Author Archives: Where's Zoe Now?

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About Where's Zoe Now?

Late-20s Australian working in Italy, blogging about travel+food+daft adventures.

Snow in Giardini Reali, Turin

Getting the hang of winter.

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Way back in October I wrote about autumn here in Torino, so I think a winter post is surely due by now. And I’ve had my laptop open half the afternoon, thinking, come on, you can talk about winter! it’s not that hard! And I’ve made cups of tea, I’ve fetched my doona to wrap around me on the sofa, I’ve kicked the doona off and puttered around the living room, and I haven’t written a word about winter, because I can’t pin down what I think of it.

The light is very pretty but there’s not enough of it, is I think how I would summarize.

Magic light this afternoon.

Magic light this afternoon. The sun was soon behind a building and my living room went dark.

Actually, we’ve had a decent number of clear sunny days in the past few weeks, days that remind me of Perth winters where you can walk on the beach in the sunshine and even push your sleeves up if the wind isn’t strong.

Except that here, even the sunny days are short, and the overcast days are shorter. I love that in late December we get magic afternoon light by 2pm, I just wish we didn’t get nightfall by 5pm.

Because the problem I haven’t solved yet is how to get myself to go out and do things once it does get cold and dark, which means that 7pm has found me with my doona on the sofa more often than I’d like. Do I go straight from work so I can’t stop at the sofa? Make more effort to organize social events I can’t skip? I did get myself out the door and power-walking down Corso Regina the other night after I’d read something that made me too cross to stay sitting down, but I’m not sure the exercise gains are enough to counter the emotional cost of “read poorly-argued things you disagree with” as a strategy.

But then — thinking out loud here — do I want to go out more? Maybe it’s wise to have a season where I’m not active, where I can’t pretend that I’m a Busy Important Person who is busy Doing Important Things, where I recognize that no matter how much I do in my life my achievements aren’t going to last very long. On an overcast day, everything seems grey and same-y, until I start to look closely at what’s in front of me, to see shape and pattern and texture and muted colour differences. Maybe I need to take winter as a reminder to pay attention to the quieter parts of my life.

So I’m not sure yet what I think about winter, but I’m starting to think it has something to teach me.

Oh yeah, and snow. Still don't quite have the hang of living with that.

Oh yeah, and snow. Still don’t quite have the hang of living with that, even when it’s barely there.

Snow in Giardini Reali

More notes from my extremely glamorous life.

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Spent a good chunk of the week moping around with a mild flu — I’m much better now — so  this week’s post won’t exactly be a tale of great adventure. Even my fever dreams are boring: I was convinced at one point that the way I lay in bed had to be somehow “like a bowl of pasta” and I still don’t know what that was supposed to mean. Answers on a postcard.

  • It snowed here on Thursday night:
    Ooh pretty.

    Ooh pretty.

    Actually, it barely snowed at all and Friday turned out to be quite a warm sunny day, but I only realized this a fair while after I’d looked out my window in the morning, said, “woah, snow!” and put on warm clothes. Which were far too warm for my office which gets strong afternoon sun. Oops.

  • Inspired by “Texts from the Dashwoods“, I re-read Sense and Sensibility. I think Sense and Sensibility is actually my favourite Jane Austen novel, partly because it’s the only one in which I really want the main couple to get together. Probably because in the others I get a strong vibe of “oh well I have to marry someone and this guy isn’t actively terrible unlike every other man in my social circle” from the heroines. As noted previously, I’m not very romantic.
  • Further evidence of unromanticism: Even though I wanted Edward and Elinor to get together, I’d also have been satisfied with them each marrying other people due to circumstances but still enjoying a lifelong friendship where “we used to fancy each other” was in the past. Or just, in general, a novel — any era and genre — that features a friendship between a man and a woman without romance being on the agenda. Any suggestions? (Besides Elinor & Colonel Brandon in S&S, obviously. But something along those lines.)
  • I also re-watched The Castle which is a delightful movie. Recap for UnAustralians: it’s a comedy about a family who nearly have their home seized under compulsory acquisition, which sounds like an odd topic for a comedy — ok, it is an odd topic for a comedy — but it works. Mostly because the dialogue is perfect: (images stolen from Buzzfeed)
    anigif_enhanced-25547-1390979979-1anigif_original-grid-image-13476-1390980030-3anigif_enhanced-32068-1390980063-9anigif_original-grid-image-20158-1390980105-9It’s nearly 20 years old, as you might guess from the images above… but I think it holds up.

