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Notes from my extremely glamorous life.

Having a bit of an urkkkk-cannot-brain-words-what-blaaaah sort of afternoon, which may not be an ideal time to update my blog! But here are some bits and pieces anyway. Next time someone tries to tell me how glamorous it must be, living in Italy, I’ll be pointing them to this post…

I was chatting with Mum the other day, and she said, “You know, even if you got the recipe for your Oma’s Christmas pudding, you’d go bankrupt making it, it’s got so much booze in it.”
I have one word for you Mum: Lidl.

It’s blurry, but that’s a 5.79 euro bottle of brandy. Or possibly brandy-scented hand sanitizer, at the sub-10-euro price point, I’m a bit dubious.
To try and lift the tone from “Zoe’s adventures in low-budget alcohol”, here’s a photo from a few months ago:
Villa La Tesoriera

One of the nice things about Torino is that when you’re in a bad mood and just need to walk mindlessly until you’re ready to be human again, there are plenty of long, straight avenues to choose from. I found myself walking up Corso Francia one late summer’s afternoon, which is how I discovered Villa La Tesoriera, the grounds of which is now a public park. It’s very pretty, and far enough from my placethat by the time I’d reached it I’d managed to walk off whatever was making me grumpy at the time so I could actually enjoy it.
I’m writing this with a hoodie over my cardigan and thick socks on — it’s a bit chilly this afternoon and I haven’t been bothered to put the heating on yet. To be honest, I prefer extra clothes to heating; I’m not sure if it’s that heated air is too dry or if it’s just that I grew up with my parents and their “put a jumper on” ways, and now it’s what I’m used to.(I once walked into the kitchen to see my mum holding her hands above the toaster to warm them up while she was making breakfast — most people would have put a heater on at that point, right? Sometimes I’m never sure what’s normal and what’s my family. At any rate, what’s definitely less “normal” and more “my family” is that I mentioned to Dad the other day that I hadn’t put the heating on yet, and his reply was, So you’re reducing Europe’s dependence on Russian gas exports, good on you.)
I guess the limiting factor in how far into winter I can wait to put the heating on is actually sociability: I can’t really invite people to dinner and say “byo blanket”. But until that becomes an issue…
Actually, I’m wearing thick socks and about a million bandaids, because I bought a pair of Doc Martens last weekend and so far in my attempts to break them in I have broken:
1. a lot of skin,
2. a pair of socks (put a bit hole in one of them),
3. my spirit.
The boots remain as hard as ever.

Also, the one day I tried to wear them out of the house (very prematurely in the breaking-in process!) I had work meetings all day and also had to walk more than I expected, ie, lots of hobbling in front of my colleagues whom I had to keep talking to as if nothing was wrong. Oops.

AT LEAST MY INNER 14-YEAR-OLD THINKS I’M COOL

Maybe I should buy some of the 5.79 euro brandy to drink until I forget how much my feet hurt…?

That time I accidentally moved abroad

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I recently booked some flights back to Australia for Christmas. Inveterate travel cheapskate that I am, I decided to save money by flying Air China, via Beijing. It only adds 10 hours! It’s several hundred euro cheaper! How bad can it possibly be??? That last question is hypothetical, please don’t regale me with stories of how bad it will be.

Anyway, I’ve already done worse. I once flew Perth-New Orleans, via Singapore, London and Chicago. 3 airlines. 40+ hours. Shoving all my stuff into a carry-on so I wouldn’t have to collect bags and possibly miss a transfer. I even got extra security questions at Heathrow due to my weird itinerary.

Also, completely unintentionally, that trip was when I moved overseas.

It started innocently enough. I intended to go to a conference, spend a month in Italy, a few months in Scotland, be home in time for spring. And even that trip was more than I’d really wanted. I’d have been happy to just go to the conference. I’d moved around a bit the previous few years — a couple of 3-month stints overseas, plus changes of housemates and a move within Perth — and I just wanted to stay put for a while. Get some house plants. Give the batch of sourdough starter I’d made a chance to take off.

So when my PhD advisor said he was moving to Scotland and suggested I should also spend a few months there, I was unimpressed. “But I like Perth! I’m writing up, anyway, it’s not like I can’t just work from home if I wanted to. And why does it have to be Scotland, couldn’t you have picked somewhere sunny?”

In the end I’m not as strong-willed as all that, especially not against someone who managed to convince me to start a PhD in the first place because — this is what he said — if I went into industry I might have too much money to know what to do with it, and I’d end up owning investment property. I can’t remember what the arguments were for Scotland, there may not have even been any.

I agreed to some months in Glasgow, a “summer”, if you can call it that in Scotland.

And it was cold, and wet, and for a while there were mushrooms growing in my bathroom, and there was that time the office smelt exactly like a gas leak but it was actually just the drains. And there were the friendliest most sociable colleagues I’ve ever met, and nights spent dying of laughter while drinking whisky in a dark pub, and amazing scenery in the highlands. And I loved it, and with hardly any arm-twisting at all I agreed to stay another 6 months.

Glasgow can be so pretty. Except that this it-will-be-dark-in-10-minutes dusk photo was taken at, like, 3pm. Winter in Scotland sucks.

When that time was up, the obvious thing to do next — as someone who didn’t want to leave Perth, remember? — would be to move home. So of course I took a job in Torino, Italy.

That was 2 and a half years ago, and I will grant that at some point, the move overseas stopped being accidental. You can’t live in a place for 2 years and not notice that you’re not living in your old hometown any more.

This image maybe over-represents how much sunshine and blue skies Torino really gets.

