Getting to Know You

Our morning may have been devoted to the school and sitting our placement tests, the afternoon and evening was ours to do whatever. I had two things on my to-do list: get food, get to know my surroundings. You may know by now that I love exploring, and I was keen to get to know the place I'd be seeing a lot of in the next month. I went back to my flat with Gaby and we made some plans.

 For a start, this is what the view was from our kitchen window. I literally couldn't get enough of it. Unfortunately our room looked out over the street, but when we were cooking this is what we saw.

Camerino is a peculiar town. It is typical of a medieval town in central Italy: it sits on top of a hill and is enclosed by walls. Our flat was basically built into the walls so if we looked down from the same window that afforded us such a lovely view, we'd look down into a ditch a couple of hundred feet below at the foot of the town. It was certainly spectacular.

As I said before the view from mine and Gaby's bedroom window looked out over the street. For the majority of the month it was a building site because of damage caused in an earthquake. I was never totally sure when this earthquake happened - whether it had created some sort of subsidance over many years, or whether it was a reasonably recent phenomenon. But whatever the cause of the problem, there was a large hole, lots of diggers, and workmen that liked to start at 6am - and who says the Italians are lazy!!!

Back at the flat, Gaby and I decided we'd go to a supermarket. She seemed to know everyone and invited a couple of Portuguese guys along for the ride. I shall call one of them Carlos. I shall call the other one Carlos' friend.

We found that the supermarket was quite a walk away and spent a good half hour getting to know each other. When we arrived at the supermarket, Gaby and I went round together buying food for our flat, the idea being that we would cook together.

Gaby was awfully efficient (or at least gave that impression) and knew exactly what it was that we'd need. At that stage I thought she was in her twenties and was a seasoned pro and courses like this - she had just finished one in London. It was only three weeks later that it came out that she was only 19 (at this point I was 20). If I had known this, I would have realised that she was a little immature and had never lived on her own (I had been living on my own at university for two years at that point). That would have allowed me to pull rank and not waste as much of our money (and that of our housemates) as we did in buying bananas that would go off in approximately five minutes.

Oh well, that's only a taste of what's to come. We bought many things and soon realised it wouldn't be much fun having them back up the hill. Carlos, however, seemed to know when there would be a bus and we hopped on outside the supermarket and got off at the main piazza. Job done.

We packed our shopping away and then started to deal with the second of my tasks to do - get to know your surroundings...

Cafe Culture

The following morning I woke up in my new room. Because it was August in Italy, it was already hot by 8am. I didn't have anything for breakfast having just arrived the day before, so I decided to join Gaby in meeting some of the other people on the course for a coffee and a croissant before we had to meet at the town hall.

I was a little swept along by everything - I didn't quite understand how Gaby knew people already, but I wasn't going to complain. At that stage I still didn't know the town and so I was led down narrow backstreets, inamongst old-fashioned blocks of flats, the like of which I'd seen in Sanremo's old town and Baiardo. We arrived at what I learned later was the main street and I was immediately set upon by another Portuguese girl I will, in the interests of maintaining my Desperate Housewives theme, call Bree.

She scooped up me and Gaby and chivvied us into a cafe that seemed to be full of other students on the language course and explained that she'd met my roommate on the plane over from Portugal. She asked me where I was from and I told her I was from Manchester.
'Great!' she said, 'there's another girl from Manchester here too!'
I was quite taken aback and then I remembered that the person that had put me onto the course was a university lecturer and had mentioned it to one of her students too.

Bree introduced us: I shall call her Lynette. I got the impression everyone knew everyone else and considering I arrived so late the previous night, I wasn't surprised. I slotted myself into the pack and waited quietly to find the lay of the land and see what kind of people they all were.

Thinking about it now, and thinking about how strong our friendship became, it seems funny that on the first morning we were all playing characters and playing to stereotypes until we got to know each other better. It seems like we went about it backwards and became friends in the most complex, round-about way possible. But then again, you could say that's why we became friends...

After the cafe debacle, which fitted a whole host of personalities into a confined space in a headache-inducing half hour, we moved on to the town hall where our introductory meeting was to take place. It was typically grand. We all took our seats - I sat with Gaby, Bree and Lynette - and the principal told us about the course.

We did a quick show of hands for different nationalities and Lynette and I discovered that we were the only British contingent - language wasn't going to be too much of a problem as the Portuguese people spoke English almost better than we did! There seemed to be as big a stress on culture as on language which I didn't understand until long after the course had finished, but was grateful for in the meantime as it meant the month certainly wouldn't be 'all work and no play'...