So now I’m off to see if my bedsheets are dry yet — laundry in winter is no fun. Maybe next week I’ll do something less boring?

22 hours in Beijing: long enough to know I want to go back.

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The day I booked my Christmas vacation flights to/from Perth I wrote in my diary:

So. I got distracted by airfare search engines and now I have a ticket with Air China, […] Singapore-Milan via 22 hours in Beijing. In January. When the smog is worst and it can be -20 [Celcius]. I can’t say “What was I thinking??” because I know exactly what I was thinking: This will make a great story.

Those facts about the pollution and weather? I looked them up after making the non-refundable booking. To give myself credit, I did look into visa requirements before putting down the money, but that was as far as I got because as soon as I discovered China offers visa-free entry for up to 72 hours as long as you enter, leave and stay in the same city, I was hitting the “buy now” button.

I think I see why some of my friends think I’m an impulsive traveller.

But I am also an obsessive researcher, even if I don’t always get the “do research”  and “book tickets” steps in the right order. Soon I was down a rabbit hole of travel forum posts with titles like “how bad is Beijing air in winter?” and answers ranging from “wouldn’t want to live there as an asthmatic but otherwise ok” through to “you’ll get lung cancer the minute you step off the plane”. There was also a lot of talk of exceedingly low temperatures, icy winds, and un-heated accomodations. Oh, and stories of getting lost and having no way to even read street signs. A stopover in Beijing might make a great story, but I did wonder if the story would be “The time I nearly died of frostbite while searching for someone who could tell me where my hostel was, ps: I now have black lung.”

So I was apprehensive as I got on my flight from Singapore to Beijing. What if my clothing wasn’t warm enough? What if I’d misunderstood the visa rules and couldn’t leave the airport? What if I lost the vital piece of paper with the address of my hostel written in Chinese characters?

Well, score 1 for Team Impulsive Ticket Buying, because I had a great time.

Things started looking good as soon as I landed and I realized how fortunate I was with the weather. It was a sunny winter mid-afternoon, a gentle breeze, and the infamous pollution looked remarkably similar to the haze you get in many Italian cities 1. I’m sure it’s not always like this, but I was thankful it was.

I was concious of my limited time, so my main priority was Eat All the Food, while fitting in as much sightseeing as I could around this primary goal. So my first move, once I’d dropped off my stuff at my hostel, was to get some dinner. At the night market at Wanfujing, I decided against fried scorpions on a stick in favour of the more Australian-palate-friendly grilled lamb (also on a stick). Tasty and with just the right amount of chili powder for a cold night.

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Porta Palazzo needs an entrance like this.

I was pretty full after the lamb, but the market was warmer than the surrounding streets due to all the cooking going on, so I hung around and had a yoghurt drink and the most delicious savoury pancake I’ve ever eaten — like this, but the guy in the market was much more skilled than the guy in the video. I also considered some dumplings, but I just couldn’t make room, so I decided to leave that for the next day.

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Most of my photos turned out like this — I blame grease in the air from all the frying going on.

As well as the outdoor food stalls, there were indoor stalls with tables set up like a food court, and other stalls selling mostly souvenirs, the sort of knick knacks that look so enticing when piled up together but which you know would look sad and tacky sitting by themselves in your house. Quite a few stalls had speakers with loud Chinese pop music going, which added to the atmosphere. No serious fine dining here, but it was great fun.

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More decoration ideas for Porta Palazzo.

Normally I’m a homebody when I travel and after dinner I go straight back to my room to read a novel or putter about on facebook, but the clock was ticking on my stopover so I pushed myself to stay out. I headed to Tiananmen Square for a post-dinner stroll under the watchful gaze of Mao’s portrait, a handful of guards, and a whole heap of cctv cammeras. After the cheery busyness of the market, the huge concrete square, nearly empty but still noisy from traffic on the road running through it, was quite the contrast. I didn’t stay long.

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Mao and guard.

