ANNA KING
Florence Columnist
Our first two weeks in Italy have been a whirlwind of 60 hours of Italian classes, leaving most of us without enough energy to speak it.
We go out and try to order our panino sandwiches in Italian, but the lady at the counter simply asks, “Which one?” Hopefully, by the end of my time here I will be able to pass as a blonde Italian, but I feel that there is more than just a language barrier getting in the way of adjusting to our new life here. The problem is the fact that we are citizens of the United States.
At all hours of the day here, as it is in the states, there are people out and about, but I am not entirely convinced they are actually going anywhere. They are walking down the streets talking with friends, or riding their scooters across town or browsing through stores not looking for anything in particular. We try to live that way, but it seems our roots always get in the way.
Yes, we walk and talk with purpose because we are young, multi-tasking Americans. But we get there, and that is all. When we go out, even when we have nothing to do, we do not waltz down the street — we power walk.
I have found that this show of fast-paced living makes us recognizable as foreigners. It is not the flip-flops and it is not our tendencies to be loud. It is the fact that we do not really look around.
We do not have a conversation with someone on the street. We do not stop at a cafe on the way to someplace and simply order a cappuccino and actually sit and drink it.
Italians take things slow — they wander, they spend hours at a table talking about their family and their church, they ride bikes instead of driving cars. They do not really have a schedule, except for their scheduled breaks. This is especially hard for us to comprehend.
As a group of us were relaxing in the student center one afternoon, a student professed to us that he was going to live in Italy forever.
“They take a two-hour nap in the middle of the day, every day, and have more national holidays than they can remember. What more could you want?” he asked us.
He was commenting on the fact that he went out to lunch and everything was closed, but in essence he was frustrated with the fact that he wanted something then and there and could not get it.
So many things in Italy and in the culture cause us to feel uncomfortable in our surroundings. The streets are not laid out in blocks but in circles, and that frustrates us when we “think” we know where we are.
There are no Targets to go to when we need toothpaste and crackers and a shirt, but there are pharmacies and grocery stores and clothing stores. The inconvenience of that bothers us.
We, as U.S. citizens, are programmed to get things done quickly. We are used to things being available and organized.
Italians, however, live in a simpler, more relaxed manner. People drive small cars — really small cars — and park them wherever.
Nobody cares. Red lights are more like an option than a requirement. Sidewalks are small, roads are uneven, stores are unorganized and unaesthetic. Things are straight and to the point. You get done what you need to do and you go back to what you really care about. And Italians care about a lot of different things. They care about their families and their soccer games and their boyfriends and girlfriends. They take pride in those things, and they spend a lot of time devoting themselves to them. All of the other stuff, the working and the grocery shopping and the being wherever you need to be right now, does not matter. Here, what matters is what you learn about each other and what you experience on the way there.
09-28-2006