Tag Archives: living abroad

Notes from my extremely glamorous life, It’s Nearly Christmas edition

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I keep getting “It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas” stuck in my head, except that line is literally the only line in the song that I know, and I’m not entirely sure of the melody.

 

I’m in Perth now. Overheard a guy telling his mates as I got off the plane yesterday, “It’s 38 degrees outside they reckon, if I were youse I’d take my jumper off now.” I can’t decide whether the heat is making it feel like Christmas. Certainly, the winter made it feel like Advent back in Torino, which it never used to. Am I shifting my cultural expectations? But I still can’t imagine it feeling properly like Christmas in the cold and dark.

 

You can tell I grew up Anglican because I think it’s perfectly reasonable to listen to an Advent carol that exhorts people to rejoice in a minor key, which, how is that even supposed to work?

 

 

Found myself in charge of decorations for a Christmas dinner last week. This is an odd choice of job for someone who used to live in a sharehouse where we celebrated Christmas by taking turns to wear the grinch hat — a Santa hat but black instead of red, and with “Bah Humbug” printed on the rim — and complain about the festive season.

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Totally buying myself one for next Christmas.

“Whatever, I’ll just buy some cheap tinsel, throw it around the room, call it done.”  Well, I’m sure somewhere in Turin sells tinsel, but I still haven’t worked out where it is. We ended up with bunting. Which, in the end, why not? It’s festive. At least I didn’t buy the bunting that said “happy birthday”.

Meanwhile, A. and A. thought the lack of a Christmas tree was too much, and painstakingly taped ribon to the walls in the shape of a tree. With branches. And a star on top. Yup, they’re getting the “organize decorations” job next year.

I decided to play up my Antipodean-ness (Antipodeanity?) and made a pavlova for that Christmas party. I am a terrible blogger and didn’t take a photo of it, but you’ll have to believe me that it was a popular success, and not just because there was only one other person there who knew how pavlova “should” be.

Feeling flushed with success, I made another pavlova today to take to a party tonight. I can hear the meringue base cracking under the weight of the cream and fruit. I’m 90% certain it will be served up as Eton Mess. Bad blogger or not, I’m not taking a photo of this one, either.

And that is why sensible people stick to Christmas desserts that don’t have engineering considerations.

Apparently I do nothing with my free time but eat. I see nothing wrong with that.

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My clothing choices the past couple of days have been determined entirely by “what options do I have that involve elastic waistbands”. Probably because since Thursday, I’ve done nothing but eat…

  • Thanksgiving. In this case, a Friendsgiving, or more accurately, a Bring-A-Friendsgiving, which ended up being 30 people. I have no idea how anyone puts on dinner for 30 people. I say this even after being a last-minute rope-in kitchen hand and seeing the process in person. In fact, I think I have even less of an idea now than I did before. As far as I can tell, it involves some awe-inspiring advance preparation, a great deal of teamwork on the night, and probably some miracles. (And, let’s face it, a good bit of running around like a headless chook.)
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    So. Much. Apple pie.

    Somehow in between all the running around, I managed to eat a vast quantity of turkey and stuffing and green bean casserole (green bean casserole 4EVA) and sweet potato casserole and apple pie and pumpkin pie. And then took leftovers home for Friday. Yessssss.

  • Bicerin for Saturday lunch. Bicerin is a traditional Torinese hot drink that borders on a dessert: a layer of espresso under a layer of thick drinking chocolate under a layer of cream. Traditionally, you don’t stir these layers together and the drink evolves as you go along, going from the milky top layer to the slightly sweet chocolate layer to the final kick of the espresso. It’s rich and warming and perfect for late November, but there’s probably a reason most people wouldn’t consider it to be a lunch in itself. I REGRET NOTHING.
  • Bagna Cauda. The Piedmontese dish you either love or you hate — the divisiveness coming from the fact that it’s a sauce made of garlic and anchovies, served with raw vegetables. I’m on team “love it”. 

