The Alps are the limit

I went to Austria last weekend. It's strange to think that Innsbruck is only 4 hours away and I've never taken the chance. The difference between North Italy and Tirol was simply striking: just a few hours of driving had taken me to a place where it snows continually, people make gingerbreads for Christmas, use the sauna and eat heavy breakfasts. The fact that everyone was speaking rich Tirol-German didn't even seem to matter. I felt right at home. There is more cultural distance between Vicenza and Innsbruck than the latter and Tallinn. Who would have thought?

Or maybe I'm just homesick?

We stayed in a bed&breakfast at Seefeld. The house was exactly what one might expect, thinking of the Alps, Austria, the winter. Cosy. Breathtaking view all around. Interiours bordering on kitsch, but somehow sweet all the same with the endless teddy bears, doilies and Christmas decorations. It was almost hobbit-like with all the comfort and tranquility. We arrived late, so the landlady left the keys on the door for us. Just like that!

Here December doesn't mean snow, but fogs. I leave from Valdagno each morning with a clear blue sky and find a dense opaque wall of fog halfway down to the plains. Some of the evenings the visibility is so bad that the only reason I manage to weave my way through the twisting roads is that I know them by heart. Halfway back up again towards the mountains the fog disappears though, and the stars blink down in the cold night. But the winter in Italy is not gratifying. There are none of those rare evenings that make the Nordic winter worthwhile: the ones when it snows slowly and the quiet makes bitter people feel at peace with the world. Instead there are bright days, the bare trees full of persimmons like orange lamps and no real need for a woollen hat. That's obviously very nice, but all this, and the panettone or nativity scenes have nothing to do with Christmas in my mind. I need to stock up on other accessories, such as gingerbreads from IKEA...

I'll be landing in Tallinn at 16.00 on the 27th.

Two Italies

or: "Oh, that's all the way down in Terronia, that is..."

Estonia is a small country roughly the size of Denmark. It's possible to drive from one side of the mainland to another in 4 hours. The population is so small (1,4 million) that it is a piece of cake to set up complicated telecommunications-systems years ahead of other countries. Yet there are a few dialect areas and enough differences between different parts of the country to create a system of labelling - the islanders, the yuppies from Tallinn, the hippies from Tartu, the mulgid, the vòrokesed, the setod (the two latter ones have distinct dialects and traditions of their own). If this is possible in a country as small as this, what does it mean for Italy, long, mountainous and historically divided as it is?

Mostly it means that they have a hard time understanding each other. More specifically it means that for example:
- each small town competes with the other small town 10 km away - which is better, Valdagno or Schio?
- the next province is like another world: ah, the veronesi, they're all strange...*
- no-one likes the milanesi because they're city folk
- the north doesn't like the south because their economy is non-existent and they look lazy;
- the south dislikes the north because they work their life away and think themselves better because of it;
- the veneziani call everyone else land-folk, dirty shoes etc;
- the trentini aren't considered Italian as they're too far north;
- the sardi neither - they're too far from the mainland;
- the napoletani must be the strangest of all the Italians, with their passion, good food, dirty city and high crime rate.
And so on and so forth. A few kilometres here or there will change not only the accent, but the dialect to a considerable degree. It's not only the language that is different - it's proper cultural differences we're talking about. Sicily is a mix of local, Roman, Arabic and Normandian cultures. Rome... well, we've all studied that in history. Genovese have their own great sea odysseys. Venice has it's mix of Byzantium merchant culture, Armenian, Austrian and whatever was roaming the Mediterranean at that time, plus the pride of a thousand-year republic throughout the middle ages. Tuscany has its glory of the rolling hills and grape fields as the prototype of the fictional idyllic Italy (while Napoli is the prototype of the fictional non-idyllic crime-infested dirty Italy).

All these differences are to be expected, considering the geography of the country and the long history of each province being governed by its own dynasty. These differences are no laughing matter. The politics is directly influenced by the northerners who would like to separate from the south and roll in the money they think they'd have this way. The south lives its life like years and years before, not hurrying for much anything and will hardly be able to understand the frantic Veneti who work their lives away without (apparently) being able to enjoy it enough. They say that even though the south wouldn't have any public money to manage themselves without the north... but then again, the north wouldn't have any pizza-chefs or barbers without the south.

North and South recalls something I've grown to consider fundamental if one is to understand how anything works in Italy: the underlying duality of everything. Everything. If there is a rule to something, there are also a series of counter-rules and exceptions. It's forbidden to have cappuccino in the afternoon, but it's allowed if it's cold outside or if you're just strange like that, but in any case a macchiatone is better. It's bad tone to let oneself go and be rude to someone without bothering to hide the insult between lines, but it's allowed and completely normal in traffic, but in any case "Lei" (official form of address) rather than "tu" should be used**. And so on and so forth. This is why the foreigners will hardly even scratch the surface when they spend a nice sightseeing week in Italy. As B. Severgnini puts it: there are two Italys. There is Italy - what the foreigners think Italy is like - all rolling hills, wine and small boys with black curly hair; and then there is Italia that is a mess and has nothing whatsoever to do with Italy.


* Venexiani - gran signori
Padovani - gran dotori
Vixentini - magnagati,
Veronesi - tuti mati...
(Venetians - all great lords; Paduans - great doctors; Vicentians - eating cats, Veronese - they're all mad...)

** this would sound like something along the lines of: "You, sir, are the biggest ass I've ever met" or "You, mister, are an unfortunate dimwit". Cursing in traffic often needs to be so fast that no form of address can really be used, in which case everyone understands "Lei" to be implicitly included in the "Coglione!" shouted out the window of a passing car.

wow! I could vote!

that's right... one of the many elections taking place each year was today and since it's a small, almost a private one (for deciding who'll take the post of the leader of the Democrat party), they let foreigners vote too. Nice, now I have some right to complain about the politics here.

Make no mistake - I don't care particularly much about politics. If anything, I'm annoyed by the duality of everything in Italy and how the right automatically opposes anything the left comes up with and vice versa. If the left is about supporting culture (human rights, helping the poor and whatever), then the right is against it. What would happen if the left would start holding up national ideals, talk about state security and legalizing money laundering*? Would they be stealing Berlusc*ni's agenda?

This duality means that if the parents make their children go to church the children get back at them by joining a communist or socialist party. As it seems, asking around: left is cool because left means intelligentsia, culture, human rights, attention to Burma and whatnot. Right are the yuppies who don't care about anything farther than their own wallet. The youth who listen to reggae are automatically the left. The middle-aged accountants are automatically of the right. I still don't know how to wrap my mind around this concept.

As the government changed one and a half years ago, I started hearing people say that the state TV suddenly has much interesting programs. This was new because the Italian TV must be one of the worst I've ever seen. Why? Because before the change the TV was made for earning. The masses don't care about documentaries, they care about reality shows. So why doesn't the right care about general culture? Answer: because it doesn't earn. This is the most plausible explanation I got out of my friends. And quite an appalling one, too.

It's (still?) quite different in Estonia, where being active in politics is mostly uncool and the uncoolest of all is the left-ish party who likes to call themselves "the centre". In Italy it's possible to hear someone declaring oneself to be Communist and proud of it. In Estonia this would be political suicide. I wish the naive young men handing out leaflets with the hammer and sickle in Padova would ever happen to go to Eastern Europe and try to convert someone. This should be fun...


* as a second thought, I think that's already legal.

A small dictionary of coffee

When food is the heart of life in Italy, then coffee might easily be its soul. Coffee is the proper round-up for any proper meal, the centre of any proper breakfast. The fact that most Italians are blissfully ignorant of the delights of fine tea becomes irrelevant in comparison.

In the European countries that miss their own coffee culture the merry-go-round of different kinds of coffee is often reduced for reasons of simplicity, dividing coffee into "normal/black", "with milk" and "latte" (large milk with coffee), leaving the fancy titles of Turkish coffee, espresso, latte macchiato and other such for the few knowledgeable ones. Or the show-offs.

Thus, for all who have ever wondered whatever might be the difference between latte macchiato and caffe macchiato, here is:

A small dictionary of coffee in Northeast of Italy

caffè normale - this is what you get when you walk into a bar and ask for a coffee. Also called caffè liscio (straight coffee) or espresso. You enter a bar, say: "Un caffè, per favore". The bar-keeper will ask: "Liscio?" ("Straight?"). This is your last way out of ordering a coffee with some quantity of milk, because you can either say: "Sì" (yes, I want an espresso) or specify any of the milk-coffee versions listed below.

