Take twelve

I can overhear the plumber talking to someone and explaining that this job is very difficult because I speak English and not Italian (and here I thought we were communicating so well with our half Italian/half English conversations!).

I know that right now you are probably scrolling back to old posts and thinking, Wait? What? The plumber?  Wasn't the plumber there last week? And the week before? And the week before? And last month? And two months ago? Do these people still not have hot water?

And to that I answer: yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes and yes, we do have hot water. And yes, the plumber is here once again.

Because yesterday I heard a noise and it turned out it was our newly hot water leaving the pipes in a steady stream and hitting the floor. No amount of plumbing efforts on our part could slow down the impressive leak and so we had no choice but to turn off the water supply for our apartment. That's right. Now we have no water.

And so the plumber is back (two hours late,  right on time).

And now, apparently the plumber is totally bummed by my lack of Italian. But as we speak the common language of you-screwed-up-and-now-you-need-to-fix-it; actual words aren't necessary! For example, he looked at the hot water heater and shrugged and said, "It is new. It is not possible." And I silently unwrapped the three sets of beach towels that were stemming the flow of water and the water was able to resume pouring onto the floor and the plumber said, "Oh! That part is not new. That part is old. Maybe it is possible that it is that part." And I walked into the other room.

See how well we communicate?

Earlier this week we had had an issue with the kitchen faucet (something the plumber had also worked on…I'm sensing a pattern…). Water was not coming out of the faucet. We know better than to complain about something so small and so we took apart the faucet in hopes that we just needed to dump the latest batch of rocks. Which we did. As Mike was reassembling the faucet, he pointed out how gross strange it was that my hair ( it was very long and blondish; really, it could have been anyone's) was completely wound around the faucet spout.

And it was weird, but considering that over the course of one week the dogs and I could blanket a small country with the amount of hair we shed, not as weird as one might think.

Except that when I was inspecting the leak near the hot water heater, I noticed long blondish hairs wrapped around those pipes as well. And there was no way those were mine.

And then that made me think of how I had noticed a large pile of blondish hair near the plumber's tools over the past couple of months. I had noticed it because I had thought it was my hair that the plumber had pulled from drains and I was horrified and mortified and I rushed to clean it up and apologize for my general grossness. Except. Except it wasn't a pile of my hair. It was…a pile of other hair. Hair that wasn't a random pile but that was all connected. Like a wig. I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing and so I forgot about it.

How can you forget about the plumber carrying around a pile of wig hair? Well, I am an American who lives in Italy. My life is all about things that don't make sense to me. For instance, the plumber's business card is for a pasticceria (pastry shop). What is the plumbing/pastry connection? Dude, I don't know. See what I mean?


So, as I looked at the hair wrapped around the pipes, everything fit together like I was on Scooby Doo and had just discovered the culprit was Old Man Jenkins and he was shaking a fist and saying, "And I would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you meddling kids!"

The hair we were finding wasn't my hair so much as it was wig hair the plumber had wrapped around the pipes. And this was undoubtedly why the plumber said the hot water heater wouldn't work if the wind blew because, duh, the hair would get tangled in the wind. And even though LD and her sister had been here to "keep an eye" on the plumber, he snuck in the use of wig hair.

And you may ask: What exact function is performed by the wig hair wrapped around the pipes?  And although I couldn't say for certain, I suspect it has something to do with pastry.

I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul

So I am pretty sure that we are being poisoned by our water.  Okay, that's an exaggeration. (Not really.) I have long been, shall we say, suspicious of the water here because it is problematic water but not in the familiar way of hard water or well water in the US. But our dogs are always itchy and my hair is generally ruined and I sometimes have to wash our clothes 3 times in  a row. And also, the Italians are always drinking bottled water and I think it's illegal to order tap water in a restaurant. I have extensively googled "water in Rome" and "Rome water" and "safety of Rome water" and now I know all about the construction of the aqueducts and that not only it is perfectly safe to drink water here, the water here is of an excellent quality.

Which I did not believe for a second (seriously, you should see my hair) and so my additional googling of "is the poisoned water in Rome why Italians are chic" and "did poisoned water lead to the end of the Roman Empire" led me to discover that the water has very high levels of calcium  that apparently coats the water pipes to the point that it protects us from lead poisoning.


On a related note, we have had plumbing problems ever since we moved into this apartment. Which you may or may not recall as I have complained it about once or twice. Or in 17 different blog posts. The latest issue was that we could no longer get hot water on demand (again) and had to leap, screeching from the middle of a shower when the hot water suddenly shut off and jump into the bathtub (that is in a separate room) in the hopes that it had hot water, or in the kitchen sink if the bathtub was also being an asshole.

