Josh's Asillo Class Jan'14

I love all the names.
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2Mar2015 – Lunch at Da Angelo’s

It was one of my favorite trattorias when I lived here from 1995-1998, and it is one of my favorite trattorias today.  The place is virtually the same, with only some recent renovations including a few new fresco-type paintings on the wall.  The food is the same – delicious, authentic, and awesome.

The people are all the same.  The same family who ran the place then, runs the place now - same women working the coffee bar, same guy preparing meals in the kitchen (one of the owners/brothers), same guy working the pizza oven (another one of the owners/brothers), same guys serving the tables (the nephews).  There are three generations of “Angelo’s” working there.

The family is from Amalfi and they are very, very proud to be from Amalfi.  Of course, Amalfi has the best food, the best sea, the best life.  And oh, mamma mia, if they ever have anything on the menu “al Amalfitana”, order it.  Trust me.

Like a lot of places in the area, they offer a fixed lunch menu for 11 Euro.  For 11 Euro you get: ½ liter of bottled water (natural or frizzante), ¼ liter of house wine (always a bit more for me, because they know me), a basket bread, a first course (usually pasta), a second course (usually meat or seafood), a side (which can be a large mixed salad, cooked/roasted seasonal vegetables, or potatoes prepared different ways), and an after-lunch coffee (Italian style, of course).  No tip, no tax.  Total = 11 Euro.

Now, let me try to explain what that really means.  Yesterday, I ordered one of my favorite pasta dishes, penne alla arrabiata.  It comes out on a huge plate, perfectly made pasta (not too soft or chewy like too often in the U.S.), plenty of sauce with actual chunks of cherry tomatoes and a healthy amount of olive oil, and piping hot.  It’s served with freshly grated parmigiano – not the uniformly-grated supermarket stuff, but the fresh stuff that has little chunks and flakes of cheese in it from being grated by hand.  And because they know me, they automatically bring me some of their homemade olio piccante – spicy olive oil that comes in what looks to be a re-used olive jar, which has been marinating with a bunch of hot peppers still in the jar, where you use a teaspoon to spoon out as much as you want and drizzle it over your plate of hot, flavorful pasta.  So good!  So good, in fact, that it is only natural to take some of that fresh bread and sop-up all of the oil and tomato sauce and essence that’s left behind after the pasta is gone.  Oh my Lord, I am going to miss that simple dish when we leave here.

That’s just the first course.  Also remember that we are still talking about a random, weekday lunch.

The salad is delivered.  It is a big glass bowl of fresh, green lettuce - the kind of green lettuce you’d see coming out of your grandmother’s garden.   Flavorful tomatoes.  Shredded carrots.  No need for a bath of dressing.  Just lettuce, tomato, and carrot with real extra-virgin olive oil and a little splash of balsamico.  Why does a simple mixed salad taste so much better here?

Now the second course.  Normally, I order the mussels.  A big, hot plate of plumb, beautiful mussels that have been perfectly prepared.  Normally, I save room to take a couple pieces of that delicious soft bread and soak-up as much of that lemony, garlicy, peppery, seafoody scrumptiousness of liquid that sits in the bottom of my plate.  Not today.  That’s normally a Friday special and today is Monday. 

Today, my friend and waiter, Pasquale, started given us our choices.  The fixed menu doesn’t come with a menu, but usually 3 or 4 choices for each course given to you verbally at your table.  The first choice he offered was “Pesce Almafitana” which is fish served with roasted black olives, roasted cherry tomatoes, olive oil, lemon, capers, and roasted garlic.  I told him he could stop right there.

What he delivered was a thing of beauty.  It was a plate the size of a small pizza with a large salmon fillet, a trout-like fish served whole (head and tail attached), another large chunk of salmon, and another large chunk of white fish.  The olives were to die for.  The roasted garlic.  The capers.  The cherry tomatoes that just oozed flavor so well-suited with the olive oil.  The fish was perfectly prepared, not over-cooked, but flaky, tender, moist, and full of flavor.   It was a feast.  That plate alone, served at any decent restaurant in the U.S. is at least a $22 entrée, and I doubt that it would be prepared that well and taste that good.