Espresso is not only a tiny cup of very strong coffee. It's made in a specific way: the water is heated up to the point of evapourating in the machine and pressed through the fine powder. Contact with cold air makes the vapour liquify again. This is espresso. All other Italian coffee types are based on espresso (unlike the French coffee that is based on strong filter coffee that has a different production process).

Espresso is rarely good outside of Italy (except Portugal, where it's better) and it's inadvisable to order some without milk when the quality is not guaranteed. It seems a mystery - even if an Estonian high-end cafeteria buys an exclusive Lavazza espresso machine complete with coffee beans and uses bottled water from the Alps, the espresso will still not taste the same as in Italy. It's simple really: the quality of the espresso depends on the amount of coffees made each day. The more, the better. For this reason the best coffee is often found in railway station bars and not in isolated mountain restaurants.

Espresso is ok to order at any time of the day, though not too usual right before a meal. In the mornings most people order coffee with milk, such as:

Caffè macchiato (read: caffè mak:iato) is espresso with a little bit of milk. It's still a very tiny cup of coffee for those who don't have time to lose over their coffee but don't want to drink it black either. The added milk can either be cold (caffè macchiato freddo) or hot (caffè macchiato caldo or just macchiato caldo).

Macchiatone is a bigger version of caffè macchiato for those who want to enjoy some more milk foam, but don't want to get a full cappuccino. It still costs the same as espresso (85 cents in the North, less in the South).

Cappuccino (also called cappuccio for short) is served in a cup about the size of a "usual" (Nordic) coffee and is espresso buried in milk foam. This is the ideal morning coffee as it's easy on the stomach and very delicious together with a nice brioche (often filled with cream or marmalade; similar to the French croissant*). But - attention! - cappuccino is ONLY a morning coffee. Having it at any time after 11:00 in the morning will automatically shout of being a foreigner who is not initiated into the Italian ways. The exception can be made if you happen to be an elderly lady and it's a very cold day. The worst that one can do is order cappuccino after a meal. This will make everyone from the waitress to the dish-washer snigger under their breath. Why? Well, having coffee after a meal has a stimulating effect on the digestion that doesn't really work if the coffee is served with a significant amount of milk. It doesn't make sense to add hot milk on top of a full stomach. Exceptions are made for caffè macchiato, however - that's a way out for those who don't like black coffee.

Latte macchiato is not the same as caffè macchiato. As the latter literally means "marked coffee", then latte macchiato is, obviously, "marked milk" - hot milk with a little (half a cup of) espresso. This is not a usual drink for Italians to have in a bar, though at home this can be quite common. A cup of hot milk is a morning classic**; variations include milk with cocoa powder and milk with coffee. Latte macchiato is often intended to be the same as caffè latte that Estonians just call "latte"*** and drink at any time of day. Mostly the difference between latte macchiato and caffè latte is that the former contains half a cup of espresso, poured in after the milk (so there'll be a mark on top of the foam) and caffè latte includes a whole cup of espresso on which milk has been poured. In Italy, both latte macchiato and caffè latte have its specific rules similar to cappuccino.

That's more or less it with the milk. Any of these can also be served with some cocoa on request (this produces even more different names). What comes to coffee itself, there are a number of variations:

Caffè americano - yes! this is it! That's what you need to ask for if you are a tourist in Italy and happen to have had enough of the world-class espresso and would just like to enjoy a cup of "normal" coffee like at home. Only that it will not be coffee like at home. As the only way of making coffee that the Italians recognise is the espresso-method, your caffè americano will just be espresso with added hot water. Sounds disgusting. Better bring your own pack of Paulig from home and do it the student-way in our hotel-room with a paper filter. Or just cave in and learn to drink good coffee.

Caffè ristretto is a double-strength, half-size espresso for strong men who aren't afraid of a challenge.

Caffè lungo is a 1,5 size espresso. This is what the Portuguese should ask for while in Italy (an Italian espresso is about 2/3 the size of a usual Portuguese coffee).

Caffè doppio is a double-size espresso and will most likely be served in a cappuccino-cup so that the espresso looks sad and lonely at the bottom.

Caffè shakerato is espresso with ice, well shaked. Perfect on a hot day.
Other coffee types exist, of course, but they are less likely to come up during a usual day at your average bar. Knowing the differences between these main coffee types would keep a tourist out of any big-time embarrassment though. Good luck.


* In Calabria (the toes of Italy) a brioche is a large, quite generic bun, often eaten with ice cream. In Veneto, however, a brioche is what the French call a croissant. There will surely be other regional differences too.

** In the morning or before going to bed is also the only time of day when drinking milk is normal. In any case, milk is always served hot and cold milk is something barbaric that only the Nordic peoples know how to appreciate. Neither is milk ever seen on the table during meals, as it classifies as sweet! Estonian (savoury) milk-soup would surely make any Italian sick.

*** This habit of calling latte macchiato "latte" classifies as another of these foreign words that are imported into the language and then shortened for comfort, though in the original language the meaning changes. It's strange, but in any case as long as in Estonia everyone understands what a "latte" is, there is no problem.

lo spritz

I included spritz in the below right-hand encyclopedia right in the beginning because it's a constitutive part of life in Veneto - it dominates all early-evening drinking activities... well, I mean, usual socialising before dinner.

Spritz is a cocktail that was born in Veneto and is becoming more and more common in the surrounding regions. Inside Veneto, each city has their own version, of which the Venetian one is the most common and Paduan most notorious.

Usually spritz consists of Prosecco (white sparkling wine; in some areas dry white wine is used instead), a dash of sparkling water, ice and Aperol or Campari. Campari is more difficult to drink, so most of the people drink their spritz with Aperol. It makes a bittersweet glass of aperitif, complex to define at once, but easy to drink. It's the default in all bars from 7 o'clock onwards and there isn't a table sitting outside a bar that wouldn't demonstrate a high glass full of vivid orange.

The amounts of wine and Aperol vary greatly from city to city, but usually it would be something like 6cl of Prosecco, 4cl of Aperol and a little water, complete with ice and a slice of orange. A spritz Aperol can cost anywhere from 1.20 to 2.50, but if you're counting cents (or drinking several) most bars will also offer "bianco macchiato Aperol", which is basically spritz without the water and costs less (extra bonus!). In Valdagno this works well, though bar staff is so used to hearing "Aperol" that almost always means "spritz" and will: a) make a normal spritz and charge accordingly; b) make something that's called "spritz bianco" and is just white wine with water - a complete rip-off, considering that the most interesting ingredient is missing.

Paduan spritz, however, is an aperitif to be afraid of: as little as two of these might distract you from having any dinner at all and/or remembering where your home is. As Padua is the city of students, this is often an advantage and warm evenings will find the 4 central piazzas full of buzzing crowds, each person clutching a small plastic cup in their hand, filled with: 1/2 of Prosecco and 1/2 of Aperol and/or Bitter and/or Cynar and/or Campari and/or Gin. The True Paduan Spritz is said to contain each of these (!).

As much as the city authorities (namely those of Padua, but not only) try to impede the masses of spritz-lovers making noise and confusion in the centre, I'm personally not sure that they will have much luck. The appreciation of aperitifs means that all parties start earlier. Mostly, after a few drinks and a good dinner your usual person already feels so content that there isn't much need for more. Drinking full on until the morning (though it happens) is less common here. If the dinner is the centre of the evening, the people will drink aperitifs before, wine during and digestives afterwards, and this can already wrap the evening up quite nicely. Estonians won't believe this, but I've had full parties complete with meeting everyone, hanging around and being silly between 7 o'clock and midnight. Could I be getting old? Anyway, it's the same 5 hours as meeting at 10 pm and keeping on until 3 am.

el rasentin

El rasentin (in Vicenza; in Venice: el resentin) is something so veneto that the whole concept carries with itself an air of mountain huts, of timelessness and of old men hanging out in front of the bars, joking in thick dialect. It's something very provincial and minutely sophisticated at once. Simple, yet genius.

