Bad T.V.

28 APRIL CREVALCORE—Did I mention how much T.V. blows chow here? Italian-American journalist John Moretti puts it best: “The bread-and-butter of prime-time programming in Italy has long been a lineup of quiz shows and 1950s style variety shows, each with a generous helping of half-naked women and comedy bordering on slapstick. Flip the channel, and you are likely to find a B-grade American movie from the 1970s [or 1980s] loaded with car chases and explosions.” I second that emotion.

In Italy, if you don’t have cable there are the three state-run channels RAI 1,2,3. Then there are the three Silvio Berlusconi-owned Mediaset channels: La 4,5, 6. You also get La 7, MTV Italia and a couple of public access channels that might have some regional shows for two hours a day and the rest of the time show a collection of tarot card readers and astrologists.

MTV shows videos (how strange!) and broadcasts its version of TRL everyday at 2 p.m. This year they’re broadcasting daily from the main piazza in Naples. Kids look the same as they do in the States. During this show and the videos a crawl across the bottom of the screen displays SMS text messages from all the kids. Green Day appears to rule the day. Like at home, the youngins’ write in an abbreviated tagger’s script that you have to decipher on the fly. Gwen Stefani and the Black Eyed Peas are also favorites. There were many lamentations as to the unoriginal state of Italian rock but like in the U.S. that doesn’t seem to stop the music producers from turning out the booty-shakin’ shlock.

The reality show phenomenon has taken off big here. (Don’t forget that a lot of this started over here first so it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff as to who is the original sinner.) There is one called La Fattoria (the Farm) where well-heeled contestants have to milk cows and perform other odious bucolic chores. Another one is kind of a cross between American Idol and a reality show. And there is a version of American Idol; Alessandro just won the other night! Wait, I’m going to cry. Right now, Jenny on the Block’s new song is playing (ICK. Sorry Nak.) My friend, Paola, who is a high school Latin/Italian Lit teacher, even likes her. I guess her tastes are even more ecclectic than mine. Example: The other night her kids were dancing around, singing to La Traviata (they know the words to the big arias) before they all three melted down fighting over who got to play the demo version of FIFA 2005 on their mom’s computer. This brought swift justice from the sheriff, their dad, Gabriele. They almost had to go to bed with no dessert. Kids these days.

If MTV or reality T.V. isn’t your cup of tea, there are the aforementioned variety shows like Sabato Italiano (Italian Saturday) and other carbon copies with dancing velline (show girls). Every show has a couple of babes who just stand around and introduce the next servizio (segment, report). The other night they should have put a lapel mike on this particular one; she kept waving the microphone around with her voice cutting in and out.Watch Univision to get an idea of what the tube is like in Italy. A little training, maybe? Oh, sorry. Due to cutbacks the babes can receive no training now. Meno male. (Sarcastic ‘thank goodness.’) My favorite show is called Striscia La Notizia which is kind of like the Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Two guys sit around and mock the hypocrisy of politicians, do hidden camera stings and show funny home videos while commenting over them. Stefania has to spot me to help me follow this show.

Last night I was watching a late-night talk show called Porta a Porta (Door to Door) where guests ring a door bell before making their entrance. It’s hosted by a guy that looks just like Ed Sullivan.The topic was I Divi Della Nostra Vita (Stars of our Lifetime). It was about all the great movie stars and directors of Italian cinema. (Nota bene:Divo/Diva can refer to both men and women and doesn’t always have the negative connotation that it does in the U.S. It just means ‘star.’) There was Claudia Cardinale (one facelift too many), Giuseppe Tornatore (Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, Il Postino) and many other greats. No Sophia Loren, though. Fortunately, there was also the bella Maria Grazia Cucinotta. I mean she is just stunning. She was the love interest in Il Postino and has even done some American movies. To her credit she has tried to avoid the traditional eye-candy roles. So they did their bit on her with a montage of her work and had some questions for her before the door bell rang introducing the next guest. Next guest comes on and the host shifts his attention to him. Apparently, the director in the booth didn’t get the memo. He (I’m assuming here) keeps cutting back to Maria Grazia for reaction shots. Only problem is, they are talking to Claudia Cardinale who’s last good film was made before the latter was born. Moreover, Cardinale was just vamping for the lens the whole time and saying nothing of substance. But the director kept cutting back to Cucinotta who was looking at her nails etc. I mean, they do the classic “honey shots” at NBA games to show all the babes at courtside but this was ridiculous and enerving because it was impossible to follow the other conversation with these quick jump cuts.

