Turmoil

You may have noticed lately that things have been a little, uh, unstable here. This is because I was wrestling this blog over to wordpress. I've now more or less got all my old entries loaded up over there, so feel free to check out the new look, and (I think) update your links, if you've got em.

Economy Size

My roommate AD works for the SHPRC (Sexual Health Peer Resource Center) on campus. Most of her work so far involves giant economy sized bags of things. Last week she bought 3 HUGE bags of candy to take to the center, all of which currently reside in her closet, so I wasn't shocked when she plunked down a full size garbage bag full of something in the corner of our living room a couple of days ago. I didn't even think about it until I came home last night to find the contents of the bag scattered on the floor. It turns out that our living room is currently the home of an entire GIANT GARBAGE BAG full of condoms (her boyfriend's visiting from UCLA. I don't even want to think about it. The sound effects were plenty, thank you very much.). We could single-handedly supply prophylactics to the entire dorm for at least a quarter. We could cut the birth rate in half. We could make an entire fleet of balloon animals. We could build an innovative inflatable raft. We could wallpaper the apartment. Cause people, it is a LOT of condoms.

Thin Wall

Just to give you some sort of concept of how thin the walls are here at Mirrielees Central, I can hear the phone ringing in the next apartment over, through 4 walls quite clearly. And then I can hear the guy pick up the phone. And then I can hear his conversation. Moral of the story? Definitely don't have a private conversation anywhere near this building. It must be some sort of acoustic conduit.

BOLD!

Dear Tic-Tac, I bought the new Tic-Tac "BOLD FRUIT" flavor mints the other day. They are not BOLD. They are FUNKY. They leave this strange sort of chlorinated flavor in your mouth after you eat them. I am not a fan. Also, they were made in Ecuador. Does this seem like a weird place to make mints to anyone else? Yeah, I thought so. So get on that. Love, M

So, I'm supposed to be driving all of my stuff to school in California tomorrow. Most of it is packed in the car already, and I am proud to say that you can still TOTALLY see out the back window. TOTALLY. I only freaked out once (or maybe twice)--mostly when I realized that all that lovely space you can feel when sitting in the illustrious VW bug sits directly above the driver's head. And, dude, it is a BAD idea to plan on putting a duffel on top of the driver's head. Especially when, for about 400 miles, that driver is your father. Anyhow, I managed (somehow, almost) to get all of my crap actually in the car, which is a minor miracle. In the process, I also discovered that when you fold down the back seat in my car, crank up the stereo, and sit backwards, facing the open hatchback, you get the maximum auditory experience out of the Volkswagen speaker arrangement. It is freaking epic. I should have been doing that a LOT more. So, moral of the story: Car packed, drivers ready, sophomore-ism here I come.

Hey, baby....ciaaaaooo

Eddie Izzard (a brilliant comic) in his show Dress to Kill, does a fantastic bit about italians that totally sums up the Italian attitude. (NB: The transcript really doesn't do this bit justice. Ask me sometime, and I'll play it for you, or look for "Italians and Fascists" on his CD Dress to Kill, which you can buy on iTunes if you want it.) "The Italians invented fascism but they were never really fascists. Mussolini, 1922 'We are all now Fascist,' but most Italians are just great on mopeds with no helmets going (makes motorcycle noise)...just driving along going 'ciiiiaaaooo. hey....chiquita, ciaaaaooooo...hey, baby...' You know, and they just hang out, they're kinda cool, you know, and everyone looks fantastic and they don't have their glasses on the top of their head, they have them just above their eyes. And there's three different types of police and they all just hang out and go 'ciaaaaaaaaooo. ciao, bella. ciao.' There's a bank raid going on in the distance...'you just be quiet over there! eh, ciao.'" There is definitely a lot of hanging out around here, going "ciaaaaao." The pace of life is just very slow, and, as my friend Klara pointed out, every 45 minutes, faciamo una pausa (we take a break) for something. If it's not the official pausa (when, from 1 to 4 every afternoon, absolutely everything in the city shuts down), it's a break for coffee or conversation, or a cigarette--basically, you'd just better hope not to get anything done in less than an hour. The other thing you need to know about time in Italy is that everything--absolutely everything--takes due minuti (two minutes), but that two minutes means every length of time between 30 seconds and 30 minutes, and 30 minutes means at least an hour. You get very used to class starting 15 minutes late (and 15 minutes is not considered late. If you show up less than 10 minutes late for class, there won't even be anyone there to wait for the teacher with yet. Students will start to filter in at about 13 minutes after the hour, and the teacher will sweep in between 15 and 25 minutes late, generally wearing a scarf in some new and exciting way.) A five minute break in the middle of class means that you'll have quite enough time to go downstairs, have a coffee, chat with your classmates, read a newspaper, and still be the first one back to class when you return 35 minutes later. They've had a great many years to master the art of relaxation, and they've really truly done it at last. No more of this rushing around being Roman and conquering things--Italy is finally quite content to sit quietly and spend hours doing nothing. Maybe it's the next level in the evolution of a cultural identity. If so, all I just hope that we get there soon. This showing up late for class thing is awesome.

20 Things I Have Learned

So, right now I'm perched on my extremely tiny Italian bed in a pool of crumbs from the bag of water crackers I've just finished off (oh yes, those of us on student budgets eat the most elegant food in all of Italy. If you've never had a water cracker...well, they're not high in flavor. I mean, they're fine and all, but not exciting. can you tell I'm trying to finish all my food before I leave? Cause I can.) and basking in a flood of carbohydrates (mmmmm white flour. yeeeaaaahhh....). This moment about sums up my experience in Perugia this summer. It is simultaneously luxurious and exciting (I am, after all, three feet from the most gorgeous view in the world...check out ww.cupcakenation.net/blog and try some of the picture links in the last 2 entries if you doubt me) and extremely funky (eg, the crackers, the miniscule beds, and the very very student atmosphere). To make this moment completely Perugian, all you'd need to add would be some Italian TV. I have watched so much Italian TV this month, you have no idea. They really like the dubbed american shows and movies here, which are actually pretty good for practicing your Italian with. In the morning, they show Beverly Hills 90210, followed by Baywatch. In the afternoon, it's What I Like ABout You, Quantum Leap, and generally, an English movie dubbed into Italian. A few days ago, it was a movie about a mormon missionary, which was incidentally one of the first appearances of Anne Hathaway (as the missionary's girlfriend). The movie was called The Other Side of Heaven. It's the true story of a missionary in the 1940's who gets sent to Tonga, an island in the Pacific. He spends 2.5 years there, and then goes home to marry Anne Hathaway and eventually comes back to the islands. My Italian was up to almost all of it, except for the technical vocabulary for "flesh eating insect." I had to look that up. And so, without further ado, I present: 20 Things I Have Learned from The Other Side of Heaven: 1. Tonga is a group of islands in the Pacific. 2. The words for "toilet" and "missionary" must be similar in the language they speak in Tonga 3. If you do nothing but compare the English and Tongan books of Mormon for 4 days, you will become suddenly fluent in spoken idiomatic Tongan. 4. If you sleep with your feet [un]covered in Tonga, something involving an insect will happen that will leave you with big bloody gashes that refuse to heal on the soles of both feet. 5. This is not a sign from god. 6. If you put them in the sun, they will get better. 7. You will not die. 8. If you give a man a pearl, he will die of a mysterious disease. 9. And then there will be a hurricane. 10. But you will not die. 11. If you sail from one island to another on a very small boat, you will be inevitably lost at sea in huge waves. 12. You will, despite not being in sight of any islands, be able to swim to one. 13. You will not die. 14. If you contract a mysterious disease, a boat will come. 15. And you will not die. 16. Your girlfriend will wait for you for 3 years. 17. In which time she will not age. 18. And then you will get married and move to a gorgeous pacific island and run on the beach. 19. And she will still not have aged. 20. At all. In all seriousness, though, this was actually a pretty darn good movie. I mean, I was interested at least most of the time. It might not be as interesting in English though, since concentrating on the language can even make some very boring things, like Laguna Beach (which they show here, dubbed, on MTV), interesting.