El rasentin cannot be bought in a bar. The drinker has to make it himself, right there on the spot. The old Venetian verb resentar means "to rinse". In fact, making a rasentin is simply getting a shot of grappa after finishing a coffee, using it to rinse the cup and drinking it. It can be any of the various tastes of grappa, but around here plum one is most common. If the cup is still hot and the strong espresso has left some precious foam inside it, the taste of grappa is accented in the best possible way, up to the point of (they say) being truly poetic.

Now this is what I call a lateral approach to coffee...

Altavilla

Each morning I take a regional train at 08:01 from Altavilla station to Verona Porta Nuova. Yesterday, however, I was still sitting on the platform at 09:30, waiting for a train that would take me to school. Each of the four train tracks had a stationary train sitting on it for at least half an hour, and all of them were towards east (Venice).

Maybe it was supposed to be a message?

cheesecake, vol 2

For the ones who still remember my controversial cheesecake story, and for Liina who needs a permanent place where to find it, here is the recipe to:

Lindy's wonderful cheesecake
(as made in Tartu in 2003, one spring night at 4 am)

The base:
- 200g of cocoa cookies, broken into a powder;
- 150g of butter, melted (or less of it, depends how much you need to make the cookie powder stick, but not too much)
- 2 teaspoons of sugar (optional)

Once the cookies have been reduced to powder either in a bowl (or the student version: in a plastic bag hammered with an empty wine bottle), add the melted butter, stir and place at the bottom of the mould, smooth on top (but not pressed).

The dough:
- 500g Philadelphia cream cheese (not mascarpone!)
- 200g or 1 and a 1/4 coffee cup full of sour cream (in Estonia) or panna (in Italy)
- 1 egg
- 1 small cup of sugar (according to taste, can be less)
- 6 tablespoons of flour + a little vanilla sugar

Mix well in the given order until even, then add to the top of the base.

Bake in an over of 150°C for 30 min (or until about to turn golden on top), then turn off the oven and let the cake sit for 10-15 min for with a slightly open door.

Optional: if preferred, add 75-100g of chocolate melted along with 2 tablespoons of milk on top.

This cake always turns out too small and/or is always finished too fast. It's best when cooled, especially after a night in the fridge. In fact, that one last tiny piece you find in the fridge the next day is the best of all.

The Mission

I'm currently going through a full-blown blast of eco-friendliness-madness triggered by a nice computer game called Global Warning. This attitude is not new - I've been through this before in various forms. I might calm down again and decide we're all going to die anyway, but each such spur leaves some habits into our household (see the post on M'illumino di meno from February).

Have I mentioned that Valdagno is an excellent place to be an environmentalist? It's an industrial area, so it's definitely not perfect, but the fact that this town was one of the first to start a compulsory recycling system and collect organic waste separately from the rest. I'm immensely proud about it. And equally sad because the municipality doesn't abide to their own rules - the cleaning ladies of the public schools obviously haven't been trained on the recycling system. I've seen them throwing empty bottles and paper all together in a non-recyclable tin.

It works thus: we have 4 garbage cans in our kitchen. There's the glass-and-plastic, the paper and the secco - everything that can't be recycled. And the star of it all is the umido, the organic waste. It's a brilliant thing to separate the food left-overs - it will turn into rich soil in a surprisingly short time, so it can be reused without much effort. The only issue is that the green umido-box needs to be taken out on the street on certain evenings so that the compost truck could take everything away during the night. In the winter it's two nights a week, so if we forget, we end up sitting on a stinking compost box for 3 days (lucky there's the balcony!). Umido is an integral part of our household chores and the one who gets to take it out on Monday and Thursday evenings doesn't have to do the dishes.

The international car-free day is 22 September. In Estonia it gets a decent amount of attention thanks to the work of the valiant Prussakov Bicycle Union . But around here the 22th September takes place significantly more often (how often, really? I've no idea...) as the Domenica Ecologica organised in the whole province at once. Using a car is officially banned inside the towns. Everyone else would get a fine for trying to take their car out of the parking lot, but our GPL-run little Peugeot passes just fine. GPL (liquified petroleum gas) costs exactly half the price of regular petroleum and pollutes significantly less. Riccardo and I drive at least 1,5 hours each day to Altavilla, so it does make a difference. But not every car can be adapted to run on GPL. Even worse, it might happen that the engine is not modified accordingly during the process that will cause ignition problems later. Though I have to say - if it works, it's great.

By the way - taking a bus is out of the question around here - one of the main socio-economical characteristics of the Veneto is that instead of a few big cities it has many small towns, no proper cities and no proper countryside either. Taking a bus from Valdagno to Vicenza is like driving through a 40km city - the bus has to stop on every corner. I take a train from the nearest station, 32km from home.

Then, of course, there is the shopping. We can sort our garbage as much as we want, but eventually it all comes down to what we buy. This is difficult. The eggs are all in plastic packaging - where did the carton go? The local milk-products centre has stopped producing milk in tetrapaks and introduced recyclable plastic bottles instead (yay!). We've started to buy big yogurt packages for eating at home, but for using them for a take-away breakfast the normal small ones are still the only solution. There is only one company ("Sì") that makes yogurt in glass packaging, but it's always sticky on the outside and altogether messy...

The supermarket we go to has introduced bio-degradable plastic bags (yay!), but they are hidden near the cash register and I don't think many people have discovered them yet. It would be such a good idea to price the normal plastic bags from 5 cents to 20 so that people would think about using the bags twice. I'm sure the supermarket wouldn't mind making a little more money... In the meantime I've still got to convince myself to reuse the once-used and weighed fruit-bags another time. Like so many things about saving, it seems a little grezzo - crude.

I'll check out an eco-shop in Verona on Monday to see if they have spray taps and any of those wonder soap nuts that can be used instead of washing powder. It's incredible how many of the usual household chemicals are simply bad for the health, not to mention downright dangerous. Even perfume, technically, should be avoided. But what's the alternative? I guess that's the reason why so many people just don't bother with taking care about what's healthy and what's not. It's too difficult to make sure what really is better and if there are any alternatives to the things people have come to be so used to.

OK, so there is the recycling, the domestic chemicals, the fuel, the excess packaging, the plastic bags. But there was one things i never thought about - indoor pollution from the synthetic carpets and particle board furniture. This is one of the things at which point people say - come on... And so do I - the thought that the nice cheap *KEA cupboard might give me allergies really does bother me. And there's nothing I can do with the moquette either - it came with the apartment. Frustration is still lasting, but I'm waiting to see if the new inhabitants of our home do their job well. As of today, we have:
- one red Kalachoe (Kalanchoe blossfeldiana);
- one beautiful rubber tree (Ficus elastica);
- one heartleaf-philodendron (Philodendron oxycondium)
- two ivy plants (Hedera helix)
- two tiny cactus plants.
We'll see if they can make me stop sneezing.

Now, all this might seem quite scary right now, but I can assure to be perfect normal in a few months and pour chlorine bleach down the tube like any other person. We'll see.

Once out at the Bay of Tallinn

I had been out of Estonia almost a year. It was great to be back and pleasant to find the people just the same*. A number of strange new houses have been built, there are more types of soviet-nostalgic ice-cream on sale, but apart from this - well, it's enormously comforting to find everything just as it always was. I had enough time to sleep for a week, spend time doing nothing with my mom, read the new Harry P_tter book, visit friends, study some, and host Riccardo - the latter being a demanding task: he had already been in Estonia 3 times before, and we had to go beyond the usual tourist attractions and see closer.

As a part of my family's effort to make Riccardo have fun during his visit we took a ride to Naissaar (an island roughly 10 km northeast of Tallinn) in my uncle's tiny inflatable boat. We packed up the tent, food and beer until it took up almost half of the little boat and set out. The weather had been dodgy all day, but it had cleared up just as we reached the port, and the ride was great fun. The waves weren't too big, but it seemed like a good idea to agree among the four of us that we can say later they were approximately 2 metres or so. As we reached the northern tip of the island the waves rose until they really did seem to be 2 metres high - the stones at the shallow bottom were giving us their greeting this way. The waves closed with a foamy rumble behind us and suddenly one of these reached out over our little boat, the water green against the sunlight. I thought: "Wow..." and felt myself sliding down into the warm water under the overturned boat.

