Living a Dream

Here's a slice of life from our time here in Milan: Anytime you walk down the street and see something and your first thought is "wait, that can't be..." you're wrong. It can, and it probably is. Lots of things happen in day-to-day life in cities that defy logic, but Milan is leading the charge and blowing four years in Chicago out of the water. Allow me to give you some examples. Wait, is that car parked on the sidewalk? Yes it is. Not only is it parked on the sidewalk, it's actually parked beside another car that's parallel parked a full four feet from the curb. Wait, is that guy smoking a joint as he walks past an elementary school? Yes he is. This happened in front of me last night on my way home from work. He was in his 40s or 50s and looked relatively put-together, so this wasn't a homeless man who had no respect for anything. Just a dude smokin a joint. Wait, does that person have a dog-poo bag in their pocket and they're just leavin...

As I mentioned last time, people have asked me/us a lot of questions about living in Italy. Usually these questions are about the food and about our classes and we occasionally answer them. But living here is making us come up with questions of our own, and I'd like to share with you a few of them. Partly because they're interesting thoughts, partly because they contain a little more information about what it's like to live here in Milano. 1) What's going on with the opening hours of businesses? Several businesses - usually consumer-industry things like restaurants and small grocery stores - are known to close for an hour or two in the afternoon. It makes perfect sense with restaurants, as very few people will come in and do a meal between 3:00 and 5:00, but it seems a little stranger with markets to me. But there's more to this: There is a cafe around the corner from my house that is seemingly open all the time. It has been opened at 6:00 a.m. Saturday when we...

When we first arrived in Italy, lots of people had questions about what was different. How are the people? How is the food? How is the language barrier? How is public transportation? How do you get around? Is it expensive? What's the best part? What's the worst part? And so on and so on (although most of you ask about the food and then everything else). All of those have probably been answered in previous posts, and if they haven't, sorry. Ask me again and maybe I'll answer. I experienced a very different sort of culture shock last week, and I want to talk about it. One of the more upsetting news stories of the new year was the Charlie Hedbo attack, which I won't heavily detail here. In short, they do satire, pissed off some extremists, and those extremists murdered a dozen people in the magazine's office. I believe this happened last Wednesday. The reason it stands out as Wednesday is this. I had a lesson Wednesday night with a couple of kids, aged 7 an...

One thing that seems to be a true worldwide phenomenon is the realization that my last name is used on New Year's Eve signs around the globe. At first I felt slighted, as if someone were cheapening the worth of my last name. In more recent years I've taken is as a weird sort of compliment and even occasionally tried to make it into a pseudo-attention-getting thing if I'm feeling very "look at me" on a particular day. But that's not what I'm supposed to tell you about because that's boring. What's not boring is that most of the big cities around the world do big exciting fireworks displays and celebrations that stretch way beyond a ball dropping down a pole and standing in a crowd of 500,000 people for nine hours. In short, New Year's in the states generally blows. In the northern US you either go overpay by insane amounts to go to a bar and then wait for three hours for a cab back home or you go to a friend's house and it's...fine. ...

I'm talking about little things, and you've all heard this before. Not just the little things spoken of by the greatest assortment of musical talent ever , nor the little things spoken of by the most accessibly human gangsters you've ever seen, or even the little things from the song by Bush. I'm talking about actual little things to do for people that make a difference to them. See, it's very easy to make a comment to someone or to give a little something that reminded you of someone, and it's even easier to receive such things. About a week ago, Jenna and I were out for a walk in the evening, conversing (as we do) in English. We passed an older man by himself who suddenly burst out in struggled-English with "Have a good....! Uhh! Aaahh! Happy Holidays!" We laughed and thanked him and returned the well-wishes. Our best guess is that this guy heard us speaking English and got excited because he knew a few things and how to say them, and amid h...

Things *are* different here. I give up. I won't go on pretending that everything is the same (I will, however, go on pretending that my last post wasn't about how things are different here). I do want to focus on one particularly curious area though, and that is the lovable supermarket. For you older stateside readers, you've been hearing about European-style supermarkets for years and years. There might have been one or two in your entire metropolitan area as of 15-20 years ago, but they're growing in number in the US of A. Aldi is the most notable one, and they're doing booming business (there are probably statistics to back this up, but I'll pass on them) in lots of big cities where people want cheap food options. Yes, you have to pay for bags. No, carts aren't an option. Yes, you bag your own groceries. These are some of the smallish quirks of the European grocery store. It's really very simple and they're almost indistinguishable from their ...

People have asked several times what it's currently like to live in Milan, and there are several answers I can give. Instead of answering them like a normal person (i.e. when people ask), I've been ignoring most of you for three solid months and will now unleash a brief and incomplete list of things that "define" what it's like to currently live in Milan. 1) Remember that scene in Beverly Hills Cop when Axel starts laughing at the two guys who walk past in their Michael Jackson jackets? It's like that. People all hear that Milan is a bigtime fashion city, and in a lot of cases it really doesn't matter. But nearly every day I will see someone who looks so ridiculous that I stifle laughter. There are lots of outfits that scream "prostitute" in America that apparently scream "I fit in" in Milan. It takes some getting used to. Also, saggy-butt parachute-style pants are honestly a thing over here. Young males wear them and don't see...