This footage was shot around 11 am; eight hours later, snow keeps falling – we ended up with about 55 cm.
As one newscaster put it: “Leaving aside 1985, this is the biggest snowfall Italy has seen in a century.” Um, and why do you get to leave out 1985?
Northern Italy is bracing itself for the winter Olympics. I am thankful they’re being held in Torino instead of Milano, but we’ll get some spillover traffic, and it seems that we already have extra security measures. Every day a pair of policemen walk down my morning train as soon as it leaves Lecco, scanning for unattended baggage. I think they get off at the next stop (Calolziocorte, five minutes away) and go straight back to Lecco, because I never see them again after that.
Milan’s central station has a very noticeable police presence, but that’s been true for years now. I was impressed to see at least a pair of them every day on the platform where my morning train pulls in, til I realized that they were actually there for the TGV (high-speed train) to Paris departing from the other side of the platform. I’ve seen them questioning north African-looking men from time to time, though so far I haven’t noticed anyone actually being arrested or prevented from travelling.
According to today’s news, Italy is at heightened risk of terrorist attacks for the next three months, due to the Olympics and then the elections. Recall that the bad guys killed 400 people on a train in Spain a few years ago, changing the outcome of the election held a few days later. The terrorists got what they were after: the new Spanish government withdrew its troops from Iraq.
Berlusconi was already making noises months ago about withdrawing Italian troops. Nothing wrong with that, but there’s no peacenik principle behind it: it’s sheer electioneering. We’re not hearing anything about that at the moment. Our prime minister has more important fish to fry: he’s trying desperately, before the end of the legislative session next week, to get one more law passed, something to do with appeals in court cases which, if passed, will help to keep himself out of jail.
He even went so far as to try to postpone the elections from the April 9th date that all parties had agreed on, “because of important unfinished legislative business,” but also, quite obviously, to have more time to bombard the public with himself via his stranglehold on the Italian media. “Par condicio” – the legal requirement that political parties get equal airtime – has become a hollow joke.
But the Italian public is not stupid, and people seem to be fed up with Berlusconi’s antics. The Italian presidency is largely ceremonial, but President Ciampi does have one ace up his sleeve: HE decides when to dissolve Parliament and call elections, usually in accordance with what the political parties request of him. Having already settled on April 9th, he has no intention of changing.
So, with any luck, Berlusconi’s bill will die in Parliament and Berlusconi’s party will lose the elections. With a great deal more luck, Berlusconi will finally get what he deserves. At this point, I’d settle for just not having him in government.
[I said]: “According to today’s news, Italy is at heightened risk of terrorist attacks for the next three months, due to the Olympics … ..snip… … a few days later. The terrorists got what they were after: the new Spanish government withdrew its troops from Iraq.”
Claudia replied: “You state this as if it were a given, but it’s not. One can argue (and I do) that the Madrid attack — which killed fewer than 200 people, by the way, not 400 — was planned months in advance, and the fact that it was carried out two days before the election is more a matter of chance than design.
The date, you recall, was March 11, 911 days after 9/11. The exact date of Spanish elections is decided fairly close to the actual day, so it would have taken a lot of last-minute planning by the terrorists to link the two so closely together. Since some of their bombs didn’t go off, one might suppose they weren’t cutting-edge organizers.
Plus, one can say, the terrorists might have expected an electoral backlash that would have gone AGAINST them, rather than “for” their interests. Plus some pundits say the left was going to win anyway. Plus, and most important, many respected surveys have shown that the reason voters voted as they did was because of the Aznar cover-up after the attack, not the attack itself. Don’t you remember, the government kept insisting the Basque terrorists were responsible, not El Qaeda?”
Feb 5, 2006
A few days ago, there was a Google ad on this page for a security company, whose web site says:
“The 2006 Olympic Games in Torino, Italy will be one of the most watched events in the world this winter. This historic event is also taking place during a time when Italy’s military alliance with the United States has become a source of much attention and concern.
Shortly after the Games, Italy’s national elections will occur. Many officials believe Italy will experience unusually high activism or worse, become the next European terrorist target. As a result, the security team at Vance believes that there are considerable security risks associated with the Games this year.”
Well, they would say so, but… that’s some rather gristly food for thought, nonetheless.
There was also an ad to Dale of Norway, supplying the official sweaters for the US Olympic team. Interesting that somebody didn’t insist on “buy American” for that, though Dale is the best…
The television industry is in trouble. For decades, broadcast television networks have made their money by buying content (shows) that people want to watch, and placing advertising within it so that the audience couldn’t help watching the ads – let’s face it, you don’t get up for a beer or bathroom break at EVERY commercial.