    It’s a very traditional dish, so much so that the regional government of Piedmont has an info sheet about it (in Italian). The vegetable choices are also dictated by tradition, and it turns out that if you’re in a vegetable market holding a bag of celery and a bag of cardi and you’re buying a bag of jerusalem artichokes, the stallholder will chuckle and say, “I see you’re making bagna cauda.”

    In case you’re thinking Garlic and raw vegetables sounds healthy, I will also point out that we had five different desserts, which is my favourite side-effect of going to a group dinner with people who all feel they ought to bring something to share.

    (This weekend I learned the English for cardi is “cardoons”, but I refuse to believe that’s a real word and will continue borrowing the Italian. I know I have rolled my eyes in the past at people who insist on borrowing words when English ones exist, but come on. “Cardoon”?)

Sheep in Parco Coletta, Turin

Notes from my extremely glamorous life

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  • I went for a walk yesterday afternoon, along the Dora up to Parco Colletta. The sheep are out grazing there at the moment. Apparently there’s an arrangement where local farmers can graze their sheep in the park, which seems to me like an arrangement that is both extremely practical and extremely delightful. The sheep were completely unperturbed by nearby picnickers making the most of another unseasonably warm day.
  • The unseasonably warm weather means it’s still well and truly gelato season, which meant that I got to introduce my visiting friend H. to the joys of La Romana. She was impressed. She also got an introduction to panettone, which is starting to appear in the shops as Christmas approaches. This was less impressive. (“A hot cross bun in giant form,” which is fair enough.)
  • I don’t get so many full-scale cultural surprises these days — even when Italian people do something I think is a bit odd, I can usually fit it into my mental picture of what Italian culture is like. But this week I had a proper woah no that’s crazy moment, this time involving German culture.You see, apparently in Germany it’s common to use two separate single duvets on a double bed, so each person gets one to themselves.

    I guess if you’re German this is perfectly reasonable practice. It certainly seemed that way to my German friend S., who had casually mentioned a friend of hers being surprised by a shared duvet in Italy.

    But I’m pretty sure I’m not the only non-German to be really taken aback by the idea. Actually, I know I’m not the only one, because poor S. got bombarded with responses ranging from “No come on, you’re pulling my leg” through to, “Can you even be actually married if you don’t share a duvet with your spouse?!” (Along with some Australian side discussion of, “Wait, do you actually call it a duvet?” “No, it’s a doona, obviously.” “Ok good.”)

    And then some googling revealed a comment from a German guy who pointed out that separate blankets allow you to fart in bed more discretely, and the conversation went downhill from there…

A perfect Perth winter day, in Torino

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Winter barefoot walks FTW!
Photo credit: “Winter barefoot walks FTW!” by Simon Wright, via Flickr

Today was one of those Torino autumn days that felt like a perfect Perth winter day — blue skies, chilly in the morning, but warm enough under the midday sun eat lunch outside and not need a jacket. In Perth, I’d have gone for a walk on the beach on a day like today, and come away with wild hair from the buffeting wind. Here, I caught glimpses of the sun setting behind the mountains as I walked through the meadows in Parco Colletta, and got grass seeds stuck in my socks.

It occurs to me I haven’t been in Perth in winter for 5 years now, and on days like today that feels like a long time. I miss Perth. Not just the people, who I miss frequently (and do a terrible job of keeping in touch with!) But the geography, too. The open space and wide empty streets, single-storey houses on quater-acre blocks. The way the city is flat, until you notice the undulations of the sand dunes it’s built upon. The route from my old place to work, cycling through bushland just a couple of kilometres from the city centre. The Swan River, or rather, just “the river”, as if you needed any other rivers in the world.

And other days I miss Glasgow, and other days I miss the tiny wheat and sheep farming town I lived in as a kid, and other days I miss the months I spent in Florence. Probably one day I’ll be living somewhere else again, and missing Torino.

We were talking over dinner the other night about the idea of being “from” somewhere. Like, can you be from somewhere if your parents weren’t from there? In Australia, yes, but that’s not universal. And I was thinking afterwards about how I’d never thought about being from somewhere until I lived in Glasgow for a year and realized that Britishness was something I recognized if I squinted and held my head at a funny angle, but it wasn’t my culture, and the city was lively and Scotland was beautiful, but it wasn’t my place.

