On Life in Bologna

This is called a monster post, and there's no escaping it. It’s been hectic in that jam-packed, sluggish sort of way; I have language class three hours a day, plus homework, plus about an hour’s total transit, which with two long meals a day plus hygiene works out to not very much truly free time. I have been taking pictures more or less diligently, so the time seems ripe for a post-bomb. Here are my collected sentiments and anecdotes on everyday life here.

I shall pacify you with James Bond in Italian! 


On Italian Etiquette and Culture in General

People think I’m kidding when I say there are no Italians in New Zealand. Certainly there are none in my family for hundreds of years back. This means that New Zealanders know about Italian culture, except not really. Say the word pest. If you add an -ah to the end, that’s how the Southern Hemisphere pronounces pasta.

The national dish of New Zealand to make when there’s company coming over is spaghetti bolonaise (more correctly, spaghetti alla Bolognese), or spaghetti noodles in the bolognese style, meaning it uses ragù. Bologna famously invented ragù about a bajilllion years ago when people started deciding that delicious food was worth the bother of making. Thick meaty ragù sauce was born, traditionally using several sorts of meat slow-cooked for hours on the stove—it’s nothing you can get out of a jar of Prego. Or a jar of Ragu. Ironically.

Unfortunately, this culinary gem bears no resemblance to the stewed, steaming pile of tomatoey ground beef dumped unceremoniously on top of a pile of flaccid, pale spaghetti that’s spent 15 long minutes in too little water (by the way, it is imperative not to mix the sauce with the pasta, or else you risk the flavour circulating throughout the dish. Better to eat the beef first and then salt the pasta into oblivion). New Zealand cooks have plenty of excellent recipes…just, none of them are Italian.
Italian food is much awesomer.

Gretchen, Nic, and Nicole at L'Osteria dell'Orsa, enjoying a "piatto d'amicizia." Basically a bathtub of fresh ravioli.

The bruschetta that we ate. This plus the pasta came to only nine euro a head.
 
The Bolognesi are constantly bemoaning that the world-famous spaghetti bolonaise has their name attached to it. Spaghetti bolonaise is that second cousin who claims to be related to you so that you’ll lend him money. It is nothing like tagliatelle al ragù, Bologna’s best-loved dish, which is a calorie and carb carpet-bomb of deliciousness, and NEVER with spaghetti, which doesn't hold onto the sauce.
New Zealand isn’t the only one at fault—America does it too, with its Starbucks obsession, eggplant parmigiana, and cannoli (did you know they’re not actually supposed to be filled with peanut butter and Doublestuf Oreos!?). This means I’ve had to do some learning, like:

1. How to twirl pasta. No one laugh. When we do eat pasta at home, I follow the jab-fork-grab-mouthful-and-bite-off-dangly-bits model. Twirling is much more of an art than I had anticipated—you do not have dangly bits hanging from your mouth or your fork. It is not done. Ever.
2. How to say “enough food.” In many English-speaking countries, if you don’t eat every bit of food on your plate, you get smacked. In Italy, if you finish what’s on your plate, you just get served more food—indefinitely. Don’t play chicken with an Italian mother, or your stomach will eventually rupture. She always has more food.
3. How to be loud. Kind of a necessary skill in a lot of everyday activities.

Vaguely related picture: Half a piada (flatbread) that Luca made for me. Delicious. I pounced on the other half and devoured it before I had time to snap a picture.

Other useful things I have learnt:

1. Reaching across the table is cool with Italians. So is putting up your elbows. In fact, dining etiquette is in general much more relaxed. It’s about the food, people.
2. Don’t put extra cheese on anything unless you see other people do it first. You risk excommunication (and if it’s seafood, lynching).
3. Italian cobblestones eat American shoes for breakfast. Especially ones that come in expensive flavours.

On Italian Security

My trouble started with the doors on my way to class. I have four unlabelled keys for various doors: the inner-inside, the inner-outside, the outer-inside, and the outer-outside. Two doors to the apartment, then a door leading outside the apartment, then a gate leading to the street. 

Like a door sandwich. Stick some mortadella in there and you are all set to meet the day.

On the first Monday, after feeling rather proud that I had figured out the double door and the big door going outside, I was stumped by the gate. There was a keyhole, but puzzingly none of my keys would quite turn it. I struggled and fumbled and watched the minutes tick by as I jammed my keys into it one after the other. I begged it in English and Italian to open. I tried forcing it. I contemplating if I could climb over. Then, at the last minute, I saw, tucked several feet behind me, a tiny little beige thing that looked vaguely broken. A button? Yes, a button! (The keyhole turns out to be just a trick—perhaps to deter foreigners?).

