity and came to stand in a crowd around us while I had a bizarre sort of interview.  They were actually really lovely and seemed pleased to chat to me.  It was such a strange situation to find myself in, I felt like a performing monkey in front of this big group of people, but above anything I saw it as a positive sign to how the teenagers I’m going to work with at school might not think I’m a total waste of time.

They got off the train nearly two hours before me, making me the only passenger on the train for the rest of the journey.  It was really eery, we stopped at deserted stations that seemed to be in the middle of the countryside. 

The next day, for my return journey, I arrived at the station about 20 minutes before my train and went to buy my ticket but found the ticket office closed.  We went round the tiny building and found a room with four members of the station staff in.

‘Can I buy a ticket please?’

‘No, the ticket office is closed’

‘Well, I have a train to get soon, what am I meant to do?’

‘Erm... well, I guess I’ll have to say to the train manager that you don’t have a ticket because the ticket office was closed, don’t worry’

So none of these four people at this catastrophically overstaffed station could sell tickets?  What did they even do?  This station never had two trains go through it in the same hour, but as the man who introduced himself as the vice-president of the tiny station explained, there was a workforce of 20 people.  Incredible.  And still no tickets.  There was a self-service ticket machine, but it didn’t work.  Also, it seemed to say simultaneously that you could only pay with a card and that it didn’t accept cards.  My friend murmured ‘well, you can play better card games with a bigger group of people’.

The vice-station-president talked us through the story of his career.  He had once worked in one of Rome’s main stations - ‘much busier than here’, he said, shaking his head, whilst we fought to keep a straight face.  He also talked us through his detailed extended family tree, complete with occupations, heritage and hair colour.  We had to have a little laugh when he went away.

Ten minutes after the train was meant to arrive, one of the guys started ringing a little bell on the platform (maybe this was his entire job?), and ten minutes after that the train pulled into the station at a comically low speed.  The station guy had told us that the rails were capable of dealing with high-speed trains, which strikes me as a confusing and misguided investment.  The train manager came and sat opposite me to sell me a ticket.  He didn’t have adequate change to hand, and was getting stressed.

Me - ‘Well, maybe we can sort it out at Gela?’

Him - ‘No, we’re not going to Gela’

I said nothing, he scrounged two euros off his friend for my change, and an hour later we pulled into Gela, which was where the train terminated.

It took me over three hours to go the 100km to Modica, but I found a cool American travel companion.  It’s nice to travel in company sometimes.  When we changed, we boarded the first single-coach train I’ve ever seen, with a sparse sprinkling of passengers.

I found the entire train experience really quite entertaining, it was just so desperately inefficient.  In Sicily’s defence, it has a comparatively developed coach network, and the train system makes no pretence of being anything it isn’t, but the travel network can’t be said to be a strength of this gem of an island.

Foreigner

I said in my last blog that daily logistics don’t really fuss me when I’m over here.  Although that’s generally true, and if I allow myself to be a little arrogant, I am a bit proud of being capable of basic survival in a different country, sometimes the whole foreigner thing does weigh a little heavier.

The fact that everyone stares at me, the fact that every single conversation I have here begins with ‘you’re not Italian, are you?’, show that however much I might like it here, this isn’t really home for me.  Of course for the most part it seems ridiculous to philosophise heavily on my relationship with the host country of my year abroad, because obviously the entire point is to push me out of my comfort zone so I benefit from the new experiences.  However, I have a fairly deep affinity with Italy having spent an important year over here when I was 18, and spent the time ever since dreaming of it, studying it and coming back over when I could.  

I’ve been asked many times whether I want to come out here to live when I’m free to do so, and my reply is always that it would be too difficult.  It’s an issue that keeps on cropping up because my opinion is so transient.  When things are going well, I am fairly convinced that life in Italy, for all its shortcomings, is onto a seriously good thing.  Now I don’t want to seem work-shy, I’m not worried about chipping away at things when they’re not going so well, but sometimes I wonder whether I’m best off enjoying this for what it is now and then going back to my own country with the nice memories.