The table wine isn’t great, but it isn’t awful, and there’s plenty of it.  Then, after lunch comes the obligatory coffee, an Italian style espresso that is believed to be a digestive (digestive), but also serves to coat the palette like melted dark chocolate.

Speaking of chocolate, lunch doesn’t come with dessert.  The strange part, though, dessert doesn’t even occur to me.  It’s just not needed.  In fact, it’s only now that I think about how healthy that meal was.  It was the classic “Mediterranean Diet” meal, but without the label or promotion or trendiness or marketing.

I gave big “complimenti” to Angelo (the elder) and he gave me the wink and the nod and the pinched fingers to the pursed lips sign meaning, “yeah buddy, I hooked you up, didn’t I?”

How many meals do you finish and think, “I can’t let these people charge me so little for what they just served me”?  11 Euro…for everything?  Come on!  The kicker is that for these folks, their real gratification comes not (just) from the profit, but instead from the appreciation of their effort and their craft.  They enjoy serving good food, made in the style of their home region, and have it appreciated by the people who come to their restaurant.  For all of the American in me, it is so nice to have this simple joy of anti-commercialism woven into the day.

And my description of Da Angelo’s cannot be complete without two other side notes:

1.      My friend and waiter, Pasquale – his name translates to “Easter”.  His brother is named Natale for “Christmas”.

2.       Giovanni is the big, loud, ultra-gregarious cook.  He is the prototypical large Italian personality in a family restaurant, who everyone knows and who treats you like a favorite Godfather from the moment he meets you.  With so much love and generosity and Almalfitana pride, you are forced to excuse him for the big, double-cheeked kiss greetings he gives you (men too!) that leaves you a little scratched from the stubble on his face and sopping wet from his sweat.  Summertime is particularly bad with the sweat.  The first time I took my parents there and introduced them to Giovanni, he made such a production out of greeting them, and took my Mom by such complete shock with his bear hug and big, sweaty kisses (it was summertime), that I honestly thought she was about to scream and/or pee herself.  

  

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No Work Talk -15Feb2015

Imagine the scene: Friday night, after a week of work and school, a group of parents from the 1^st grade class bring their kids to a class gathering at the local pizza parlor.  Maybe 8 or 10 families are there.  All the kids gravitate to the playroom inside the pizza parlor, the adults sitting at a long table with a beer or glass of wine.  The men generally congregate toward one end of the table, the women to the other.   A random selection of public school parents hanging out, getting to know each other. 

A couple of hours later we pull our over-tired kids away even as they cry bloody murder that they are entitled to five more minutes.  We finally get our kids in our cars, they instantly crash, drive home, piggy-back rides up to bed, pretty typical scene.

Back in the kitchen recuperating in the quiet, a few things dawn on me.  First, the past 2.5 hours of socializing was done in 100% Italian language, for the kids and the adults.  There were 0 other Americans present and most of the Italians spoke little to no English.  There was no hesitation or trepidation from anyone in our family to attend an event like this, knowing it would be all in Italian, which is pretty cool by itself.  It is still pretty exhausting to have to concentrate for that long, especially at the end of an already long week, and doubly especially with so much noise and distraction at the party.  {I lag behind everyone else in the family with Italian language skills and I am far from fluent.}

The second thing that dawned on me is that for the past 2.5 hours of conversation between 7 or 8 first grade fathers who don’t know each other very well, there was not one minute spent talking about work.  As a matter of fact, besides their curiosity of me and my role on “the American base” (which always generates a lot of curiosity among the locals), no one asked anyone so much as what they did for a living.  It never came up…in 2.5 hours of random conversation…ever.  I couldn’t tell you what most of them do for work and not because of a lack of comprehension.  I think one guy worked with the mechanical parts that are used in drilling equipment.  The only reason there was any reference to that is because Italians (most foreigners we’ve met) love to tell you about their travels to the U.S.  This guy had been to several places in the U.S. like Kansas and Texas and Louisiana – not exactly top 3 U.S. tourist destinations – which generated the question of why he went there.  His trips to the U.S. were work-related and I finally figured out the part about the drilling equipment.

