Keeping cool in Bologna

So now I'm in Bologna.  The month in Sicily with Libera Terra ended yesterday, and, after collecting last bits of research, packing up my stuff, reminding my housemates that if they want the basil plant to live they need to water it, and saying goodbye to everyone and their mother (literally: Leo called his mother on his cell phone so that I could say goodbye to her, too), I flew out of Palermo and up to Bologna.

Here I'm staying in a B&B and rambling around the city in a low-key, relaxed sort of way.  The tourist office gives out not only free maps, but an EXCELLENT (and also free!) guide book with descriptions of different themed walking tours, including one on green spaces.  So I took a long walk around to see the Parco della Montagnola, the Orto Botanico (botanic garden!), and the Giardini Margherita.   Along the way I ran into a book sale, where I very firmly reminded myself that I Do Not Need Another Book to Carry Home with Me before buying one anyway (Cosimicomiche, a book of physics/science-inspired, whimsical, clever short fiction by Italo Calvino, an author I really like.  Totally worth having to find room for it in my suitcase).  And then I passed a farmer's market and asked for a peach to eat right away--it was delicious, and the man cheerfully refused to let me pay him for it.  So I munched on it as I wandered up into Parco della Montagnola, where I sat on a bench by a fountain and read my book for a while.  The statuary around the fountain was a little puzzling.  There were a pair of lounging mermaids (not the usual delicate sort--if Athena were a mermaid, she would look like these),

a lion who was maybe supposed to look fierce (but mostly looked startled) crouched over a dead ox, another pair of lounging mermaids, another lion with a serpent twined around it, crouched over a dead horse, and, in the middle of the pond: three stone turtles.  I'm sure there must be some kind very profound symbolism there.  Or something.  There was also some excellent graffiitti:

I  had a conversation with an elderly Italian man who came by on his daily walk through the park.  He  used to be a doctor, and spent time in both France and California.  At the moment he's lonely because his daughter and grandkids are off at the beach and he has no one to talk to.  He called me Emilia, thanked me profusely for letting him share the bench and talk for a while, and said goodbye (complete with handshakes and cheek kisses and thankyous and have a good rest of the day) at least three times over the course of the conversation before he actually got up and left.

A little while later I walked about ten minutes down the road to the botanic garden of the University of Bologna, which was lovely, and took some pictures:

sat in the shade there for a while, as it was by then getting to be nearly midday and HOT.  And after that I walked across town, admiring (and appreciating) the portici that shade nearly all of the sidewalks in Bologna:

and on to the Giardini Margherita, where I had lunch at a little table overlooking a pond full of more (live!) turtles than I have ever seen in one place before.  And then, since it was still hot and humid, I spent most of the afternoon stretched out on the grass in the shade, napping and reading and flicking the occasional ant off the back of my neck.  There was even a bit of a breeze.  And then I took a leisurely walk back, and a shower.

I like Bologna a lot.  It feels very modern and active, full of rasta-haired, crunchy-granola university students, public parks, free concerts/movies in piazzas, and differentiated trash/recycling.

Tomorrow evening I'll be taking a bus overnight from here to Taize, the international monastery in France, where I'll spend a week before heading home via Florence.  Not B&B home.  Not apartment in San Giuseppe home.  Not Florence home.  Home home.  Really home.  Makes me smile just thinking about it.  : D

Under the sea

Ned, Joel (my two housemates), Nadia (one of our good friends at the office), Michele (mee-KELL-eh, Nadia’s boyfriend), and Mic (a friend of theirs from France whose name I never quite caught) and I spent last weekend on Ustica, a small island just north of Palermo, mostly famous among scuba divers.  Nadia knew of a small house to rent, complete with terazza, porch swing, and view of the sea:

Ned, Joel and I spent Saturday in Palermo, and met up with the others in the evening to take the hour-long boat ride out to the island, where we walked up lots of steps and hills and out into the “countryside” of the island (mind you, this was maybe a 15 minute walk tops, and that was because we ran into people they knew on the way) to our house and made dinner all together.  On Sunday morning we (minus Mic, who had a broken arm and went for a walk to the water instead) went to do immersione (“immersion”, ie, scuba diving!).  We went out on a boat with lots of other scuba divers.  Here is the scuba diving spot where the boat dropped anchor:

Joel, Nadia, and Michele all have scuba diving licenses, so they went out on an underwater guided tour sort of a thing.  Ned and I both had what is called a battesimo (a “baptism”).  This is something they do for people who are curious about diving but haven’t taken any lessons.  It isn’t even so much a first lesson in scuba diving as it is a way to experience it without needing to understand how it works.  After a brief introduction to underwater hand signals (everything’s okay!  something’s wrong. my ears/head hurts. I’m anxious. let’s go up/down,  and so on) and an explanation of what you’ll be doing, they help you put on all the scuba gear (wet suit, scuba boots, flippers, scuba mask, a belt with counterweights to keep you from constantly floating back up to the surface, and a vest that has the oxygen tank and other complicated bits of equipment).

Then you have your own personal guide who, after helping you get used to the sensation of being underwater and breathing, takes you around on a mini-tour of about 15-20 minutes about 7-8 meters (about 20-25 feet) under water (for comparison, Nadia, Michele and Joel, after the first-level course, have licenses for up to 20 meters, although guides occasionally take them as deep as 30).  Your guide holds onto the back of your scuba equipment (like a kitten), and takes care of steering, depth, and all the monitoring and adjusting of equipment along the way.  All you have to do is:

1. Breathe
2. Compensate (this is scuba diver vocabulary for release the pressure in your ears when it starts to build up, just like you do on an airplane)

You can also kick your flippers a bit, which comes naturally anyway.

It was awesome.

Point number 1 (breathing) doesn’t come quite as naturally as you would think.  The air from the tank is what they call on demand: meaning that there isn’t a bubble of air in front of your mouth; there’s a tube you hold in your mouth, and when you breath in, the air is there for you, but it’s ever-so-slightly more work than normal breathing.  It’s also drier than ordinary air.  You have to learn to take long, deep, calm breaths (which, incidentally, also helps to keep you calm underwater).  I found that I actually had to occasionally remind myself that I could breath.  It’s counter-intuitive when you’re underwater, and you start holding your breath without realizing it.

Initially, at the surface of the water, everything felt bulky and heavy and I hadn’t quite figured out an efficient way to tread water while wearing flippers and wound up doing a lot of unhelpful thrashing, but as soon as we got underwater, everything got a whole lot easier.  It was fun.  I saw a scarlet sea star, and a giant school of tiny little neon blue/purple fish, and some jellyfish, and lots of rocks and seaweed and assorted other fish of various sizes and colors.  There was an odd sort of detachment that I didn’t expect, because of the scuba mask and the way you move slowly (because every movement is amplified underwater, especially when you’re wearing flippers), and you swim with just your flippers, not your hands, which stay folded in front of you (except when trying to touch a fish, which inevitably doesn’t work, but is hard to resist).  It’s not like standing suspended underwater and moving wherever you like—you stay more or less prone, and mostly look at the sea floor or ahead of you, which meant that, visually at least, I wasn’t really aware of how far under water we were unless I made an effort to look up.  I don’t think I’ll take up scuba diving as a hobby, but I’m really glad I went.  It was very cool.  I don’t have any pictures of me in scuba gear, but I do have pictures of Ned:

I looked more or less the same, except smaller, and I think my flippers might have been a different color.

They dropped us back on land for lunch, and in the afternoon I read in the shade and went for a walk down to a swimming spot with sunny rocks to lounge on.  There was also a prehistoric village nearby.

After dinner we watched the final game of the soccer world cup at a bar near our house, and Monday morning we took a early boat back to Palermo.

