Ok, so I can’t be sure that university here is harder than in Canada, but I do know that it is perhaps wackier. Or the teachers are just mean. Or that students are just insane. The school year started on Thursday here, as I headed home around 6:45 on the train it was packed with students heading home from the University of Vicenza. It became apparent that these students all had a few things in common. For one, most were already studying on the train, almost every one of them had a book open and was reading during the train ride. In my experience, the first week of school is still the slacker week, sure they gave us readings and homework, but for the most part we all put it off for one more week of freedom (thus beginning the pressure and stress when all this needs to be studied for midterms… I suddenly do not miss school at all). Also, while some read on the buses most of us took that time to chat with friends, send text messages or zone out to our mp3 players. Reading on the bus was mainly exclusive to midterms and final exams, a few last minutes of cramming as we headed to school, but coming home was always the time to decompress after classes, before we got home and pulled out the books again.
Secondly, any amount of books I lugged home from the bookstore on the first day was nothing in comparison to this. The students here were all carrying big heavy backpacks filled with books as well as other bags full. Some also used carry-on luggage to transport their books. And if you’re thinking this is just a first day of school situation, nope, they do this everyday (I also tend to wonder if they haven’t just figured out that not all textbooks need to go to class, I mean do the profs. really make them bring them? Ours rarely did, so our every day life was basically our notebooks and pens and a few dozen printed pages worth of studies and notes because while we had to buy the heavy texts, they were rarely used, instead were supplemented with many $ worth of printed pages and dead trees). Hauling books to class is a work out in itself here.
And this isn’t just exclusive to university. Everyday I see young kids with backpacks that weigh more than most of them, filled with textbooks and homework that they have to complete by the next day.
As for the actual university program, I still haven’t figured it out except that here it is basically 5 years to get your degree (I don’t know if it’s a bachelors or what). The years are split though, first you do 3 years and then you can choose to do the next 2 and get your degree, I’m not sure what you get if you only do the first 3. Apparently it used to be a 4-year program like us but they wanted to give students a choice after the 3 years to go into a career or something.
After all this, I’m not exactly sure that going to school here is any harder than in Canada, because while they do have to write papers here and write exams, I can’t see why school would be made easier in one place and not in others. I think the ways we all go about it are different and we become accustomed to the way we are made to learn. That being said, I’m glad I did school in Canada, because carrying the books, taking the exams, the constant studying, I’m not sure I could handle all it. That’s not to say the way I did it wasn’t filled with stress, god knows I had many late nights and spent a lot of times crying from all the stress, but here it sounds like the pressure is greater or something I can’t put my finger on.
Also, from experience it seems that the students here go crazy. Or so that’s the conclusion that we’ve reached after a small study of a handful (2-3) of people that we’ve done our own psychiatric evaluations on (we being me, who has taken some psych courses; Christian, who has dated the crazy students; and Livi, the translator and wise older person giving out sage advice).
An amendment to what I said about Italian University not being harder than in Canada… maybe
From the mind of Christian…
Italian TV, like I’m sure everywhere else, is showing a lot of US election coverage (Canadian, not so much… what day is it again? And may I make this plea for all my fellow Canadians not to vote for Harper. Please?). The other day we were discussing the candidates when Christian asked me who I would vote for and of course I said Obama. He then started talking about McCain and asked Livi and I if he was related to the same McCain’s who have the french fry company.
We tried to explain that it was just a common last name in North America, like Smith or Johnson and we weren’t sure if he was related to those McCain’s.
Cut to Saturday night when I went out with Christian and his friends. We were all in the car and I was listening to them talk, I then heard Christian bring up the election. He now refers to the candidates as “Obama” and “Potato.”
I don’t think I could have said it better myself.
Heaven help us if they elect a potato for a president.
PS: How is this for sexist? As we were driving yesterday I sat in the car with 4 guys. I couldn’t understand a word of the conversation except they peppered their speech with “dio cane” every other word (for those unaware, this literally means that God is a dog). So I started laughing and making fun of them, apparently they were all horrified when I said the words (over and over actually to make my point). They informed me that woman cannot say this, but only men. When we got home later that night I asked my aunt about it, she was mad I even said it when explaining it, because yes, women do not say it, she also said she never hears Christian say it… although I hear it all the time around the house from him and Meraldo (evidently in such a Catholic country as we have hear that comparing god to anything else is horrifying, even though I argue that none of us are exactly upstanding catholics). Apparently at home she says Christian says “Zio Cane”. He’s calling one of his uncles a dog… I wonder how they feel about that?
If only it were that easy
Quick note on a conversation with Nonna recently. We called her to see how things were and after she spoke to Livi (in what sounded like a mix of both English and Italian) I got on the phone with her. The conversation went as follows (or at least the first minute)…
Jen: Hi Nonna, how are you?
Nonna: String of words in Italian dialect that was inexplicable to me.
When Nonna realized that I wasn’t really catching on to what she was saying she started to question why I hadn’t learned the language yet (never mind the fact that she was speaking dialect, something I swear I’ll never get used to). Apparently I should have had the language mastered at this point, it didn’t occur to her that last week I wasn’t able to respond in Italian either.