Our water supply had also slowed to a trickle in most faucets. Our landlord, L.D., was as always, quick to spring into action. "Please," we begged, "we cannot get showers." L.D. mulled it over and complimented my sense of interior design. I thought she was telling me I was an architect but that's neither here nor there. "The hot water?"we prompted. She asked how our son John was doing in school and told us how handsome he was.  Our landlord thinks our son is pretty much the best thing since sliced bread. We saw our opening and seized it: "John is very sad because we have no hot water and he can't get a shower," we lamented. And L.D. called a plumber on the spot.

The plumber didn't show up the first day he was scheduled to arrive. (You aren't having deja vu, that is how all my Italian plumbing stories start. Oh heck, that's how most of my Italian stories start, period.) He did show up the second time he was scheduled to arrive and was only 2 hours late. He spoke the same amount of English as I speak Italian and so of all things, we were able to understand each other quite well.

He spent several hours checking things and he used some tools and replaced some small things, all the while telling me things were no good and pretty much everything needed to be replaced. He tried to call our landlord to tell her this and it turned out she had given him the wrong number. Hmmm. So I called her and handed him the phone. He told me he would be back tomorrow and that I owed him "only 70 euro." So we got into a bit of an argument as I told him I owed him nothing and he could collect the money from the landlord and he said he couldn't and I said he could and he said he couldn't and I said he could and we comprised on me giving him 30.

Because apparently the small things he had been replacing fell under tenant responsibility. Or something. Plus he had to buy a new shower head and a mystery substance that turned out to be glue. Have you ever tried to play Pictionary or Charades and the word is glue? I can tell you right now that you will never guess it. It would be even harder than the time we were playing Pictionary and my Uncle Billy kept drawing what seemed to be a broken leg or a leg in a cast and it turned out his word was "skiing" and he was drawing a broken leg because that's what he felt had happened to the person who had been skiing.

So glue was an English word the plumber didn't have and an Italian word I didn't have. So he mimed his two hands coming apart and together. "Butterfly!" I guessed, "Farfalla! Monarch! Monarchy! Caterpillar! Cocoon! Spring! Rebirth!" Finally we settled on him typing the Italian word into Google translate and then I practiced the Italian word and he practiced the English one and I told him he owed me only 50 euro for his English lesson. And then the plumber showed me his scar from where he had been bitten by a great white shark attacked by a pit bull.

The plumber assured me that he would return in a week to replace the water heater if L.D. the landlord would agree.

And sure enough, two months later L.D., her sister, and the plumber all arrived. The minute the plumber was out of sight,  L.D. kissed me and hissed something I couldn't make out and pointed to below her eye. "Non capito, " I whispered. She looked helplessly at her sister and they both whispered  and pointed to an area below their eyes until I finally got that they were saying they were here to keep an eye on the plumber. Because he steals? Because he will rip them off? Because he doesn't know the English word for glue? Because he has a habit of killing his customers? I didn't have enough Italian to ask and so the world will never know.

"Ah!" said L.D. and asked me if I had a picture of my son to show her sister. Her sister made nice noises but apparently was missing all that L.D. saw in him and so L.D. launched into a list of all his positive attributes: he was so handsome, he was so nice, he spoke Italian so well with such a good accent, he was so good at video games and only ate vegetable under duress. And then explained to her sister that I was an architetto. By which she meant interior designer. By which I insisted I was an editor and they asked how I spelled my name and further admired the photo of John.

And so the end result was that the new hot water heater was installed, L.D. and her sister left and the plumber unscrewed the water faucets to show me all the tiny rocks that were in them. ROCKS. "It is no good, " he said. "Roman water is very good but molto calcio." I must have looked puzzled, but really I was just horrified by the rocks. "Calcio," he repeated, "but not football! Sound same! But not!"

I asked him if he could install a filter to prevent the rocks and he could not. But luckily I had only to unscrew the faucets and occasionally dump out the rocks. No problem.

I thanked him for the new water heater and told him how nice it would be to always have hot water. "Not always," he said.

"Per che?" asked I. He told me that the hot water might not always always work because of the wind.

"The wind?" I asked in disbelief assuming we were having another miscommunication.

"The wind, " he assured me, demonstrating the definition of wind by puffing out his cheeks and blowing and ruffling the curtains, "it's normal. No problem."

