Tights

So, the weather is getting warmer and the urge to wear skirts and dresses and other things that are not thick black dress pants is starting to make itself known and yet the number of classes I teach at the Uber-Fancy Local Fashion Thing create a bit of a dilemma with that. Because my students are largely men and tend to show up wearing suits and ties and other such uber-fancy paraphernalia, I can't really rock up in a fluffy skirt and a tank top and plop myself down in the entry hall while all the other women sail by in stilettos and god knows what else.

It's okay, though. I happen to own two highly respectable pencil skirts that can be paired with heels and some form of shirt/blouse and are not too uncomfortable. And one of them even still fits well, so that's always a plus. All that was missing from this plan was a pair of tights so that I would look both professional and not quite so bianca like a mozzarella. At home I could just stop by in the nearest super market or drugstore and it would take me all of ten minutes to come back out with an appropriate pair of tights.

Yeah, in Italy, not so much. I stopped by in Aqua & Sapone this morning, having noticed that there is an entire wall of tights there once and decided to start at one end and work my way to the other and surely by then I'd have found something that worked well.

Oh, self. Don't you wish.

so, first of all, there seem to be about eighty-twelve varieties of tights. There are "teen" tights which feature a lower waistline and some bizarre sort of "comfort" waistband. There are old lady tights that claim to hold your legs together and enable you to sprint around like a twenty-year-old. There are "luxury" tights which apparently massage your legs in circular motions. (I can't decide whether this is creepy or intriguing.) There are others that appear to have built-in panties... or maybe just strategically placed lacy bits to give the illusion of panties? (Either way, definitely creepy.)

Eventually I caught sight of some that were contained in little boxes and appeared to be the regular boring kind for people who don't want their tights to have any special abilities. Aha! (We already know that I am an unrefined peon.)

Next up: the oh-so-fun size and measurement discrepancies between Europe and America. I do not know my height in centimeters or my weight in kilos. So that's tricky. I chose the middle measurement mostly at random. (Interestingly enough, they seem to fit okay.)

And then: the color. In America, there is this handy dandy color of tights called "nude". It is very discreet and super useful, because it goes with most things (much like the skin of the average person). Also, by "nude" they apparently mean, "nude for people who have skin that is a nice shade of normal", rather than "nude for people who look like they were raised in a cave and may or may not actually glow in the dark". So when I wear it, it makes me look like I have normal skin, not glow-in-the-dark cave skin. Always a plus.

This shade does not exist in Italy. Or, at least, not in Aqua e Sapone. Boo. They do have a shade called castoro (which means beaver, I think... kind of odd) and various shades of nero and grigio. And then they have one called daino (which I just googled and apparently it means "deer" - what's with the woodland animals?) which might work as nude-ish for people with naturally darker skin. And then the lightest one is called "melone". I purchased this, because I suppose it is my best bet, but (much like the name suggests) it makes my legs look ever so slightly orange.

Why would you make tights that make people look orange? I do not understand. Is it because of the popularity of fake tans around here, which are sometimes kind of orange? So people can seamlessly blend their tights and their tans? Still, though.

I disapprove. I think I will be wearing the black pants to Uber-Fancy Local Fashion Thing once again tomorrow, and will perhaps conduct further investigations over the weekend. Sigh.

How did I just write a whole entry about tights?

Delightful

When you wake up to the sound of church bells and (gently) throw open the shutters and the sun is shining and a little kid is running across the piazzetta below, laughing, and you can hear accordion music coming from somewhere (I love accordian music!) and it smells like summer and it is still the weekend, life is good. This type of thing is what makes it seem so impossible to leave Italy, in fact.

Sometimes in the winter, when you have a day with five boring lessons in a row, and there is fog and rain and that weird damp cold, you might look up at the pervasive grey of the sky and think, "meh. I could just as well be at home (in America, I mean), finished with work at 5pm and curled up on the sofa with a book from the library, and I wouldn't be particularly sad about missing out on this." But when summer comes... then it's different.

The cafes put their tables and chairs outside again, so you can have an aperitivo in the piazza, sipping a spritz and looking up at the Duomo, all lit up against that intense blue of the sky at dusk, and you can stroll around in the soft air of the evening, eating gelato (and maybe getting bitten by mosquitoes, but, hey, life's not meant to be perfect, right?).

I really just am a sucker for accordian music. I'll come back feeling a bit less gooey at a later time.

Life Skillz

I am like a problem-solving machine over here today. Usually I have little to no life skills to speak of, but today I am having an uncharacteristically successful day. I am kind of scared to go cook dinner, because I figure the stove will probably explode or something - you know, as a sort of cosmic getting-things-back-into-balance gesture. Anyway... I feel the need to document my success before that happens.

Problem A: Finding a coursebook from which to teach French. Our language school has recently decided that it offers French courses as well as English, and that I am in charge of them, being the only person on staff that speaks any French. (Actually, the conversation went kind of like this: "hey, Christen, you speak French, right?" Me: "uh... yes..." Boss & co.: "Great! So, I'm going to give you this course at..." and that is how I came to be teaching four different French courses, two of which are Business French, no less.)

Anywy, the difficulty with this is that, while we have a great big library of stuff for teaching English, ranging from Business courses to English for Medicine to this awesome book which includes a game of pronunciation bingo (yeah, shut up - you know you wish you got to play pronunciation bingo), we have nothing for French. So every time we (read: I) get a new French course, I hop on the train to Bologna and visit the Feltrinelli International and pick out a coursebook. (Right now we have four different courses with four different purposes at three different levels, but I figure sooner or letter something will repeat and I will be *so* prepared when it does.)