The next morning I had to make some hard choices about what to do with the hours left to me. Beijing is huge (understatement!) and there are so many amazing options. I decided on the Temple of Heaven park, which I went to as soon as I got up. I am obviously a decadent westerner because I was all rugged up against a chilly morning and considering finding somewhere indoors to go instead; meanwhile the locals were out doing tai chi and playing badminton and hackey sack. Like in the market the night before, there was plenty of loud music and the atmosphere was sociable.

Those are actual adults playing hackey sack. Good thing we didn't know in highschool that our activity of choice was shared by middle-aged Chinese women.

Those are actual adults playing hackey sack. Good thing we didn’t know in highschool that our activity of choice was shared by middle-aged Chinese women.

The main tourist draw of the park are its temples, which are beautiful:

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Nice work, architects.

I wish I could tell you more about them but I only had a quick look around one of the complexes before heading back to the subway, because I was on a misison for dumplings. (I think dumplings are a legitimate excuse for failing at blogging, yes?) Lonely Planet recommends Dūyīchù and I’d say that’s a fair call. It’s well set up for tourists with a picture/English menu available, but importantly, the dumplings are delicious. They made for a great end to a great trip, which was far too short. I have got to do this again some time.

Finally, I can’t not mention the giant festive tree near Qianmen subway stop, which clearly calls for a “Who wore it better”-style contest between Beijing and Turin:

who_better

Points off for Turin for only being colourful while lit up at night.

Practical info for future reference: When I went through immigration, every line was long and slow except the 72-hour visa-free desk which had no queue at all. Score! Make sure you have info on both your arrival and onward flights. From Beijing airport, the Airport Express takes about 30 mins to get to Dongzhimen subway station and costs ¥25. From there, the subway is a great way to get around — clean, cheap (around ¥3 for a single trip) and has plenty of English signage, including all station names. I stayed at the Peking Yard Hostel, cost was ¥80 for a dorm bed (plus ¥100 refundable deposit) and I would stay there again.

I ran into some problems getting cash because my Italian card isn’t very international-atm-friendly and I didn’t have the PIN for my Australian card at the time, but I did eventually manage to use my Italian bank card at an ICBC atm. You definitely need cash to get around.

[1] Not sure “it looks like Milan!” is a good thing to say about a city’s air quality, and how it looks probably isn’t much of an indication of how toxic it is, anyway. But for a very short visit, it was easy to deal with.

Mandurah foreshore, Australia

Continuing the great Aussie road trip tradition. Also, a jigsaw puzzle museum.

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Taking a road trip has become something of a Christmas/New Year in Perth tradition for me. Never anything too ambitious, just get together with friends, pick a spot a few hours away where we can stay cheaply, pack a car, and get out of town for a couple of days.

I think the low-key expectations are important here. It’s easy to imagine some kind of movie scene, with the open road, perfect weather, background music exactly matched to the emotional tone of our conversations. Of course, the actual experience is more like mad traffic on the freeway, stonking hot weather and a broken car stereo.

Or, in the case of 2013’s trip, a 5-hour BONUS PICNIC STOP when we broke down 10 km from the nearest town and about 150 km from the nearest tow-truck operator open December 30th. Fortunately, we had a shady spot to wait on the side of the road, an esky full of food, and the people in the house up the hill brought us cool drinks and made sure we were ok. Unfortunately, there was some kind of decomposing animal in the gully just behind us and every time the wind came from the north, we got a good whiff of it. Also, by the 2 hour mark we’d exhausted most of the possibilities of “I spy” and couldn’t think of any other games. (“I spy” only made it to the 2 hour mark because “star picket” took a very long time, since there was only one of them visible in the whole area and it was halfway behind a tree.)

RIP, B.'s mazda :( You were great until your head gasket blew and cost too much to repair.

Turns out cars need functioning head gaskets to go anywhere.

This year, between “I’ve been there twice in the past 6 months” considerations, “I don’t want to drive that far” considerations and “I don’t want to camp but we need to stay cheap” considerations and the general unavailability of places that met those contraints, we wound up staying in a cottage on a property not far from where last year’s breakdown happened. Fortunately, Donnybrook is much nicer if you’re staying there deliberately.

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Our digs. 5000% better than sitting on the side of the road.