The remote control was the first technology to put some power into the hands of consumers. When ads come on, people just zap over to some other channel, watch a few minutes of something else, and zap back when the ads are over. Or don’t zap back, because they got more interested in the other show.
Did the TV industry complain about the remote control when it came out? It undoubtedly detracted from ad viewing. Nowadays they scream about Tivo. This, for those not familiar, is an easy-to-use TV recorder. You can program it to record your favorite shows if you won’t be home to see them and, when you do get around to seeing them, it’s easy to skip forward every time you come to an ad. One friend of mine, even when he was home to watch the show at its scheduled time, would record it. He’d sit down to watch (from the beginning) about ten minutes into the show’s broadcast time, so that he could skip the ads even as the show was still being broadcast. You can do stuff like that with Tivo. It’s cool.
(NB: Tivo doesn’t exist in Italy and I wouldn’t bother if it did – nothing worth recording around here, and I don’t have time or inclination to watch that much TV anyway.)
As ads are reaching fewer and fewer TV viewers, advertisers have become less willing to pay premium prices for advertising slots, and more desperate to find other ways of reaching consumers with their “message.”
One solution is product placement: paying producers to showcase certain products in shows and movies, often very obtrusively. One product placement shot that leaped out at me was in “Jurassic Park,” when about 1/3 of the cinema screen was briefly occupied by a Macintosh computer. Although out of focus in the foreground, at that size the beige case and rainbow apple logo were unmistakable. In “Spiderman 2”, a fight takes place atop a truck barrelling down the streets of Manhattan. In spite of this scene taking place at night, the truck is so well-lit that the product name (beer) is practically spotlighted.
Producers will tell you that product placement is part of the financial package that helps pay for your entertainment. Product placement in television shows is currently illegal in Europe, but the European TV industry is trying to get this law struck down, on the grounds that it does nothing to protect the consumer (Europeans see a lot of American shows with placed products anyway), and unfairly hampers European producers in finding funding for native European shows.
I wonder, though: at what point is a show just one big ad? James Bond movies started to look like that somet time ago. Do some other movies, such as costume dramas and fantasies, NOT get made because they lack product placement opportunities? Perhaps extra funding is needed for these kinds of shows because they are unfairly hampered by the need for historical accuracy – Elizabeth and Darcy can’t be shown swigging down Pepsis.
Growing up near the equator in Bangkok, I was not exposed to seasonal lengthening and shortening of days. The sun rose sometime before I woke up, and set around dinnertime (6 or 6:30 pm), with no noticeable change throughout the year.
I eventually learned that other parts of the world go through this weird annual cycle in which days get longer in summer and shorter in winter, but I was never far enough from the equator to see this in action until the summer of 1984, when I made an unexpected trip to London (from Indonesia – long story, some other time!).
I wrote my friend Barbara for help finding cheap accomodations. She got me a sub-let in a classic bed-sit flat, and offered advice appropriate for a young woman alone in London. "How late at night can I safely be out alone?" I asked. "Til around two hours after dark," she replied. I was disappointed – not that I was a party animal, but this would mean coming home awfully early, I thought.
The trip from Jakarta to London was very, very long. At the end of it, I had to get a heavy suitcase from Heathrow to Shepherd’s Bush by train and tube and on foot. Finally, having found the place, I had to drag the suitcase up four flights of stairs (or was it five?). I was finally in the flat and settled sometime in the early afternoon. Completely done in, I went to sleep.
I woke knowing that I had slept a long time. But the sun was still in the sky. I was very confused. Had I actually slept the rest of the day, through the night, and well into the next day? That didn’t seem possible. My watch was still set to Indonesia time and I was too sleepy to calculate what that must mean in London time. Finally I located a clock and found that it was around 8 pm. And there was still plenty of daylight. The sky did not darken til around 10 pm: two hours after dark wasn’t an early curfew at all!
Now I live in Italy, far enough north that the change in the length of days is noticeable, and, after fifteen years, I have yet to get used to it. When daylight savings time went off in the fall, I was plunged into gloom, literally and emotionally. At least now we’re heading in the other direction: it’s still full dark when I wake up at 7 am, but the sun is rising by the time we go to catch the bus at 7:30.