The biggest problem, to me, however, is the lack of production values. I guess I’m just spoiled that way. In the U.S. we’ve tended to go to the other extreme. An ounce of form is worth more than a pound of substance. Fox Sports, followed by Fox News were the real innovators in the early 90s with the glowing puck on NHL games and other graphical interventions. No wonder then that Sky Italia has better service and is the only alternative to regular T.V. —to wit it’s Rupert Murdoch owned! News programs, documentaries and sports shows have almost no graphics whatsoever. Yesterday, I watched a highlight montage of the week’s Serie A soccer games. There was not one graphic even labeling what team was playing or the score. Just some lady talking a million miles per hour going from one game to the next.

Dubbing is still a big phenomenon.Italians still dub many of their own movies and what orginal T.V.fiction that there is. I guess people just got addicted to all of this looping over the decades back from when sound engineering was much more primitive. It drives me crazy whether it’s a foreign film or something homegrown. The people that loop in the dialogue speak too perfectly. Perfect grammar, perfect accents. Besides the lips not matching the dialogue (even Italian to Italian), it just comes off as too aniseptic. However, I did see an original series last night on La 5. It’s called, Ho sposato un calciatore (I married a soccer player). It’s like that series that was on ESPN about a fictional NFL team. It’s your typical melodrama/bodice ripper but has great production values. Almost too American looking. Someone in Berlusconi’s empire actually dropped some serious coin on this one.

I find the fact that Italy is lacking in visual sophistication interesting coming from the country that gave us Giotto, Michaelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci just to name a few of the greatest visual artists of all time. I mean, Leonardo overcame the greatest odds to produce such a timeless body of work. Pope Leo X actually kicked him out of his own country for his “sins.” Some would say he got off easy. Just ask Girolamo Savanorola who was torched for crossing Pope Alexander VI. (Thank the French for saving Leonardo’s bacon. King Francis I invited him to France where he lived out the rest of his days, working until the end.) So you’d figure that such a rich country could up the allowance for production values. For it is T.V. and radio that really unified this country. Any person you see on the street over the age of sixty spoke another language other than Italian at home as a child. So leave it to the opportunistic son of a fabbro (blacksmith) born near Forlì (25km southeast of Bologna) to make the “trains run on time” and have his regime give birth to RAI. His name? Benito Mussolini. He confirms my rule that all politicians, whatever their stripe, are obsequious weasels. He started his career as a socialist and communist founding the newspaper Avanti! (circulation, 200,000—not bad for such a small country Mr. Ridder). He was kicked out of the Communist Party after supporting Italy’s entrance into World War I, having previously run headlines like, “Who leads us to war betrays us.” He found it more politically expedient to switch sides when he figured he could gather more readers to reflect the changing times. Therefore, since he started it all, I blame him for today’s crap T.V.

Thanks to authors John Moretti and William Manchester for providing some of the historical infromation in this post.

A real phat pad

27 APRIL CREVALCORE—I opened i scuri (the shutters) this morning to some tipo (guy) yelling in Arabic for what seemed like an eternity. The weather has been otherwise perfect for the last two days; blue cloudless skies, temperature in the seventies.

Crevalcore (www.comune.crevalcore.it) is a small town of about 12,000 inhabitants. It is located approximately 28 km to the northwest of Bologna. It is closer to Modena than Bologna but still in the province of Bologna, so the cars have little ‘BOs’ on the border of their license plates. The guidebooks tell us that the name Crevalcore probably comes from the Latin crepa corium (scorza crepa in modern Italian) which means something like crusty cracks in English. Scholars believe this is because Crevalcore sits in the marshy flood plain of the Panaro River where the ground used to open up during the hot summer months. Modern irrigation has disposed of this problem. A large dike now runs along the length of the river, farmers’ vineyards and vegetable gardens nestled in its shadow.

The town is organized around two porte (doors), the Porta Bologna and the Porta Modena, that used to be the entrances to the protective ramparts, long since gone. It has a very symmetrical street plan that is faithful to the Roman hamlet of antiquity upon which it is built. We live on Via XX Settembre which runs perpendicular to Via Matteotti, the main portico-lined street in town. All of these side streets are lined with tile-roofed, earth-toned apartment buildings. The streets are barely wide enough for two cars to pass and are made of various sized bricks. Everything in town looks like it has been recently renovated. The manhole covers on our street say 2004 on them. Lucky for me the Romans designed this town, otherwise I’m sure I would be lost half the time. As it is, the way to the store is: down two blocks, cut over one to the right, continue past Via Matteotti for one more block where the little strip mall sits on a corner outside of where the ramparts would have been.