In fact, we seemed to avoid mishaps entirely. The biggest problem we encountered was that at our designated leaving time I was still at the bank trying to sort out access to my money. My card had been reissued 6 months prior and because I’d never used the new PIN, I’d forgotten it. And then they wouldn’t let me change the PIN in person, I had to get them to mail a new one to me. Which they did, except to my Italian address. Let’s just say my bank genuinely tries to have good customer service and I would recommend them to anyone based in Australia, but they are not set up for expats.

In the end I borrowed some money from my parents (want to feel decades younger? hit up your parents for cash) and we were off. And the late start gave us an excuse to stop for lunch in Mandurah, which has an unreasonably nice foreshore. (Am I allowed to say that if I’m from Perth?)

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Too bad no-one can afford to buy property here any more.

Once we arrived, a lot of our time was spent hanging around playing cards and admiring the local wildlife. By which I mean my friend A. — who is very much a city person — valiantly survived her fears about the numerous spiders, moths, large ants and small lizards to be found in rural Australia. We did also see a kangaroo. This did not make up for the other animals.

But a road trip isn’t a road trip without some oddball attractions, so the next day we went out for lunch (and some post-lunch cider tasting) and then wound up in the Bridgetown Jigsaw Puzzle Museum.

Worth it for the carpet alone.

Worth it for the carpet alone.

Those pictures on the walls? Are all jigsaw puzzles.

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One of the less intricate ones.

Look, I’m not saying you should travel all the way to Australia to visit the Bridgetown Jigsaw Puzzle Museum, but I am going to point out that it’s entry by donation and it kept us occupied for far longer than you’d expect. Which is more or less the opposite of most world-famous museums, where you pony up 15 euro and get bored after 20 minutes. Just saying.

On our drive back to Perth the next day we detoured to the coast at Busselton, a town with an amazing beach and an amazing lack of a good route into/out of town. Well, it’s probably fine most days, but none of the roads are designed to take a lot of traffic and on New Year’s Eve it seemed everyone in the south west wanted to be in Busso. We got stuck in the only traffic jam of our trip, complete with people driving on the footpath to get into the turning lane (WHO EVEN DOES THAT?), but it was worth it for this:

Good spot for lunch on New Year's Eve.

Look I know there’s only, like, 5 people on this entire beach but there really was a traffic jam to get there. Australian beaches are just magically empty.

Aw yes.

Practical info for future reference: We stayed here and would definitely recommend it as a quiet getaway spot. (Power comes from solar only, so be prepared to go low-tech!) Beds were comfy and the kitchen was well-equipped. Also, a road trip tip from my sister: if your car has a cd player, whenever you’re at an opshop (thrift store/charity shop), keep an eye out for 90’s hits going super cheap. No road trip can’t be improved by Backstreet Boys.

Les Miserables ticket

Les Miserables at the Crown Theatre: Review

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I’ve been wracking my brains and I honestly think this is the first musical I’ve ever seen live. Heck, I think the last time I went to the theatre might have been a highschool excursion. I know I’ve seen a couple of operas in my life — Madame Butterfly in a free concert on the Perth foreshore several years ago, and another I can’t remember anything about except that it was in an actual theatre. (Maybe I dreamed it?) At any rate, I am in no way qualified to say anything about the show. But lack of qualifications never stopped me from blogging…

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I did actually buy a ticket and not sneak in. Which is a pity, because sneaking in would have made a better story for the blog.

The short version of this review is: So! Much! Fun! If you’re in Perth and were wondering if you should get tickets, then this non musical theatre person says, do it. Well, I imagine tickets are sold out by now. But you should have done it. The singing and orchestra were very good, the set was cool, it was worth seeing just for the innkeeper’s wife. 100% serious, I would pay money to see a musical that’s just the innkeeper and his wife getting up to shenanigans.

My biggest annoyance was that the woman playing Cosette simply couldn’t act. Which is awkward when she’s a central character.

Of course, she’s not helped by the plot, which has her and Marius seeing each other for the first time and then 1 minute later singing a bunch of ridiculous songs about how in love they are. Unromantic grumps that we are, my friend B. and I giggled through that entire section. Can people really fall in love so fast? sings Cosette. Nah love, that’s just your hormones.

