What I'd say...

Hello there again, sorry for the pause but things have been 'interesting' here.

Decisions have been made (although everything is subject to change should the right opportunity arise), plans have been formulated and people have been informed.

This week I fly back to the UK for my brother's wedding - it had better be good, I'm giving up three days wages for it so I expect rings delivered by owls, prancing ponies and dancing men (and that's before dinner).

On the subject of work, things are going well, except I still don't understand how the Italian mind works. I've never been good at getting hints, I much prefer to have things spelled out for me - but here in Italy there is no such thing as straightforward. Even the simplest of situations has to go through some contortions in order to fit with the Italian psyche. I just wish they'd recognise that I don't mind being told the truth, even if it is slightly unpalatable, rather than being left to try and work it out myself (which will never happen).

Anyway, live moves on and so, soon, will I.

Style council

And talking of fashion and Italy being a formal country, how come there was a middle-aged woman with a ginger mullet on the train yesterday morning?

Fashion (turn to the left...)

As you may know, I teach a lot of conversation classes here in Vigevano. Now don't get me wrong, I really like my adult students, they are kind, friendly and well-meaning but, and it is a big but, most of them have never really been anywhere but Vigevano. I don't mean that they've never left the town - a fair number of them work in Milan and several travel abroad on business - however, they have a somewhat limited outlook on life. This is mainly because they live in the town they grew up in, surrounded by family and friends, most of whom they know from school.

As a teacher of conversation classes, it would be all too easy for me to sit back and let them discuss the same subjects again and again (what's wrong with Vigevano, travel, food, reading, films etc. etc.) but I prefer to push my students a little. Try to get them to think out of the box, as it were.

To do this, I ask provocative questions and put forward contrary opinions (some of which I hold, others I don't). And on a regular basis I run up against a brick wall. All too often, the response is blank looks and a retreat into 'this is the Italian way'.

Such a response happened last week. The chosen subject was fashion and clothing. I lead the discussion into women wearing trousers. Everyone agreed this was alright, indeed one student said that no-one she knows wears skirts any more. I then established that, historically, trousers were men's clothes. Nods all round. So, I said, how would people react if a man decided to wear a skirt into work?

Complete and total blank incomprehension.

One student reiterated that none of her friends liked skirts but that if one of them wanted to wear one, SHE could. I repeated my premise - what if a man wore a skirt into work? Nothing. It actually took one of the other students to explain this in Italian before the first one caught on. The combination of man and skirt just did not compute.

The overall conclusion was that Italy is a formal country and no-one would dress like this. Admittedly, I can't imagine anyone wanting to wear a skirt but I can at least image it happening. I do remember, many years ago, (before I became a teacher) a rather interesting case of sexual discrimination in one of the London Borough Councils which had sent a man home because he wore a dress to work. At the time I had a long discussion with one of the secretaries at work about the rights and wrongs of this case. She claimed it was unnatural for him to wear a dress, all the time wear trousers herself.

Oh and Scottish kilts don't count, apparently. It seems that even though they are a piece of material wrapped around the waist, that doesn't make them a skirt.

Holey moley

Here's an update on the hole post I wrote on 21st February (I think - just go and find it yourselves, I can't be bothered with any of that linking stuff, I'm not able to stay online long enough to get it to work).

Anyhow, earlier this week, my peace and quiet was broken by various clanging and scraping noises from the street below. On leaning out of my window (something I do a lot now that the weather has improved) I saw a couple of workmen, with a small truck, putting up temporary signs along the road. Now even though the signs were images and not words, I couldn't work out what they were there for but, this is Italy and who knows what's going on. A couple of hours later, I heard a pneumatic drill being used, and when I later went out to get some bread, I saw the workmen digging a trench in someone's yard. I didn't think anymore of it but I did notice the signs hadn't been removed even after the work seemed to have stopped.

Then this morning, the sun was shining so I opened my windows, only to be aurally assaulted by an opposite neighbour playing the radio at full blast whilst singing along. Her voice wasn't that bad but the music did leave something to be desired. However, in the process of pulling my head back in through the window, I glanced down and saw... more workmen.

To be precise, three workmen, all wearing the fluorescent orange work jackets (and matching trousers, in one case) which marks out the municipal worker here. Of the three, one was leaning on the back of his truck, prior to driving it away, another was smoking a cigarette whilst reorganising the various shovels and brooms leaning against my front wall and the third was on his knees mending the road.

Yes, you did read that correctly. He was on his knees, patiently fitting the square blocks that make up the road surface outside my home. He was using a small hammer to loosen the soil and tap the blocks into place and he was very picky about which block went in which space. It was a pleasure to watch a craftsman at work. The whole process took about three hours, leaving a smooth and seamless repair to the road.

When I went out later, I passed a couple who live further up the road. Now I don't speak much Italian but I could tell from the way they looked at the huge tarmac patch outside their home and then stared down the road to the repair outside my home that they were wondering when it would be their turn. They did not look best pleased but the signs are still up so there's hope for them yet.

In the meantime, I get great pleasure from looking at the beautiful work done outside.

Travelling light...

This has been a busy week. The weather has been up and down, one minute raining, the next brilliant sunshine. I've been going into Milan to work in the morning, which is something I really enjoy - not the journey but the teaching.

Talking of the journey, we had a tragic incident on Friday. I didn't know the details until the next day but here is my experience. I had to be in a lesson in Milan at 12:30, to do this I had to catch the 10:50 train (and spend 50 minutes hanging around). I trundle up at 10:40 to discover the train had been cancelled. However, what was unusual was that instead of dispering, the passengers were still milling around (I won't go into analogies of termite nest, how cliched). Being somewhat resigned to the bad train service, I went to a local cafe, had a coffee and called my company contact to get her to warn my student. When I finished my coffee, I went back across to the station because a huge coach had pulled up in front. It seemed that TrenItalia had, for once, been efficient and organised a substitute service. This surprised (and pleased me) as normally a cancelled train leads to the Shrug "What can be done..." response.

This coach was already full when I got there and people who had boarded were being ordered off by a local policewoman. However, once it had gone two more appeared, and this is where being big, bolshy and British paid off. I 'persuaded' the locals that it was important that I got on this coach (being about a foot taller with a big, heavy handbag did help). Once ensconced it was a matter of sitting and waiting. About an hour later, we arrived at the next train station where we got off the coach and onto the train.

While travelling from my station to the next, we crossed a bridge on which a train was stopped. Next to it were a couple of fire engines, an ambulance or two and several police cars. These had blocked one side of the two lane bridge which explained why it had taken us an hour to go by road, a journey which takes about ten minutes by rail.

I managed to get into my lesson only twenty minutes late (which suited the student who was extremely busy). The journey back was incident-free which left me wondering what it had all been about.

On Saturday morning, I was sitting in my local cafe having breakfast (as I can't get porridge here, I've developed the habit of having a latte macchiato and a brioche in a cafe every morning) when my eye was caught by the front page of the local newspaper. My Italian isn't good enough for me to read the paper but, having bought my own copy and with the aid of a dictionary, I found out that an elderly man had thrown himself under the train, just before the bridge at about 8:30 that morning.

I don't know what prompted his decision but it did put my annoyance into perspective.

They're cycling in the rain...

My, oh my, oh my. The weather has turned bad again and I'm back to watching my favourite extreme sport. This sport would, if officially recognised, have Italy as the undisputed world and Olympic champion in perpetuity. I am, of course, referring to umbrella cycling.

For the uninitiated, this consists of riding a sit-up-and-beg bicycle in the rain while holding up a large umbrella. The umbrella serves two functions, it keeps the rain off the cyclist and it makes it impossible for said cyclist to apply the brakes - this doesn't actually matter because the cyclist takes no account of surrounding traffic, safe in the knowledge that the umbrella will protect them from collision with any of the large metal boxes that also whizz around the roads here.

There are two main practitioners of this sport, the middle-aged man who wears a bulky water resistant jacket and the elderly woman who wears a fur coat. Both garments restrict the movement of the cyclist thus adding to the danger element.

There are minor variations including hanging plastic bags from the handlebars and talking on the telephone (I kid you not) but I am an admirer of the classic form, long may it continue.