Revisited Worlds

This post begins as scribbling in a notebook, as I sit on the platform of the Bologna train station very early in the morning. I've had a total of 17 hours of sleep over the last four days and I'm doing pretty well, considering. I woke up feeling cool and languid, even on the sofa bed.

There's something about Italy in the summer. Before my term abroad, I'd never gone travelling other than in the summer. There is still something about the feel of tired feet on paving stones, and a cool morning that you know will be hot as soon as you move, and sharp shadows cast across the piazza. Its the smell, that's not exactly clean. Its sweat on the back of my neck, and a desperate need to drink Fanta. Bologna in the winter felt like Bologna, but it didn't feel viscerally Italian in the way the two days in the city did. Maybe I was conditioned by my first experience when I was 17. Maybe jet lag has something to do with it too. I feel both extra awake and a little unreal.

Somewhere in that sensual experience, it comes to me: I love Italy again. The glamour that I'd lost by December has come back, but this time its combined with the pleasure of recognition. It's the pleasure of returning to a loved place, and finding things exactly as you left them. And Bologna will always be there.

Oh, sure, little things change. If I come back in 50 years, the stores on the corner of D'Azeglio and Farini will be different - but the corner will be the same. Bologna will always be a little bit my city - because while I loved visiting my friends, and I thought that was the point of this trip, I realized that the city itself is a friend. I think I will return in 50 years to be one of those white haired women who walk arm in arm with their white haired husbands in slow steps across Piazza Maggiore in the evening.

By returning, I've retroactively understood and appreciated just what my semester here meant. So many places seem contingent on a time of life, a certain relationship, an particular activity, in order to be properly appreciated. As I got progressively disillusioned in the fall, and felt like I wasn't doing the things college students do, or meeting the right people, or getting enought "out" of the experience, I felt like I was wasting time. I blamed Italy, I blamed my program, I blamed myself. But the point isn't to get something "out" of Italy. How American of me, to constantly be drawing a bottom line!

Italy's great power is that it doesn't care what you or I think about it. It just goes on being Italian. There are terribly superficial aspects of the culture and politics, and in my disappointment, I missed the point. The real culture is underneath, neither Berlusconi and the reality game shows nor opera and the Renaissance. Italy is all of that - and none of it. It can't be summed up so easily. It has a permanence, that is so hard for an American to grasp. Its something of the feeling of sharp morning sun heating the air over the piazza, the smell of exhaust and coffee, the cafes opening. As it ever was, so shall it always be.

Insterstate 91: Not Quite A Love Song

Nobody loves I-91. There are no songs written about out, no road signs on the walls of diners (or Applebee's). If you live in New England, you know its second only to I-95 in its unavoidability and congestion. But every cross-country ski season, I spend most weekends driving from New Haven to northern Vermont and back, almost entirely on I-91. My teammate likes to compare that road to a pneumatic tube: you get on at one end, and four hours later, you're deposited at the other. I'm short on exotic travels at the moment, but here is my affectionate take on a road I've seen too much of in the last 2 months.

We get on at exit 1 in New Haven, CT. We're heading North, because that's the direction of Friday afternoons, fresh snow, and adventure (South means the weekend's over, work is looming, and the sore muscles are setting in). After 2 years, New Haven's starting to feel like home. It's even kind of beautiful if you catch the sun setting behind West Rock. There's something about East Rock and West Rock, the two sheer-sided hills that rise abruptly on either side of the city, that makes me feel like I can imagine the way this part of the country looked to the first Europeans arriving from the sea.

Hartford's the first real landmark, a little under an hour later. I've never been to Hartford, despite having driven through it about a million times in my childhood on the way from Maine to Philadelphia. Am I missing anything? I have to admit that the blue onion dome that I can see from the highway has always made me wonder if there's more to the city than the insurance company offices that dominate the skyline.

Just north of Hartford is a landfill. I've got a love-hate relationship with Connecticut: I love New Haven, and hate the rest of it. Ok, that's not fair, but I still feel like this about sums it up: Northern New England has mountains; Connecticut has a giant mound of trash. When we got hit by the snowbomination/snowpocalypse/snowmaggedon this January, the featureless artificial hill looked like a bizarre, nightmarish giant marshmallow.

