Things I want to say but don't necessarily deserve their own entry

-The best part of my job is that I get to wear jeans to work. I know, a seemingly stupid thing to be excited about and might make you question how much I love my job if this is the best part of it. But, after years and years of having to wear uniforms or “business casual” to work, wearing jeans is pretty kick ass (my dress code involves looking respectful, so look nice, but no need to be business casual).

-Italian students are chatty, chatty, chatty. You can ask them a simple question and they’ll give an extra long response, which I generally don’t mind until the end of the session and I realize we didn’t cover everything I wanted to (if anything). One of my students, who is the most beginner of all of them, is hilarious with her English, quite purposely too, and it’s hard to be funny in a language you barely know (intentionally that is)… but she’ll make up things when she has no idea what the answer is because she wants to entertain me (such as when we were talking about clothes, I pointed to a picture of a pair of shorts and asked what they were. She couldn’t come up with shorts so she kept calling them little pants, then asked why I couldn’t accept that either, since essentially, it is kinda true).

-The world is apparently coming to an end and I have no clue what is happening. Here’s the great thing about not knowing much of the language, you can watch the news and still be blissfully unaware of what’s going on. I mean, the financial world is apparently in ruins, they constantly show the New York stock exchange and the Euro stock exchange on the news and Bush is promising Americans that everything will be ok (pshaw… we’ve heard that before Georgy) and I couldn’t tell you what is going on. Two of my students work in one of the bigger banks here as financial advisors or something like that (they deal with stock is what I know) come into classes and tell me that the ceiling is crashing in on them and work is extremely stressful. The only warning I’ve received from Christian is to take all my money out of the bank, lest TD bank goes bankrupt (something tells me I shouldn’t trust him as a financial consultant though). I’m off to google this stuff to make some sort of sense of it all.

-I’ve also become a pretty adept driver with a stick shift. That is provided I don’t stop… especially on a hill. Once I get going it’s all good, but stopping is another story. Although I like to blame my aunt’s car, because with the driving instructors car I had no problems (I’ve been told this is because it was diesel and the cars I use will not be) yet with my aunt’s I stall every time it comes to start again after I stop. I miss automatics. Luckily, I will be using my uncles’ car most often and I don’t seem to be having too many problems with his car… keeping my finger’s crossed of course.

-It still hasn’t rained here, it’s still sunny and pretty hot, like Vancouver summer hot. I’ve been here over a month and have barely seen any rain (if it does rain, it is immediately followed by sun). The Vancouverite in me finds this odd. I mentioned this to people today and I was told that everyone here is tired of the sun too and it should rain by the end of the week. This will inevitably lead to an entry next week of me complaining of the rain and wishing for sun.

-We went and saw Mamma Mia here in the theatres. The talking was in Italian but the singing was still in English with Italian subtitles. I assure you, Pierce Brosnan is still hilarious when he sings, it could quite possibly be funnier the second time you see it. I had Jessica, Livi and Antoinetta laughing at me because I was laughing so hard every time he sang- I was literally in tears.

-After much discussion on Sunday night I came to the conclusion that dating in Italy is pretty much as screwed up as anywhere else. We were at Stella’s house for dinner and someone asked me if I had a “fidanzatto,” which I was taught meant fiancé. I asked my aunt for clarification because I’ve often heard this and “amarosso” interchanged, even though I thought amarosso meant boyfriend (amarossa meaning girlfriend) and thought that this difference was a pretty big one. Well, they’re often exchanged here (I think in dialect) so people will either ask if you have a fidanzatto or amarosso, meaning “are you dating anyone.” This started a whole discussion on when you become someone’s boyfriend or girlfriend… when you leave the “friend” zone and become more. This then turned to the older people at the table (at this point there was 5 of them) reminiscing about when they first started dating their spouse and how people these days move so much faster than when they dated (one couple said they were dating 3 weeks before he got the nerve to put his arm around her… whereas nowadays, in 3 weeks a lot can happen… or as my aunt said, in one night a lot can happen). This then left the two young ones (aka Diego and I) to explain things, which didn’t work so well because I ended up confusing Diego and everyone else. This prompted me to tell everyone that they needed to read more women’s magazines, because it’s all too confusing for me too and Glamour seems to have some sense to it.

-This leads me to my last point… there are two questions that everyone asks you here in Italy that generally aren’t asked in Canada (or they’re often seen as rude there). Number one being “how old are you?” Number two being “are you married (or dating someone)?” This became very baffling to me when I was asked this at job interviews, seeing that asking someone these questions when you’re a potential employer is illegal in Canada. Evidently, not so much in Italy, where I was told they ask if you’re married because they want to know if you could be pregnant (or soon be pregnant), because then you really aren’t of much use to them if you’ll be on maternity leave (I must say, I was glad that the age question isn’t followed with “why aren’t you married yet,” instead I often get “oh, you have lots of time to get married”). It’s also good to note that on Italian resumes (or CV’s as they refer to them here) people often include their birth date and age, sometimes even a picture and that in some places video resumes are becoming popular (non gracias).