And can I add: Poor Eponine. If, like I was until recently, you’re unfamiliar with the story: Eponine is in a love triangle with Marius and Cosette and apparently the only way for this to be resolved is for her to die. I mean, death is probably better than being stuck with that drip Marius, but still. Add to my musical theatre wishlist: a musical in which Eponine tells Marius to go jump in a lake and then goes on to lead the student rebellion to glorious victory. Again, 100% serious that I would pay money to see this.

In summary, I would give this 5 stars if it were a completely different musical (get writing, musical theatre people!) and/or if Cosette could act well enough for me to care about her. So I guess 4 stars it is.

Finally, I promise I will never shoe-blog ever again, but I have to show these off. Going to the theatre gave me the chance to wear these for about the 3rd time in 3 years, but considering I got them for $10 from the opshop, the cost per wear is pretty decent.

Much more walkable than you'd think.

Much more walkable than you’d think.

Postcard from Dusseldorf

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Old town skyline.
As mentioned before — sheep!
I was so warm at this point I had my coat unzipped.
There are 9 statues in this series, scattered throughout Dusseldorf.
Looking across to the fancy riverside houses.
Slightly scary animatronic Christmas toy display in a department store window.
Christmas decorations.

Boxing day, I woke up early in Munich to hop on a plane to Dusseldorf. I had a 10-hour stopover there before flying to Beijing, Singapore, then Perth. Fortunately, even though I was a bit bleary from an early start, Dusseldorf is a lovely city to spend a day and the weather worked in my favour — unlike Munich, it wasn’t snowing there that day, and was even sunny for a while.

The day made a relaxing break between a fun but hectic Christmas with family and a long flight. I spent most of the day down at the river, walking around to try and offset the upcoming hours of sitting on planes. Though I made sure to get in some gluehwein, too!

PS: More postcards from…

Practical details for future reference: Dusseldorf airport has a left-luggage facility which is open from 5 am – 11 pm and is staffed (!) so I — rightly or wrongly — felt safe leaving all my luggage there, including my laptop, and went around town with just my wallet and phone. This made for a much nicer day than I was expecting since I didn’t have a heavy bag. The office is in carpark P3 and is signposted quite well. Cost was 3.50 euro/day.

You can either get the S-bahn into town every half hour from a stop right at the airport, or take the skytrain to the main airport train station and get a regular train into town — these seem to run more frequently. The train trip takes <10 minutes either way and costs 2.50 euro.

12 100% fun, 100% self-improvement-free things to do in 2015

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Good spot for lunch on New Year's Eve.

Good spot for lunch on New Year’s Eve.

I’m no better than anyone else at keeping new years resolutions.

But I’m a compulsive list-maker and I can’t quite handle the thought of entering the new year without making some kind of list of things to do. So I made a list of fun things to do in 2015.

There’s 12 of them so I have around 1 per month which is about how often I say I’m bored, everything is boring, there’s nothing to doooooo. I’ve listed them here for future reference, but this is absolutely not a checklist, they’re in no particular order, and I don’t intend any self-improvement.

  1. See a musical. (This one is cheating because I have tickets to see Les Miserables with friends next week.) (done!)
  2. Bake bread.
  3. Walk some more of the Via Francigena.
  4. Go to Barcelona for a weekend.
  5. Go swimming. (done!)
  6. Get some photos printed and make an actual physical off-my-harddrive display of them.
  7. Host a dinner party.
  8. Go to the mountains (for winter sports or hiking or drinking hot chocolate; I’ll leave that open). (does Como count, even if it’s in hills rather than mountains?)
  9. Knit a hat.
  10. Make and listen to a playlist of all the ridiculous 90s pop music I haven’t heard for years.
  11. Go to the cinema. (This is non-trivial in a city with only one cinema that regularly shows original sound movies.)
  12. Visit the Museo Pietro Micca, which is apparently very cool and somehow I still haven’t been there. (done!)

Happy New Year everyone!

Perth, Australia, from the air

Coming and going and the annual Perth trip.

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I’m writing this from Perth, where a cloudless day has turned into a breezy summer’s evening. I’m listening to the neighbour’s windchimes and the rustle of leaves. I’ve traded my winter coat and thick socks for a tshirt and skirt. This morning, I did a load of laundry and it dried within an hour or two of me hanging it outside. Earlier this evening I sat around with my family drinking Spritz Aperol.