There was never any declaration of “no shop talk” either. It’s not as if someone said, “Please guys, let’s not talk about work tonight.”  Nope.  It wasn’t even as if there was an unspoken understanding that this wasn’t the place to discuss work.  Really, it was more as if it never even occurred to them to talk about work.  It wasn’t on their radar.  Imagine that.  That would NEVER happen in the U.S.  There is no way 8 random dads get together for 2.5 hours of conversation without someone asking someone else “So what do you do?”

What did we talk about?  We talked about our kids, the school, the curriculum, the economy, and the weather.  We talked about the differences between Italian dialects and American accents.  We talked a lot about activities in the mountains nearby.  One guy in particular is an expert “powder skier” who spends most weekends in the winter exploring some “off piste” slopes, and was full of interesting information.  He showed us the “avalanche app” he had on his phone that provided up-to-date, detailed information on all of the avalanche conditions in the Dolomites.  I never knew so much about avalanches as I learned that night.  We talked a lot about favorite vacation spots, good food combinations, wine (which everyone here seems to know a lot about), and extended families (who all seemed to live nearby).

When I mentioned this observation to our good friend Eros, he looked at me blankly and couldn’t understand why I thought that was interesting.  Eros is a retired electrician, who spent a lot of time in the past playing soccer and hiking the Dolomites, and who is among lots of other things a regional expert in mushrooms.  He’s been married for over 40 years, spends a lot of time with his granddaughter, and keeps busy with his “honey-do” list from his wife.  His explanation was simple: for most Italians, work is something that goes on in the background to pay the bills.  It is just not such a central aspect of most people’s lives.  Why would it be?  We only have one life, he explains, why spend it so focused on work and money when there are so many other things to be passionate about?

That’s a generalization and I know it’s not true for all Italians.  Everyone falls on a spectrum.  But where most Italians fall on that spectrum is pretty far from where most Americans fall on that spectrum, for good or bad, and it was never so evident to me as our time at the “First Grade Pizza Night”.

ct

School, Work, Life, and the Stomach Flu

(Written February 25, 2014. Delayed posting due to technical computer issues.)

Life in Italy is beautiful. It is also life, and with that comes work, school, after-school activities, birthday parties, house projects, and the yearly bout of stomach flu. Josh is going on day 4 of it right now. As I am stuck at home with his aching belly, it gives me a chance to catch up on my non-existent blogging. If we still have any readers, I can tell you, you have not been away from my thoughts. When I pass an enchanting scene that is quintessential Italy, only-happens-in-Italy, or only-seen-in-Europe, I think, “wow, that would make a nice blog.” Usually, that’s as far as the thought gets. Sometimes I snap a picture with my cheap, highly-inferior-to-an-iphone/galaxy phone and think about adding it to a blog. I will work some in now!

My favorite cheese man where I get the best cheese Saturday mornings. It's the freshest best cheese and so delicious.

Our town's small open air market that is held every Saturday morning. I love it. On any given Saturday morning, I might buy a tablecloth, socks for the kids, a new scarf, and definitely cheese from the guy pictured above and fruit from the stand pictured below.

A typical scene downtown Vicenza. I was walking back to my car after shopping the large downtown market on a Thursday morning.