Next we cross into Massachusetts, and quickly come to Springfield, another city I've never been to despite driving through a million times (Worcester completes the trio). Should I see more of Springfield than convenient pit stop gas stations? The Basketball Hall of Fame is shaped like a basketball, which is pretty cool, but I'm not sure thats enough of a draw.

Its better to hold off on the pit stop in any case, if you can wait until Northampton. Not only does it have the Iron Horse, venue of many an Enter the Haggis concert, its got curry at the Haymarket Cafe and a great natural food store.

Northampton (exit 19) certainly beats Deerfield (exit 24). Deerfield, although I'm sure its a lovely place, is home to two things I strongly disapprove of, though of course not in equal measure: Yankee Candle and one of the worst massacres of the French and Indian War.

That war left its mark on another landmark a few miles on: the sign for French King bridge. After much wondering, I discovered that the bridge is named after French King Gorge, which was named for (you guessed it) the King of France. This doesn't answer why 1. if the French lost the war, we kept the name, and 2. it isn't called Louis XIV Bridge, instead of being named for "any generic French king".

Now its the Vermont border, and 91 begins to follow the twists of the Connecticut River. Exit 2 is Brattleboro, home to yummy if overpriced general store, with chocolate chip cookies the size of your head. Putney (exit 4) has a real small-town diner, the type that serves six kinds of pie, and has a Saturday meatloaf special. Its not totally old-fashioned - they were serving "beefalo" burgers - but then, it is Vermont.

For a long time after that, its just the road and the trees. There's plenty of time to listen to music, and invent song parodies for the all-teams talent show. But sooner or later (sooner if our speed-demon captain is driving), we get to White River Junction. That's usually the end of the line. This season, one meet was in Hanover, a little bit farther and on the New Hampshire side of the river, but the other two were in Jericho, in the western part of the state. That means taking the other branch at the junction, and following Route 89, a beautiful road with panoramic mountain views and signs for bear crossings.

I've never driven to the end of I-91, the last 110 miles through St. Johnsbury to the Canadian border. Though it's dangerously near to a cliche that my "road not taken" should be in Robert Frost's home state, its nice to think that even though this is such a familiar route, there's still a part of it I haven't travelled yet. Maybe next winter.

Korean Food in Dushanbe; and Other 2010 Superlatives

Best (and worst) of 2010

Best book I read: The best new book was Zeitoun, Dave Eggers' novel-like account of one man's decency and resilience during hurricane Katrina. I also hugely enjoyed a book I was assigned for class last fall, North and South.  Elizabeth Gaskell had Austen's gift for character, and Dicken's eye for social injustice.

Best movie I saw: new: A Single Man; old: Two BBC miniseries from the '80s: Traffik, the clearest depiction I've seen of the folly of the war on drugs, and First Among Equals, which follows the careers of four politicians vyying to become Prime Minister - not a masterpiece, but I really enjoyed it.

Best song of the year: Neither are new, but I spent the year obsessively listening on repeat to Sodom, South Georgia (here) by Iron and Wine and The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Runner(here) by Belle and Sebastian.

Worst song of the year: I spent three hours in a Tajik taxi whose driver only owned one song, and, just my luck, it had to be Moscow Never Sleeps (here, if you really want to subject yourself to it).

Best restaurant: While I love Bologna's Osteria dell’Orsa, the most unexpectedly wonderful place was the Korean Restaurant on Rudaki Avenue in Dushanbe. It is also conveniently across the street from the Uzbek embassy, and served as a peaceful, air-conditioned refuge to refuel on jasmine tea before facing the bureaucracy. 

Best meal: fish stew, cuttlefish risotto and a sorbet trio at a small italian restaurant in Bled, Slovenia.

Best thing I ate: Tajik fruit – Ishkashim grapes, Shahristan pears, Khorog cherries, Vrang plums.