Sorry (not sorry) to my Northern Hemisphere readers for telling you all this.

A hastily-taken plane window shot -- it gives the general impression at least.

A hastily-taken plane window shot — it gives the general impression at least.

I always find landing in Perth a surreal experience. I’m sure it’s partly the sleep deprivation — this year, I had Christmas in Munich with extended family which was super-fun but not sleep-conducive, then a day-long stopover in Dusseldorf on Boxing Day (more on that in another post), then Dusseldorf-Beijing-Singapore-Perth1.

Perth doesn't have sheep grazing on the banks of its river. Dusseldorf does.

Perth doesn’t have sheep grazing on the banks of its river. Dusseldorf does.

But landing in Perth is also weird because it has become something that marks the turning of the year, a point where time folds in on itself. Every year, I have a head-spinning moment of wondering if I’d ever really been away or if my life is Perth in late December/early January and everything else is a dream.

Yes ok, the sleep deprivation definitely contributes to the literal dizziness of that feeling. But the annual cycle is real. Except it’s not quite a cycle. People have gone on living a year here while I’ve been living a year elsewhere. Friendships evolve. Places change. New buildings go up, others get knocked down. And even after living in Perth for years and years, and visiting regularly, there are still things I notice for the first time when I arrive again. This time, it was the smell. A warm dirt and eucalyptus smell, a smell which I instantly recognized as “Perth smell” even if I’d never realized it before.

So for now, this coming and going is part of my life. I like it, even if it does make things more complicated. Like the immigration entry form. I am yet to decide whether I’m a “visitor from overseas, country of residence: Italy” or an “Australian returning to Australia”. Can I be both?

[1] Pro-tip for anyone attempting a similarly stupid-but-cheap itinerary: in Beijing, you have to line up to get your passport stamped even if you’re transferring from one international flight to another and don’t leave the airport. It’s a long queue, maybe have a snack on hand? But don’t get caught out like the people ahead of me in line did — they got almost to the front of the hour-long queue before they discovered that since their connecting flight had a stopover in Shanghai, it was actually a domestic flight and they had to go to a completely different desk to get a Chinese entry stamp.

How to pack light for Christmas holidays

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Normally I have a really easy time of this — I fly directly to Australia so I just throw a bunch of tshirts and a few pairs of shorts in a bag (clean or dirty, doesn’t matter, I can always wash them when I arrive at my parent’s place) and bam. This year, I’m heading to Germany tomorrow for Christmas and flying from there to Australia on the weekend. This raises the difficulty level enough that I need a step-by-step guide.

Step 0: Be overambitious. Carry-on only! A smaller backpack than anyone would think reasonable for 3 weeks! Bring the laptop even though it’s bulky!

[Actually, this year I’m skimping on step 0, since I finally replaced my ratty old 35-litre tear-shaped (ie: useless-shaped) backpack with a shiny new 40-litre bag that’s good and rectangular. I refuse to be drawn into a discussion of whether I should have replaced the old bag 3 years ago, when it had almost a full pint of beer spilt on it in a pub in Glasgow, or even 2 years ago when it started shedding its plastic lining all over everything I put in it.]

Shiny new beer-free backpack.

Shiny new beer-free backpack.

Step 1: “This will be easy.” You just need to substitute warm clothes for some of the tshirts, right? Start making a pile of clothes on the bed.

Step 2: Look at pile of clothes on the bed. It’s such a small pile! Add some more clothes.

Step 3: Put clothes in bag. Awesome, they all fit! You are the queen of minimalist packing!

Step 4: Oh yeah, your laptop needs to go in there. And the power adapter. And your journal. And a book to read on the train tomorrow. And some snacks. And shoes.

Step 5: Pull clothes out of bag. Start putting other things in. Ditch some tshirts.

Step 6: Repeat steps 3-5 a few times. Consider the fact that you have a Bachelors degree in mathematics but are unable to work out if a collection of items will fit in a bag without actually putting them in there to find out. Maybe this is why you’re now a physicist.

Step 7: Procrastinate! Make dinner. Clean the apartment. This is a vital step since procrasti-cooking and procrasti-cleaning are your primary means of eating a nutritious diet and not living in squalor.