First, though, I must go back to my last blog from, oh, when was that? Yea, 4 months ago. Actually, it was my second to last entry. I must amend the entry when I talked about school. At the time, the kids had just returned to school from a long summer break where they are mostly home with me and vacationing with the family and it’s all in English. It took a little while for them to get readjusted to Italian immersion life, but like most kids, they did great. By December, when we had Isabel’s parent-teacher meeting, her teacher was beaming and remarked how Isabel had “blossomed”. As she will keep her same teachers throughout her elementary school time here, we should get a true commentary on how she is developing. They will observe the full transformation from the American who started first grade knowing two words of Italian, to the girl who can jabber with her Italian friends and perform with the best of her class.

Isabel's most recent journal entry.

Josh, too, had a good report. It was different, of course, reflecting on the difference in personalities between the more reserved and studious girl, and the vivacious and extraverted boy. Josh’s teachers remarked how he is very good in the classroom when given a task or project. He does his individual assignments well and with accuracy, and he also works well in a group. His only weakness is during free time when he gets together with his group of friends. There is a particularly strong group of boys in his class and he is a part of this group. From the sounds of it, they can get a bit rowdy and don’t always follow the rules. We hear, not infrequently, about pushing, pinching, dare un pugno all’ ochio (punching in the eye – only one time for that one thankfully). It’s playground rough-housing and at this point we’re taking it as normal boy stuff.

The kids playing with a St Bernard puppy on the farm where we stayed in the Dolomites over Presidents' Day weekend.

Josh is in the American equivalent of kindergarten, though in contrast to American kindergarten, it is mostly play. They do lots of drawing and painting. They are working through writing the alphabet in their notebooks and also some numbers. They do not start learning to read at this level. That will start next year in 1^st grade. Kindergarten here is mostly fun and getting along and learning rules and fine motor skills. Next year, the pressure will start as they move fast in first grade. He will start learning to read (in Italian) and the homework is impressive.

Josh's coloring of Palladio's most famous Villa Rotonda.

Josh is a bit nervous about starting elementary school next year. His sister has already warned him about all the homework he will be assigned and all the times where he will have a story to read 10 times. That is one of the most common homework assignments: “Leggi 10 volte” (read 10 times). One day I caught them together and Josh was in tears as his sister was really laying on the scary stories of first grade. Poor guy. At least he will be going into it having a good comprehension of the language, unlike Isabel. I asked at Josh’s parent-teacher meeting if he was speaking in Italian in school. They answered, yes, too much. Ok, got it.

Other than school, Isabel continues with gymnastics and she recently started piano lessons. Josh is doing soccer with our local town’s team. Calling it soccer does not seem to really do it justice. It’s Italian football. It’s their most prized national sport and it’s taken very seriously. Josh is the youngest on the team and some of these 6 and 7 year olds play like American varsity high school soccer players. I’ll let Chris expand more on this subject. For now, I’ll leave it like that and say it’s IMPRESSIVE!

Besides school, there is the rest of life. We are trying to finish plans for a new bathroom with frequent meetings with the contractor, which are all in Italian, just to add another challenge to a house project. Chris is dealing with a crazy, demanding schedule at work right now, and we are, of course, trying to plan our next round of travels. Traveling is still one of the most beautiful benefits of being here. We just finished a weekend of skiing in the Italian Dolomites and we are looking towards some great trips to come. Life never stops, no matter where you are. We are rolling with it, and trying to soak in as much of the beauty that is this place where we live, along the way.

Skiing at Alpi di Siusi. February 2014

Josh's bilingual stories_Pics from Paris Day1

Even the kids were impressed with the rose windows in Notre Dame

 Here we have had all of these wonderful, incredible adventures over the past few weeks and months and what finally brought me to my latest blog post is a simple parental anecdote.

Josh can be quite the character.  I think back to some of the yarns he will tell from time to time and it’s pure comedy.  First of all, he doesn’t lie as much these days as he used to, but you always have to stay on the lookout for it.  For Isabel’s complete lack of ability to lie, Josh makes up for it in spades.  He has been known to tell some doozies, and with such passion and conviction too.  In any case he certainly can streeeeeetch the truth sometimes, especially when he gets excited, and he clearly has a more “creative interpretation” of the world than our more literal Isabel.  That’s first.