Worst thing I ate: Tajik ice cream. Comes in many neon colors but has only one flavor: plastic.

Hangumar displaying the bread dough

Best educational experience: bread baking in Tavildara.

Best museum: tie between the British Museum, which feels like it was designed for archeologists and adventurous children, and where all mysterious objects are labeled as "origin not yet known", and the Fra Angelico cells at the Chiesa San Marco in Florence.

Worst museum: the Hulbook, a questionably reconstructed ancient fort in southern Tajikistan; interesting from a propaganda perspective, but would make an archeologist weep.

Best church: Basilica di San Antonio, Padova. I loved its blue-grey domes and the combination of frescos from the 1300s and 1930s. 

Best beach: the endless public beaches of Latvia - where the beach cafes also win the competition for best borscht. The "anti-imperialist" Tajik borscht doesn't use beets, though, so its not a fair competition.

Best hotel: Muminjon’s guest house in Bukhara, in a seemingly-unchanged 18th century merchant's house, with a shade tree, harbuza melon and a friendly cat.

Lonely Planet in action

Best Guidebook: The Lonely Planet guide to Central Asia. Pretty useless for Tajikistan, but we followed it religiously in Uzbekistan with good results. Plus it served as toilet paper, a fire-starter, and a useful child-distractor while interviewing harried mothers.

Most useful thing I brought: my Naot "Scandinavian" sandals - suitable for the Italian riviera or a Tajik village, and didn't give me a blister in 3 months of constant wear, not even when I hiked in them.

Least useful thing I brought: the ankle brace my mother made me take - but I never sprained my ankle, so maybe it was preventative. 

Best bargain: Couch Surfing; also, though I couldn't have predicted it, the extra $50 to fly home from Gatwick, which saved me getting stuck in the Heathrow weather cancellations.

Worst not-a-bargain: £100 train from Edinburgh to London cost more than all the Ryanair flights put together - but the view of the rainbow over the North Sea might have been worth it.

me sketching in Bukhara

Best tourist cities: Bukhara and Ljubljana - beautiful and accessible without being crowded or kitschy.

Worst tourist cities: Kulob or Florence - Strange comparison, I know, but Kulob, Tajikistan may have never seen a tourist in its life, while Florence has seen far too many. It doesn't stop either from being good places to visit, but finding the best stuff takes more work.

Most unexpectedly wonderful thing: Ieva, Rob, Nazira, Mehri Niso, Hangumar, Laura, Shanbe, Matine, Nikita, Uri, Lola, Feli, Veronyka and all the other new friends who I don't have space to list.

Plus the Wakhan corridor (see above). 

Obvious thing totally not worth it: the Registan in Bukhara was bombed by the Red Army in the '20s - there's not much left of the Emir's palace.

Obvious things totally worth it: punting on the Cam, climbing Bologna’s tower, Edinburgh castle, the reclining Buddha at the National Museum of Tajikistan, Venice.

The Two Towers

"Its snowing in Forli," my roommate said, with some surprise. We were standing in our kitchen making lunch, with the tv news on in the background. Forli is about forty minutes from here, farther south and closer to the Adriatic. If it was snowing there, surely it wouldn't be long before the storm reached Bologna.

I'd just finished the last of my exams. The wonderful but nerve-wracking thing about Italian oral exams is that the professor "verbalizes" the grade - i.e. tells you what it is immediately. "26 [of 30]. No wait, if you can tell me how Liszt is related to programmatic music, I'll give 27," to quote my music professor. The point being, I already knew I'd passed everything. I had four days left in Italy, and I didn't have to spend them in my room drinking gallons (liters?) of tea and trying to memorize the entire history of Latin America. What could I do with my freedom?

Washing up, I glanced out the window. Snow. Absolutely no doubt about it. Snow!  "Giulia, sta nevicando! [its snowing]" "Grazie, Anna," my roommate laughed at me, but I didn't care. I wanted to immediately run outside, like a five year old, and spin around in circles in the courtyard.