When I emerged and saw the others' heads bobbing around the bottom of the boat my first thought was to gather up as much of the baggage as possible. I grabbed the first plastic bag I saw and heaved it on top of the boat bottom. It was canned fish - I still have no idea how it could float. The only other thing we found was a 5-litre bottle of water (also floating). Nothing else was to be found around. As I sat on top of the boat, trying to pour water out of my sleeves, having water, paddles and canned fish with us seemed to be a poor consolation. I remembered vividly the transparent waterproof bag into which we had packed all phones, car keys and documents - it hadn't been tied to the boat as the tent and food was. I deduced it must have sunk and, between taking turns to paddle ferociously towards the shore, said goodbye to my (already second) brave camera, driving licence, id and everything that would be a mess to reapply, not to mention pay, for. The situation definitely didn't seem serious enough to take on the "earthly things don't matter" stance yet.

When the first surprise had passed and we had congratulated ourselves accordingly for having ended up in a proper modern-day shipwreck (merehäda, literally "trouble-on-the-sea"), my uncle took out his waterproof pouch holding a phone and, calm as if he would be rescheduling a business meeting, called a few of his friends living on the island. "Hey, how's it going? Are you at the island? Ah, too bad, a wave overturned my boat here at the north tip... Yeah, very strange, never heard anything like that around here... Well, I'll just call x then..." Of the people who were in a position to help us from the island most were right at the other side of it, more or less 10 km away. So, instead of making a big deal out of things, a decision was made that a few guys from the north end would come to pick us up in a row-boat.

In the meantime, paddling was serious business. The strong current kept turning us away from the shore, directing back towards Tallinn. There was no way of turning the boat right way up again - even if only half of the things were still latched to it, it would definitely have been too heavy to turn for 2 men and 2 women at open water. Also, this operation would certainly have liberated everything that had still remained inside, so the little hope of procuring our belongings from the sea with no working engine would have been lost. While paddling was doing little to take us closer to the shore (in fact, we seemed to drift farther away with each minute), it did give a sense of purpose to the situation. While wondering how long it could take for someone to set up their boat and reach us, we had time to make an endless series of jokes on how to open a tin can without any tools save a cellphone and a bottle of water; create a keep-warm boxing match and agree on telling lies to any family members until the whole adventure would be safely behind us. It must have been by the end of the second hour or so when we saw a tiny spot moving towards us across the waves.

Our saviour wasn't three men, but one - a stout fellow with the look of a weary old Basset Hound, pulling on the oars of his tiny boat with the impression of being quite somewhere else. Riccardo and I transferred to his white plastic rowboat and, having connected the upside-down rubber boat behind it, pointed ourselves once again towards the shore that wouldn't come closer.

It went on for another hour. I didn't have another chance to paddle and staying immobile soon made my teeth clatter with cold. Waving hands around just to move some part of my body, I listened to my uncle arranging for another boat to come from the other side after all - the current was too strong to row across and darkness would be coming in a while. The sky had turned a brilliant pink, contrasting the sharp outlines of the dark clouds against the sunlight that would soon be gone. It takes time for the night to come in Estonia, but we didn't fancy having to try our luck in the dark.

There wasn't much more to do than wait. Being in trouble didn't seem as much fun as it had before and the pool of water inside my pants was quite cold to sit in. As the twilight started to thicken around us, we finally saw the border guard arrive. They headed for the location we had previously communicated and passed us without noticing. Great! So much waiting and now they don't even see us! It was a relief to see the boat finally turn.

Watching from the warm inside, we saw 3 border guards, my uncle and our valiant saviour finally grab the rubber boat, its propeller still sticking out, and turn it the right way up again. At the moment they had managed it, we saw all the waterproof bags spread around over the water. The blue tubes in which my backpack and shoes were, the black plastic-packed ones with food, the yellow bundles with warm clothes and - miraculously - the tiny transparent package, most important of all. One by one, the closest bags landed in the border guard boat. I remember sighing at the irony of the situation - there it was, while the documents were floating off towards south, and they were saving the beer first...

It took some time for the boat to circle the surroundings and make sure no other bags were left. It seemed unreal - we really hadn't lost anything except some of the boat equipment. I couldn't believe our luck. As we took our course towards the south end of the island, my uncle's phone rang and for the first time it wasn't anything about boats. My mother wanted to know why I hadn't answered my phone for the last few hours. "Ah, well, you know, I switched it off until we were in the boat. We're setting up the tent... Yeah, it's nice here... Hey, I've got to go and help with the cooking, talk tomorrow..." It had been a while since I had told such outright lies to her. But the opposite would have been worse, at least she could sleep that night.

It was a wonderful feeling to set foot on dry land. A friend of my uncle's gave us a sauna and a place to sleep for that night. Arriving to the warm house and starting to unpack all the wet bags felt like being extremely rich. One thing after another that I had already believed lost emerged and I turned random things in my hands, returned to me from under the sea.

The best news of all was a mountain of food that had stayed dry (unlike the clothes). We had an excellent feast and good old traditional ways of warming up – vodka for the inside cold, sauna for the outside one. By that time we were already wondering how much planning it had taken for my uncle to arrange all that and how long should our thank-you letter to Nokia and the Estonian coast guard be. It has been a while since I have slept as well as that night.

But on the other side, I felt it was my duty to thank the sea the old way. It had gotten us in trouble, but also let us go and take all our belongings with us as well. If there is one thing that growing up on an island teaches you, it's that the sea is not always so kind. I bought a bottle of vodka and said thanks at the tip of the farthest peninsula.

* except bj, who I was glad to find looking much happier than before.

Inglish

My brand-new master course in Verona includes 80 hours of English lessons. I tried to tell the tutor delicately that I'd rather prefer advanced Italian (as I doubt the professor will be able to teach me anything on the side of an intermediate group), but she didn't get my point. I'll just sit it out, then, it's not so bad either. But it does give me a lot of time to think of Italians and their idea of English.

Considering that it's a movie-translating country, it's surprising how much the Italians love everything that is foreign. The favourites are the Scandinavians (mostly Sweden - sorry, Marie), US and UK, but most other civilised places are all fine too. There is a very special way in which "the Nordic countries" are seen (north means north of Austria, by the way, though France doesn't count). Mostly this includes an understanding that anything to do with the state is definitely much better organised*, that the job market works better, that there are more women in the parliament, that the sky is more blue... **. And of course, the English language is revered up to the point of foolishness.

I thought this tendency of praying towards North-West just a slight quirk of the young population. In fact, I didn't really see it much in Valdagno. This is why I was so surprised when I suddenly heard one university professor after another sticking English phrases into their speech. When I asked for Italian equivalents, I was told that "leadership" and "mentoring" and such don't translate, so this is how they are used. Alright. Then I heard "public speaking" and "week-end" instead of perfectly Italian "parlare in pubblico" and "fine della settimana" and started to think something was not in its right place. In fact, there are:
1) English words integrated into Italian, such as "il computer", "lo shopping", "lo smog" for new objects or actions. Mostly used the same way in other languages too.
2) English words integrated into Italian, though original alternatives exist, such as "weekend", "office", "meeting", "mouse" (pronunce: mau:z).
3) English words integrated into Italian, but by a different meaning than originally; or words that look like English, but aren't. These include "mobbing" (bullying), "sponsor"(buyer, as in someone who orders a project), "pullman" (bus, but no idea why it's supposed to be English), "week" (short for "weekend"), "stage" (apprenticeship, derives really from French (I think), but sometimes pronunced as English).

Really, I'm not hoping for the 1920s back when all words of foreign origin were changed to Italian ones (and, as legends say, each bar turned into "quisibeve": "hereonedrinks"), but I can't help noticing that as the English words sink deeper into the language, they drift away from their original meaning. Where a native English speaker would remain perplexed, Italians understand each other perfectly, saying "brekk" instead of "break" and "buon wikk" ("have a good weekend").

Needless to say, these very same Italians that are so eager to pick up new words to use for making themselves look cool, don't really speak English too well. They do like the Nordic countries, but somehow still travel south. They can't manage films with subtitles as the national film-translation business has never given them a chance of reading from the screen. This is not a problem for me: I prefer good Italian to bad English. But I couldn't hold myself back from writing on the evaluation-sheet of the most eager of our non-English-speaking Inglish speaking lecturers to take some lessons so that she'd at least know how to read "outsourcing" from her Powerpoint slides. The karma will surely get back at me right when I get a sudden strange urge to use French expressions in my presentations...


