Salad Dressing

Fruit and vegetable stands are a dime a dozen in my neighborhood. There's one directly below my apartment and another one across the street. However, while vegetables are easy to access, I haven't been eating much of them here. As every American knows, vegetables are just platforms for dressing and unfortunately, Italy is a dressing desert. I've searched high and low for a bottle of ranch or blue cheese, only to find a whole lot of nothing. Today, I finally decided to give up and assimilate. 

The local version of salad dressing is a mixture of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I learned this only by attending a cocktail party at which carrot sticks and celery were served next to bowls of olive oil and balsamic. I actually asked the bartender if the carrots were intended for the oily fluid, just to be sure. He assured me that they were, and it was typical of Italian cuisine from Emilia-Romagna. Armed with this knowledge, I prepared to make my own this afternoon. I already had olive oil in my cupboard, but I needed to trek to the supermarket for balsamic vinegar.

At the market, there were a dozen different kinds to choose from. I initially resorted to my cheapskate decision-making method of calculating the per-unit cost of each brand, but then it struck me. I live in Italy, the home of balsamic vinegar. Modena, where it has been made for a thousand years, is just down the road from me. This was not the time to out-cheap myself, it was an opportunity to buy something unique and unavailable in America. I forgot about economizing and went middle of the road. I'm so glad I did. I made my "dressing" and it's amazing. I've been snacking on lettuce for hours. I just might have to visit Modena for some food tourism. Who wants to come?

Designer Dog

Since my preterm courses are finished, I had this morning off. As much as I wanted to sleep in, instead I joined my roommate on a quick shopping jaunt. Shopping in America usually means a trip to the mall, but not here. My roommate took me to a boutique on the outskirts of Bologna called Clara. This was the classiest place I've ever set foot in. The racks were filled with proper Italian designers, and signs asked customers to not touch the displays or disturb folded garments. The staff was impeccably dress and all spoke rapid-fire Italian. Prices, of course, were astronomical. It would have all been terribly intimidating but for one thing. 

An obviously well-heeled customer entered the shop with her dog on a leash. The dog was clearly a mutt, and an ugly one at that. It was small and black with teeth that jutted out. The owner, a woman, didn't carry her dog. Instead, she let the dog's dirty paws clack across the marble floor. While I expected the staff to reprimand the woman for bringing her dog with her, they greeted her warmly. When the woman reached down and unleashed her dog, they just smiled. In a shop where the customers aren't allowed to touch the clothes, a dog off the street is permitted to roam at will. 

As it turned out, there was a sale section at the shop that offered some seriously deep discounts on clothes from past seasons. My roommate got a gorgeous black and cream dress by Valentino, and I got a silly polka-dot frock by PennyBlack. We plan to be extra-vigilant about our electricity consumption for the rest of the year!

Ravenna On My Mind

I've been meaning to write this post for a week now, but I've been rather tied up studying. I had two finals this week. My Italian exam was yesterday, and it was painful on so many levels. First of all, it was incredibly long. The written section took almost three hours to complete and was as thick as a book. This was followed by an oral section, for which my Italian was hilariously inadequate. I sat across an enormous oak table from two native speakers, one of whom I'd never even seen before, and tried desperately to keep up with my end of the conversation. It was a struggle. I'd start a phrase, only to realize halfway through that I didn't know a key verb conjugation or vocabulary word to complete the statement. I'm not too concerned though, as the final was only meant to be a placement test for further studies in Italian. Unfortunately, I think my class schedule is already to full to consider it.

My microeconomics final was this morning, and so I am currently free, free as a bird, until the first full semester starts on Monday. Actually, that's a lie. I'm hardly free at all. This is Orientation Weekend and there are lectures and seminars crammed into practically every waking moment. At least there are no exams or problem sets looming in my immediate future.

In any case, while this weekend will be spent sitting through endless lectures, last weekend I had a bit of an adventure. A group of us decided to get the heck out of Bologna and go to Ravenna. Why Ravenna? Why not? It was kind of a random choice of weekend destination, but I heard it had some very old stuff worth seeing, so off we went.