Secondly, his stories have considerable “bounce” to them.  By bounce I mean that they jump all the Hell over the place.  “This person to that thing to over there and then this other thing and oh my then you’ll never believe but so-and-so was there and oooooh that happened, bla, bla”…it’s like a Robyn Williams stand-up routine - it’s hard to follow, but entertaining as Hell.

And lately, what really makes it fun is the fact that he now tells the story of his day with a bunch of Italian words thrown randomly into the mix.  Not only that, but he pronounces the Italian words with legitimate Italian pronunciation.  Like the other night:

“Ooh Daddy, I have to tell you about what happened today.  Maestra Donatella told us all to line up against il muro so we could get on the pulmino to go down to the piscine.  I drew a picture, did you see it yet?!  But ooooh, Tomaso was being molto male and Mamma Mia! you wouldn’t believe what he did!  I like Catarina a lot, she’s my friend, even though she spilled latte on my grembiule.  Oh yeah, then Sofia got in the way of Matteo so Luca pushed her back into la scuola and boy oh boy was Maestra Donatella arrabbiato!  I tried to tell Filipo that io non fato niente because I didn’t want to get into trouble because I’m a good swimmer even if I don’t like to swim in aqua freddo.  And did you know they have a big scivolo which is totally AWE-SOME!  And that’s why my giorno was super-fun today!”  …on and on, hand gestures and all.

It’s classic Josh.  He’s awesome!  Suzanne and I just sit there and watch.  Occasionally we’ll look over at each other with the expression of “Do you know what the HELL this kid is talking about right now?” and then we’ll shrug the response “Nope….whadya gonna do?”

….kids!

;)

ct

On Pont Neuf

Birds eating from their hands in front of Notre Dame

View from the top of the Ferris wheel

Halloween, Italian Style

Happy Halloween everyone! Many ask if this holiday is celebrated here in Italy and the answer is, "kind of." Each year this holiday becomes more and more popular. There is still no traditional door-to-door trick or treating in Italy, but there are fun readings in school with pumpkins and bats and ghosts. This year, Isabel's school actually had a Halloween party at a local community center. The kids got dressed up and had snacks and there was even a dj spinning some dance tunes. The kids were mostly dressed as scary things like monsters and witches. That is how Italians see dressing up at Halloween. It brings one back to the more scary and spooky part of the tradition. There are no strawberry shortcakes or other cute characters. I did see a couple monster high girls, just tell you that is popular with young girls across the globe, or at least here in Europe.

Josh and Isabel ready for the party.

Isabel and a couple friends at the school Halloween party. The girl in the center dressed as Rainbow Brite is Isabel's American friend. She is the only other American at their school.

Italian kids here in Vicenza have a special treat in that they can go traditional trick-or-treating at the Army Base Housing area. They have started opening it up to Italians. Tonight, we are bringing a couple of Isabel's best Italian friends. It should be kinda crazy as this is a small housing area and all American families, and now Italians too, will be descending on these poor people who live there.

The true holiday for children to dress up in Italy is actually Carnevale. This is the time just before lent, better known to Americans in the form of Mardi Gras. During Carnevale, kids are off from school. There are parades in various towns and sometimes a costume parade at the mall. Kids throw streamers and there are special sweet cakes that are baked only around Carnevale time. The biggest carnevale celebration is in Venice where people come from all over to participate in or just observe the elaborate costumes and masked that are worn.

Carnevale in Venice

La Scuola (School)

We have completed our first two months of the new scholastic year. This will be our second year in the Italian school system. I had great hopes of writing more about the school experience last year, but, like many resolutions, it just didn’t happen. I’ll try to make it up this year. So, here we go….