Our apartment is on the second floor of a three family dwelling. There is an older lady who lives below us and a recently- widowed man and his daughter live next door. They have a big black cat named Nerone (Nero) who comes to visit on the roof that is below our back window. Our pad looks to be about 600 square feet, tops. We have a kitchen/living room that is fully furnished. There is an antique buffet that weighs about two tons on the left side, an antique table with four matching chairs in the middle and a new love seat that Stef just bought at IKEA that we are desperately trying to keep the cats from shredding. On the right is a countertop that runs the length of the wall. The fridge occupies the corner. In the middle of the counter is a stainless steel four-burner gas range. The sink is on the left end. Above are matching cabinets with a built in exhaust fan. In between the cabinets and the fridge is our water heater which is about the size of a bar fridge. The ceilings appear to be about 12 feet high. The floor and the wall behind the counter is covered in matching tile. Our landlord, a really nice older man with a heavy Bolognese accent, brought us a new 20-inch T.V. last night; it sits on the buffet. Need cable though. Italian T.V. is really crap. Ours is crap, too, but with better production values. More on that later.

The bedroom has a nice queen-size bed and several pieces of antique furniture. Tommy D would love to get his hands on this stuff. There is one window in the kitchen which looks out on Via XX Settembre, one in the bedroom which looks out in to someone’s courtyard and one in the bathroom, again on Via XX Settembre. (Note to self: Find out what the hell happened on XX Settembre.)

The bathroom is rather spacious and is directly in front of the front door and a small entry hall. Again, everything is brand new. Shower, sink, commode and of course the ubiquitous bidet (bidè in Italian). Reminds me of the joke from Crocodile Dundee when Paul Hogan sees the bidet for the first time and asks Linda Koslowski what it’s for. She tells him to figure it out and promptly turns and leaves. He messes with it and sees how the water shoots straight up in the air. He runs to the window and calls down to her as she’s getting into a cab, “It’s for washing your backside isn’t it?!” She gives him the thumbs up. Most people here just use it as an auxiliary sink for hand washing things with Woolite.

The walls in this place are—wait, let me go measure—14 inches thick. Residential buildings are built with cinder blocks and covered with an adobe-like material and paint on the outside, a layer of insulation followed by plaster on the inside. No drywall here, baby. The windows are double paned with fancy rubber seals. There are wooden shutters on the outside that you can fix into place with these little iron busts of Garibaldi (I assume) that flip up. You close them at night. Thank god that these are back in fashion. During the 60s and 70s tapparelle (roll down shutters) were in fashion. It makes places look like NATO bunkers. They’re still around, but you see much less of them. We get decent cross ventilation but I’m sure we’re going to have to invest in a fan for the summer. I also want to get the materials to make some zanzariere (screens). A lot of people have air conditioning now which is a testament to how hot that summer was a couple of years ago when so many people died. People either have these fancy digital floor units that come with remote controls and an exhaust tube you run out the window or these 3’x3’ white units that are mounted on exterior walls,usually next to the satellite dish! Satellite dishes are less and less common as fiber optic cable reaches more and more people. Most cables are buried here and it takes more time to get everyone hooked up in the outlying areas. Stefania’s parents have Alice in Crespellano which is like Time Warner and have DSL Internet and Sky cable T.V. So we go there when they aren’t home to catch up on Internet and good T.V.

Today, I had the car because Stefania had to go to Florence for an early meeting and took the company wheels to drive down there. (Sounds cool, doesn’t it. But work is work anywhere.) First, I stopped by the KOOP grocery store to pick up a bottle of red sparkling wine. I spent 4.35 euros. Man, wine is cheap here. That bottle would cost more than twice that in the States. This bottle happens to be from Treviso but it’s easy to go to local growers and stock up and even bottle it yourself. Yesterday, when I went to do some grocery shopping, I also bought a can of Pringles. Not the mini-size but the full tube, baby. I needed a fix, man. I’ve been convulsing on the bathroom floor without enough transfats in my bloodstream. Gotta get that monkey off my back. I’ve had only one can of Coke in almost two weeks, too. And this was a mini can of Coke that I got out of the machine at Alfa Wasserman, my former clients. Yes, you heard me right; machines sell six-ounce cans. And, no, I haven’t had an ice cube since I’ve been here.

Needless to say, I got busted with the Pringles. I didn’t destroy the evidence—Stefania found the can in the trash. I meant to save half the can for her but damn they were so good! Guess I have to wait till the KOOP opens tomorrow to get another fix.