It was an early train, so our first mission upon arrival had nothing to do with all the historic sights. It was a matter of survival. We needed coffee, and that we found along with an unexpected surprise: the nicest man in Italy! In my limited experience, most bar workers here are pretty gruff. They do not stop to exchange pleasantries, smile, or even acknowledge you exist outside of a hand offering payment. This man, by comparison, was chock full of delight. He asked where we were from, told us where to go, and all-in-all we had a lovely chat. Alas, the streets beckoned and we abandoned the cafe.

This was a decision we almost immediately regretted. The day had begun sunny and warm. I had regretted wearing long pants.The day was now cloudy and cold. I regretted wearing short sleeves. This was a recurring theme throughout the day. The weather was always hot or cold, but never comfortable. Valiant tourists, we forged ahead. I got some kitschy photos of me fake-petting a stone lion and posing in front of medieval masonry. We wandered aimlessly, hoping to find Dante's tomb. When the aimless wandering didn't work, we asked a local for directions, which we received in Italian and kind of, sort of  understood. The closer one gets to the tomb, the harder it is to find. It's located adjacent to a piazza with a large church. For a moment we thought perhaps he was buried inside, so in we went. While Dante wasn't there, it was still a worthy visit. The walls were lined with funeral monuments to people who died up to 700 years ago. I really liked one with the word PETERE engraved on it. I'm thinking of copying it for my own tombstone.

Anyways, there was a staircase beneath the altar area of this church. At first I assumed it led to a crypt, but further inspection proved me wrong. The stairs didn't really lead anywhere, they just passed in front of a window in a brick wall. For fifty cents, you could turn a light on and illuminate what was behind the wall. At first glance, it looked like a perfectly ordinary room in a medieval brick structure. The ceiling was low and supported by large brick pillars. The floor was more impressive, as there were patches of ancient tile work scattered here and there. This was difficult to get a good glimpse of as it was covered by a pond. The room was really a pool with several feet of water and at least a dozen goldfish swimming about.

As neat as the fish were, they were not enough to distract us from finding Dante's tomb. Having realized he was not buried inside, we searched the perimeter and quickly found it. It's not unimpressive, but considering the grand scale of most things in Italy, I could have been more impressed.

The next item on our list was the Basilica, as recommended by the nicest man in Italy. What the nicest man in Italy failed to tell us was how expensive the entrance fee was. No thanks, we said, we have the internet. We hit the gift shop instead. The postcards are beautiful.

We whiled away the rest of the day visiting churches and World Heritage sites, sitting in the park, eating pasta and perusing shop stalls. It was such a joy to get out of Bologna for a little while and enjoy a change of scene. I was almost sad to leave, but we had to hurry back to Bologna that night. There was a jazz festival in Bologna that weekend, and I had a Ray Charles tribute concert to get to. The concert would have been fun anywhere, but it was more than a little surreal to attend in a thousand-year-old piazza.

Academics

My life here in Bologna isn't all fun, games and trips to IKEA. In actuality, I spend the overwhelming majority of my time at school. Since most of my readers probably aren't familiar with it, I thought I'd take a few paragraphs and explain the program.

I'm a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, or SAIS for short. SAIS has three campuses, one in Washington D.C., one in Nanjing, China and a third, of course, here in Bologna, Italy. About half the students spend their first year abroad, and then move to D.C. for their second year. The school essentially offers only one degree, a Master of Arts in international affairs (there's also a one-year program for mid-career professionals, and a tiny Ph.D. program, but they're so small as to be effectively irrelevant to my experience). The program is split into two concentrations. Everyone must take a sequence of international economics courses, and then choose a second area of study to specialize in. There are both regional and functional concentrations available. For example, you could choose Latin American studies or international security. In addition, all students must pass proficiency exams in two core international relations courses and a language other than English. It's quite a lot to achieve in two years. I haven't really gotten started yet. I've been in Bologna for the last month for two pre-term crash courses to get prepared for the proper school year, starting in two weeks. I'm doing survival Italian and an economics prerequisite, both for no credit.