By the time I'd found my gloves and got outside, though, the sun was back out. But there was just the fainted coating of snow on the cars in the street. I decided there couldn't be a better moment to do the most touristy thing Bologna had to offer. Though I've been here three and a half months, I still hadn't climbed the tower. Le Due Torri, or the two towers, are at the heart of Bologna, and I walked past them almost everyday, but I had never been to the top.

the Torre strung with Christmas Lights

There is a superstition that if a student climbs to the top before they have finished their studies, they won't graduate. Now, I don't usually believe in this kind of thing - I'm pretty sure I stepped on all the "stones one is never supposed to step on" at Yale in the first week of class, before I knew any better (though if I somehow flunk out in my senior year, we'll know why). Nonetheless, I had waited, but now that I was finished with the exams, there was nothing to hold me back.

I'm actually so glad I chose today. Not only did the city look breathtaking with the snow on the roofs, the view was better with familiarity. I could pick out all the streets and buildings I walk by, and even see the smoke rising from the chimney of my palazzo. It was a perfect way to realize just how much I have come to know the city, at the same time that I couldn't believe I'd never seen it from this vantage before. It was truly saving the best for last.

ancient wooden stairs, going up, and up, and up...

Shadow of the tower, and the snow clouds heading north

Piazza Maggiore and San Luca on the hilltop

Bologna la Rossa

Patriotism and Pronouns

Warning: this post may be overly influenced by having read too many essays about constructivism and discourse analysis on too few hours of sleep.

Today I survived the first in a series of end-of-term ordeals: an oral presentation, in front of my entire class, in Italian. Though my attempt to produce an analysis of the European Security and Defense Policy was dogged by many errors of grammar and phrasing, the biggest problem wasn't on account of the language barrier. Actually, I found myself hesitating about how describe Americans - specifically, with which pronoun.

It drove home the point that I was a foreigner, the only non-European in a class on European international relations. Normally I would have said "we provide leadership in NATO" without a second thought, but in this context, there was no "we", only "me" (alone, being judged....cue the gibbering). I certainly wouldn't want to imply personally responsibility for the actions of my government by saying "we", particularly when talking about policies I don't necessarily support. I don't accept it when non-Americans tell me, "you invaded Iraq". No, I didn't: I was 13 at the time, not that it stopped me from protesting angrily.

All the same, it felt wrong to say "they", like it was somehow disloyal, as well as dishonest, to turn my own nation into the Other. What a complicated thing patriotism is! In the end I ducked the tricky questions of collective responsibility by just saying "America" and "it". With that distance in my pronouns I could position myself in a neutral space, belonging to no nation. That's how I feel a lot of the time in Italy - like a citizen of the world, neither native nor foreign. Yet at the same time I never feel so American as when I am abroad. I love and appreciate America more when confronted with the alternatives, but that doesn't mean that all of the comparisons are favorable. I don't wish to be held to account for the actions of my country, perhaps because I already hold myself responsible for everything I would like my country to be. It is the part of me that reflexively wants to say "we". That sense of duty, more than any sense of superiority, tells me that I am a patriot. 

 I've got two more oral exams left, and one written one, but I'm going to celebrate my Americanness by procrastinating and watching How I Met Your Mother. 

Creative Protests

This is one of the best posters I've seen from the anti-Gelmini protests (see my previous post). At the top it says, "We attack the profits/ we gain (our) rights." Then below: "There is money for the University... guess who has it?" The answer, clearly, is Berlusconi and his friends, who are constantly under attack for corruption and cronyism. I love the image of the little fish banding together to eat the big one. It's a classic leftist argument - that there isn't actually a crisis of public funding that requires cuts to services, but the misuse of public funds by mogul-politicians who encourage businesses to avoid paying taxes. Italy does have a growing debt crisis, and does desperately need reform - but that doesn't stop this kind of populism from also being true.

This is a photo I took of another demonstration in Bologna. These protesters are wearing placards made to look like the traditional Italian death announcements, but that read "RIP the Public University".