I can’t stay here forever, eventually my work contract will run out. What’s next?

Sometimes I’ve considered just not stopping, keeping on moving every 6-12 months. There’s an entire corner of the Internet full of people who’ve decided to perpetually travel. I can see why. Waking up in a city you’ve never been to before is genuinely exciting. And the possibility to re-invent yourself constantly, always being around new people who don’t need to know about your old hangups or unwanted personality traits or past mistakes — if you squint and hold your head at a funny angle, it looks like redemption.

But inertia has kept me in Torino for a while, and I’m glad it has. Waking up in new places is nice, but so is sleeping in your own bed. And what’s even better than having people not know you were a mess a year ago, is having people know perfectly well what a mess you are right now, and they love you anyway. Which, yes, Captain Obvious, but I’m a slow learner.

So I’d like to settle down somewhere eventually. Where? When? Who knows… I’m not sure I’m ready to move back to Australia just yet, but I suppose I shouldn’t rule out the possibility of doing it by mistake.

On language skills and dried fruit.

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When I first moved to Italy, it used to really bother me that I couldn’t understand the conversations I was overhearing around me. What are all these people talking about? I’m missing out on so much!

And then I went back to Australia for Christmas, where I understood everything going on around me, and I realized the truth. Most of what you overhear, you don’t want to overhear. Those 2 weeks in Perth, I swear about 90% of conversations I overheard were either people making loud phone calls on the bus to reschedule their colonoscopies to work around their urologist’s appointment, or bros telling their gym buddies about the new Paleo-kins diet they were on where you’re only allowed to eat spinach, bacon and protein powder and maaate you just have to try the spinach-bacon protein shakes I make, I’ve been slamming them down, every meal, they’re amazing.

These days, my Italian language skills have improved and while I’m far from fluent, I’m starting to think the level I’m at is somehow optimal. I can usually understand what I hear if I actively listen, but I can still tune out conversations on the bus just by not paying attention — even if someone says something outrageous, I’m not going to pick it up unless I’m listening for it. And my spoken Italian is rubbish, but I’m starting to think that’s for the best… 3 stories to illustrate:

The other night, I’m on the tram, it must have been around 11pm so it’s quiet but not empty. Everyone is minding their own business; two guys get on. One is very obviously drunk, the other is his loyal friend who is really hoping to get him home as quickly as possible, hopefully without too much drama. I make the mistake of listening in. The drunk guy is discussing his girlfriend, who’s dumped him earlier today. How could she?! But whatever, she was no good anyway, he was about to dump her. But how could she?! It’s all her fault anyway. But how could she duuuump meeee? At which point, I’m very glad that a) it was his stop and his friend made him get off, and b) I couldn’t think how to say “Maybe she dumped you because you’re a tedious drunk,” because that would have been mean and probably gotten me into a fistfight.
A few weeks ago, I was cycling to work and pulled up behind another cyclist at a red light. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice something moving. It’s a spider. On seat of his trousers. I did consider trying to say “hey, there’s a spider on your butt!” but I decided against it because it didn’t look like a dangerous spider, and I could just imagine the follow up, “No, really, it’s a very dark coloured spider and you’re wearing light beige trousers and it’s moving around so it was visible in my peripheral vision, I really truly wasn’t checking out your butt while waiting at a red light, really…” So awkward! Not to mention, the only Italian I could think of was less like “butt” and more like “arse” and he’d probably just think I was yelling obscenities at him.
Yesterday, I was at the supermarket buying grapes. This one’s a longer story, because on the face of it, there’s no good reason for me not to have asked one of the other customers, “do you reckon any of these are seedless?” But I was worried they might ask why I was after seedless grapes, and then we’d be in the realm of things that are hard to explain even in your mother tongue.

So the story with the grapes is this. Saturday, I was feeling especially crafty, so I decided to make my own mixed peel (candied peel, if you’re American). Turns out, it’s really easy, I used this recipe and it worked splendidly:

This might end up in a Christmas cake, if I don’t eat it all first.

In this case, success is followed by hubris. What else could I preserve? Glace cherries sprung to mind, but of course I’ve missed the cherry season by several months (next year!). Why not… raisins? So there I was, buying grapes, and refusing to ask for help finding seedless ones because I didn’t want to have to explain, “well I made my own mixed peel even though you can buy it, so now I’m thinking I’ll make my own raisins even though you can buy them and I swear I’m not that sort of person normally.” (It didn’t help that a lot of the how-to-dry-raisins instructions I found on the internet were on Mormon lifestyle blogs. I made sure to buy beer and coffee along with the grapes, to preserve my own self-image.)

Turns out the kilogram of grapes I bought were not seedless. But hubris is followed by madness, so I sat down with my kilo of grapes, and a knife, and I cut every single grape in half and pulled out the seeds. Every. Single. Grape. About halfway through, I checked in with myself:

Self, what will you do if this all fails and you don’t end up with anything resembling raisins and you’ve wasted all this effort?

Well, what else would I be doing on a Sunday night?

So now I have 2 trays of grape halves in a very low oven, maybe they will form something resembling raisins, or at least something close enough that I can soak them in booze and put them in a Christmas cake.

Come on ugly grape ducklings, you can turn into beautiful raisin swans!

Maybe I should spend my Sunday nights on Italian language learning, instead.

Saturday highlights, 23 March 2013

Where's Zoe now?

Living a long way from where I grew up.

Tag Archives: life

Notes from my extremely glamorous life.

That time I accidentally moved abroad

On language skills and dried fruit.

Saturday highlights, 23 March 2013

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