Because my culture is Australian, and my place is Perth.
“Nice to meet you, I’m Zoe, from Australia.”
“Oh? Where in Australia are you from?”
“Perth, it’s on the west coast.”
(That last statement delivered almost as a question, because I will never completely lose my Australian habit of upward inflection.)

Turin by night from Monte dei Cappuccini

Notes from my extremely glamorous life: way too much food edition

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Late summer through autumn is when Piemonte goes into full-on food mode and I love it. I spent this afternoon with friends at Festival delle Sagre, a food festival in Asti, a town about an hour from Torino. It had been a cool and rainy morning and text messages flew back and forth about whether it would still be on, whether we should go. We couldn’t not go! It had been so much fun last year and if we didn’t go today, K. wouldn’t get a chance to go. We got word there would still be food stalls, and decided to go whatever the weather.

Around lunch time, as we were bundling into cars with our rain jackets and umbrellas, the sun came out, and stayed out all afternoon. (It’s raining again now.) It ended up being a warm late summer afternoon in Asti, filled with food and wine and conversation and laughter and a spin round on a ferris wheel. Me afterwards: “I’m glad A. and M. brought their kids, they gave us an excuse to go on the ferris wheel. Wait. We probably would have done it anyway, wouldn’t we.”

Things I have learned recently:

  1. Lugging home my work laptop on the weekend is truly useless. No matter how much I fully intend no really for reals to get some work done on Saturday morning, I will inevitably find something else to do. Like clean a kitchen.
  2. I say “a” kitchen because my procrastination is at a level where I will clean pretty much anyone’s kitchen rather than do work.
  3. Cleaning kitchens is more immediately satisfying than doing physics research.
  4. Having gelato in the afternoon is no barrier to going for granita at night. I’m about 80% certain at this point that I will eventually leave Italy with type II diabetes.
  5. Most alcohol makes my stomach churn unless I have unsociably tiny quantities. However, preliminary research suggests this is not true of sake. Further experimentation is required. Funding agencies: I’ll gladly take grants to study this. Call me.
  6. You will never go wrong by bringing a batch of cookies to a get-together. (cf my comments above about type II diabetes.)
  7. Turin is really pretty at night.

 

Remember how I was asking the other week for onion/garlic-free recipes? One suggestion (thanks CatherineRose!) was quiche, which I love in principle… but in practice I’m too lazy to make pastry for a base. Fortunately, this is a good cheat-y pseudo-quiche recipe, one of those ones where you basically throw flour and egg and some tasty things in a pie dish and pull out something reasonably quiche-like from the oven 40 minutes later.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a pie dish.

Fortunately, I do have several spring-form cake tins that are about the right size for the recipe.

Unfortunately, spring-form cake tins do not hold raw egg at all, as I discovered as I got raw egg all over my table cloth. No worries, I thought. I’ll just put this spring-form cake tin inside a larger spring-form cake tin and that will catch the drips. I put the pair of tins in the oven, and 30 seconds later was yelling something along the lines of “No f&#$ you, quiche!” as I watched the egg drip through the outer cake tin and onto the oven floor.

Fortunately it was at this point I finally realized I could scoop everything into a muffin tin that would hold the mixture perfectly to make a dozen mini-quiches. You know that “I meant to do that!” look that cats give when they know they’ve done something ridiculous? That was exactly my face at that moment.

Gran Madre and Superga at night

The other four seasons of the year.

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It is currently pouring with rain and I’m wearing jeans and a cardigan, and I’m starting to lose faith in the traditional weather-based seasons here in Turin. (At least we had a summer here this year, unlike last year!) So I want to propse a new set of seasons, that aren’t about the weather. They’re the Living Abroad Seasons. There’s four of them, so that’s nice and traditional, although up-front disclaimer: they’re not equal in length, which jars against my need for symmetry, but oh well.