My absolute favorite banner, though, is this one, protesting Gelmini's cuts to research funding. I saw this online, so I'm not sure what city its from. The banner tells the balding Prime Minister:

BERLUSCONI

If you have any hair

Its only thanks to the research

"Stay on the barricades for a real education"

Taking to the streets, Via Zamboni

I was sitting in class when I first heard the shouts from the courtyard below. A young man with dreadlocks and a bullhorn strode into the lecture hall, opened a window and shouted down "Come up." Within moments, the room had been taken over by more than one hundred student protesters. My professor made no fuss, simply gathered up his notes and sat down in the front row to see what would happen next. The dreadlocked student went up to the microphone. "Prodi thinks he'll be speaking here," he said, referring to the former Italian Prime Minister, scheduled to deliver a lecture from that podium later in the day, "That's what he thinks, but he's not going to be able to do it now." The occupation of the university had begun.

I wrote about the Gelmini reform (named for the sponsoring minister, one of Berlusconi's beautiful young hench-women) in my post on the strike at the beginning of October. On November 30th, the legislation passed in parliament, and in the days leading up to and now following the vote, the educational system went into revolt. Students occupied the Colleseum and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and high schoolers went on strike and took to the streets. The clashes with the police at one protest in Bologna even made the cover of the New York Times (which itself was reported as news on Italian tv). In the political science department, the front gates are drapped with banners, and a desk has been pulled across the entry. Graffiti read, "Stay on the barricades for a real education". Inside its mostly quiet - a few classes still go on, though with fewer students - and the rigged-up speaker system was playing "What If God Were One of Us?", not the most raucous protest anthem. Nonetheless, my classroom that was taken over on Tuesday is still full of sleeping students, and the professor didn't even try to hold lessons for the rest of the week.

My Italian friends are mostly taking a passive role in all of this, but they accept it as normal and legitimate. As an American, though, I can't quite wrap my head around it. I've tried to explain to my friends that we just don't have protests like this. But then how do you make it known when you don't like something, they ask. How do you protest if you don't take to the streets? That's the response I've gotten from everyone, even my friend who just finished his service in the police. When I stop to think about it, its a perfectly reasonable question. Why don't Americans, and American students in particular, ever protest? In the 60s and 70s, American students occupied their universities just like their compatriots in Europe did. Why does it seem so inconceivable now?

One of my professors tried to explain the disparity by reference to the Turner Thesis, (bringing back my memories of cramming for the AP US History exam). Turner argued that the western frontier, and later the idea of mobility that it created in the American imagination, served as an escape valve for social tensions. Unions are weaker in America than in many European countries, my professor proposed, precisely because there is often the sense that rather than staying and fighting to improve conditions, one can always move on and try one's luck elsewhere. Its a classic example of Hirschman's exit/voice correlation - in Italy, the relative lack of class mobility means that its easier to organize collective action around class-based issues. The lack of alternatives to the public university system means that students are willing to fight to preserve its functioning and affordability.

All this makes me wonder if the American perception of opportunity and mobility at times holds us back from seeking real change. I wouldn't want to give it up: the persistence of the American Dream allows our country to continue to reinvent itself; neither do I mean to say that class conflict is a good thing. There's a trade-off between quality and equality, and a reason that the top American universities surpass most European ones. Yet in Italy, university is nearly free: with fees, it might cost at most 1,000 Euros a year, while Yale charges $53,000 and even public universities costs are in the tens of thousands. After Gelmini, Italian universities will be a little poorer, a little less accessible, a little less able to compete globally. But they will still cost much, much less than American ones.

My mother had another explanation for why her generation was willing to protest against the Vietnam war, while my generation hasn't mobilized against Iraq and Afghanistan: the draft. Today, without the threat to make us feel personally involved, its hard to get worked up. Its also been said that young people today aren't apathetic, but post-partisan, that our support for Obama showed that we are more interested in cooperation than confrontation. However, Obama's struggles have shown some of the limits of this type of approach. Access to higher education is an issue of immediate importance to college students. Maybe we should take a little inspiration from our European friends - we don't have to take to the streets, but we could at least speak up to defend our own interests.