We had to sit placement tests so that we could be placed into classes of an appropriate level and we were informed of a couple of opportunities coming in the next couple of days - a concert and tour of the theatre and our first official outing (to some caves).

The scene was set and the players had been moved into position...

Desperate Housemates

By the time I arrived in Camerino it was pitch black. the bus had wound its way up a hill and I knew I was high up, but I had no idea where. I met the principal's husband and he took me straight to his wife. They were a very Italian couple - lovely and incredibly hospitable, but you only needed to look at them once to tell where they came from.

The principal was an incredibly tall woman. She was quite formidable. Still she was lovely and escorted me directly to my house. I confess I'd signed up to the course and not really given much of a thought to accommodation; I'd been looking forward to the trips and classes, but it had never occured to me that I wouldn't be spending all my time at the school - most of it, granted, but certainly not all of it.

So the principal took me to my apartment: that too was typically Italian. It had an old wooden door into the building and then I was living one floor up. The principal told me I'd be sharing with three other girls who were all great. Considering this was only my second time in Italy on my own and for the second time I was staying with more people I didn't know, I was grateful that this time, my co-habitants got a glowing review. That said it wouldn't be a very good marketing ploy for the principal to turn round and say, actually the girls seem quite horrible.

Still, I was excited to meet them, and settle in to my new apartment.

The principal showed me to my room. It was down a corridor, past the kitchen on the left and the bathroom on the right. There were two bedrooms, one to the left and one right at the end of the corridor. Mine was straight ahead. We knocked on the door and were admitted by a short-ish girl with brown hair and big brown eyes.
'Hi' she said.
'Hi' I said.
So far so good.
The principal left us to get on.

You'll be pleased to know that the conversation went on and developed and we did get on. For those of you that read my posts avidly, you'll remember that I chose a Pride and Prejudice theme for my last group of friends. This time I think I will choose something a little less high-brow: Desperate Housewives should just about do it.

So I shall call my roommate Gaby. I don't intend for this to be a cheap racist comparison, but Gaby (my roommate) was Portuguese. She was full of a music project she'd just completed in London and the beau that she'd just met. It transpired she was very musical - very into musical theatre - needless to say she had quite a pair of jazz hands on her. But I wasn't in a position to make sweeping judgements after meeting her for five minutes, and if my previous stay in Italy had taught me anything about first impressions, it was to wait before jumping to conclusions.

If I was going to share a room with her for a month it was important that we got on. This was also true for our neighbours in the apartment. I shall delve into some Desperate Housewives history for their pseudonyms: Catherine and Anna (Gaby's niece). These little epithets will all become clear as my story progresses.

I met them that night as well. One was French, the other Belgian. They too seemed nice. Anna, the Belgian girl, seemed quite eccentric but I couldn't exactly talk now.

I went to sleep that night after a mammoth day. After meeting my housemates, the travel trauma had been forgotten as an unpleasant dream. I looked forward, with some apprehension, but forward nonetheless to getting down to business the following day which was to see placement tests and ontroductory classes, but more importantly, it would begin in a cafe where I would meet the rest of my desperate gang.

Back for Good

Just less than a week after returning home, I left the UK for Italy again - this time for good. When I say good, I don't actually mean good but I do mean as I left on the 31st July 2009, I wouldn't return home (save for a fortnight at Christmas and two summer weddings) until the second week of September 2011. Good.

When I flew out this time, I was going first of all to Pisa, and then, by a seriously convoluted route, I was to end up in a small hilltop town called Camerino. I was flying out on a Sunday to start a four-week intensive language course the following day on the Monday. I'd never done anything like it before and I was psyched for it. I'd had a reasonably positive experience with Italian public transport up to this point, so if I was worried about anything, getting there wasn't it.

So I arrived in Pisa. I've been before, though just the once. Back in 2005, I went on a family holiday to Tuscany. My love for Italy really started blossoming from there and it was strange to be back a few years later after never thinking I would return, and certainly not under these circumstances. If you want to know why, I suggest you start at the beginning.

Pisa is one of the only Italian airports that have a train station attached. There are many times in the following year that I wished that was the case for Milan as well. So I had a four minute ride into Pisa and then I was off to Florence. I got myself a MacDonalds and found a corner where I could sit and gorge myself before getting on a train to a small place called Foligno.

I didn't know Foligno that well - to be honest I'd never heard of it. I know certainly the station a lot better now as my train was delayed two hours there. But that's just it - my train wasn't delayed there. It just never showed up - well not for two hours. Being a Sunday, all the normal Italians were at mass and spending time gorging on massive banquets: there were very few people I could have turned to for help. I had to wait it out.

