Today was the first day in a long time in which I was truly frustrated and angry. Do you ever have those days where all the small things go wrong? The program director put me into the lower-level class without bothering to administer the placement exam, and while I can’t gauge the level of the other class, I felt out of place for the whole three hour duration. I had trouble with the exercises because I know the gist but not the nit-picky grammar. I made a social faux pas in class and felt jittery all morning from having too much espresso. Two Italian women snickered at a group of us for putting extra cheese on our pizza. My friend ditched me to meet someone else. The cell phone store was closed, and when I found one, my Italian was so bad that the shopkeeper was forced to switch to English so I even understood what I was buying.
I don’t mean to sound as though I’m exaggerating my frustration over a day’s petty mischiefs—I genuinely think that a good bout of frustration often sets you back far enough that you have to look at everything from a distance, which may call some larger problem into sharper focus. This, I think, is what is happening. It hit me like a mid-life crisis while I was doing exercises in my new Italian grammar book—a passage described the two types of typical Italian travel guides: the ones written by American women that show “love without interest” and focus on the superficial elements of wine, boys, and good food; and then the other type written by English men that show “interest without love” and go into excruciating detail over Italian pride, pretention, and civil chaos, describing the country as a sort of Purgatory that everyone imposes on everyone else. Although I think everyone initially tends to side with one view or the other, it’s impossible to be so polarised once you’ve truly understood a culture at its roots.
I couldn’t understand why I always felt the need to moderate everyone’s endless (truly, truly endless) comments that “you’ll just LOVE-LOVE-LOVE Italy! You’ll have the BEST TIME! You’ll come back a different person!” But I think I understand now. What I’m feeling now is neither homesickness nor culture shock; it’s more like an epiphany (I hate the concept of an epiphany, but there really isn’t another word for it). I realise that no matter what country you visit, no matter how remote or dissimilar from your own culture, no matter how full of rainbows the travel guides make it seem, no country is a paradise. Italy is not paradise. Amidst all the sweet superficialities, something hard and dark and painful is lurking deep at the bitter centre.
I can understand how Italy’s reputation has become what it is, especially with the popularity of study abroad programs that filtre the experience so that the only things you see are those aesthetic pleasures like handmade pasta and fantastic architecture.
However, Italy is a place, like any other, where bad things happen and where people are unhappy and in pain. It’s not all great food and fashionable clothes; things here are chaotic, broken, inefficient, unapologetic, and dingy. There is a general hatred of political leaders and immigrants; riots, strikes, organised crime, and unemployment regularly intersect with daily life, and people are unhappy about all sorts of things.
Perhaps I should feel kind of a from-self-to-self “I told you so,” but all I feel is disappointed, perhaps because I had a hard day. Perhaps because my little soap-bubble dream lasted no more than a few days.
Enough of that—I want to sound big-picture, not cynical. Today I went to class, bought a cell phone, talked with friends, and did other normal, everyday things. But I see it as just that: normal life. Not some escapist fantasy that I’ll someday be forced to leave. I had always kind of hoped I’d end up living somewhere other than plain old America, but now I think that all countries have their problems—just in different flavours—and that all cultures have invented ways of making life bearable (if life is not bearable, to be frank, they either move or die out). Living in a different country is usually harder than living in your native one, because you haven’t developed the tools to deal with their nagging cultural problems, and in fact, you are even more aware of them.
Here’s to the lessons learnt from a hard Monday. Tuesdays are supposed to be gentler—aren’t they? We’ll see tomorrow morning.
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