*this is usually expressed as: "you know, abroad the maternity leave isn't so messed up", not really considering any places very near Italy where the maternity leave doesn't even exist or is anyway likely to be much more messed up than in the rich industrial Veneto.
**In fact the only things for which the foreigners are ridiculed are food and fashion. The gag-effect as a reaction to socks-in-sandals and midnight cappuccinos is infectious. Soon you will see me stop writing about the Italians who fuss about how much milk you can put in your coffee at which time of the day; and start fussing about Germans who ask for a cappuccino in the afternoon***.
***that's a big no-no.

the windmill's lament

Managing youth projects is intensive work. More than the technical-logistic side, it's a balance between the group's most extreme complainers on each side of any issue. Keeping people happy. No group is ever, up to the last participant, truly happy about how things are going. Then the only thing that is left is to play with various levels of satisfaction that are possible in a given situation.

This tranquil way of putting things is my civilised side. Apart from this there is also another one, the straightforward, no-flowers side that says: fuck this.

I've somehow landed myself in a nasty bit of an odd-job where I've got to manage youngsters way below my usual level (the usual level includes people who already have a mindset of a reasonable human being, that is mostly 17 and up), a set of curiously diverse groups (from highly motivated right up to but-I-was-hoping-for-Hawaii type), and, as a prize on top of all this, a bureau-hierarchic set of partners, group leaders, office workers and other such people who each have their own ideal of how 70 young people should be taken care of, of which only a few actually work with people on a regular basis. The bomb is set. I imagine the last day will see a lot of unlooked-for sincerity.

PS - my EVS finished and I almost didn't notice, because I was running the previous youth-Odyssey (see post below). That turned out quite well, but all in all I've thoroughly had it with non-profit, fighting-windmills sort of work where the missing salary is supposed to be made up by positive energy and such. At least in business the devil - the money - is out in the open and everyone knows it's the driving force for everything. In non-profit it's the same, but translates into reputation, relations, keeping a face, doing good and hoping someone will notice.

in action and out

I'm leaving on Monday for 10 days of facilitating a youth exchange on cultural difference. We'll be 38 people, meeting in Ljubljana and coming over to Valdagno during 10 days. I built a website that is available here: www.451net.org/in_action
The project is made to be quite a nice one: after all our experience we can be sure of it. Most of the participants are 18-20 years old and haven't participated in international events before - it promises to be quite a lot more interesting for them this way. We'll see.

It was supposed to be much bigger in the beginning, stopping in more towns and being all grand. But we're experiencing the same problem as so many other Italian NGO's - the National Agency, the office coordinating the use of EC Youth Programme funds on the state level, is effectively not working. I haven't had any local trainings the volunteers are supposed to have and at the end of my service (10th month of the project!) the money still has to arrive. For all the people who call our office and ask if we are looking for new volunteers... well, I would really like to tell them to give it up with Italy as there is no hope for small organisations in the present climate. I wrote to the Commission and they said - someone will read your letter in the future. Sigh. That's why this sector is called non-profit and my position is called a volunteer. I'm not even supposed to get anything in return for what I do. But I have to say - this sucks.

No-one is guilty...

When I first came to Italy, I received a phonecall - my Volareweb flight had been cancelled. "So when is the next flight?" I asked. "Oh, well, actually we cancelled the whole line..."
I was some of the first Volareweb passengers to be stranded as they eventually cancelled the whole airline.

As exceptional as this example might be, chances are that anyone who has spent a longer amount of time in Italy will know how easy it is for trains, buses and flights to just stop moving. Transport services go on strike so often that no-one hardly pays attention anymore.

This is probably why Alitalia made a big one this time. Not only were all the national airline flights cancelled, but so were all the others, as the general flight monitoring and radars and all that were offline too. Approximately 40 000 people stranded, up to 400 flights affected. No prior notification. According to the column Italians of Corriere della Sera, neither the early-morning flights from Stansted, scheduled to arrive well before 10 o'clock - before the official start fo the strike - wouldn't fly anywhere. Nice.

My mom got her share of distress as well. She spent a great well-earned holiday here with me, but had a pile of work waiting for her back home. We arrived in the airport 2,5 hours before the flight to make sure that everything would go well. Instead we got to wait for someone to tell us that there is a strike (but we already knew it from the newsstand) and that there is no reimbursement for any costs.

Indeed, they are all waterproof - the Czech Airlines who were supposed to operate the flight said that they don't pay for expenses because none of this is their fault. Alitalia is not covering anything either, because: a) it's "unforeseen events"; and b) it's not their fault, but the government's. The previous government, lead by Silvio Berlusc*ni, apparently made some reforms that make the transport employees unhappy. So should he pay? Even though he most likely is able to, apparently it's not his fault either...

My mom had an insurance for any disruptions in the travel, but the contract doesn't mention strikes, only weather and traffic accidents. That must be because the North-European customers don't know better.

Open Space

News off the 451 website:

[11.05.07] From 7 - 12 May, a youth conference "Young European Parliament" is meeting in Mestre, Venice. 451 has been giving the organisers a hand for the last 3 days by setting up a series of Open Space Technology afternoons. The participants, among Italians including people from Norway, Sweden, Greece and Bulgaria, discussed their positions and possibilities as young people on substance abuse, immigration and integration issues, and international development. The feedback from the participants has been very positive, expressing surprise at the Open Space as an incredibly dynamic and involving group working method that enables everyone to express their opinion on topics that are most important for them.


The Open Space sessions were conducted by my colleagues Riccardo, Giorgio and myself. We were asked to give the organisers a hand with holding the afternoon group-working sessions after each morning of presentations by experts. We had 50-70 youngsters, most of them arrived directly from school and expecting something quite the same as school. They were surprised to find that they were free to discuss what was interesting for them, only as long as they wanted to and - most importantly - without an expert in sight. We got back surprising reports on drug abuse, immigration and integration issues and a group of very inspired young people.

Some of my favourite lines from discussion groups:
"But you don't have to take drugs to have fun - I'll tell you a joke and you'll have fun anyway..."
"So if you go on a bus and it's full of Albanian guys, what do you think?"
"You know, this is the first time someone asks us what we think about it!"

What's (been) happening in Estonia?

Disclaimer: the following piece of writing may contain subjective statements on history and politics. All specifications and counter-arguments are welcome.

Ma che cos'é successo in Estonia? - This is the sentence I hear so often in the last days that I have even developed a fast-talk-version of the happenings from my point of view:

"OK, so there's this monument that for the Russians is for those who fought against fascism in WW II, but for Estonians is for the Red Army who occupied Estonia in the end of the war; so now the monument was moved from the city centre to a military cemetery and some young people got drunk and went to the streets to riot and Russia is using the chance to develop its own interests from the affair."

Seems simple, does it? Maybe not. This is what a friend of mine emailed to me a week ago:
"Did you here about the riots in Tallinn? For my own luck I haven’t been here when it started, but my colleague and friends said that they felt like in a war. There were 60 injured and 1 dead and they destroyed a lot of shop windows and houses and cars were burning… And now we have a prohibition for alcohol… already the 2nd week… And now everybody waits for 8th and 9th of may to start all over again as it is the end of the war for Russia. So I don’t really feel comfortable at the moment…"

The riots themselves took place in the end of April. The story around the Bronze Soldier has been going on for a year now, after some Estonians talked up against having it in the city centre (or after having the Russian population waving Russian flags around the monument? Which came first?). From then on "patriots", or, more specifically, bored young people from both sides have been going around the monument to pick fights and the police set up a watch for avoiding any further problems. In any case it seemed to be something that young people spent their time with in the lack of better things to do. The riot agitators used this available energy to create thousands of euros worth of damage - cars, windows, shops, bus pavillions, anything one could find to break in a city centre. The police is certain that the riots were organised at least to some extent by individuals supported from Russia. Oh well. There is no love between the states, none at all.

Obviously the affair has brought up the issues between the Estonian and Russian population and the history of the past 100 years. They didn't have to have anything to do with the monument. Initially. But people have been fast to create the connections. As the history of the Baltic states is rarely a strong spot for people who didn't study there, here are some ideas for those who think that they know what's happening in / around Estonia:

- sometimes the Kremlin comes up with statements that suggest natural right of Russia over the Baltic states (I'll add a reference as soon as I find some of them), as the area has been theirs for such a long time. This sounds completely unreasonable to Estonians.