My name is Kelly, and I’m a 17-year-old girl from Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia. I’m fairly average as far as things go, I go to school and have a part time job in a department store, and live in middle class suburbia. I live with my mum and my two younger brothers, and my dad, while separated from my mum, visits often. I am doing a two year accelerated Italian course, and my exam is in less than 3 months! My school offers regular exchange programs and some of my class (there are only 10 of us) decided that over this summer (winter for all you northern hemispherers) they would do this exchange. Unfortunately, due to some complicated circumstance (I think the English teacher had a baby) my school couldn’t do the exchange with the school they normally would do it with, and so we needed to find some students to stay with us during our winter, from somewhere in Italy. Intercultura came to our rescue, as they had too many students going to Perth, Western Australia, and so they sent six boys from varying parts of Italy to stay with us. We got about two weeks notice and so my family made the snap decision to host Sergio, because we wanted to, and because there was no one else who could. Sergio is the same age as me but he’s an only child, like many Italians. He looks typically Italian, not so tall (compared with Aussie guys), olive skin, dark hair and the most amazing deep brown eyes. He found my blue ones equally fascinating. He lives just outside of Reggio Emilia, in the northern Emilia Romagna region but he has his roots in Catania in Sicily though, and so can effectively now speak three different languages, Italian, English and Sicilian.
Sergio spent two months here and we have both learnt so much from each other, and still do as we talk often. Both of us had all sorts of preconceived ideas about what the other would be like, due to stereotypes. Sergio told me that Italians thought that Australians were very much like Crocodile Dundee, and the men treated the women like they were below them. He soon learned that most Australian women are more than capable of telling someone to “Bugger off” and that unfortunately kangaroos just don’t survive in the average suburban backyard, where about 80% of Australians live.
I personally was completely unsure what to expect. Here Italians are portrayed tossing pizzas and twirling moustaches saying “Mamma mia!”, and of course the reputation Italian men have of being unfaithful and slippery lovers. You also get the fast cars, and the beautiful shoes. Of course all these things are present in Italian life, but there is so much more, as I discovered.
Culture, language, geographical differences were often very present, when Sergio came into my family and yet we both discovered that despite these things, we shared the same emotions, ideas, and liked to go out and hang with our friends, flirt (although he did this without thinking), watch movies, play sports and listen to music like most teenagers. We also discovered a mutual love for reading, and had read some of the same books but in different languages! I can’t list all of the differences but here are some I remember…
Language differences were the first to be noticed, as while his English was a lot better than my Italian (which it should be, as he has been studying it for nearly 10 years), it was far from fluent. Luckily my knowledge of Italian, my knowledge of English (the equivalent verb of ‘decompose’ is ‘decomporsi’, and so that choice of word is better than ‘rot’), his knowledge of both the languages, and a little help from the dictionary, enabled us to cross most of these boundaries. Many English words come from Latin words, despite it being a Germanic language, so there are some similarities.
Some of the things were funny, like when he discovered we used the verb ‘to pump’ to describe the action of putting air into an airbed, or to pump water. ‘Pompare’ can have sexual connotations in Italian, which I shall leave to your imagination. He and the other five boys managed to convince my friend Sarah that “Ti faccio un pompino” means, “I break your legs”, when it actually means, “I’ll give you a blowjob”. Typical teenage boy humour coming out there as they found it hilarious when she would yell it at them, thinking it was a threat. I soon learnt to take anything they said with a joking frame of mind.
Anyway, little things came up, like when he asked “Are my hairs ok?’ instead of “Is my hair ok” – because hair is plural in Italian, you ask if all your individual hairs are ok, rather than the body of hair. Makes sense to me. Also, saying, “the my shirt” (“la mia camicia”) instead of just ‘my’. He also found it weird how we Aussies inflect our last syllable, so that ‘no’ sounds like ‘noi’, and we apparently talk too fast and abbreviate everything, which I’m sure is like most languages. I retaliated by saying that at least he doesn’t have to learn at least 30 different conjugations for the verb ‘essere’ or ‘to be’ and know what context you have to use them in. In terms of pronunciation, he was horrified at our lax treatment of vowels, tried to teach me the correct way to say ‘t’ and to teach us all the difference in sound when letters are doubled, like the difference between ‘saremo’ and ‘saremmo’ the future and the conditional ‘noi’ form of ‘essere’. This distinction is important when you come to words like ‘pene’ and ‘penne’, meaning ‘penis’ and ‘pens’ (or pasta) respectively. The whole experience left me thinking about the crazy ways we say things in English and how it doesn’t make a lot of sense at all, as well as a better understanding of Italian, and left him being almost fluent in English.
