Bus Driver Pops in for a Quick Meal - Leaves Bus Running Outside

This is a funny one:

Acerra, autista Ctp salta una corsa e ferma
il bus sotto casa per cenare: sospeso

The police found a bus running, with no one in it, along the side of a street.  It turns out that the bus driver had popped in to his house for a quick dinner and had simply parked the bus outside.  When questioned, he said he'd simply gone in to use the restroom, and seeing as how dinner was ready, stopped to eat a bit.

He was charged with several crimes by the police.  However, he was only suspended, rather than fired, by the company he worked for!

This was near Naples...

Crossing the Road

One of the things that I really miss about Austria is how civilized the drivers were at crosswalks.  They'd slow down, wait for you to cross, and then go on their way.  In Italy, it's basically a game of "chicken":

I have fantasies about taking a crack at one of the ones that refuses to stop with a baseball bat.

Funny Products

This first one is "American Wheat" (complete with stars and stripes)... labelled "Manitoba".  Weird, as I'm sure everyone knows, Manitoba is a province in Canada.

This second one is one of a huge variety of clothing with completely nonsensical English labels and phrases on it.

Having driven through it, I really don't think Fresno is a great place to go surfing, given that it's several hours away from the ocean.  It didn't actually strike me as a great place in general, but then again, I only drove through it.

 

Mexican Food in Europe

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that one of my long standing complaints about life in Italy is the lack of decent Mexican food.  Oh, there are a few places here in Padova, and once in a while I get desperate enough to go back to one, but then I remember why I never go.

This:

http://mungowitzend.blogspot.com/2009/05/worst-mexican-restaurant-on-earth.html

is a really funny description of "the worst Mexican restaurant on earth", and isn't too far off from many of the experiences I've had.  In Italy, they would have understood some of the Spanish, but probably wouldn't have sour cream, as that's quite difficult to come by here.

Here's a quote:

The waitress brings the food. The "quesadillas" were rock hard, and filled with chili that clearly came from Chef Hormel-ito. Appalling. This was served with rice and beans and quacamole. NOT. It was served with some purple lettuce and cabbage, with a big dollop of mayo, and then some canned corn and canned navy beans. More of the sour cream, and more of the ketchup salsa.

 

The Retiree Party

Italy is a rapidly aging country, and sclerotic politics, that much is widely known.  Once again, however, I was to be surprised by an election billboard posted near our home:

This is for the "Partito Pensionati" or, translated literally, the "retiree party".  Their motto is "get off our lawn, you damn kids".  Not really, I looked it up and it's actually "we've got ours, now kiss off".  Ok, I made that one up too.   Leave your own motto for the "Retiree Party" in the comments below.

Tu Razzista

Immigration to Italy is a relatively recently phenomenon.  Until very recently, Italy was a country that sent people abroad, rather than accepting immigrants in search of better jobs and lives.  Unfortunately, however, like everyone else in Italy, the immigrants have figured out that the consequences for misbehaving are hardly ever very serious, and so the bad apples have made a name for themselves through a string of rapes, robberies and other random acts of criminality.  Many news outlets have picked up on this theme and often publish the fact that some miscreant is a foreigner, while at the same time mostly ignoring how much Italians flaunt the laws themselves.

Today, I noticed an election billboard:

 

The text, "Tu colpevole... tu pena certa subito" is grammatically incorrect Italian, which, translated fairly literally, means something along the lines of "You guilty... you certain punishment right away", and is meant to immitate a speaker with a poor grasp of Italian.  Translating it a bit more liberally, one might end up with something along the lines of "You do crime, you go jail, capish?".

In other words, while the core idea of people actually being responsible for their crimes is certainly laudable (and applicable to everyone from the lowliest criminals amongst recent immigrants up to the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi), the delivery is something that I, as an immigrant and foreigner here myself, consider to be offensive.

Random Notes from the "Big Move"

We recently moved back to Padova, Italy from Innsbruck, Austria.  Here are some various, random notes:

• Moving truck rental in Europe stinks compared to the US.  It's something like 3 or 4 times as expensive if you want to rent a truck in one place and drop it off in another, and those two places happen to be different countries (even though they're only 4 hours away).
• Moving in general in Europe is fairly difficult compared to the US.
• I'm happy to be back in Italy!
• The language barrier in Austria was really a killer.  I speak Italian fluently, and to go from that to being a complete "zero" was really difficult.  I'm glad to be back somewhere where people are impressed by how well I speak the language.
• We'll miss the mountains, but enjoy the wide open skies.  Innsbruck is an extremely beautiful place, with high mountains all around.  However, sometimes it's nice to have more light, and to be able to look off into the horizon.
• I miss Austrian drivers.  Italians are, comparitively, and on average far less well-behaved (and of course there are plenty of exceptions, I'm just talking about averages).   You risk your life every time you walk across a crosswalk.
• It's wonderful to have hand carts in the supermarkets.  I have no idea what possesses supermarkets in Innsbruck to never have any .  On the other hand, in Italy, it's also annoying to have to weigh your own produce, rather than at the checkout, and use the 'sanitary gloves' that they provide in Italy.  Just wash your food before  you eat it, sheesh.
• The snowy cold winters in Innsbruck aren't bad, actually, however, spring time in Italy is truly something to behold.
• Padova, as a city, is much more interesting than Innsbruck.
• Driving up to Innsbruck with the rental truck was quite scary - there was a snowstorm on the Brenner pass as I went over, which would have been a bit unnerving even with our regular car.  With the rental truck, it was downright nerve-wracking.
• A huge thanks to all our friends who helped with the move: Ingrid, Nigel and Emily, Brad, Andrea, Marco and Raffaella.
• An even bigger thanks to my in-laws, Ruggero and Marisa, who have done an incredible amount of work to help us out.  Of course, they'll get their reward: now their granddaughter is very close by and they can see her regularly.
• Italy is still quite maddening: it's a stunningly beautiful country with an amazing variety of natural and cultural resources, from the carved woodwork of the German-speaking Sud Tirol area, to the arid beachers of southern Sicily.  However, it has a lot of serious problems that no one has the will to face.

All in all, we're happy to be back, even if the future is very uncertain in many ways.

 

No Kebabs in Lucca

Between Berlusconi and the opposition, there is plenty of silliness to go around in Italian politics, but I don't like to write about that too much, as it just gets depressing and is covered better elsewhere.  What is occasionally interesting to report are the odd bits of local news that are, at times, particularly crazy or outrageous.  For instance:

E Lucca vieta kebab e cous cous

In English, "Lucca bans kebab and cous cous".  In other words, they have passed a law against "The opening of new food purveyors whose activity is based on different ethnicities" (Non è ammessa l'attivazione di esercizi di somministrazione, la cui attività sia riconducibile ad etnie diverse).  Can you imagine what would happen if a town in the US tried to ban, say, Mexican or, for that matter, Italian food?

Alitalia - Off to a Rocky Start

For those wondering what has become of the "new Alitalia", it can best be described as hurtling down the runway, but not gaining a lot of altitude.  The "sale" has been closed, although there is still a lot of union activity going on that's quite disruptive - apparently a number of people missed their Christmas flights, which can't have put them in a good mood about using Alitalia's services in the future.

The other big, open issues facing Alitalia are 1) finding a foreign partner, and 2) figuring out what to do about the Malpensa airport, in Lombardy, near Milan.

Apparently, a deal is all but signed with Air France, which the French have been crowing about:

«Air France-Alitalia? Merci Silvio»

With good reason too.  As the article points out, with Prodi's plan, they would have had to shell out 1.2 billion euros, and assume the debts of the entire company.  With the current plan, they get a quarter of the company for 300 million Euro, and no mountain of debts, which Berlusconi conveniently passed off to the Italian taxpayer.  Also, as part of the deal, Italian routes have been consolidated, because AirOne, the other carrier with a lot of Italian routes is being folded into the new Alitalia.  The deal received a "get out of jail free" card from the antitrust authority as a further sweetener from Berlusconi. Air France probably get even more of the company as the group that got gang-pressed into buying up Alitalia heads for the doors at an opportune time, which makes something of a mockery of Berlusconi's insistence that Alitalia stay "Italian".

The other big wrinkle in the proceedings is the Malpensa airport, which was a fairly important hub for Alitalia, that served Milan and northern Italy in terms of long haul international flights.  The Lega Nord, or "Northern League", part of the governing coalition, wants, at all costs, to keep Malpensa operative and important, and as is pretty much par for the course for a government of any stripe in Italy, don't seem to believe much in the idea of a free market for the available slots, where companies will step in to service the large number of business customers that are in the area.

With the government putting its full weight, and a large dollop of public money, behind the new Alitalia, it will likely manage to struggle aloft, but for the time being, I still would avoid flying on it, as the strikes don't look to come to a quick end.  Eventually, it will probably be folded into Air France, who, I might add, are a bunch of theiving bastards, having stolen/"lost" my baggage seven years ago, with only a pittance in compensation.  Before things go further big changes, though, they'll probably settle down to some semblance of normal for a while, so it's unlikely there will be much to talk about in the near future.  I'll be sure to write if things heat up, though.