Once the academic year starts, I'll be jumping in with both feet, taking a full course load of economics and international relations. I was originally accepted into the international development track, but since I arrived I've been less than enthusiastic about how restricted the course offerings are in that area. A professor sagely advised me that thanks to my development "experience" as a Peace Corps volunteer, a degree in the field is rather superfluous. So I switched tracks to general international relations and look forward to the flexibility my new concentration affords me. The registrar was shocked to hear that I was giving up IDEV. "People kill to get into that program," she said. Well, maybe some people do, but not me. I'll let others fight to the death over the introduction to development gateway course, while I take a course on risk in political economy instead. I'm also auditing a course this fall on Italian art and culture. There are field trips! I'm very excited.

The campus here in Bologna is rather a joke. It is literally a single building, but it has everything a student could ever need. There are classrooms, a computer lab, a library, a cafe that serves pastries, pasta and prosecco (it is Italy, after all), a student lounge and, in the basement, a locker room with a drum kit and a ping-pong table. Everyone has to blow off steam somehow, and if the vino upstairs doesn't do it, banging around on a snare drum might. Being an American university abroad, all the windows are blast-proof. Following the earthquakes last year, the building was reinforced at great expense. You need an ID card to open the front door. It's all very safe. I guess if you're in Bologna at the time of some  massive zombie apocalypse, the SAIS building would be the place to be. Even more importantly, the view from the penthouse deck on the top floor is spectacular.

So that's basically it. Anyone want to go back to school now?

Making It Home

When I first moved into my flat here in Bologna, my room was a tad depressing. The white walls and plain furniture lent the place a very institutional air, and it just didn't feel like home. This is a common problem amongst students who didn't have space in their suitcases for home decor items, and are now faced with big, empty apartments and nothing to fill them with. To remedy this situation, Bologna offers one rather familiar option. So while some students jetted off to Florence or Parma or Venice for the weekend, a friend and I met at the train station and boarded the bus to IKEA.

This was a good deal more difficult than we anticipated as pronouncing IKEA in Italian turned out to be nearly impossible. My friend asked several people where we could find the IKEA bus stop, and each time the person questioned stared at us in confusion for a second before quizzically responding with some variant of "ee-kay-uh". No matter, we found the bus, boarded and were on our way, zooming through the narrow streets on a coach bus, like we were headed on a long-distance school field trip.

After some time on the highway, we arrived at a large shopping complex outside the city. Beyond the parking lot, we could see mountains and vineyards and a generally picturesque view of the country. We felt small twinges of guilt as we turned into the behemoth of the generic big box store. The guilt didn't last long. We wandered through the show rooms, fantasizing about our apartments if we ever lived anywhere long enough to furnish the place. We filled our shopping bag with adorable items we didn't strictly need. Dozens of vanilla-scented tea lights? Yes, please! Picture frames with stock art inside? Absolutely! A house plant? Of course!

When I list out our purchases it sounds like our trip was very quick and efficient. It wasn't in the slightest. IKEA is designed to make you linger, either through distraction by their quirky furniture designs or confusion by their quirky store layout. You couldn't get out of an IKEA in a hurry if you wanted to, and we didn't want to. So we agonized over choosing pictures and frames and potted plants like the future of the universe hung in the balance. Is this color too green? Is this candleholder too plain or too fancy? Should we get one or five?

Thankfully, our shopping styles complemented each other and after endless discussion, we each ended with almost exactly the same items. I bought a peace lily and she bought a different plant, but that's pretty much the only difference in our decorating choices. We dragged our bags up to the cashier, about 4 miles away from the rest of the store, and there received gift cards in the amount of our bus tickets. The cashier told us we could use them on our next trip to IKEA. Considering we had just spent the better part of a day there, we weren't really planning on coming back. Besides, then we would just get another gift card and the cycle would being anew. After a quick refreshment of generic soda, at last we wandered outside into the fresh air. 

Down by the bus stop we met a couple other students who had also made the expedition to IKEA. One of them had a pillow in her bag. It was then my friend realized that she had forgotten to buy one. The time was 7:50. The store closed at 8:00. Could we get in, find and buy a pillow, and get out of an IKEA in that timeframe? It was a challenge we embraced. We ran back into the store, bounded up a flight of stairs and down another, whirled through the aisles to the bedding department and started feeling up pillows. I found a big pile of decorative ones that cost about the value of my gift card. Maybe I wouldn't have to come back to IKEA after all! I grabbed one in an electric blue. My friend located a pillow that suited her needs, and we were off like a shot to check-out where we hoped to cheat the system.