The wind.

foto friday

The Bear Portion:

while this is undoubtedly a social commentary on the political and economic status of Italy, I think it also says: Raawwrr! I'm a bear!

double rainbow will forever be synonymous with the YouTube video of Paul "Bear" Vasquez.  Raawwrr! I'm a bear! Double rainbow all the way!

dogs that step in dog poop. it is not bear poop. it is not in the woods. the pope does wear a funny hat. Raawwwrr! I'm a bear!

The Thieving Portion:

our car with the addition (subtraction?) of a smashed back window. good morning rome/a!

another victim of smashed window syndrome. 

hmm.

I am not a professional thief and I do not play one on TV. However, if I was going to break into cars, I'm pretty sure the car with the plugged in iPod would be more appealing than the cars with no worldly goods in sight. lazy.

while I certainly do not condone thieving or vandalism, I think what we are seeing here is simply a case of environmental concern.  If you have just eaten a hunk of chocolate and you can't find a trashcan, sometimes you just have to smash a car window so that you have a receptacle in which to toss your candy wrapper. Because no one likes a litter bug.

And The Rest:

Hey, I ain't mad atchya. Sometimes beer just tastes better from a glass.

oh, your orthodontist office doesn't have a bidet? Sad.
P.S. Bring your own soap--that bar is a little bit dirty.

the price may seem outrageous ($9.52), but to be fair, it IS extra crunchy. 

Some nights when we have a babysitter for the first time in 10 months and we find a pub with real (aka not Italian) beer on tap and the music blaring is Megadeath and Metallica and Elvis and Johnny Cash and when they aren't yelling at the soccer game, the Italian patrons are playing air guitar, on those nights, all I can think is where the hell can I find some chicken donuts with bacon?

Why not?

People keep treating Stella like she is a regular dog and She.Is.Baffled. It is not that Stella is an unkind dog so much as that she is crabby indifferent. Beyond food and thunderstorms, there is not much in life about which she feels strongly. She tolerates more than she enjoys. And whereas Sookie believes that life is divided into things she LOVES and things she hasn't yet encountered but is sure that when she does she'll LOVE them, Stella's approach is more stay the hell away from me and I'll stay the hell away from you.

But the Romans are dog people as evidenced by all the dogs shopping in IKEA and checking out sales  in the malls and reading newspapers in cafes and sitting beside human children in double strollers. And so people think nothing of grabbing Stella's snout and kissing her. Which shocks her because she has spent 14 years making it clear that she is Not That Kind Of Dog. And so it would seem that Stella and the Italians suffer the same language barrier that the Italians and I suffer. By which I mean just me because the Italians can speak Italian perfectly well.

The building in which we live is populated mainly by older folks. They could be anywhere from 50-107 because Italians do not at some point stop fighting the good fight and slide into pants with elastic waists and sensible shoes ( unless you count motorcycle boots). Men wear hats and vests with jackets and ties to get a coffee and women who use a cane to walk still wear heels and minks(there is absolutely no such thing as political correctness here, so just go with it) and berets. I have seen ladies of a certain age sporting blue hair--not the heavily permed, teased and tinted blue hair of grandmothers of yore, but full-on-asymmetrical-bob-dyed-blue-hair blue. Because as our local barber says, "Perche no?" Incidentally, the local barber closed shop for a bit as he had an additional room built onto his shop. "Ah! expanding?" asked my husband.
"No, I am getting a foosball table," replied the barber. A year later, the foosball table has yet to materialize , but then again, all of Rome wonders if we will see Line C completed during our lifetime.

One night I was returning from an outing with the dogs and met one of our elderly neighbors on the stairs ( yet another reason why Italians live longer : even our oldest of neighbors think nothing of eschewing the elevator in favor of walking four or seven flights of stairs). I was carrying Stella as she is ill-bred and defective has a bad back and our neighbor stopped to kiss her (Stella pulled back in startled dismay) and to dangle her scarf for Sookie to bat as though she was a cat, which Sookie gleefully obliged by batting. As though she was a cat. "Mi piace le scarpe," I said in my awkward, ill-accented Italian, pointing to her shoes that were heavily embroidered in rich colors and had the faces of lions on the toes. She replied very quickly in surprise and there were a lot of words, the gist, I think being the question did I speak Italian? I am known in our building as the one who does not speak Italian. All conversation, including queries as to why I don't speak Italian, are directed to my husband and son. I told her that my Italian was bad but that I was trying. Many more words were said, the gist maybe being that it takes time or that it was raining, and she leaned forward to again kiss Stella.