The current season is August, aka, Nothing Is Happening Here, Get Out of Town Season. Turin’s one of those Italian cities where everyone clears off to the mountains and/or the seaside for as much of August as possible. Shops close, there’s no traffic even in peak hour, the mailboxes in my apartment are piling up with uncollected letters. Normally I’d also be out of town for mid-August, but this year I somehow managed to arrange things so I arrived back in Turin on the 15th. Ghost town. It’s peaceful, in a way.

And August is a good break to psych up for People Arriving Season in September/October. People come back from holidays, either tanned (if they’re Italian) or sunburnt (if they’re like me). The university year starts, as do many fixed-term jobs, and new people arrive in town. I am every stereotype of an introvert, but I love meeting new people. (I just need a lie down in a dark room afterwards.) Finding out where people are from, why they’re here, noticing shared interests, it’s all great. People Arriving Season is my favourite Living Abroad Season.

The next season is the Long Season. Work. Socialize, in a more normal way now that not everyone is a new face. Slog through winter. Daydream of summer holidays. Christmas, New Years. Maybe travel somewhere fun over the Easter weekend. Become closer friends with people. Drift apart from others. Once the novelty of living away from where you grew up wears off, this is the season that looks like “real life”.

And then we get to Goodbye Season, in June-July. The university year ends, and so do those fixed-contract jobs, and over the course of a few weeks easily half of the new friends you made in September will have moved on to new things. It’s an exciting time, because people are going to do all sorts of interesting things and you get to be happy for them. But because I sort of snuck out of Perth when I left, I never really did the goodbye thing there (sorry everyone!) and I was in no way prepared for how exhausting Goodbye Season would be until I experienced it for myself. Constantly thinking, “will I ever see them again, I wonder?” is a bit of a downer, it turns out.

Sometimes I daydream of moving everyone I know and love to the same city — or inventing teleportation — so that I can keep all my friends nearby. And of course I could settle down somewhere and have a stable group of friends that I see every week for years and years. I know people who have based their lives around stability and it’s suiting them splendidly. But I suspect life isn’t as stable as it sometimes looks, and for now I’ll choose the highs and lows of instability.

Street art in Turin, Italy

Things I have witnessed since moving to Turin.

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This afternoon, I’m leaving on a work trip to Lake Como (sometimes you have to make sacrifices for your career, you know?) so just a quick listicle type post for today.

Some of the more notable things I’ve seen in Turin:

  • The other day, 4 people in period costume were leaving Porta Nuova metro station the same time as me. One of the women was wearing a skirt with a bustle and she had to turn sideways to get through the fare gate. As I got to street level, I discovered they were part of a parade.
    Those skirts weren't designed with metro turnstiles in mind.

    Those skirts weren’t designed with metro turnstiles in mind.

    Continue reading →

Torino Jazz Festival in Piazza San Carlo

Notes from my extremely glamorous life: it’s summer (and it’s still not Christmas)

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A long lunch today. 19 of us including the kids, crammed round two tables put together to make one long one, talking and laughing and passing the wine around. A hot day; humid and still. We shift around, trying to position ourselves as best we can to get airflow from the fan. Then I realise why this scene feels familiar. It’s just like Christmas in Australia.

As J. pointed out, we even had cherries. Definitely Christmas. Continue reading →

Adventures in bureaucracy: health insurance edition

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One of the… fun… things about living in Italy is the regular adventures in bureaucracy. This week, it was my health insurance. Or rather, my tessera sanitaria, the card you carry around to prove that you have health insurance.

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This one’s not mine, obviously! (“Tessera sanitaria” by Domenico – Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.)

Now, I’m sure that technically you don’t need the card. Certainly you don’t in an emergency. I spent half a week in hospital under the wrong name because they didn’t check my ID until I’d been there 5 days and had done multiple xrays, an ultrasound and received most of a course of antibiotics. I’d have conversations with nurses where they’d look at the name on my notes and ask “Oh, are you Albanian?”
“Uh, no…?”
“Your surname, it looks Albanian.”
“Oh, no, it’s just mis-spelt.”
And apparently this wasn’t any sort of problem.

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