I am afraid of falling into the superficiality of making embarrassingly naive generalisations about the cultures and people of the respective countries, and in any case no-one wants to dwell too long on the whole ‘Italians are warm and welcoming, and British people keep themselves to themselves’, though there is of course some truth in the stereotypes.  I’m much more interested in my personal experiences of being here and there, and the simple truth is that a lot of my happiest moments have been over here.  I look at the nice things, the warm memories that I have, and the lovely little Italian touches to life, now I’m talking coffee in the piazza, kindly strangers treating you like an old friend, the sense of loving community that Italy takes to a new level, the food...  and I remember how I miss all of this when I’m back home.  Looking just at this, it would be clear that this year should really be my induction to a longer stay in the bel paese.

One big mallet through the pretty picture is that Italy just doesn’t work very well.  I’m feeling particularly sensitive to this right now because I’ve just been stranded at a town 15km away as the buses just didn’t arrive, no explanation, and I had to call in a favour with an acquaintance.  This, of course, is not an exception but a repeat of many previous encounters.  Despite being, if anything, a prohibitively prudent traveller, anecdotes spring to mind (that a lot of you will certainly be bored of) of being stranded at the notoriously dangerous Napoli Centrale station at night, at the dead-end middle of nowhere Terontola station at 11pm with very limited Italian, at the wrong Perugia station in the middle of winter with no buses, trains or taxis in sight...  We British people tend to think it’s kind of cute or endearing that fundamental aspects of Italy are not in-keeping with Western European norms, but the truth is that the cogs of general society are slow and cumbersome.  Sure, it’s part of its charm, but when you’re here for more than a holiday, you’ve got a life to get on with and everything just takes more effort, and it stops being a joke.

So that’s a little rant about the specific issues that Italy finds itself with.  The problem of living over here has two strands, and the second is that which I started with, that it just isn’t my home.  I think everyone should be made to experience being a foreigner for a while, because when things are going badly it takes a conscious strength of mind to maintain your sense of worth (sounds dramatic but bear with it).  My favourite Italian teacher articulated this well one day when I was particularly frustrated at the inadequacy of my language and my knowledge of Italy - I felt like a child again, out of my depth and just unable to do fundamental things that I wouldn’t even have to give conscious thought to in England.  With a comforting arm on my shoulder, she said (in very slow Italian), ‘you’re foreign, not stupid’.  To be honest, I do feel more stupid over here.  As a young adult, I’m used to being able to express myself well and to pretty much do what I want to do on the level of mundane life activities - if I need to catch a bus, buy blue-tack or explain to my landlord what’s wrong with my washing machine, it’s easy.  You may have guessed that those are three abbreviated anecdotes from the last couple of weeks.

And then there’s how people view me.  I understand that being a British person abroad is only dipping your toe in the torrent of stereotypes and racism that foreigners and immigrants have to deal with.  As I have done nothing at all to achieve my nationality, I feel awkward that, as an English girl, I am not going to encounter huge problems as I carry on this privileged gander abroad, so it is with more than a note of caution that I lament the problems that I do encounter.  All of that understood, I tire of the feeling that I start each conversation on the back foot - people speak to me in idiotic foreigner speak, not conjugating verbs, not forming entire sentences, gesturing dramatically, with no grounds for their presumption that I won’t understand.  If I don’t understand, they terminate the conversation immediately, judging it a waste of their time.   They have conversations about me when I’m stood right there, it gets on your nerves a bit.  Over here they’re not awfully used to foreigners, and I know they’re not trying to be rude, but it’s difficult for patience not to wear a bit thin when I’m so consistently not treated as an equal.  Add these hampering assumptions to the problems that I do have with working in my second language, and I do question whether this is really a way I’d choose to live for a long time.  After all, I’m never going to speak Italian like an Italian, and I’ll certainly carry on looking British.

I don’t like the false implication that living in England would be a back-up option, a second best if this love affair doesn’t work out. Much as I go all moony eyed over Italy (I’m sure to the boredom of a lot of you), I am always proud to be English/British, and it’s an important part of my identity (see title of blog and photos of me at the Olympics draped in flags).  I don’t know whether this Italy thing is anything more than a fun infatuation that I will enjoy for a bit until I want to go home.

I am not painting a glum picture of my year abroad, I am looking at the bigger picture, mostly because it’s quite fun to imagine where life might take me in the future.  When I’m in the big wide world I will be in the very lucky position of having lived in a different country for a couple of years, and the question of whether I’m coming back is a pretty natural one.  The truth is that when I’m in one country, I pine after the other.  The optimistic flip side of that is that I’m more at home here than I could really have ever dreamed of; if that wasn’t the case, there would of course be no decision to be made.