Language leads into culture quite easily, as you can see from above; most English speakers could quite easily say ‘pump’ without imagining sex. I remember the first big conversation I had with Sergio was about religion. I think it was because Mum wanted to make sure he would be ok about going to church, so it wasn’t such as stupid thing to do as it sounds. Knowing that most Italians say they are Catholic, and my church is a Protestant one, I was curious to learn about the differences. Sergio told me that his family rarely goes to church and that most families are like this. He said that he thinks there is a God, but that he doesn’t agree with many of the Catholic ideals. This had occurred to me, as being a fairly smart girl I noted that most parents in Italy have only one child, and this feat usually requires some kind of contraception. Also, I was told that it is rare for an 18 year old to still be a virgin. Anyway, he was ok with going to church, but was slightly shocked when I took him to a youth group service at another church on Friday night. Think a modern building, a loud band, coloured lights, overhead projector with the song words shown, games being played to show God’s message, most of the crowd being under 30, and after one can play table tennis, drink coke and chat with friends. His words were, “This isn’t a church, this is a discoteca!” That was funny, and I explained to him that it didn’t matter how loud the band played as long as the message was getting across to the kids, very different to the quiet reverence and traditions he had seen in churches in Italy.
Another thing me and my friends who were hosting the other boys discovered was the love of politics. At a barbecue (where we all put our sausages in our bread and they didn’t) a virtual shouting match arose between the six guys, all rapid-fire Italian that none of us could understand.
I asked what it was about, and was told they were discussing politics and the differences between the north and the south of Italy. Sergio, his parents originally from Sicily, was quite fired up at Lucio, the rich boy from Parma. We were just like “Um, ok.” Australians as a whole are pretty laid back and we have very few severe political issues or debates with two major parties both of which are not extreme in any sense, and so politics rarely ever comes up in conversation unless we have a referendum or something.
We had some other different things, ways of seeing life, how important jobs are, family (I have 12 cousins, he has 1) and food. He ate so much, and yet didn’t gain a kilo. I don’t eat a lot because I feel sick if I overeat, but he told me that I would be considered to be sick in Italy because I didn’t eat. Australians are also very fat people, like Americans; and although I believe our fresh food is of good quality we have a lot of fast food alternatives, which Sergio didn’t touch. He also didn’t understand why we would put pineapple on our pizza, or marshmallows in hot chocolate or even milk in our tea.
Gosh, I’ve written so much, only one more paragraph to go. The environment, we discovered, was different here than in Italy. In Italy it is considered a big deal to drive the length of the country, which I believe is about 1000km. It is around 800km to drive to Melbourne, the nearest capital city to Adelaide, and this is a drive my family has done so many times I’ve lost count. This means we have a lot of space, and one of the first comments Sergio had was “Every house has a garden!” Italy is so squished that space saving is a way of life or so I’m told. Another comment was “Everything is so new”. This is because Europeans have only occupied Australia for a little over 200 years, hardly long enough to have ancient monuments. With such a large country we have every type of environment and climate you could want, from tropical in the north to snow in the mountains. Adelaide is fairly mild, a little like southern Italy. We get most of our rain in winter; the daytime maximum rarely ever drops below 10 degrees Celsius, and we get no snow, which Sergio found odd, when he arrived in the middle of winter and it was 13 degrees and we thought that was freezing.
Sergio’s face when he first saw a kangaroo was quite hilarious too. We took him to a nearby wildlife park, as only in the country can you see them, and we were just wandering by them, so used to them, and Sergio just stopped. He couldn’t stop looking at them; it was like he was looking at an alien. It was only then I realized what odd animals they actually are, so once again I was learning through him! We now talk via email and the phone and his parents have said that I am like a daughter to them now and would love to have me stay in the future, which I intend to do!
Probably I could write a whole book on what each of us learnt, both being curious and able to talk to each other for hours, but I won’t! I was lucky in having such a nice guy come and stay, some of my other friends had different experiences with the other guys, so I am very grateful to have had such a great time with him and learn so much.
This has been exchange student week for me. First I heard from Kelly, asking to subscribe to my newsletter and explaining why she was interested. I suggested that she write something about her experiences, which she very quickly did.
Then I got email from a 16-year-old American girl looking for a host family so she could come to Italy on an exchange program next school year. We’re not set up for it ourselves (and are hardly a typical Italian family), but I gave her some suggestions on other places to ask, and will ask around for her as well.
