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Sakit ng ngipin ko.. parang puso ko. JOKE.

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One Month Reflections

Here are a few things I have been musing about. it's kind of stream of consciousness, but that's good if you want to let people into your head-space.

I have found myself saying to the people back home that, "I hate Milan", "I would rather be anywhere but here", "It's not a friendly city". That last one may be true, but the greater truth is that 1) I have only been here a month and about a week of that has been spent on trips, 2 )I don't speak Italian, so of course everything is harder, especially social interactions, and 3) It's not the city I'm upset with, it's our advisor and the foreign office at school.

The truth is I actually like our neighborhood. It’s full of old people. Most of our neighbors are over 60. It's great: there is no pressure to be cool. The neighborhood is called Bicocca, but we sometimes refer to it as Boca, because of the demographics. There is an Aldi's-like grocery store a five minute walk from our apartment. A mall is ten minutes by foot. And a new subway line (the Lilac Line) has just reached into the neighborhood. When it is open, it is fantastic, but sometimes it is closed without warning. The neighborhood consists almost exclusively of apartment high rises. They all look about the same. The heights and colors vary slightly. Sometimes the apartments have balconies, more often they do not.

The Bicocca campus is about a 20 minute walk from the apartment, which is very close considering some of our classmates ride a train for twice as long to get there. When walking to school you have to vigilant of puddles. There are some big ones out there, especially in the rainy autumn and winter. The fog is far more prevalent than the rain. It took me a week before I realized your could see mountains (foothills) from our living room window.

We have not been downtown much yet. We went once about two weeks ago but had to turn around immediately because Sam's phone had been picked from her purse. Almost comically (if it weren't so panicked) we were ambushed by three African men trying to "give" us bracelets. The actual closing-in of the bracelet-men and the rising fear about the missing phone amplified each other nicely.

The other downtown excursion was when I convinced my roommates to go to the free aquarium with me. I had read the Trip Advisor reviews and knew that it was small and not super exciting, they had not. Regardless, it was free and it was an excuse to get into the center of the city. The aquarium is attached to a beautiful park with a sports field and what looks like a mini Brandenburg Gate.

While in the park I experienced what must be the biggest culture shock for me: public displays of affection (PDA). Or as it would be more appropriately named: public soft-core. People really go at it. No park bench is safe. At first I thought this activity was limited to airports and train stations where the impending sorrow of separation often drives people to temporarily forget themselves in love (or lust). I walked to the grocery store the other day at about 6pm and saw two teens locked in a passionate knot on a bus stop bench. When I passed them they looked at me like I was the one who shouldn't have been there. Perhaps this is why the morning after pill is legal in one of the most Catholic countries in the world.

So problem one has been partially addressed. I don't know the city well yet. I'm trying to know it better and part of that includes getting better at the Italian language, which leads us to problem 2.

I have Rosetta Stone and I have an intro Pimsleur CD, but I also have American roommates and a healthy dose of procrastination mixed with denial. So even with all these resources I am still at pre-beginner stage. Mostly I depend on cognates with both English and French. I have also found that my fondness for crosswords has come in handy. Let me explain. In crossword puzzles you are often given a clue where the answer is an imperfect synonym. You sometimes have to think in kooky ways to discover the connection. This sort of thinking frustrates my mother endlessly when we do crosswords, but it helps me when I hear a word that is like an English word and when taken in the situational context can be sussed out. This process is, however, far too involved for regular use. Often it takes until you get home to have that "Eureka!" moment.

Putting yourself out there can be tiring, even for someone who likes to talk to strangers as much as I do. The language barrier almost sapped me of my stranger-curiosity. Almost. I think it is being suppressed, but as time rolls forward the curiosity is starting to get restless and looking for a way out. This is also fueled by the realization that if I do not start either speaking some Italian or finding activities with people who speak at least some English I will be talking almost exclusively with the same two people for the next seven months. While I like my roommates, I think I would go mad not talking to anyone else. It also turns out that my roommates are both very shy people, so when I do put myself out there socially I get little back-up in the form of help carrying the conversation. The conversation ain't my brother, but he is heavy and some help would be appreciated.

That being said they are excellent allies in terms of navigating the school and the Italian bureaucracy. They had to go through the whole process of applying for the documents so you could apply for residency before I got here. And they had to do it through trial and error, in another language, with only incorrect information from the university's foreign office. That is an experience I do not envy. I got the cliff notes version, thankfully.

That is also only one example of how I think the university has failed us. The foreign office is the same one that did not respond to my emails about how to enroll for over a month this past spring. The same one that bounced me from person to person saying that they couldn't help. The same office that almost couldn't be bothered to send my paperwork to the Italian Consulate in NYC so that I could apply for my visa. The original woman we were told to contact is supposedly housed in the foreign office. I have yet to hear anything from here, nor have I ever seen her in the office. After being bounced around the foreign office staff again we were assigned to someone for good. He was in the office during his office hours. Sometimes. He once rescheduled a meeting with me because he had "and emergency tennis match". Never mind that none of us were actually enrolled in the school yet. (We have finally been officially enrolled, btw)

The other failure is on the part of our advisor. He is also never in his office. When Sam and Mike first arrived he emailed them that he would be out of the country for at least two weeks, so he was no help upon their arrival. Whenever we ask a question he looks at us like we are idiots. He didn’t believe us that the foreign office was giving us the run around until he tried to call them while we were in his office. After trying everyone in the foreign office and none of them being there he finally got an inkling of what we were dealing with there.

I also find it odd that he didn’t ask one of his students or really any student to show us around campus. If anything this would make his already easy job easier. I'm pretty sure UB and Michigan Tech assign a sort of student ambassador to the INVOGE student. I think that would be logical, but apparently I live in a world devoid of logic, thank goodness I'm not taking math here, 2+2 may actually equal 5. Luckily Sam met an Italian student who was at Michigan Tech last year at a field course in France in October. Her name is Val. She is very sweet and very willing to help us with any questions. The only problem is she live an hour and a half away by train (not subway train, but a real choo-choo train) so she is only on campus a few days a month, if that.

In the months to come I am sure that I will come to feel a fondness for Milan. I feel like this is an arranged marriage where you learn to love each other only after you spend enough time together for a sort of respect and appreciation to develop. Milan and I need to learn how to work together, to figure out how to complement each other, and to finally cultivate that affection I know is possible. Whenever I am discouraged, I remind myself that I have only been here for a month. I have barely scratched the surface. While many things are different, I am more often amazed at how similar people are wherever you go. There are the young and the old. The punks and the chic crowd. The city folk and the country folk. Those trying to make name for themselves in the big city and those just trying to make it through the day. Everyone has to run to catch the subway sometimes, no matter how glamorous their shoes are.

#reflections #culture shock #adjusment #acceptance #catharsis