I started to think about my upcoming month. A friend of a friend had put me on to it, apparently she knew the lady that was the principal of the school I was to be studying at. But I never met her, even her contact came through someone else. I filled in all the forms and got myself a place on the August course. It was going to be pricey, but I hoped the 480Eur I'd earned during my month teaching would go a little way to offsetting my living costs.

The course included a place to live as well as a tutoring fee and some excursions. I had a bursary because I was a student myself and it halved the overall fees, making it a not-too-shabby investment. My plan had been to gain some soft exposure to the language when I was teaching, learn some more in the language course, and by the time I arrived in Verona I'd be fluent and ready to go to all my classes and ace every one of them.

It didn't quite work like that, but let's not dwell...

Anyway, I was really looking forward to the whole experience, but I was still in Foligno, waiting for a train to Fabriano (another place I'd never heard of, and haven't since). Two hours later the train came and evening was fast approaching. It was about an hour over to Fabriano, but even that train was delayed. I arrived, still waiting for a connection up to Camerino and met with an unhappy truth.

I went to the ticket office to ask what I should do. I then cursed myself for being stupid: the ticket office isn't open on a Sunday. My only option was to scour the departures board and find the next train. Oops. The last train. And it wasn't even a train. It was a bus.

No problem. I had plenty of time to wait for it. I got to know Fabriano quite well too. I passed the time avoiding a gentleman I dubbed Weird Ugo which helped to keep me occupied. The bus came and I had acquired a new set of English-speaking friends. Frankly without them I'd have been up that old creek sans paddle. They were going to the same place as me because they studied at the university in Camerino. Not only that but they called the principal of the school I was to be attending and asked her husband to pick me up at the bus station and take me to my flat.

They helped me get on the right bus up to Camerino and showed me where to get off - the bus, it wasn't an insult. They explained how to access the moving staircase and get into the main city at the top of the hill. it was there that I met the principal's husband and heaved a great sigh of relief.

My train travel ordeals were becoming a regularity.

Homeward Bound

The time has come. I have finished the first mini-leg (let's say the first ankle) of my time in Italy. I'd crammed so much into a month that I had plenty to think about on my way back. Early the next morning, my friend and I got up and got ready to get the bus down to Sanremo from Baiardo. We had to be quiet as Tom Daly (not really, you might want to get an explanation for that) was still sleeping. We managed to get on the bus and get down into Sanremo nice and early. We hopped on a train to Nice and left Italy behind, for now at least...

Because I only had hand luggage, I went straight through security with my friend as I didn't have to wait for check-in to open. My friend was leaving a few hours earlier than me, so I sellotaped her to her plane and then found myself a nice little corner to do some relaxing. The hours slipped by and soon I was on my early evening flight back to Liverpool. I have never seen such a beautiful view as we left Nice and I'm genuinely sorry I can't share it with you in photographic form - blame Easyjet. The airport is right on the coast, so as we took off, the sea yawned out before us showing the curviture of the earth on the horizon. The sun was on its way down and throwing this beautiful yellow glow over everything. The sea was perfectly calm and the yachts in the bay were drawing patterns with their wakes. What a stunning parting gift.

It was then, when I was thousands of feet up in the air that I decided to write down my memories from Italy so that one day I could share my collection of bizarre and incredible stories with the general public. I got out my Moleskine notepad and started at the very beginning and my adventures in Nice all the way through to the lady that wanted to get changed completely on the bus to Baiardo. I made my first few observations about the art of the 'man purse', queuing etiquette and the completely different pace of life in Italy compared to the UK. The last observation I made was that despite all these things, I couldn't wait to go back.

I didn't have long to wait. In theory I should have stayed out in Italy for an extra couple of days to give me a smooth transition into a language course that I was going to do for the month of August, and with hindsight I could have gone and stayed with my family in Brescia, but these things are never set in stone and so I had already booked a flight home. It was nice though; I got to see most of my family and share with them some of my madcap stories and repack my bag for learning instead of teaching. And four days later, I was ready to go all over again...

Last Night She Said, 'Oh Baby I Feel So Down'

My friend and I reached Baiardo that evening after my interesting travelling experience. There was just one other person staying there, a guy who was a swimmer by day and an English tutor by night. I shall call him Tom Daly, though he wasn't nearly as irritating.