And that was when I noticed her necklaces. One necklace bore an ornate cross. The other necklace was a plastic red t-shirt the size of my hand bearing the number 10 and the name Totti, as in Francesco Totti, captain of the AS Roma soccer team. And seeing that necklace on a woman who is 87 if she's a day was a reminder that in Rome, no matter how many times you step in dog poop (literal and figurative), there is always the possibility of being delighted.

neither here nor there

This Christmas ---apologies in advance as I will now insert a song that will play in your head all day, but writing that makes me think of George Michael singing: Last Christmas, I gave you my heart, but the very next day, you gave it away…This year, to save me from tears, I'll give it to someone special--For whatever reason, the two back-to-back flights I took on Aer Lingus both played that little gem and it is now the gift that keeps on giving. You're welcome.

And so, this Christmas I found that I have mentally shifted from being an American who lives in Italy to an unidentified Other. Surrounded by a language not my own, immersed in a culture that is still as often as not foreign, I feel American in a way I never did in America. And so even though I am puzzled when people make guesses as to my nationality and American doesn't even make the long-list(Spanish? Greek? English? Canadian? Italian?), it is how I identify myself.

And yet, for the first time, I felt distinctly out-of-step while in America. If there was a Venn Diagram of Italian, American and Neither/Nor, I was hovering in the Neither/Nor category.

The very same little things that had made Italy seem strange now made America feel not quite right: the way waitstaff dropped your bill on the table before you had finished eating in their eagerness to hustle you out ; the uncomfortable need to hurry; the anger at waiting; the scowls directed at noisy children;the drivers who obeyed traffic rules; the salespeople who called for next in line and the customers who waited their turn; the cashiers who didn't bat an eye at making change, no matter how large the denomination they were handed.  These were all no longer my normal and yet the very lack of these things had made me crazy when I moved here.

At the grocery store in America, my son automatically began bagging items as they were scanned, only to stop, puzzled when the cashier smiled and began bagging them herself. "Oh! I forgot that cashiers can bag groceries here!" To be fair, I'm certain that cashiers in Italy can bag groceries, they just don't. Ever. Probably in the history of grocery stores, there has never been a cashier who bagged groceries.

In another instance, I was told I owed five dollars and I handed the bored teenager clerk five quarters. She waited impatiently, holding out her hand. I waited patiently for her to count my five euros so that I could move on with my day. But that didn't happen because although euros and quarters are the same size, they do not equal the same amount. And so I looked a little really dumb, even after my friend came to my rescue and explained that I was used to euros.

At one point I sat in a long line of cars at a stoplight, all of us waiting to go straight. The turning lane was wide open and yet not one car was utilizing it. Fools, all of them. So I used the turning lane to pull parallel to the first car in line at the stoplight. When the light turned red we would, of course, messily merge so that we could both go straight. Except I recognized at the last minute that I was not in Rome and I was going to cause an accident and so I quickly turned and took the long way to my destination.

None of this is to say that I am any more adept at social norms in Rome. I continue to get anxious and sweaty every time I do not have exact change and I have yet to remember not to greet friends with hugs and instead to air kiss both cheeks. I haven't taken to soccer any more than I ever took to football. I sometimes wish the waitstaff would just give us the check and not assume that of course we wanted to sit and digest our meal and enjoy each other's company.

And so I find myself neither here nor there and out of step in both. It is more "huh" than bad, but it is also all questions and no answers.

Very Christmas Pictures

piazza barberini

mossy bumper

Christmas market

piazza navoni

piazza venezia

edible nativity scenes

la befana

latest in street performance: the Christmas miracle

santa puts the naughty in naughty or nice

efficiency. but not really.

It has been a trying month here in Rome. I think, at least partially, we have now been here long enough for the novelty factor/ adjustment period/culture shock to have faded and now we are just living Real Life. Granted, it is still real life in Rome, but to be a bit cliched, sometimes real life takes those obscenely large lemons from the Italian coast and hurls them at your head.

We were dealt many small annoyances: cable not working (don't worry, we pay for it whether or not it works); heat not working during the coldest days of the year thus far ( don't worry, we pay for it whether or not it works and whether or not we are currently wearing ski jackets and sleeping in hats and gloves); and an incident with a wack-o teacher at John's school (don't worry, she has since moved on to the greener pastures of Calcutta). And a rather large annoyance that may or may not have been caused by gypsies. Or Nicholas Cage and Angelina Jolie in Gone in 60 Seconds.