Arrival

Okay, so a rapid introduction.  I’m Laura, I’m 21, I’m from England, and am spending a year in Sicily working as a language assistant in a school.  I am nearly certain that the only people reading this are immediate family and friends, so there’s no real need for any more substantial introductions.  I’m writing a blog so that the small group of people who is interested in what I’m doing to a level of some detail can be adequately informed, whilst I at the same time get some record of my year.  So here we go.

I arrived in Sicily sometime during the night on the 6th September 2012, having taken a sleeper train from Rome.  The plan was to wake up fresh and rested, as if from a dream, and find myself in the land that I will call home for the next year.  Well, I did arrive at Siracusa in the morning, but it was after a fitful and uncomfortable sleep, disturbed constantly by the noisy train.  Towards the end of the journey, I was woken up by a well meaning but surely delusional Italian grandmother, who slapped me gently in the face about an hour and a quarter before we arrived in our destination.  How do I need an hour and a quarter to get ready when I’m on a train?!  By that time there wasn’t even a functioning bathroom.  

Anyway, blinking through sleep deprivation and a feeling that I’d made the wrong traveling choice, I got off the train at Siracusa, to the insistence of the Italian grandmother to give me a lift to the bus station and find my stop (the stereotype is right - Sicilians are tirelessly hospitable.  More on this in later blog).  It was a long wait, nearly three hours, so I found myself a cafe.  The Sicilians running it were dumbfounded to discover an English girl bound for Southern Sicily for longer than just a holiday - this total bemusement has been a real feature of my time here.  I am very obviously not Sicilian (the blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin are a real giveaway), and I am the only Northern European I’ve seen in my town, Modica.

I got a bus to Modica.  It’s a short distance, just 65km or so, but the bus route was meandering along small streets, dot-to-dotting about 8 small towns before mine, and took two and a half hours.  Although the scenery was obviously nice, the streets were lined with litter.  I swallowed the niggling fear that my town was going to be an absolute dump.  The thing is that I’ve been to Italy before, quite a lot, and I love it, so the things that bothered me most when I first came over to Italy - the language, logistics of day-to-day life - didn’t really worry me much any more.  What did concern me was an image in my mind of a very small, very shabby town, where nothing ever happens and I’d spend my days sipping tea on my own and trying to befriend pensioners out of desperation.  Well, the bus went down a hill and into a town centre, and I felt very happy and very relieved, because the town is stunning.  I’m a bit fickle like that - if it was flat, concrete and run down, I would have started on the back foot.  As it is, it’s a baroque town stacked on a hill.  Almost everywhere you look there is this stunning view - it’s like having a piece of artwork thrown at you when you look down the street.  It has lifted my spirits a lot while I’ve been here.

It’s a cute little town, which hums along okay in the day and then buzzes in the evenings.  I live and work (will work - haven’t started yet) on the main street, which has a load of bars and shops and stuff, and is closed to traffic on friday and saturday nights so that the italians can do their passeggiata (basically you walk up and down, maybe with an ice cream, for an hour or two - they do it every day, but bigger and better at weekends).  There seems to be live music on the weekends too, there was a cool band there on friday whose set I watched twice all the way through.  

The most annoying thing is just how conspicuous I am here; I swear I could paint myself green and there’d be no notable difference in the amount people stare at me.  I never really know what to do with myself, it’s pretty awkward to smile or say hi to all these strangers, but this also isn’t a place where people walk around ignoring each other.  I know a couple of people to say hi to.  When I start work, I’m hoping that I won’t be so much of a stranger surrounded by strangers.

There’s lots to look forward to.  I have a course in Rome for two days at the beginning of October where I’ll meet all the other British people working as assistants in schools in Italy, and they should explain how to do the job.  I’m excited for work, and I’m looking forward to getting more integrated in the town.  It’s a nice surprise that I like Modica so much already, even though my life here is so new and precarious, and that although the first few weeks are supposedly the toughest, I’m excited and optimistic about the year.  I’m actually just off to the beach now, on a whim.

Lots of love xxxx