 

Isabel and Josh in front of Isabel's school.

Isabel has started second grade (seconda). Yea! She is really excited about it. She completed first grade last June.  We threw her into Italian elementary school with the sink or swim attitude. We figured, if she sank, she was still young and all would be fine. If she swam, it would be wonderful. Well, we think she did great, and she remained happy which was one of the most important things for us.

 

Of course, the question everyone keeps asking is, “So, does she speak Italian?” That is actually a hard question to answer for a few reasons. First, kids don’t learn language like we do. She is not studying verb conjugations and proper Italian grammar (yet). She doesn’t know what the subject or indirect subject is in a sentence. She picks up things that she hears. She learns some simple vocabulary from her homework. She pieces them together and out comes some speaking, however grammatically incorrect.

 

The language skill is also difficult to judge since she definitely does not want to speak it, at all, in front of us. If I am around when she is playing with an Italian friend, I catch a few words muttered here and there as I am hiding behind a wall being very quiet. It’s coming along. Her Italian is not grammatically correct and sometimes it’s just totally crazy wrong, but I’m glad she is trying. Today was the first time I heard her mutter, “Ma dai!” and that told me she will be picking up extraordinarily more of the language this year since she is going into second grade with a year of Italian school already under her belt. “Ma dai” is the equivalent in English of saying, “come on!” in an exasperated way as if the person in front of you on line is asking one to many questions to the cashier and taking way too much time. “Ma dai!” is often used with an exasperated hand gesture.

 

Josh has also started school with one year completed. He is in what they call “Grande”. It’s the third year of the preschool. The preschool is basically divided into Piccoli (3 year olds), Medi (4 year olds), and Grandi (the 5’s). In the American school system, Josh would have started his first day of Kindergarten this year. He would have been starting elementary school. It was a little hard for me to see him continue back to preschool, but I remind myself that his experience is so different than most other American 5 year olds. I have to appreciate that, and I hope he will too someday.

 

In Grande, Josh will learn to write all the capital letters and do some very simple writing and calculating of numbers. That, and the continuation of fine motor skill development, is pretty much all the curriculum that is covered at this level of school. I’ve heard people say it’s what American kindergarten was 40 yrs ago when mostly you did the alphabet and some finger painting.

 

When Josh moves on to Scuola Elementare and the first grade, he will start with A, capital letters, and 2+2. They start very basic. Preschool is not mandatory, so some kids are coming to first grade with only 6 years of being home with grandma. When starting first grade, they basically only assume the kids know how to write their name and know how to write all the letters in capital. That’s it. They start slowly, but give them loads of homework every week so they progress quickly.

 

Isabel’s homework last year proved quite challenging for both of us. She attends school from 8a-4p Mondays and Wednesdays. The other days of the week, she attends from 8a-12:30. She would come home, eat lunch, and then start homework. It was basically like homeschooling your child, with the added challenge of everything being in a foreign language. I would sit there with her, surrounded by Italian dictionaries and Google Translate on the laptop. She was exhausted. One day she simply fell asleep with her head lying on her notebook. As the year progressed, she began to understand more and more Italian, and her exhaustion lessened. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even noticed this phenomenon until the teachers pointed it out at a parent-teacher meeting sometime around March.

 

One example of homework from first grade. Each week was a new letter of the alphabet and its assorted combination with the vowels. It cracks me up how sigaretta (cigarette) was one of her S words (the picture colored orange). Would you ever see that in an American school??

 

 

Another homework example from later in the year.

 

 

I can certainly say this year is easier already. Having a much greater understanding of the language is the biggest help. Also, the teachers you start with in First grade are the same ones you have all through elementary school (unless they quit or retire), so her teachers know her well and she is very familiar with them. I think she got lucky, because we really like them both and they call her their little amore (love). All in all, school is going well for both kids this year. It’s definitely an adventure, but a great one.