Flashback

I was digging through old files on my computer today, and found this fragment, from back in October of this year (last year, I guess it is at this point).  I think I meant to post it here as part of something longer and never got around to writing the rest of it.  But it made me laugh, so I shall post it as is:

~ ~ ~

Today we were on the bus on the way home from class, and we saw a man walk by with the top half of a (naked, life-size) female clothing dummy (like a giant Barbie) tucked under his arm.  And then not long after, here comes another man with the other half (a pair of legs).  So that was interesting.  Sadly, none of us had a camera handy.

Speaking of Italian...

I have apparently acquired a Florentine accent.

I can’t actually hear it, but at least five different people in the last month (the guy at the bus station in Modena, various people at Ca’ Penelope in Maranello, the signora in the apartment below us here in San Giuseppe Jato) have told me so, and the Tuscan journalist who was here doing an article on Libera Terra a few days ago said, (within ten minutes of meeting me, without any prompting, and I swear I hadn’t mentioned it yet) “So, you studied in Florence then?”

In a country where people habitually spend the first five minutes of any conversation working out where you grew up based on your accent, it means, in some sense, that I am officially “from” Florence.  I couldn’t be more proud.

And then, to keep me humble, there is Micciché, who goes into gales of (good-natured) laughter whenever I attempt to “speak” Sicilian, and who told me this morning that I am the official American representative of the group, since I am the only one of the three resident American students who still has a bit of an American accent.  Granted, this is not an entirely fair comparison, as Ned spent a year in high school and two years college in Bologna, taking all of his classes at the university.  In fact, the first time I talked to him on the phone, I thought he WAS Italian, despite the fact that I knew he was American.

In other news, after nearly a year of living in Italy, I am happy to report that I can finally reliably remember the difference between the following (bear in mind that the difference in pronunciation between l and gl in the middle of a word is subtle):

- table (tavolo)

- little table (tavolino)

- tablecloth (tovaglia)

- napkin (tovagliolo)

Part of the problem (aside from the way table can actually be either masculine or feminine depending on the context, as well as  all the tavo vs. tova, and the fact that napkin sounds like tablecloth but is a different gender) was that I always thought napkin ought to be la tovaglina, [the little tablecloth] which, alas, it isn’t.  But at least, given a few moments to think, I no longer ask someone to please pass me the tablecloth.

Not to worry, however, since I continue to entertain everyone with occasional lingual mishaps.  Yesterday Francesco was explaining to us the process that turns the grain the co-ops harvest into a package of pasta.  This involves a pastificio (a pasta making factory).  Wanting to make sure I had the system down right, I asked, “So, Libera Terra Mediterraneo buys the grain from the co-ops, and then sends it to the pasticceria [pastry shop] to be made into pasta?”

And on Saturday morning I asked Micciché if “these eggs [uova] were a different kind than the others we’d been working with?”.  This made him chuckle, as we were standing in a field of grapes [uva].

This field of grapes (aka vigneto, vineyard), actually:

It's Micciché's vineyard, and we spent Saturday morning (from about 6 am until noon) helping him with the "green harvest", which means pulling/pruning off all of the grapes before they're ready.  The cantine (where wine is made) can't handle all the grapes grown every year, which means that after a while they close, and won't buy any more.  However, the government will pay a certain number of farmers to pull all the grapes off anyway and leave them on the ground, if they can't be sold to the cantina.  We spent a good bit of the morning (and lunch afterwards) getting Micciché to (re)explain (for the umpteenth time) the logic of this, since it doesn't seem to be about the health of the vineyard, although that might be a factor.  And still don't really understand.  Will get back to you if we figure it out, although Micciché's conclusion seems to be that it's just una politica sbagliata (which loosely translates as dumb politics).  But, hey, if the government is willing to pay him for it, he is willing to pull off all the grapes.

While we're at it, here's the view from Micciché's vineyard:

And, lastly, Ned, Micciché and Joel in the vineyard: