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