So, yeah. This morning I had no classes, so I got on the train and, three hours later, there I was with two copies of a new textbook and the accompanying cahier d'exercises. (Workbook.)

Problem B: Said French book does not come with a class CD although it frequently suggests that you listen to one. The language-teaching world is fraught with such trickery. "CD included!!!" the workbook will tell you, and you will glance at the back cover and see a CD securely attached there, labelled "Student CD", and you'll go on your merry way, thinking you're all set. No. You're not. That's the student CD, which has the audio tracks for the exercises in the workbook. This ensures maximum awkwardness when you pop the sucker into the CD player and go all "okay, now we'll listen, and match the dialogues to the pictures" and then a list of vegetables or something blares out from the speakers. No, what you want is the Class CD. This is somehow much more difficult to obtain. For example, the one I wanted has to be imported from Belgium or something equally ridiculous for the low price of 70 or so euro. Yeah. Right.

So I went online and did some googling and managed to get all hooked up with this illegal downloading thing and downloaded the tracks I needed and burned them onto a CD and labelled them neatly with my little purple-ish labelling pen and voila! Fatto. (It was all very sneaky. I have never downloaded anything like that in my life, so now I feel very underhanded. But 70euro for a CD? Really? I could hire actors and record my own for less than that. Maybe.)

Problem C: We need about ten million copies of every other CD on the planet because we only have one of each and they are somehow all in the trunk of the Boss's car. No worries, y'all. I'm on it. Just running a little illegally burned CD cartel from up here in my room. Yup.

Problem D: After this eventful day and only two hours of teaching (that end-of-the-year slump is approaching fast, methinks), I hopped in the car at 10pm (because of course those two hours of teaching would need to occur between the hours of 7 and 9) to find that it had no gas. Which is not a situation conducive to my making it to Uber-Fancy Local Fashion Thing Headquarters on time for my 8am class tomorrow. So I took myself to a gas pump and wrestled the cap off (and I do mean "wrestled", quite literally) and outsmarted the machine with my mad counting skillz (yes! I can count to six! yay!) and put gas in the car. Here's hoping it was actually the regular old senza piombo and not something crazy that is eating away at the car's insides as we speak.

Problem E: I have a mild cold but I am a wimp and it feels like something is trying to push my eyeballs out from behind. Solution: tylenol. Yay.

Goodnight.

Milano

I accompanied a friend from work to Milan the other day. In addition to being just plain fun, it was also kind of cheering in the I'm-a-retarded-foreigner department. When you've been here a while, you kind of stop being able to use the "I've only been here three months" excuse to cut yourself a break when you do something stupid, so you might beat up on yourself rather a lot. On this particular Saturday, though, I was able to impart all sorts of useful wisdom to my less-experienced friend (who has, in fact, only been here a couple of months, and therefore can still use that excuse): that the smaller rete regionale machines in the train station won't give you a ticket to Milan; that you shouldn't get off at Milano Rogoredo or Milano Lambrate but wait for Milano Centrale, how to buy a ticket for the metro, how to use said metro once you've got a ticket, where to get off to see the Duomo (although, being that the station is called 'Duomo', I feel like that's more or less obvious if you think about it for a minute), and other things like that.

Also, there are things in Italy that are really fun to show someone for the first time. The Duomo in Milan is one of them. I very clearly remember turning the corner into the piazza my first time in Milan (having hiked the seventy billion kilometers from the train station because I was scared of the metro at that point), and I was all sweaty and tired, but then there it was and it was amazing. It's one of those "Oh! Oh! Oh my god!"-type moments.

We take photos of various things, make a pilgrimmage to the big store of the Local Fashion Thing where we teach (it looks nice - must remember to compliment whichever of our students is in charge of the window displays), and eat some gelato while staring dazedly at the Duomo. It is a beautiful spring day.

On our way back up the Via Emilia, the Mille Miglia cars whiz past us, honking and sputtering, and the people lined up on the sidewalk cheer. There's a band playing in the piazza. They've put the yellow chairs back out by the fountains, which means reading in the sun to the sound of water splashing (yay!). Later, we have a spritz in the shadow of our Duomo while a warm breeze floats around.

Summer is back!

In which I eat some cheese and call it dinner

Teaching English is pretty fun. I mean, think about it. Half the knowledge you need is already there if you're a native speaker. (The other half, the teaching bit, takes a little more effort to acquire, but it's doable, thus far.) You get to meet all sorts of people. And they're generally happy to see you. Unlike the me-being-a-doctor scenario, which involves children associating me with needles and evil people who poke them and are connected with being sick. I mean, aside from people who are being forced to learn English for whatever reason, most people come to lessons voluntarily. Some are even being given a little break from work in order to attend.

The trouble with teaching English, though, is that the hours are pretty ridiculous. Sometimes you have a lesson at 8am and some more sprinkled throughout the day and another that finishes at 8:30pm. Sometimes you arrive at home and take your heels off and your feet hurt and you've forgotten which of your five businessmen students is an Inter fan (again!) so you won't know who to ask about the match next week.

At such times, the last thing you feel like doing is hauling out the pots and pans and knives and torturing some food into a semblance of edible. (Edibleness? Edibility? What? What am I even talking about?) So you take a piece of Pecorino Toscano out of the fridge, lop off a few slices, and call it a day, sitting in front of the computer and staring vaguely at the computer while wondering what you meant to do when you sat down in front of it. (Hint: probably it involved checking your email, genius. Just click on Internet Explorer and you're halfway there.)

So, sometimes, that's what happens at my house. You know what, though? There is calcium in cheese. That's good for you. So there.