If only it were that easy huh? Learn the whole language in a month. Does she know something that I don’t? Should I be drinking more of the water here rather than the bottled stuff all the time? Is that the secret to learning it, through osmosis?
I’m trying Nonna, I’m trying… here’s hoping someday I’ll get this crazy language mastered. (Yes, I realize she wont be reading that but I wanted to share my funny experience).
(More than) A few thoughts on… accents.
Accents have always puzzled and intrigued me. I’ve always thought it was interesting how something as simple as they way in which we use our language can not only reveal a lot about who we are but where we are from and even our socio-economic status. It’s often been said that in Britain accents are so finely tuned that people could tell where the speaker was from just based on how they spoke, this also revealed (or maybe just made general assumptions) about a person’s level of education or what class they belonged to.
In Italy they have somewhat of the same thing, but instead it’s based on different dialects in the country. In Rome they have Roman, here in Veneto they have their own as well and it works it’s way around the country. It’s all based on the Italian language but how it is used differs in different regions, so much so that others may not be able to understand each other. I have also found that many don’t even speak real Italian but just that of their dialect. This also makes it hard for me because I’m trying to learn real Italian but have problems understanding others a lot of the time. For those wondering (I know we had this discussion before I left), it is in the Tuscan region, that the ‘real’ Italian is spoken.
I bring all this up because not only because accents have been a source of amazement here in Italy but also because the anthro-geek in me thinks that this would be a good study (although I’m sure many of this nature have been done, in fact I think I should have paid more attention during linguistic-anthro because we did indeed study this). What I think set me wondering was that accents that I found indiscernible were blatantly obvious to others. I found this out last week when I was at my English course in Verona. As I mentioned previously there were some American’s there with us, we were all around the same age and fresh out of university. One girl was from Seattle, another from California, another from Florida and a guy from Georgia. To us, we all had similar accents, with the exception of the guy from Georgia, who may have had a slight southern tinge to his voice, but not as heavy as one might expect. I was talking to the girl from Florida one of the days and a guy also at the course approached us, he was from Germany and was there as a teacher of both English and German. He interrupted us and said to the other girl that her accent was like music to his ears, that she probably had one of the most beautiful accents he had ever heard. I was puzzled. Not only because I wanted to know what was wrong with my accent, but I couldn’t tell the difference between our speech. Granted there are some of the more slight nuances between an American and Canadian speaker, such as the stereotypical eh and the different pronunciations of certain words, or the minor difference in the pronunciation of the o-sound, but to either of us, the difference didn’t seem that apparent. After asking him about it, apparently he had noticed a large difference between all our accents, something that we couldn’t notice no matter how hard we tried.
It seems that unless there is an obvious difference between the different accents, such as the thick southern accent of the US, or the Boston or Chicago accents (to name a few) it’s almost impossible to find these differences, yet for others the differences are large. Evidently a Canadian accent exists and it’s not as musical or beautiful as the Florida accent.
I also bring up this whole accent thing because it also surprised me how one’s accent can change or remain the same. One of the head teachers at the school got up to speak at one point and continued to teach us some part of the lesson for about half an hour. In all honestly what he was trying to teach us was lost on me and apparently my American counterparts faced this same problem. You see, he was American, or so we assumed, he had an American name (Eric) as well as his last name and we were so focused on figuring out his accent that we couldn’t concentrate. When he first spoke he sounded American, but as he continued his sentences would always end with this weird accent. It was no longer American but this amalgamation of British, American and some other thing we couldn’t quite place, quite possibly it was just the intonation of someone who was confused between their British and American self (he indeed sounded as if he had a case of the “Madonnas”). Afterwards the other girls approached him to see where he was from, turns out he was born and raised in the US, but came to Italy about 8 years ago and uses both Italian and English to communicate.
In contrast, I thought of my aunt. She was born in Italy, but came to Canada at a young age and learned English. She then moved back to Italy many years ago and generally uses Italian to communicate during the day, although with me here she probably uses English much more now. What is interesting is that she has no confusion of accent, when she speaks English, it’s the same Canadian accent she’s always had. I can only assume that when she speaks Italian, her accent is Italian. When I asked her about this she had no explanation, which is what I expected, because how would one consciously know about a change in accent?
It’s all just so interesting (to me at least). How our accents can be so much part of our identity and such a cause for confusion at the same time.
So what am I getting at? I’m not sure, but I had all these thoughts on accents that confused me and I wanted to write about one of the more serious differences that I have been wondering about lately rather than my normal mindless nonsense about the difference between coke and coke light.
Pictures? You betcha… but first let me ramble.
A few odd thoughts from me first:
-On the train into Vicenza, just as you leave Schio there is a house that is painted to look camouflaged. I keep trying to take pictures but we move too fast. But it’s camo’d up too look… well I don’t know. Problem is, I still see it. Is the desired effect not irrelevant then? Why would one paint their house camo anyways? Is there some weird need to stay hidden that I should know about? Point is… the house looks ugly (odd, since most houses here look good no matter what they’re painted just because I love the styles) and I can still see it. I just don’t get it.