The thing about junk food here in Italy is that it exists, of course, but is a bit harder to access. All shops close for two hours at noon except supermarkets. There are no quick shops that sell snacks except on the Autostrada. I had a killer headache last week and there was no aspirin in the house. Tough beans. Had to ride it out until morning. So I cried myself to sleep in pain. If you want Coke or snacks you have to go to a bar or the supermarket. And of course you pay a premium price at a bar and even more if you sit down there. Again, they keep regular hours. Haven’t read a newspaper in two weeks either. If you don’t get up early and get to the giornalaio (newsstand), you’re s.o.l. He closes at lunch. No running to Q.T. to pick up a copy of The Star. Moreover, I’ve only seen three obese people since I arrived. (I counted. Two yesterday, one last Saturday.) If you’ve got bigger than a 38-inch waist here, good luck! Better buy a big towel to wear. Need that Big Mac on the fly to feed those hungry kids at home? Drive 30 minutes to Bologna. Park outside the center, catch the 13 bus into the center of the city and walk the rest of the way to the McDonald’s. Better get there before it closes, too. I think there’s another one somewhere else around here, but I couldn’t tell you where. Drive-thrus? Hah. Never seen one. Heard they exist in some places, though. Anyway, most people wouldn’t waste the gas idling if there was a line. Let me be clear. There is no way, in Crevalcore, to get a hamburger, taco, frozen burrito etc. if you have the munchies. Nothing in the cupboard when you get home from work? Better run out to a restaurant before they close. Luckily, Italians don’t eat until 8, so you’re probably okay. There is also a notable lack of paper cups and other portable trash that people walk around with. I’ve been trying to spot paper, plastic or foam cups but have only seen them at the big mall in Casalecchio where there are some fast food joints. Local bars and cafes only serve in real glasses and cups. And even if they had a to go cup people wouldn’t walk around with them. I don’t know if there are any Starbucks in Italy yet but if there were it would be interesting to see if they modified there approach and only served in real cups. They would certainly have to use different beans than in the States. People don’t eat or drink in cars either. Our car, a 2004, doesn’t even have cup holders, just a sunglasses box. Fortunately, it is illegal to drive and talk on cell phones. Cuts down on the road fatalities. The great news is that it is now illegal to smoke indoors anywhere. When we went to that small bistro in Bologna last week not one person tried to light up. This is a small miracle in Italy where people love to try to thwart authority.

After a stop at the store I determined I didn’t have enough money to wash the car at one of those do-it-yourself places I found so I headed for a nice drive north to explore the roads for future cycling possibilities. Windows were down and I had the new Cold Play song, Speed of Sound, on Radio Monte Carlo cranked. Looks pretty good for the bike. I drove for 20km over to a small town with a nice castle called Gallezza, then doubled back towards Crevalcore and found a nice, small country road that went along underneath the dikes of the Panaro River. This will probably be my main track for a while as I only encountered a few cars and one truck (even though they are forbidden on this road). Everyone rides bikes here. You see the typical guys of all ages wearing racing gear to people in their seventies and eighties trundling along on ancient, creaking bikes wearing tweed sport coats. Still need to do a couple of things to my rig which is back in Crespellano, though. I need some lithium grease to lube the parts I had to put back together after the trip and will need to invest in a new rear cassette to get smaller gears if I plan on climbing the hills that start at Crespellano. Around these parts it’s as flat as a pancake since we’re in the Po River Valley. The hills around Crespellano are full of 14% grades and tornanti (switchbacks), but the scenery is incredible. I want to drive to Fanano this weekend which is in the Appenines in the Province of Modena.There’s still snow on top. You can see it from Crespellano. On the way to Moteveglio on Monday, we hit one stretch of road with 5 switchbacks in a row then came across a ‘beware of the deer’ sign and some country boys in camo gear standing next to a car. Bet I know what they were doing. However, Stefania swears she has never seen a deer in this area before. Well, I’ve never seen the Tooth Fairy, but I know she exists because she leaves me 5 bucks every time I lose a tooth in a hockey fight.

Happy Birthday Steve.

April showers....