Does that look like a gate button to you? No. No it doesn't.

I had just as much trouble on the way back in that afternoon. There are two doors to the apartment, right next to each other, and I was straining and scuffling trying to open the wrong door, because there are TWO separate double-doors and they both have separate keys.

It’s really too much for me. I think the Italians are paranoid and should have fewer keys. Just saying.

On Me Failing at the Transportation System

I had done everything right. I had my euro for my ticket, I was at the stop on time, and I had the bus number correct. I watched the driver of bus #20 pull into the stop. We made eye contact. We even kind of smiled a bit. He slowed down, pulled closer to the curb… I was doing it! I was successfully navigating the transportation system!

That was until the light turned green, when he jammed his foot down on the gas pedal. Wide-eyed and open-mouthed, I watched my friendly moment of camaraderie evaporate as he ZOOMED through the stop. Nope! Not today! Sorry Catherine! Apparently you have to launch yourself at the bus to prove to the driver that you’re not just standing around at the bus stop because you feel like it. You have to establish your dedication. If he looks like he’s not going to stop, you threaten him with bodily harm.

Instead, I slunk onto the next bus and was so afraid of overshooting my stop that I got off too early and walked in ten minutes late to class. Luckily, everyone at BCSP understood my tale of woe and the spiteful, hurtful bus driver. Mistakes aside, I took the bus by myself for the first time, to no great disaster, although Luca sent me the best text ever—Madre in panico. Non ti sei persa, vero?—“Mother in a panic. You didn’t get lost, did you?”

Then, on Tuesday, we had the pasta-making workshop (more on that later). We had to meet in the Piazza Malpighi at 5 p.m. All week we were reminded by e-mail—Be absolutely, perfectly punctual! Do not be late! Bad things will happen! In truth, this means that the Italian way will prevail and we will still leave 5-10 minutes late as always, but there will be a lot more fretting and chaos beforehand, and that I will find a way to become a part of it.

It’s all the bus system’s fault, as usual. I had just gotten used to my beloved #20 bus, but #20 didn’t go to that piazza, as I found out in the last minute or so before I had to leave. It involved a 40-minute ride with a line change halfway through. No! Horrors! Panic! Having no pen, I committed the line numbers and stop names to memory and promptly forgot them. Once on the bus, I found out that there was no machinetta (ticket-dispenser), because to ride #88 you need a pre-purchased ticket. Oooohhh…this would be good to know if I weren’t already on the bus! Please note: passengers without tickets are subject to a 40-euro fine upon discovery.

o_o Ahh. Ahh. Don’t flip out, Catherine.

I scusa’d myself into conversation with the man sitting next to me, who was totally chill about it, and directed me to scusa my way over to the bus driver, who was SO NICE ABOUT IT. I don’t know how often he has panicky foreign women babbling to him while he zips between cyclists, but he just kind of shrugged it off. Eh. Va bene. Go sit down. 
Totally love that man.

Could be worse...I could be using one of these forms of transportation. 

On Italians Shouting at Each Other

In spite of my difficulties, I am totally in love with the bus culture. It’s very like the subway culture of NYC and probably all public transportation systems, where a confined public space means that people who don’t know each other get very familiar. You can people-watch up close, and the Italians oblige you with all sorts of behaviour. People make out on the bus, shout into cell phones on the bus, blast techno through headphones on the bus… But my favourite is when they get into shouting matches.

Italians are happy people because they eat awesome food, work sensible hours, and spend lots of time with family. They’re very understanding when you’re in trouble or have made a genuine mistake and need help. But when you purposely step out of line, hoo boy, you’re in for it. On the bus ride home, a little Italian grandmother got fed up with another woman talking on her cell phone. After fixing her with a thoroughly evil glare that would melt window glass and blast straight through concrete, she let loose. “You get the hell off your cell phone! We’re not in your house! For the love of God! Is this your house? Stupida! Stupida! Che stupida!” And of course, the other woman, still arguing on her cell phone, starts giving it right back, “Who’s talking to you? I don’t want to hear it! What are you going to do about it? Just shut up about it!” and explaining into the cell phone about the idiot woman who’s making such a fuss.