Using the gift cards worked without a hitch, and we ran back outside with a few minutes to spare before the very last bus back to the city. It was almost a perfect night, if not for the mosquito that bit me on my face. That was unfortunate. However, having done a tad of home decoration, I can honestly say it was well worth it. It's amazing what a plant and a few generic pictures can do for a place. I'm home, home at last. 

Umbrella

While most Americans imagine Italy to be a land of endless lasagna and eternal sunshine, I have not found that to be true. Bologna is often cloudy and rainy. When it rains here, it really pours, and this can go on quite literally all day. For instance, this morning I woke up to rain. I walked to class in the rain. I walked home in the rain. I walked back to class in a cloudy haze. I walked home again in a cloudy haze punctuated by loud claps of thunder. 

I did not bring an umbrella to Bologna. I thought the porticoes would provide sufficient coverage from the rain, and they do, where they exist... which is not so much in my immediate neighborhood. Oh well, I borrowed my absent roommate's umbrella for today. Alas, she returns tonight and so my "borrowing" days are soon to be over. Walking home from school tonight, I had a mission. Buy an umbrella.

Now I had no idea where to find an umbrella. Wal-Mart is the type of shop guaranteed to carry umbrellas, and there are no Wal-Marts here, nor anything even remotely similar. Italians favor tiny shops with mind bogglingly limited selections. Imagine a supermarket that doesn't sell eggs. Regardless, I searched every shop window between the Porta San Donato and my building for an umbrella. I found none. However, I did find the Emporio Duse. I think it's proper English name would be "junk shop". It was a shop, filled with junk. Cheap pots, fake flowers and shower curtains were piled high on every shelf. Hanging from the ceiling were umbrellas. 

If there was a sign giving a price, I didn't see it. Instead, each umbrella was individually labelled with price tag possibly written by someone's arthritic grandmother. They were totally illegible. I walked away. A few aisles away was another selection of umbrellas, this time inscribed with the Hello Kitty logo. I looked at a tag. Squinting with enormous effort, I worked out what looked to be 4 euro. Not bad, I thought. Surely all the umbrellas were in the same price range. 

I returned to the first set of umbrellas I saw, picked a cheery green one, and sauntered up to the counter immensely pleased with myself. I greeted the cashier, and she rang through the umbrella as I hunted for my wallet in my backpack. 

"Tredici," she said. 

I swallowed.

I looked to my left and saw a bucket chock full of umbrellas, with a large sign advertising them very clearly for 8 euros. I sighed.

My day had been going so well. I was so proud of myself for shopping alone, in Italy, in Italian. More than anything, I wanted a happy ending. To be able to say that I actually did something right, no mistakes, no apologies, no awkward moments.

And that's how I ended up spending 13 euros on an umbrella. It's hanging in my closet right now, and I have to say it looks pretty sharp. It really is a very nice umbrella, and it will certainly get plenty of use, so maybe, just maybe it was worth every euro.

Walking Tour

SAIS arranged several walking tours of Bologna to help students get to know their adopted city a little better. I went on one this morning. It was absolutely wonderful, and I learned so much. Of course, after two hours of walking we only got through the tiniest fraction of Bologna's incredibly long and storied history.

Some highlights...

Porticoes: Bologna was the first European city to free slaves. When this happened, the city was overrun by former slaves. To accommodate them, the current residents added rooms to the facades of their homes and columns underneath to support the new structure above. The porticoes became such a hallmark of the city that it was actually illegal to build anything new without a portico until the 18th century.

St. Stephen's Church: This is actually a collection of connected churches. There used to be seven, but only four remain. The newest is from the 15th century. The oldest is from Roman times, though the floor, the tour guide mentioned, was much newer. It was replaced in the 12th century. Charlemagne visited the church to move the relics of two very early Christian martyrs. I have walked in Charlemagne's footsteps!