You know it's springtime in Bologna when the prostitutes begin to appear like tulips along the Via Emila. Once the Roman road that went from Ravenna through Bologna and on to Piacenza and other parts northwest is now a major state highway that seems to attract the world's oldest profession like no other in the area. Let me put my otherwise puerile American sensibilities aside to discuss the inherrent danger to society of said practice. It's perilous and must be stopped! Not because of any outright moral indignation (I'll save that to our venerable politicians) but because when I'm zipping along at 100km/h in my late model Nissan Micra I do not want to scratch my main means of transportation on the side of some cretinous fool who has stopped on the side of the road in the misty darknes to inquire as to any spring sales or discounts being offered for said old profession. There must be cars, and nice ones at that, stopped every 100 meters on the outskirts of town conducting their negotiations. Prostitution is indeed ileagal here but I would have figured that the Italians would have figured out a better way to move such carnal activities indoors and tax the bejesus out of it than simply making it against some law. Now that would be a sin tax! I mean, they will fine the crap out of you if you exit your vehicle along the highway for mechanical reasons and are not wearing a fluorescent safety vest. So how come the ladies of the evening don't have to wear one? The johns could spot them even more easily. Come on boys, as they say, get a room.

Working girls notwithstanding, the rain has brought out things other than the birds and the bees and brought down one government. Berlusconi aside, today is the Festa della Liberazione or the 60th anniversary of Italy's liberation from the Fascists and Nazi Germany. Town dignitaries sporting ribbons have sprung up on podiums in the piazzas everywhere to offer laudatory speeches in honor of the fallen of Europe's greatest tragedy. Commemorative posters are on trees everywhere and bunting draped over statues. This is to be contrasted with the rainbow peace flags draped from many a balcony in this region. The war is still a vivid memory for many of Europe's most aged country. I would posit that that is really the main reason why there is so much opposition in continental Europe to the goings on in Iraq and Afghanistan: People here remember what it is like to have been invaded and to have witnessed so much destruction and are therefore a bit more gunshy about using military force to solve geopolitical problems.

In January 1945 Crespellano, from where I'm writing this dispatch, was bombed by the U.S. Army Air Corps as it was a staging area for German troops outside of Bologna. The Allies had had to delay their offensive to penetrate the Gothic Wall along the Appenines south of Bologna until spring because of bad weather. All throughout the spring of 1945, vicious fighting occured along this front against several divisions of dug-in German troops. Bologna was bombed relentlessly as it was a main rail and communications hub and the last stand before the open plains of the Po River valley that led straight to Germany from the south. The Allies finally took Bologna in mid-April 1945 and caused over 70,000 casualties among retreating German troops trapped between Bologna and the Po River. Stefania's father, who was born during the war, doesn't remember much of the war but recalled the misery and destruction of the post-war years. The Vigarani family hid in the hills near Sasso Marconi, south of Bologna. He told me that the Ospedale Maggiore where I wait for the bus is not the real main hospital of Bologna but a new one built after the war to replace the one that was destroyed at another location.

Anyway, Italians love to make the "ponte" or "bridge" a two day weekend into three or four. We've been staying here in Crespellano while Stefania's parents went to open their small apartment at Cesenatico for the season. Since my classes fell through for the moment because of clients' financing problems (happens a lot since some classes are publicly funded to help increase Italian firms' competitiveness), I've been working on my resume and my Italian. I'm not too optimistic at the moment as to long-term job prospects because what I do kind of falls between the cracks of the design world. Teaching for me is fun but it's hard to pay the bills. Luckily Stef has a good job with some good fringe benefits so we'll be fine. There's plenty of other things for me to work on for the time being. Moreover, I can't work legally yet even if someone offered me a job; my appointment at the "questura" to file my papers for a long-stay permit and a temporary work permit is May 11. My teaching is legal because it's run by a British company.

Since my cold and jet lag are gone, we profited from the long weekend like any good American family by going to the Shopville mall at Casalechio di Reno. It looks like any other mall in the world on the inside and we made a beeline straight for the big electronics store, kind of like BestBuy. Our mission, to get me a cell phone so I wouldn't get lost again. Since I don't have a "codice fiscale" (social security number) that is evidence of official residence, Stef had to do the buying. I settled on a Motorola model. All the new ones have video cameras, email etc. This one is also a tri-band which will work anywhere in the world. All ofEurope works on the GSM system which offers more bandwidth than in the States and the added feature that you can remove the SIM card, for example, and place it and all your info in another phone. You can get a plan like in the U.S. or buy cards that have a set number of minutes so you don't ring up a giant bill. That done, we exited and walked past some new Nissans on display in the main gallery. It was funny to see a new Pathfinder; it's enormous compared to most cars. And a Pathfinder wouldn't even be considered a big SUV at home. Good luck filling that puppy up or finding a parking place.