I was directly between the two, and they were shouting over my head, and it was the best thing ever. Italians shouting matches are my new favourite thing. 

On Bolognese Weather

I had a fantastic look-what-a-dumb-American moment. Luca had showed me how to operate the central heat (mercifully, it’s just a button), but I hadn’t realized you also have to aprire the heater (that would be, for lack of a better translation “to turn it on”). I have been trying to heat my room for two days with cold metal. This explains an awful lot.

You’d think Italy in January would feel warmer than New York in January. WRONG. By some miraculous miracle of urban planning by the Etruscans back in Whatever Year B.C., the city of Bologna was founded in a valley (only 54m above sea-level, according to Wiki). To add insult to injury, it’s built on a network of now-subterranean canals, so in addition to the cold air there’s tons of moisture. Temperature-wise, it almost never goes below freezing, but the humidity is consistently around 95%, a very damp cold.

Yeah. There are some mountains. The blue arrows show the direction of FREEZING COLD AIR.

The cold by itself is really not so bad, in fact, when you step outside in the morning, you think, “Hey, this isn’t so bad at all! I’ll just go and put my jacket back in the room…” I did this the first morning in Bologna, not realizing that the cold takes only fifteen minutes to worm its way through your clothes and all the way down to your marrow. Then it makes itself comfortable there for the rest of the day.

Around about day four you realize just how much energy Americans really burn to keep their houses in the high 70s all through the winter. Yeep. The heating system is gas-operated, and when you switch it on you can see the flame blaze up, which leads to me thinking how much gas I must be using, which leads to me feeling bad switching on the heat. After a few days, you decide you don’t care quite that much, because when the skin of your toes grazes the icy floor tiles in the morning, or when your wet arm stretches out for the towel in the freezing air of the bathroom, you decide that having the heat on really is the better idea. I’ve decided that this sort of discomfort is made better by whimpering and cowering.

Also, socks. 

This news is really not totally unfortunate; it means you can eat huge portions of rich food without repercussions! All because of that lovely fact of physiology that when your body is cold, it burns more calories to keep warm—the perfect system, really.

On a similar but more terrifying note, I was startled to find out that a sizeable number of girls in the BCSP program are going vegetarian this semester. Vegetarian! In Bologna la Grassa (yes, that means the FAT)! Bologna, the everything-is-made-of-meat! Bologna, the Porkariffic! I don’t know how on earth they manage, but it’s got to be difficult. Apart from vegetables being expensive to order at restaurants and harder to find readily, you kind of need that heavy food to keep you going. Any vestigial vegan population here has long since shriveled up and starved to death.

But really, If Bologna’s meat-rich, dairy-rich, carb-rich cuisine were transplanted to Miami, the people would be the size of houses. Here, it’s more like survival. Foggy Bologna streets are tough on an empty stomach, but one giant helping of tagliatelle and man, you feel so awesome.

I did weigh myself Wednesday after dinner (I know, worst time to weigh yourself, but I just had to know) and came up with a number more than 10 pounds below my usual weight (that can’t be right…), so I’m nervous not being able to check. If I start ballooning out in the photos, you let me know. Otherwise I’ll have to buy a pair of “motivation jeans” as the other girls call them. If you can’t fit into them, you’re too fat. 

On Dumb Mistakes, continued.

Other fun mistakes I’ve made. I’d like to begin by reinforcing a quote from a fellow BCSP student’s blog—Marc says “In Italy, there are 500 ways to flush a toilet.”

Absolutely apropos, Marc.

So far no two toilets have yielded the same adventure—including the two Luca’s house. Italian flushology is so advanced and creative that I have yet to meet a toilet with a flusher handle (how boring! how gauche!).

Now, of course it never occurs to you to look for the flusher before you sit down, that would be just silly! It’ll be right there! Then the next thing you know, I’m crawling on my hands and knees, looking behind the thing, pressing random parts to see if they were buttons, and desperately hoping that I wouldn’t have to ask for help (eugh, imagine that conversation in Italian).

I was so confident after my victory over the first toilet that I was woefully unprepared when I discovered that the toilet in the second bathroom had an entirely different mechanism and used a drawstring instead of a wall-button. It wasn’t even close to the toilet! How is that fair!?

Too much information? Well, it was traumatic for me, and you ought to know—especially if you’re going to Europe.
I’ll end on that note. Stay tuned for a tour of the Galliani house!