- some Estonian history: pagan and ununited until the early 14th century; then occupied by Germans and Danish during the Northern Crusades; from then on dominated by Baltic Germans as landlords up to WW I, as the country was occupied in turn by Germans, Polish (partly), Swedish and Russians. Russian domination lasted from 1710 - 1918, though the cultural life always belonged to Baltic Germans (apart from the Estonian cultural awakening of the 19th century and 15-20 years of russification from 1890 onwards). The Russian influences on the Estonian culture were neither strong nor deep-rooted before the birth of the Soviet Union.

- Russian politicians (and their young sidekicks, the Nashists), have repeatedly accused Estonia of being neofascist in the last months (no reference, read any public statement). In WW II, Estonians were fighting on both sides because hardly anyone could choose the army to which they were conscripted. At the present point, Estonians are anti-Communist more than anything else. Fascist ideology, insignia and literature is internationally forbidden. There is no reason why the Soviet ideology, insignia and flag shouldn't be as well.

- the Russians make up about 25% (other minorities 5%) of the Estonian population of 1,4 mln. That's a lot of people, but most of them were immigrated as a part of the Soviet demographic politics after WW II. Most of the Russians living in Estonia today are first- or second-generation residents. See also the BBC article from Narva, northeast Estonia.

- (The other side of the same policies was the deportation of 30 000 people from Estonia to Siberia by the Soviet authorities in 1941 and 1949.)

- the Russian Federation has refused responsibility for this and other human rights violations, as the Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union. This is understandable. At the same time they claim credit for the victory over fascism with the end of WW II, though the credit should go to the Red Army - the Soviet Union. Double standards?

- to date, the Kremlin denies the Soviet occupation of Estonia and claims that the state joined the USSR voluntarily.

- a large part of the Russians living in Estonia have no citizenship, neither Russian nor Estonian. This is because in 1991 the Estonian citizenship passed directly to the descendants of the Estonian citizens before WW II (or at least before the Soviet occupation) and everyone else had to apply for citizenship. A part of the process was a language, culture and history exam that is said to be unreasonably difficult. This is the main reason why Estonia has been accused of discrimination of the Russian minority.

- the discrimination that the Nashists refer to exists on gossip level only. The European Commission DG Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities and the Council of Europe conducts research on the matter: link 1: EC and link 2: CoE. The main problems have to do with the lack of sufficient legislation for preventing discrimination and the lack of effective governmental integration policies. At the same time, no serious issues are reported. Some discrimination has to do with language skills - Estonian is not an easy language and the Russian population has little motivation to learn it, but no knowledge of Estonian can still hinder a person from finding a job. I know that something needs to be done to solve this, but - honestly - in which country don't you need to know the official language in order to work?

- the Russians were the majority nationality of the Soviet Union. This granted them a number of advantages over other nationalities, starting from Russian-language schools and other facilities in each member state, guaranteed jobs, right up to shorter queues for applying for accommodation (because one couldn't just buy a flat at that time, one was given when it was free - but it could take any amount of time). At least this is what my mother tells me. These rights have been cancelled after 1991 and the contrast will at least to some extent look like discrimination.


Now, all this is politics and history. It gets me angry easily, as the historic memory is strong in me too and I can't stand hearing Kremlin asking for the Estonian government to step down. But it's only politics. I don't care if a friend of mine is Russian. I have great respect for the Russian literature and I'm sorry for my poor command of the language.

I'm already used to having to explain to well-meaning foreigners that Estonians don't speak Russian as a first language and consider themselves very different from Russians both in language and character. Their innocent question "so do you speak Russian in Estonia?", even though it intends to show nothing but interest, and is probably emerged from the only bit of information they have (that Estonia is next to Russia), will hardly make any Estonian shine with appreciation. Usually the reasons for it are too long and complex to analyse right there on the spot, so I merely give the impression of picking on details too much. Seeing from outside it's all the same anyway, I guess.

La Quaresima - the veggie story

Religion is not very big in Estonia. Compared to Italy or Poland, that is. The country is predominantly Protestant, but apart from going to church on Easter Sunday there aren't too many people who would be both devoted and open about their religion (it's not socially encouraged - believing is something deep and personal). I did go to Sunday school as a child, but I don't remember much apart from colourful pictures about Moses. Thus I don't really know much about Catholicism either, apart from what I learned in history about the Reformation and all that.

The Lent is a big part of the Estonian religious tradition (in fact, the word for Easter, "lihavõttepühad", literally means "time for taking meat"). But nowadays it's hardly followed anymore. The religious Bulgarians turn vegan for the whole 40-day period. Italians merely avoid eating meat on Fridays. But I couldn't even start to imagine the Estonian way of fasting. I guess one could just make their own rules. Last year Riccardo and I challenged each other to stay away from alcohol during Lent. We did it, but it proved very difficult in societies where aperitives and beers are a social custom. This year we decided to be easy on ourselves: keep the wine, drop the meat.

I've always regarded vegetarians with a kind of reverence for being able to live without meat. Since returning from 3 weeks in Turkey last year with the only wish of never seeing another kebap again, I've started to understand that not eating meat doesn't have to be a mental effort, but could just be a matter of taste. So I welcomed the challenge.

In Italy it isn't very difficult to avoid meat, as every mealtime is divided into two courses: "the first" (generally pasta or rice) and "the second" (meat or fish). Apart from a few exceptions, the pasta is usually vegetarian and it's very easy to be too full to have anything else afterwards. Usually, that is.

The main difficulties occurred in relation to Damiana's (my Italian mom's) wonderful ragù that I had to decline so many times; the tramezzini (soft triangular sandwiches), usually made with various kinds of prosciutto or seafood that are quite irresistible; and canteen-keepers that don't understand the meaning of "vegetarian". Halfway through the Lent I visited a country restaurant with a group of 14 or so. We had ordered ahead - both vegetarian and meat pasticci (the Veneto version of lasagne) that looked tantalising indeed. The food was excellent and everyone quite content until the owner, lured into a gastronomic discussion by one of our companions, revealed his secret: of course I always put sausage in my pasticcio, otherwise it wouldn't taste like anything! I didn't know which was worse - the insult or the feeling of utter stupidity at not having recognised pork in my food. I thought of my dear friend Elina and what a scene she might make in righteous rage if someone set her up like this. And then I thought that I didn't really have a reason to lament, as I'm not really a vegetarian anyway, far from it, and even farther from being a devoted Christian. This, obviously, didn't make me feel any better.

Then there is the occasional unease at having a potluck dinner or shopping for a picnic together with a group. Shopping is exceptionally uncomfortable, as meat products always cost more than everything else and while dividing the bill it doesn't end up fair to the few people who don't even intend to touch the ham. So the choice is between paying (preferred, as it's friends after all) or coming across as overly scrupulous and/or stingy (often the only way for the coin-counting volunteer). I still haven't managed to find a satisfactory way out of these kinds of situations.

Basically any setting where I can't decide on my food is a potential problem. Flying, for example. KLM has solved the issue simply by serving two small sandwiches, of which one is ham and the other cheese. Malev, Hungarian airlines, allows meal-selection on booking and aboard I got a nice special box with my name on it, including a cheese-paprika sandwich and a muesli-snack. On the flights to Istanbul Malev's meals are equipped with a visible 'no-pork' sign, which is nice, but I do wonder about Muslims taking any other flights. Turkish airlines is very nice - they just serve salads.

It's already some time since Lent. In the meantime I've spent a week in Turkey and my meat consumption has probably made up for the whole 40 days of staying without. But there wasn't much to do - some countries are simply not habitable by vegetarians. Last year's 3 meat-packed weeks taught me that unless one wants to survive on peynir pide (cheese pie) or soups (made with meat stock in any case), there is hardly any way (at least for a foreigner) to remain true to one's convictions about meat. Though, of course, no pork is ever served. This is one thing in which I agree with the Turks completely. Pigs, being able to digest anything in a surprisingly short time, seem to be rather nature's clean-up crew (such as wolves) than animals made for eating. Though Italians have turned ham-production to an art with all their prosciutto crudo, salame and mortadella, my first culinary goal will be to avoid pork. Then, maybe, I could start thinking of any other vegetarian distances.

So here I am, a wannabe-ovo-lacto-vegetarian. I don't need meat in food and the Lent did make me feel exceptionally good, but the difficulties of being vegetarian are simply too troublesome for me just yet. I would probaby be able to put up with most issues, if I could install the label of "vegetarian" as a firm part of my identity, such as: Hello, I'm Maris, I'm vegetarian. But until then I'll toddle along with one foot on each road.

schools 3: bed

The third round of our lectures in schools was going to be a challenging one, including an early start and two schools in a single morning. I was as ready for it as I could have been with all the practise, except that on Thursday morning I was feeling completely melted and couldn't neither get out of bed nor make any properly audible sound. Endless sleeping, teacups, lemons and a paperback "Return of the King" later, I'm up again. Being sick has lost its appeal after moving out of home.

help a little old lady across the street

Crossing the street is serious business. In fact, it is very easy to tell a foreigner in someone waiting for ages on the sidewalk or trotting across the street in a run, only to freeze in someone's headlights. Because stopping to let someone pass is not something usual here. It's rather a personal favour and to be thanked for.

At the pedestrian crossing. Obviously: waiting for the cars to see you, then stop, then making sure that they really do stop, and then crossing... all this simply takes too much time. It is much easier to let the cars go by. Go by. Go by. Now, how should anyone be able to get to the other side without making someone brake abruptly and release a score of bad words?

It's quite simple really. All it needs to get across the street is a little synchronisation. What you should aim to do is just pass through the flow of cars with nonchalance, as though they were all standing. Spotting a gap, you should start walking directly towards the previous car to arrive in the middle of the road just as it has passed. Then the only issue is a few steps to clear off from the next car, which is no problem at all. Arriving in the middle of the road has already revealed a sufficient amount of understanding of the Italian road rules. You will live.

Now, this applies sufficiently well in North Italy (probably also in the hectic Milan, but I'm not making any promises), but Rome is a different story. In my time there I tried to make a video of the 3-5 traffic lanes on a normal 2-lane road, of the scooters swarming around everywhere, of 3rd line parking, of the locals crossing streets in some mysterious way, tourists freezing in someone's headlights... but I found it wouldn't be possible to really make it justice this way.

In this environment, all my practised nonchalance came to nothing and I found myself adopting a different pattern: walk-don't-look-pray. It works too.

school 2: itc

This encounter was smaller and cosier than the last one. We also managed to avoid the demonstrations of power by overzealous professors. But I still feel it's quite hazy what we're trying to explain to them. How to put experiential learning into words if it's made to be felt? Try again after Easter.

Le 52 gallerie

Bookshops are enchanting places even if one doesn't usually read in the given language. I often visit them around here, though the English selection is usually limited to a few of Jane Austen's works. Already the atmosphere gives away a lot of information. The current affairs section is full of multiculturality issues - always tantalising, though I know for a fact that it will take me months to finish one of these books. The poetry corner is neat and classical. But the true surprise was the first time that I came face to face with the history shelf. Imagine a 1x2metre bookshelf, of which two lower levels contain general Central European history, Roman Empire and everything predictable. The rest of the height of the bookshelf is full of books about the First World War. All imagineable titles along the lines of "There they fought", "1917", "In the trenches" etc. All about this particular war. Endless books about the battles that took place barely an hour away in the mountains.

The Pasubio mountain range, situated in the Southern Prealps of the province of Vicenza, has been the site of some serious military activity. The Italian-Austrian front from WW I has left its unmistakeable signs on the whole area. One of the most remarkable remains of it all is the Road of the 52 Tunnels, La Strada delle 52 gallerie, that was constructed in 9 months in 1917, as a means of transporting provisions up to the fighting soldiers on the protected side of the mountain. It reaches across 6,3 km, more than 2 of which inside tunnels (guess how many). The road rises up from 1216m to 2000m above sea level. It took us 3 hours to walk it, 2 to return on the other side of the mountain.

Now, though walking can be an easy enough word, it can cause some misunderstanding. It turns out that when a walk, the one where one walks across a town, park or riverside, is a passeggiata, then going_walking, camminare, is an altogether different thing. Once I turned up in light ballerina-shoes, thinking of going for a walk, when in fact we were going walking. I should have worn strong mountain-boots instead. Walking means walking in the mountains, getting up early for it, going with friends, bringing sandwiches, dressing especially, bringing backup t-shirts, sweating, walking slow for 3-4 hours, working hard for it, no stopping, never complaining. Arriving to the top latest before noon. Returning, tired but happy. It took me a lot of time to start understanding what it all means. That I can stop for making a photo, but that's the maximum. That all the effort will probably be repaid at the top when the clouds clear up and the panorama takes one's breath away.

Last Sunday was the third in a series of Sundays spent in the mountains, so we decided to make a serious round this time, though the weather was quite grey. The first part of the road is the most steep. Going through tunnels 1 and 2, knowing that there are 50 more to come, didn't seem like the beginning to a particularly enjoyable day. Luckily it got a little easier later, until we arrived to tunnel 19 that wound about for some 300 metres in complete darkness. As the tunnel ceiling is not particularly high nor the floor too smooth, this was no laughing matter. A light came in very handy indeed. The locals tell stories of people who have felt their way around in the dark for a full half hour until being illuminated in their unorthodox positions by another walker who has thought to bring a torch. Some way up the tunnel floors were iced. I would never have managed it without Daniele's walking sticks. In a few places there was high snow on the track and starting from nr. 34 many of the tunnel entrances were almost completely covered in snow, leaving only a small gap.

From about 1700 metres upwards the fog / clouds (technically it should be clouds if we can see them from below, but no-one believes me...) cleared up and we were greeted by the bluest of skies, arching over valleys full of white cotton fog. My only regret at these moments is that there is no way my little camera could take it all in. It couldn't. The magic is the feeling of achievement, of arrival, as well as the panorama.

After sandwiches (one of the scarce moments when the sawdust-like Italian bread is truly delicious) and a little rest in the sun we walked back on the other side of the mountain. The road arches downwards in slow elongating curves, easy, but long. The snow hadn't melted on that side yet, and though the sun was hot enough, it might have been 5 degrees in the shadow. It's only in the mountains that one can go around in a light jacket in the snow and not be cold. Going down slowly on an almost level road would probably have given us a fever though. We decided to cut straight down on a steep snowy track.

It did feel quite extreme, running and sliding down a mountainside at speed. I finished with my trousers filled thickly with snow and having tripped on young pines a few times, but otherwise perfectly happy.

Back at 1216 metres, changing shoes as fast as possible in the 8 degrees and strong wind, I thought of the circumstances in which the road had been built. The slow, winding road that we had used to return was open to Austrian fire. The Road of the 52 Galleries was built at great sacrifices for a simple task: getting food up to the fighting soldiers. There are holes for dynamite in the walls of higher tunnels incase they would need to be blown up while retreating. The fact that the road is now used for careless peaceful Sunday recreation, must be a great victory indeed.

conformity / rhythm

I have come to greatly appreciate the rhythm of life here in Veneto. The day makes sense: morning lasts until 1, then people eat, then they rest a little, and the day goes on from 2-3 to 6-7pm. Then one eats and rests. Even though there are small differences between regions as to when exactly the lunchtime is (tends to be later in the South, earlier in the North), more or less all the 58 million Italians eat at the same time. This rhythm is stronger than a person. Everything grinds to a halt, not a soul on the street - must be lunchtime.

The same happens every August when all the vacations around the country are taken out all at once. It is too hot to work. All cars one sees are going either to the sea or the mountains. Cities gradually empty. Small towns stop functioning completely - the few who do stay at home in August won't even have a grocery shop to go to, let alone getting the day's newspapers. Most of the 58 million Italians are: 1) at the beach 2) in the mountains 3) abroad. But Italians travel SOUTH rather than north. They go south from their homes where it's too hot in August, to an even more intense heat. This has always baffled me. If they want to go to Morocco, why don't they go in May? Why don't people go to Norway in August, as summer is the only time to go and it's too hot anywhere south of the Baltic Sea anyway?