Step 8: Try to find ways to leave things out. Maybe if you stay up all night reading the book you were going to read on the train, you can sleep on the train tomorrow and leave the book at home? Realize this will save you a small paperback’s worth of space and will make you miserable. This is barely enough to dissuade you.

Step 9: Success??! You have a bag, it has stuff in it. Time to pull your laptop back out and write a blog post about this. Maybe with an insufferably smug title that positions you as some sort of expert, like “How to pack light for Christmas holidays”.

Step 10: Realize you haven’t packed any toiletries. Packing is the worst.

Dinner flash mob in Turin

3 things I’ve learned in Italy

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Before I moved to Italy, I imagined that after a couple of years, I’d be fluent in the language (ha!), I’d have learned to cook lots of amazing dishes (I had takeaway pizza for tea tonight), I’d understand Italian politics (ehhhh… maybe it’s beyond understanding?) and I’d be riding around on a Vespa (obviously I’d never seen traffic here).

But I’m not completely wasting my time, and here are three things I’ve learned:

1. How to appreciate traditional food.

Not always, I admit. My pizza this evening was from the place downstairs from me that is run by a Chinese family and sells pizza and Chinese food. (An obvious combination, right?) Definitely not generations of a family from Naples, each son learning from his father how to prove the dough and mix the tomato paste.

But I think it’s fair to say that in Italy, “This is just how my grandmother made it!” is high praise for food. I’m only exaggerating a bit when I say that food from the next town over is crazy foreign food that you might eat once a year at a food festival. There are special foods for not just Christmas and Easter but a whole bunch of saints days, as well as the seasons, and the idea of eating something at the wrong time of year is inconceivable.

Traditional doesn't mean "no fun" - this was a dinner-eating flash mob back in summer.

Traditional doesn’t mean “no fun” – this was a dinner-eating flash mob where everyone wore white, that I happend across back in summer.

All of which is quite novel for me. I’ve never quite worked out how to answer, “What dishes are typical to where you grew up?” which in Italy is a perfectly good get-to-know-you question, but in Australia makes no sense. And when I go back to Australia, I love that there are Mexican and Indonesian and Vietnamese and Thai restaurants all within walking distance of my parent’s place. But I’ve become quite taken by the idea of having a well-defined cuisine, that you’ve cooked and eaten so long that you understand it perfectly.

(Note that I’ve learned to like this idea, sadly I’m a long way off from being able to cook…)

2. How to interact with small children.

Confession time: I’m not naturally a children person.

If you’re a friend of mine and you have kids: your children are wonderful and I legitimately like them.

But I have a hard time thinking of anything to say to people about their babies other than, “yup, that sure is a baby.” Toddlers mostly remind me of tiny drunk people. Supposedly if you’re a woman, your hormones are meant to make you want babies. All my hormones have ever made me want is carbohydrates.

Before I moved to Italy, I mostly just ignored children, which is easy enough to do; they’re generally pretty low to the ground. But I got here, and everyone is nuts about kids. People strike up conversations with toddlers in the supermarket. Teenage boys (!) coo at babies on the bus. No-one has a problem with kids being around, even in museums and restaurants.

So I suddenly found myself in this environment where interacting with peoples’ kids is just a thing you do, like greeting shopkeepers or using your umbrella if it’s even a tiny bit rainy. And it turns out it’s a skill you can develop. (Unlike the umbrella usage, which I’ve never got the hang of. Holding an umbrella up takes effort, why bother when it’s just drizzly?)

Also, toddlers really are like tiny drunk people: you can keep them entertained with the stupidest things and you’ll get bored long before they do.

3. How to wait.

I got a good lesson in this one earlier this week. I’d received a bill for garbage collection services, and Tuesday, the day before it was due I went to the post office to pay it. I would have gone earlier, but the week before, I didn’t get around to it, and the Monday was a public holiday.

Turns out, everyone in Torino got the bill at the same time. And it’s payable only at the post office.

So I get to the post office, and I’ve got ticket number 190. They’re currently serving number 103. At a rate of about 1 per minute.

Yes, I really did spend 90 minutes waiting to spend 1 minute paying a bill.

I won’t say I enjoyed the experience, but it certainly taught me patience.