With gas being at almost 5 bucks a gallon you really learn to think twice about where you go and how you drive. All of you kind readers who have minivans would be spending 100 large a week to fill up the typical 20 gallon tank or spending almost $500 a month on gas alone for one car. Stefania has a 35 litre tank and we spent 40 euros to fill 'er up. So when the wife runs in to the post office to mail a letter, you don't sit with the car idling, you don't idle for trains or run the AC unless it's boiling outside. Which brings up the question, 'why is it so much?' Well, one reason is that the Italian government tries to pass on the true cost of driving to drivers in order to discourage people from consuming too much. Believe you me, if gas were cheap, they'd all be buying 12-cylinder sports cars. In addition, the taxes help fund the Italian state. These are the hidden costs of life in Italia. Healthcare for all, guaranteed state pensions all around equals higher consumption taxes. If you have a family health plan at Knight Ridder they get you for 250 or so a month; here they get you at the pump. According to CNN, the base price of gas here is $1.72 gallon, the rest is taxes. So it's hard to compare apples to oranges. To top it off, now that the weather is getting warmer (hopefully), certain days of the week are off limits to all motorized vehicles in the center of town to combat smog problems in dense Italian cities. I'm not sure how that effects buses of scooters since it hasn't happened in Bologna yet. And if you leave a light on here you'll go straight to hell. No natural resources means, yes, higher prices. Houses are also wired to accept about a third of the electricity as a typical house in the States. That's why most people don't bother with buying a clothes dryer. We have a really high-tech wahser by Whirlpool (all digital) but no dryer. So, they sell all of these cool contraptions you can put outside or in the bathroom to dry your clothes.

If you come here you'd better also master the stick shift and finding diesel fuel. Haven't seen one automatic car here (sorry dad). A properly driven manual car uses about 5 percent less fuel than its automatic counterpart. Ask Tom Strongman about this, but I believe that auto transmission on cars in the States is still like an $800 option even if they don't offer a manual!Most cars here are these new high-tech turbo diesels because diesel fuel is slightly cheaper. They don't smell like they used to. Knowing how to drive is another thing. Most people are fairly reasonable but tend to be a little more agressive. The problem is the geezers in their old Fiat Pandas or the guys that think they are qualifying for Formula 1 and drive down the middle of the road to pass one car then to be behind 10 others. Italians hurry up so they can then slow down.

The police tend to take a laid back approach here. I asked Stefania why prostitution is allowed along highways or people are allowed to drive like maniacs. The answer is always "Multe" or fines. Fines are the answer to everything. She maintains that, historically, Italians have always been impossible to govern and this complete individualism and everyman for himself ethos rules to this day, which can be a problem when trying to be part of the EU. People only respond when they are fined. If drivers are caught, the rules are strict and severe--points lost off license, steep fines. Prostitution, the same: high fines. But when the coppers go on their monthly stings the girls are of course sprung from jail by well-financed "representatives." Most of the prostitutes are "extracomunitari" who are shipped in and out like cargo and it's hard to stem the tide with limited resources. It's not the world's oldes profession for nothing. Italians aren't proud of this public eyesore but most just shrug and say "what are you going to do? You don't like it? Don't go there."

The payoff for safely completing the Prostitute Slalom is a night out spent with friends starting out at Mama Club. This is an aperitivo club on the top floor of a palazzo on Via Farini near the historic center of town. An aperitivo club is something new whereby you pay 10 euros (only guys pay) and then are ushered into these beautiful rooms with 15-foot ceilings adorned with frescoes and cool music playing over the hidden speakers. There are modern works of art and trays of finger food laid out at strategic locations. There are also private rooms that can be rented. The guys and the girls look like they stepped out of GQ or Vogue. You hand the barkeep the token they give at the door then are entitled to one drink. We all chose sparkling wine, had some hors d'oeuvres and then made our way to our next stop, a great little bistro near the Sette Chiese (Seven Churches) on Via Gerusalemme called L'Infedele. The great thing about Italy is that no one can smoke indoors anymore, not even in bars! And it seems to be working. Not a cig in site. I had the Emiliano plate of warm toasted bread, mortadella and cicci coldcuts washed down with a nice local read wine. All six of us ate, cad wine and coffee and a shot of vodka for 70 euros. By the time we left at midnight, the place was teaming. I didn't think you could get so many people into such a small place.

The night finished with a beautiful walk under the poticoes to Via Ugo Bassi to check in on my two old medieval friends, the two towers of Bologna follwed by a left turn and winding tour through the maze of cobbled streets behind the Piazza Maggiore.Throngs of people congregated in hidden corners under the porticoes or spilled out of small clubs by the university. We had one last stop to make: ice cream! Some of the best there is, made with real cream. We bid goodnight to one third of our group, drop Paola and Gabriele back off at their phat pad off of Via Andrea Costa and repeat the prostitute Slalom back to Crespellano for the night. Not bad.