University: When the University of Bologna first began, students were taught in the homes of their professors. The Pope didn't like this, so he had a palace built to be used as the university. There is an anatomy theater inside that dates from the 14th century. I saw the table on which they laid the cadavers and the pulpit from which the professor taught. He didn't actually touch the body, he directed his assistants to perform the cutting. When Napoleon arrived in Bologna, he had another campus built for the university, and it is this one that is still used today.

Roads: Many of the main streets in the city center were built by the Romans, and they go to quite distant places. For example, one that runs through the location of an medieval fish market goes all the way from the Adriatic Sea to Milan. To this day, it is very heavily trafficked. I know, because trying to cross it was harrowing!

What struck me most about the city was how functional the old buildings and streets are, and how accustomed the locals are to it. There's a McDonald's in a building from the 12th century and no one blinks an eye at it. I visited my friends' apartment, which has an amazing view of an enormous church, and I asked how old it was. No one knew, but they guessed five or six hundred years and shrugged. Everything is old in Italy, they said. I used to think America had old things too, but Italy is redefining the word for me.

Adventures in Washing

Learning to do laundry abroad seems to be a recurring theme in my life. First, there was South Africa where I hauled water from a tap, poured it into a bucket, threw my clothes in, tossed in some powder and swirled things around. Now I'm in Italy, and I have a machine to do all that for me. You'd think it would be easier. You'd be wrong. Yesterday I finally ran out of decent clothes and resolved to try out the washing in my flat. It was quite the adventure.

To begin with, the machine itself is very different from the big American ones I am accustomed to. Instead of just pouring the soap in with the clothes, it goes in a little tray you pull out from the top like a drawer. Alas, the tray is divided into three sections and the laundry soap only goes in one. Which one? Heaven only knows. I drizzled it everywhere. Fabric softener is supposed to go in another, but since the  soap was already everywhere, I figured what the heck? And I drizzled it everywhere on top of the soap. I'm sure you can already tell this is not going well.

I put my clothes in and shut the door. Now I was confronted by a series of buttons and dials, all neatly labelled... in Italian. A language I regrettably still do not speak. Thankfully, some words are easily translated. Delicato I figured was delicate. OK. That setting might not clean anything, but it probably won't ruin anything either. I turned the first dial there and moved on to the next. This one had pictures, but they weren't much help. One was a t-shirt, another was a blouse and then came several variations of a crumpled Santa hat. I gave up immediately and turned the dial to the least crumpled Santa hat. Finally I came to the temperature dial. From my experience in South Africa, I am relatively comfortable with Celsius, so this part didn't give me too much trouble. However the confidence boost was short lived.

There was a big button at the bottom of the control panel that I took to be the start button. I pushed it. Nothing happened. I pushed again. Nothing. Now I know that idiocy is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, but I was so convinced that I was right that I just continued. Push. Nothing. Pound. Nothing. Jam. Nothing. OK. Maybe it was another button. I pressed another one. Again, nothing. This went on for some time, as you can imagine. My frustration grew. Just as I was contemplating hand washing in the sink, I had an idea. Check to make sure the machine was plugged in! Confident that I had solved my problem, great problem solver that I am, I checked. The machine was, in fact, already plugged in. Darn it. But was the power on? I flipped what had at first appeared to be a light switch. It wasn't a light switch at all! I pressed the big power power button and the machine started grumbling immediately.

The cycle seemed to take forever to complete. When it finally finished, the machine was about a foot away from the wall where it had first started. Strange. I opened the door. I was immediately hit by a burst of chemical "freshness". OK. So my clothes smelled clean. Too clean. I took them out. There were still wet, of course. I hung them on the drying rack. Soon the air throughout the flat was perfumed with the scent of ultra-clean clothes. I will use less detergent next time. I will also try to work out which tray to use. That seems to have been my problem. In any case, my clothes eventually dried, but not exactly as I would have liked. My jeans can practically stand up on their own. When I tried folding my dress, it made a distinct crunching noise.

I am chalking the whole experience up as a success because the goal was to clean my clothes, and voila, they are clean. The process just needs some refining. I'll let you know how that goes.