We raided the food store and got a pan of water on to boil. I say we, I mean we burnt ourselves a lot of times trying to light the gas hob with a lighter and then asked Tom to do it for us. The water took about an hour to boil - plenty of time to catch up. It also gave us time to properly examine our surroundings.

When I'd been there with everyone else it hadn't been appropriate to delve into the nooks and crannies, and I'm glad I only spent one night knowing that there were creatures like this one (left) lurking in the shadows. It was also fun to discover the picture of the funny old man that was on one of the walls. I took a picture of him because he was obviously important to someone...

But what was by far the most bizarre aspect of the house was the staircase. As you can see there is little rhyme or reason to the size of the separate steps so much so that they were probably built before someone invented boring things like rulers and spirit levels. You certainly wouldn't want to fall down those stairs, or catch your toe on the way up... Anyway we ate our fill, whatever our fill was from what we had managed to raid from the food store and we shared even more of our stories as well as reflecting a little on the experience.

It was then that I really regretted my decision to go back to Brescia. Not only had I missed out on banter like finding big curly worms and pictures of funny old men, but I'd also missed out on Cinque Terre, one of the most beautiful places in Italy.

My teaching experience would end the following day and sadly, I ended up leaving with a bittersweet taste in my mouth. So as I went to sleep that night (after chatting with Tom until all hours) I couldn't help feeling that I could have done it better.

Nudity in Public Places

I left my family in Brescia for the second time on the Monday morning (and this time remembered to stamp my ticket). I had to spend most of the day on Italy's collection of slow trains and I wasn't looking forward to it. I had much to ponder and several changes to make.

I went to Milan (again - who's counting - I make it four times) and despite a person waking me up whilst taking a nap at Milano Centrale, everything was going swimmingly until we got to Genova. I'd been the same route the previous week and I knew I had to change at one of the stations in Genova. The first time I'd gone all the way to the terminus and hopped on my other train no problems. What I hadn't realised was that train had been delayed. This train was not. And I missed it.

Bother.

Well get the next one - you may be saying. It wasn't as easy as that. I had to get to Sanremo for a certain time so that I could get the bus up to Baiardo. Even this wasn't as simple as it sounds. I was meeting one of my friends from Sanremo and we were going up to Baiardo together. Though I would have been ok spending the night in Sanremo, my friend had to go back to Baiardo to collect her stuff as we were both flying out the following afternoon.

Things were about to get tricky.

I hurtled through the station to ask someone when the next train would be, the nice lady at the ticket office told me I should have got off on the stop before. I explained that I knew this and that telling me what I should have done is little use as it's not going to help me get the last bus to Baiardo. (I didn't actually say that, but I would have done if I'd had more time.)

Anyway, she gave me an alternative route via some other place on a train that, for anyone's money, looked more like a bus. I changed in another place I'd never heard of and then again in another place with a population of about four before I was on the train to Sanremo. I was clock-watching avidly - counting down the stops: 'We're not gonna make it!' 'Yes we are!' 'No we're not!' That was a very entertaining conversation I had with myself for about two hours.

I saw the second to last stop and started to get ready. It took ages to get to the next stop and then we went in what was by then a very familiar tunnel - for some reason we'd skipped the previous stop and gone straight to Sanremo. Good job I was paying attention.

I ran down the walkway.

This took some time.

I arrived at the waiting area to greet my friend and we legged it to the bus stop. Ten minutes later we were on the bus to Baiardo and I was glad I had an hour on the bus to calm down.

Now at this juncture I want to share something about the bus to Baiardo. When it's not full of tutors and others affiliated to the company, it's speckled with locals. I don't know what it is about these locals, but several of them seemed a couple of basil leaves short of a ragu.

I was busy catching up with my friend and telling her all about the time that during hide and seek one morning at camp, we'd gone and lost three children at which point it had ceased to be a fun game. Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the locals take their top off.
'It's ok,' I thought, 'it is hot in here.'
I carried on and told my friend about the morning we tried Olly, Olly Octopus on tarmac and in about four rounds we ended up with six injured children. This local caught my eye again.
'Hang on,' I thought, 'he's wearing a bra!'
It transpired this local was a woman. Awkward. Still. No matter and I went on to tell my friend about how my kids had written me a thank you message on my blackboard and had spelt it 'thank yuo'.
'OH MY GOODNESS! THE WOMAN HAS TAKEN HER BRA OFF!'
She was literally changing completely on the bus. I mean what kind of situation means that you have to change the majority of your clothes on a public bus!?

Needless to say that when we got to Baiardo I'd had my fill of Italian public transport...