Sunday was spent driving through the beautiful foothills of the Appenines to the hilltop abbey of Abbazia di Monteveglio followed by a relaxing evening with Paola and Gabriele watching movies with their kids.

Until next time. Sopinski out.

Three Albanians and two little ladies...

My first day of teaching went about as expected. My boss, who is Australian, was supposed to pick up me and another young Australian teacher, Shawn, and take us to the firm where we were going to teach. He was running a bit late and gave us call to meet him outside. As we stepped onto the sidewalk a beat up silver Honda Civic came screeching to a halt in front of us. We hopped in and sped off in a cloud of dust and squealing tires. Two blown red lights later (stopping is just a suggestion in Italy) we pulled up in front of our destination. A nondescript office building near the Ospedale Maggiore and the Via Emilia. I think they are some type of biotech firm and have arranged for some of their employees to take English classes.

My boss came in and introduced everyone and then I spent the rest of the 90 minutes explaining what we were going to try to accomplish and making introductions. There level is pre-intermediate so I should be able to see some substanial progress made.

After class, I spent about a half hour walking in circles trying to find the Via Emilia which I knew was only blocks away from the firm but I kept hitting dead end streets. Bologna is certainly not laid out on a grid like American cities. When I finally got to the bus stop, I had already missed the 5:30 bus and had to wait another 40 minutes or so for the next. I was taking what is called the Corriere which is bus that goes to the outlying areas. The bus came and almost an hour later I started to get antsy because we were getting close to home. I was really straining to pay attention because I had never taken this bus before and darkness was falling. So, we pull into a town that I later realized was Sant'Agata in Bolognese which I mistakenly thought was my town, Crevalcore. The minute I stepped off the bus I figured out that I had made a mistake but the bus driver didn't hear me yell. Being on the edge of a dark, sleepy little town and having no other choice, I schlepped my two bags on down the deserted country highway. Cars were zipping past me alarmingly close. Dogs were barking from behind vine-covered walls. There was not an open store or bar in sight. After about 500 meters of walking I came upon two old ladies standing behind the cancello (gate) of the driveway of their house. One appeared to be in her sixties and the other seemed to be the former's mother. I greeted them and explained that I had gotten off the bus at the wrong stop and wondered how far Crevalcore was on down the road. About 5 more km was the answer. Damn, I thought. Not yet having a cell phone, I then asked if I could use their home phone. They both demurred and said, "No, no, scusi signore, but we are just two little old ladies. We are too afraid, you know, with all that goes on nowadays." I shrugged and said I understood, not knowing if I was missing out on the news of some serial killer on the rampage in the Bolognese countryside. So I headed out again towards home, weaving a tapestry of profanity in the cool night air.

I hadn't gotten much further when I hear a car pull up and slow down right behind me. I looked into the older-looking car and there was a middle-aged man in the front seat with his wife and young son in the back. He asked me if I needed a ride and I said that I did. They looked safe enough so I hopped in. Turns out that this family was what the Italian refer to as the dreaded extracommunitari or people from outside the European Community. This is a politically correct way of saying immigrants and I don't mean immigrants from the U.S., Scandanavia etc. The driver said his name was Arben and he lived north of Crevalcore. He was Albanian and had lived in Italy for a number of years. I told him my name and that I was American. He said he figured I must be a straniero (foreigner) because only foreigners walk along the highways. He explained that he knew how it was to be an outsider and that nobody helped him when he came here so he was helping me.

He dropped me off at the Coop in the little strip mall by our house. I offered him money but he refused and sped off into the night. I trudged home to a light supper and a lecture on the subtleties of Italian public transportation and not accepting rides from extracommunitari.

Another day, another euro and boy was I tired.

It's been a long strange trip...

The baggage death march began at precisely 5 p.m. last Wednesday. After having crammed, stuffed and shoved all of my worldly belongings into two CCM hockey bags, one bike bag and one golf travel bag, the adventure could now begin. Dawn broke early the next morning but I didn't care because I was still asleep on the collection of pillows that I had been bunking on for the past week. When I finally awoke I began preparing to leave the house for a noon departure for the airport. After topping off my caffeine stores and loading my grandpa's family truckster, I picked up my brother and headed to KCI.

I approached the counter at American Airlines with all of my belongings and some trepidation. I had planned for about 300 smackers worth of excess baggage fees and I wasn't far off the mark. (350 to be exact.) What I hadn't planned for was rearranging everything on the fly. You see, AA has a 30kg limit per bag and mine were almost twice that. So I had to purchase another bag, go off to the side and place 15kg from each bag into the third bag. Once that was done, I was on my way to Chicago, albeit with a much lighter wallet.