I often talk to Italians of the white nights of the north. They are genuinely interested and confess to not even being able to imagine the sun coming up at 3 am. Some tell me that they have a sure long-term (sic) plan to visit North Europe, just to see all this magic. But then I say - yes, then it's best to go in June, because nights turn back to normal in August. And I see their cheerful travel-dream expressions vanish: "No, not in June..."

The problem could be that people can't take vacations unless everyone else takes them (hardly makes sense). Or rather, that it would be too difficult to tear oneself out of the conformity of traditional time frames. Taking a vacation in June, but not being able to do so in August, is like eating a pasta for breakfast: non si fa, it's simply not done.

Now, I wouldn't have any problems taking this as yet another of the local peculiarities and trying to live with it. Except that the rest of Europe does not follow exactly the same timeframes - they don't follow the sanctity of the lunch-hour; they organise projects that require travelling - outside of August. Even as early as April. Ma non si fa! I used to think that the reason why we are having difficulty finding participants to our partner projects in Turkey, is that Valdagno is a miserably passive place when nothing is happening because no-one initiates anything because nothing is happening because no-one wants to participate. I've been frustrated out of my mind for having to convince people to go to see Istanbul* for a week, almost free of charge. Considering that technically it's charity, I never thought to have to spoon-feed these things to anyone. Then I thought of the same types of projects that we have coming up in the summer, for which it's already clear that we will have a competition, rather than a scarcity, of participants. The plane tickets will be more expensive, the destinations will be much hotter than Valdagno ever gets in August, and it's not even sure that everyone can go with the amount of interest we have. It simply doesn't make sense.

Then I thought of the force of social rules. So many people here would rather eat nothing at all than have a salty breakfast. The reasons for breaking the rhythm that has been lived for decades should be far greater than a small NGO trying to promote youth mobility. We're not important enough to make the Veneto change the way they have their holidays.

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* What exactly I mean by "seeing Istanbul" can be checked in the post below. If you happen to be a miracle-Italian and want to see the best of Turkey in April after all, see www.451net.org and contact us.

school 1: ipsia

A part of my work for the next few weeks is to go from one school to another and speak about European programmes that could be of interest to 17-18-year-old Italians. A lot of these 17-18 year-olds don't care much about what we have to say, but there is always a few who think along. I guess it's them we do it for.

Me, my colleague Riccardo, and the representatives of the local youth information point took on the first school yesterday. I had been asking around about it beforehand and this particular school is known as quite a rough one. "They probably won't listen." "That'll be the hardest one." And so on. There are schools like this in my home town too, and I know that as firm as these images are, they are often generalised.

We had gone through the material several times beforehand. All the presentations were ready and all we needed was 10 minutes to try out the technology before starting (showing a movie becomes noticeably less impressive if it doesn't work, is too light, needs volume or such). But it turned out that we had to start half an hour earlier than planned. The potential cable-computer-USBkey mess was saved only by the impressive improvisation abilities of Riccardo's Mac. (My Linux computer would have been quite useless in this situation.)

To be honest, listening about all various kinds of opportunities for 90 minutes in a row would be trying for me too. I too would like to comment about it to my neighbour, or gossip, or make jokes. I probably wouldn't pay much attention, knowing no-one will test me on the material later. From this perspective the students acted as any normal youngsters would in this situation and I really didn't mind the mild chatter as long as half of the people looked like paying attention. In fact, it was one of the teachers who annoyed me most.

She walked in halfway through the second half of the session and stood in the back of the hall. It was obvious that she had taken it upon herself to keep an eye on things instead of sitting down and listening to what we had to say. When I was halfway through explaining the funding issues for EVS, she interrupted me loudly and treated the students to some well-chosen and obviously habitual sentences along the lines of "the signorina is talking" and "one shouldn't allow themselves to disrespect..." and "why do you always have to make a bad impression for the whole school". I thought to myself of all the times I had heard something similar in highschool and how little impact it had made on me. When I could finally continue and started with: "So where was I...", she interrupted me AGAIN to tell me exactly where I had left off. I felt like making faces, but I smiled. After all, the Informagiovani will have to return with the same session next year. The teacher continued to walk around the audience, having apparently only started to keep the order. When someone asked if for Erasmus it is necessary to learn the local language (slightly off topic, but otherwise quite a fair question), I had barely opened my mouth when the professor drew herself up to her full height and went: "But of course you have to learn the local language! What do you think?" I was happy to contradict her - obviously it's impossible to arrive in Finland and become fluent right away. Most of the international studies will be in English and the local language gets only as much attention as one has for it*. The discussion went on in this pace for a while and we got to hear a few other annoying condemning calls to order before the end of it. In all honesty, it was quite appalling. If these young people hear that they are the shame of the class / school / town every day, they will truly become so. What else could they do if someone convinces them every day of being irresponsible, immature and disrespectful? I'm quite sure that the most likely response is to be irresponsible, immature and disrespectful.

Apart from the disrespectful teacher, the whole thing went down just as well as we could have hoped for. Next school is coming up next Thursday. We'll try to cut the talk in half and create some action instead. If possible, without the teachers.


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* In Estonia, and for what I've seen, in any country where some percentage of people speak English (roughly means countries other than France, Spain and Germany), most of the international students have lectures in English and don't even arrive to the level of being able to have even a 5-minute conversation in the local language. This applies also for myself after one semester of Lithuanian. It's only normal - acquiring a new language in a matter of a few months would be an achievement indeed. This is one of the reasons I'm disappointed in Erasmus as a method of knowing another culture. The situation of an Erasmus student usually prevents any attempts to get to know local people, language or customs. But YFU exchange students (highschool level) who often go to small towns with no chance of managing in English, will learn faster than anybody will believe.

ALL ABROoooAD!

EVS, the programme I'm here with, supported by the European Commission, is not the only kind of activity that the youth groups or organisations can ask financial support for. In fact, there are a lot of opportunities to get grants if you have good ideas. One of these kinds of projects are youth exchanges - intercultural youth meetings where one group of young people hosts other groups, shows them around, organises various activities. Everyone has fun, but most of all, learns a lot through experience.

I'd never have an idea what Turkish hospitality is like, what the Czech do for fun, how spoken Hungarian sounds or what the Portuguese mean by saudade, if my friend Laura hadn't gotten me into organising a youth exchange with her back in 2004. This event was an awakening to 3 years of vagabonding through more than 20 countries. It's also thanks to her that I'm in Italy now.

My hosting organisation (by now, my home NGO) is partner in 8 youth exhanges this summer. It's more than any of the Eurodesk offices around Veneto. Different countries, different topics. The only problem is that we're living and working in such a small town that it's difficult to convince the youth that there can be good possibilities here as well. In any case, we've now officially started our 'all abroad!' campaign. In the following months I'll go around the local schools with the people of the local youth information point, explaining to schoolkids what is Youth in Action and what the whole point is. That it's not only a way of making cheap vacations, but a good opportunity to learn languages, train yourself, manage a project - things that one generally would have to pay much more for. This in turn holds a lot of other opportunities, such as being better prepared for jobs related to organising various events or working in an intercultural context.

So now there's me going around with our flyers. The author is our web designer Anna Menti. Here's an example:


These exchanges are a magic waiting to happen. I've already seen it a few times, but it's always worth a watch. First you have to call the people, convince them, coax them with the idea of a cheap vacation, say how nice the place will be. Then, when they've made up their minds, they get all excited while discussing what kind of food to bring along and what to show about Italy; they write out small dictionaries and read travel guides. Taking the train to go to the airport is a mixture of excitement and anxiety. Then we start to receive messages: "we're arrived, things look ok, really tired, talk later"; and "ciao, it's fun here, we went around Prague, very nice!" and "this is so cool!!!". During the days after arrival the group goes around and tells everyone with bright eyes about where they've been. They stay on MSN until the wee hours talking to all the new friends. Things cool off after a while, but there is always someone with whom the contact remains. And noone will easily forget the feeling of a really good youth exchange.

Some of my friends are convinced that all this "youth projects and stuff" is a big waste of money. They're entitled to their opinion. But I have to wonder - if someone has had adventures, parties, long discussions with youngsters from completely different backgrounds - be it an ex-communist country, a Muslim country or whichever - isn't this someone less likely to discriminate against people based on stereotypes? Isn't it an achievement?