 I think had we been in America, we would have been off-the-charts furious with even one of these inconveniences. In Rome we mainly shrug. "What can you do?" say we. It doesn't make bumps in the road less annoying, but it does make our reaction to them less intense. (Even though we may still be annoyed and looking forward to shopping in America in which I can buy organic apples that aren't even in season and a pair of earrings all at the same store. )

The difference is that in America, efficiency is a way of life. If our cable or heat is on the fritz, we expect it to be restored within minutes and to have those cable-free minutes removed from our bill. We have 24 hour service in America and when our small middle class annoyances are not immediately resolved, our blood pressure skyrockets and our tempers flare.

After all, when you live here, certain expectations are forced to fall away. And that means when you have scheduled a plumber or an electrician or your landlord is coming to pick up the rent check, you know not change your dinner plans. Because this is but an opening bid. No one is going to show up for that first appointment. And they aren’t arriving for the second one either. But it is possibly that the third time will be the charm if you allow for two phone calls approximately three hours apart in which the plumber/electrician/landlord assures you that they will be there in 30 minutes. Eventually you will either adapt to this way of life or move to another country. If you have properly adapted, your agitation and annoyance will eventually give way to  surprise and delight that someone has actually shown up, no matter how much time has passed and even though chances are good that , unbeknown to you,the plumbing issue in the kitchen will be resolved by the plumber dismantling the sink in the bathroom.

  

Or, for instance, you may live here and are currently on day 17 of no television. You will be pretty sure that the cable isn’t working when you turn on the TV and instead of a Gilmore Girls re-run, the screen instructs you to text your local Sky cable technician. Which you will and which will result in nothing. And so you will call instead. But the offices won’t open until 8:30 a.m. (I know, I’m shocked as well. I had no idea anything opened that early in Rome.) And so you will call again later. And with any luck, a technician will be scheduled to arrive in three days. 

You’ll give the heads-up to Massimo, your building manager, so that he can provide Fabio the cable guy with access to the roof.  Massimo will say an awful lot of words, the gist of which is: "No." Per the rules of the condo board, Massimo will have to contact the cable company and handle the situation as the cable dish for the building is on the roof. The same roof that the cable guy you have contacted is not allowed to access. You’ll cancel Fabio. You won’t hear from Massimo. When you track Massimo down the following day, it turns out that this is not something that he will be handling after all and you will have to schedule an appointment with a technician from the cable company. And so you’ll call.

When a technician is finally reached after three days of texting and calling, you are told not to worry, they were ignoring your requests because you had cancelled the appointment. “But I need to reschedule,” said you.

 “Oh. Then you have to call again.”

“But can’t you just reschedule the appointment?”

“ No, no, it is not possible. You must call again and schedule an appointment.” And so you do. And you will be assured that someone will get back to you within 72 hours to set up an appointment. But 72 hours will come and go and so you will have to begin again.

Or perhaps we have locked ourselves out of the house. In America, a locksmith can be there within an hour, no matter what time this lock-out may occur. We do not have to try to break into an apartment with seven locks on the door ( don't worry, only one of them was locked at the time) and make such a racket doing so that our upstairs neighbors appear to see what the hell it going on. And our upstairs neighbors would not be horrified and quickly quash my suggestion of calling the non-emergency police services to help us break-in. And then laugh at our sincere idea to try and break in by shimmying down a drainpipe and climbing onto our balcony from their balcony. And then bring us sweaters and offer us coffee. And then call "uh...a guy I know" who arrived in a cacophony of Italian rap music and backfiring car and looked like Jesse Pinkman and successfully broke into our apartment and then needed to be paid a small fortune in cash. Because when you make your living as a house-breaker-in-er, you can't declare your earnings to the government and give your clients and/or victims a receipt.

And in that, what we can take away from that tale is that the job will get done either way, but only one will have an interesting story. And demonstrate what unbelievably kind, generous and good-hearted neighbors you have. And the scenario in which an efficient locksmith arrives will make you much angrier and more annoyed than the one in which Jesse Pinkman arrives, because in one you have certain expectations and in the other you have such low expectations that they are actually less than zero. So you can only be grateful and pleasantly surprised.

And in that, you will still marvel when you see a car bump into a scooter , knocking its driver to the ground. Because the fight that ensues involves the driver of the car getting out and making what can you do? hand gestures while the driver of the scooter replies with his own gestures of what the hell?  And then they each shrug and drive away. Because it is Rome. And what can you do?