KMCI to KORD was uneventful. Chatted with a fellow who was returning from a business trip and getting married in the fall. I didn't have to wait long before boarding the 767 bound for Brussels, Belgium. I scored big on this flight, having a whole row to myself in the back with an Air Port between the seats where I could plug my computer in. So I stretched out and watched movies the whole way there.

No good deed goes unrewarded, of course. And since I had such great accomodations on the way there, I paid for it in spades upon arrival in Brussels (which must be the world's biggest airport). Since we had to wait in line for almost an hour before taking off in Chicago, I missed my connection to Bologna. So, the nice folks at AA already had me booked on a Lufthansa (CRJ-200 for all you plane geeks out there) small jet to Munich in three hours' time. From there it was on a bus to the next terminal to catch a Dolomiti Airlines ATR-72 to Bologna. Man, the Euros must have some serious cash, now. Both Brussels and Munich were enormous, aluminum and glass, spit-shined monuments to modern technology. Polished floors, glass elevators, people movers, internet cafes and the like. But watch out for the flight attendants on Lufthansa. The two ladies looked like they could have you in a headlock in no time flat if you lipped off.

My luggage was supposedly checked through to BLQ, so I caught a few winks over the Alps and awoke for our descent into Guglielmo Marconi (yeah the guy who invented radio is from Bologna) Airport. I rode the bus to the terminal and the luggage was already coming out. This was the first time that I spied any security since my trip had begun--two dudes in cammo with machine guns patrolled an almost empty airport. All of my luggage was there except my beloved bike. So I piled everything I owned on to a carellino and weaved to-and-fro to the lost luggage counter to make a denuncia. The guy was very nice and typed my coordinates into the computer and told me they would deliver the bike to my house that evening. (Long story short, they had apparently pulled the bike out of line in Brussels because they spotted some CO2 cartridges that I use to fix flat tires that I had stupidly left in there and our intrepid department of Homeland Insecurity had missed. So they confiscated the 5 dollars-worth of CO2 which in turn made my bike miss its flight. They left a nice big chip in my paint job as a nice souvenir.)

Anyhoo. Stefania and her dad were waiting with open arms and two cars. So we loaded up and headed out to her parents' house in Crespellano, a suburb of Bologna. We proceded to unpack some things. Then I showered up and got ready for an awesome bad-ass meal of polpette con piselli (meatballs with peas in a nice sauce.) Mind you, these just aren't some rolled up balls of ground beef but rolled in with bread crumbs and ricotta cheese and other spices--all hand made, of course. This was washed down with some chilled, sparkling red wine from a local farmer's coop. Yeah, I know it's a tough gig, but someone's gotta do it. (Shut up Dave, and keep on eatin' your Prego sauce out of the jar, but I'm having some of mamma's home cookin'.)

After dinner, we loaded up the Nissan Micra and headed for our appartment in Crevalcore, whcih is about twenty minutes away. The cats were waiting and were glad to see me. They are of course shreding every chair in the place, but then that's what indoor cats do and they should be glad that we didn't move to Wisconsin.

The next day dawned gray and rainy and we went to the Coop grocery store down the street and loaded up on Mortadella (baloney) and pasta and dropped about 50 euros right off the bat. Didn't do much on Saturday, just watched some movies and went to bed.

On Sunday, we went to Crespellano, where again I had to force myself to eat some hand-made tortellone stuffed with ricotta cheese followed by pork cutlets, bread and salad. Again washed down with some white sparkling wine, this time. Are you noticing a theme here? Lorenza, Stefania's sister, her husband and three kids were there and we had a fine time taking them down the street where an old farmhouse is tucked among the new houses to visit the chickens.
Later we drove into downtown Bologna to go to the Fiera (convention center) where Roberta, Stefania's best friend was working the international book fair. From there we headed out for pizza where they know this crazy waiter who's from Naples and is a real character. It's a nice little joint with fluorescent lights and a wood-fired oven. Costs 5 euros for a pizza the size of a large plate. I had caught a cold in the meantime and so we decided to call it a night and went to sleep at our auxillary residence in Crespellano.

Today is Monday. I got up and headed into Bologna to go meet my new boss and get trained for my first class this afternoon. Stefania's dad dropped me off and I will have to take the Corriera to Crevalcore this evening.

That's all for now. It's a beautiful crisp, clear day in Bologna and I'm looking out the window at the church of San Luca, perched on a hill overlooking the city. My cold is better and I'm getting ready for my first class.

Ciao for now. Un bacione a tutti.