-So I was out of the loop in regards to news and such, especially hometown news since it is Italy and we could probably care less with what’s happening in Vancouver. Nor do we care about hockey, although I have been told I may be able to see a few games here at some point. But I thought about my question yesterday about Luongo as captain and decided that being a son of an Italian immigrant and having the looks and last name of an Italian, this can only mean the Canucks will win the cup this year. Trust.
(btw, I’m so aware of how that all sounded, but what do you expect, I’m in Italy)
-It’s raining here today, apparently our weather is linked to Vancouver somehow. I’ve heard it was sunny there while it was here, when it started raining there today, so did it here.
-Is anyone else out there happy to know that Jen in Italy still talks about the weather as much as in Canada? Sadly I don’t have the same access to weather.com so I can’t be my obsessive compulsive self about pictures.
Finally… I got the pictures downloaded in one place. I was trying to do it on my ipod to Facebook yesterday but I don’t like how that was working out, so today I finally downloaded them there and have a link for people to see. You don’t need an account to look at the pictures (just to comment), so click the link to see the small amount that I have so far (sorry, I haven’t taken many because I haven’t ventured that far
out of Schio).
http://www.new.facebook.com/album.php?aid=55060&l=301b5&id=593062131
updates, news and writing on my iPod
I hope this works I'm on my iPod and unsure of what I'm doing.
First I posted a few pics on my facebook for those on my profile. If someone can post the link for others in the comments it would be appreciated.
Also for my own amazement and wondering I just found out because Italy doesn't care about hockey... But Luongo as captain? Really? I guess it's good enough.
That's all for now I guess.
Ciao!
Oh, She’s Just Being Jen
I’ve been here less than three weeks (yes, I had to look that up because it seems like it’s been more with all I’ve gotten accomplished) and I’ve already fallen (literally) back into old Jen patterns.
I fell. And I hurt myself too. Hooray for medical coverage that I will not use because Jen still doesn’t use doctors even in other countries.
Before you go freaking out (Mom), I only sprained my ankle or twisted it or just hurt in a way that I felt pain, something that I’ve done so many times that it hardly makes an impact on me anymore. You see, I was walking down the mountain that I call home to the bus stop that only stops halfway up for the 11:45 bus to the city. Stupid Jen wore flip flops because I wanted to embrace the remains of the summer season (yes, it’s technically fall, but it’s still feeling like summer) and because of the erratic drivers, I have to stay as close to the side of the road as possible (sidewalks… Italians scoff at these sidewalks you speak about). I didn’t realize that the road ended and the grass began after a little bit of a ledge so after a small misstep I was down on the pavement, sprawled like the idiot that I am. Of course, I rebounded in true Jen fashion and got up and continued walking muttering to myself “walk it off Sandri, walk it off.” And it worked, until later in the evening when I was talking my driving lessons with an Italian named Enrico who tells me to do things in Italian and then my aunt, sitting in the backseat, must interpret them for me… midway through the lesson I felt excruciating pain as I pressed down on the clutch for the hundredth time and then I spent the rest of the day hobbling around the house.
It’s such a Jen thing to do to advertise my idiocracy on the internet eh? I think most people don’t advertise when they fall, but I generally make a habit of letting everyone know… also I want to see if Ms. Leah Artoodeetoo did the same thing since we are co-dependent in that regard (that shout out was also to see if she was reading this since I haven’t seen a comment yet Ms. Plomp). Leah, did you happen to fall at 1am your time on Tuesday?
As for today, it’s feeling better and I will later stupidly put on heels as I go to work for the first time at my job. I’m teaching English in Vicenza twice this week and I think four times next week. I also have a bunch of work lined up here in Schio next week as well, so work is going well and the Euro’s will eventually be flowing in (except, Italians only get paid once a month, so I have to wait another month L ).
I’m currently sitting in the kitchen alone as Livi and Christian are at work and my uncle is out shooting birds. I swear, every morning I wake up in a war zone with shots ringing out in the sky just outside the house. Paradise for a girl that constantly dreams that she is being shot and hates guns :D
I’m also still slowly learning the ways of the Italian life. Such as, you do not drink at the bar at the Schio train station, I arrived early yesterday and went to get a cappuccino, I walked in and immediately knew it was wrong… I personally thought it would be full of old men, just like those that sit outside the bar drinking their coffee. Nope, all men that sat and ogled what was probably the only woman to step foot in there all day. Me being the nice Canadian that I am, felt it would be rude to just walk out, so I drank my coffee and left. When I got home later my aunt plainly told me that you do not go into that bar… you just don’t.
FYI: Cafes in Italy are bars, sadly, I cannot sit in them all day and read as I did in Vancouver, instead you drink your coffee, usually standing at the bar and leave, sitting down generally costs more. Another thing I’ve learned about Italy… you pay to do everything.
