Cari Amici,
Hey what's up? I haven't written for a very very very very very long time. I guess I could say that it has been too long, and it has. Well--here' my life:
On the first hand, I have my final exam of my intensive month tomorrow which I am thrilled about! Thrilled to be done because honestly it was not my favorite thing to get up and go to every morning. 3 hours of grammar review starting at 9:30 and going until 12:45 with a "pausa" of 10-15 minutes in the middle. The pausa is never long enough...I mean I love grammar in both English and Italian but I found that my class was more dull than anything else. At least now I know how to correctly say "I gave them (the keys) to him" without having to say..."Do you have the keys, and did you give them to Gianni?" "Oh yeah, I have the keys and I gave the keys to Gianni. Gianni is the person to whom I gave the keys..." Repetition is annoying but there are so many ways to eliminate it...boh'
So I didn't really tell you anything about the city where I live...Let's start with my casa. La mia casa is outside of the city center, I guess you could say I live in the burbs....I leave the house every morning and walk down/almost fall down three flights of stairs...I fly out of my door (I'm usually almost late) and before I do that I have to push the "open gate" button to open my front gate. Once that is done I take a left and walk to the end of the street, then I cross to my right BUT I have to make sure there are no cars/motorcycles/bicycles coming--then I cross. Oh and there is an Orthodontist's office (?) across the street and a woman always parks her gray cinquecento a few spots down from my front door. A fricken' cinquecento.
The houses in my neighborhood are pretty large but most of them have multiple occupants--i.e. two families living in them OR one family with a lot of relatives. I like the huge house full of relatives idea. Makes me happy. Once I take a right at the end of my street I pass two beautiful houses--very Italian, very well kept and simply beautiful. One is brick and has green shutters and a little entryway with a chandelier-light fixture and a lovely front garden. It has it's own private gate and a little parking area for cars, I'm thinking these people have more than just pasta in their bank account. The other one is pink stucco. I'm talking pink...as in fuschia or pink lemonade or raspberry. It also has green shutters AND the best part is that when I walk by I never fail to hear somebody playing the saxophone--day and night, saxophone music drifts out of this house...I love it! Mysterious and well played. It's definitely not a recording. Oh and I almost forgot the house on the corner. The house on the corner is old and slightly rickety but it's being fixed up as of last weekend--there are scaffoldings all around the outside--I love this casa because it has a gigantic rose garden. Every single pezzo di free space is filled with roses and when I walk by, whether it is raining or shining, there are always roses--some are pink, some are white, some are red--they come in all different colors. I am tempted to pick them but I never will because 1. They don't belong to me, and more importantly 2. I don't want to take them away from their friends...they are so happy and joyful where they are--I wouldn't want to steal the opportunity of enjoyment from the other passersby.
So as I am daydreaming and glancing nonchalantly at the roses I continue down the street as I pass an elementary school? (maybe a liceo--high school) and a drugstore. When I start getting closer to the drug store I almost always check my watch and it is usually 9:03. I am on time. Then I stand at the walk sign and press the green walk button. The cars/vespas/bicycles/motorcycles (by the way there are so many different breeds of motorized bikes here, I can't list them all) fly by me on the left. The cars driving across from me, coming from my right are almost always stopped. The lights here don't work like they do in the U.S. The light turns green for one side and then red and then green and then red for the other. Oh, it's probably because the tram uses the same road that cars do, but it runs on a track. It sounds confusing and it is, but if you saw it, you would probably understand a little bit better. I don't really get it and I stand there every morning. So at this point the people coming from the right are stopped. The people on my left who are coming off of the street that I just walked down are taking a right--but the are stopped--and the cars coming straight on from my left are still driving by. I pressed the walk button 2 minutes ago. Now old people and students and other bicyclists have started congregating with me at the cross walk and we all make various sounds of annoyance and check our watches. The old lady next to me exclaims to everyone "Questa luce non e' mai verde, eh?" (this light is never green, is it?). And we all look around and chuckle and nod our heads because we know that it's true. Ma poi, the light changes color and we can walk and we're so excited so we start to go and then the cars coming out of the street to my left are taking a right because it's their only chance and we are all walking and the cars are all going and not waiting or caring if we walk or if they hit us (but they honestly do...but not really until they hit you? It's possible that they don't care if they hit you...) and we have 5 seconds FIVE SECONDS to run across the street as the tram passes and picks people up and we're trying to cross and then the doors close and it's not even worth running because you're not going to catch it and....damn. Next tram comes in 10 minutes. This is my tram most of the time unless I am lucky enough and somebody stops to let me cross the street, which has happened on 2 occasions. I regard these kind people as the sweetest and most generous of benefactors--honestly in Italy, this could be considered miraculous.
So I sit at the tram stop...they have these metal seat-bars that are more interesting/cleanly (probably) than our grody american plastic seats--plus they just help you to look cooler because you lean against them in a kind of "oh I'm here and I don't care when the tram comes" kind of way. But you do. And then the tram shows up--it's blue and shiny and looks like some sort of futuristic monorail, nothing like the T, which has an old fashion, Boston charm...ma, it looks clean and European and chic. So the first time you ride the tram, if you're an American and you like an exorbitant amount of personal space you have a small panic attack. The tram has arrived and you are looking at the glass doors right before they open and you see...people people people tante persone all piled in leaning against bars and bumping/breathing on/generally standing on top of eachother...so you go in, you don't just enter though...you push through the crowd and make sure you are out of the way before the doors close on your leg or your arm or your bag...and then you click your ticket in the little machine. And it feels like the machine is going to eat/rip your ticket to bits but it doesn't. Sometimes people steal rides and don't click their ticket--me too, I'm not made of money and I run out of tickets every now and then. They do have cameras but I don't think that they have the man power to catch all of the people who don't click their tickets...and then you can either stand in the middle of the tram or you can sit or you can lean or you can hold onto one of the bars. Did I mention that all of the people stand close together but they have a way of looking as if it doesn't bother them? I've figured it out...it goes like this--don't look at anyone else while they are looking at you. In this way, you can look and see what everybody else is wearing, what people you think are creepy and don't want to stand/sit next to, and you can take some of the discomfort out of being so uncomfortably close. Actually, if you look like you don't care, it's even better because then you begin to think that you don't care and eventually you really don't care. I don't care anymore either. I do like to sometimes exchange disapproving glances with the old ladies/older people on the bus especially when there are goofy teenagers acting up. It makes me feel more authentic, plus I'm pretty sure that I pass for older here on most days, so I'm happy to up my age to 30 when I need to....more in a few hours. I gotta go chat with my host mama. A presto.
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