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.