It was time to go to Italia for real. In fact, it’s been a long time coming. I’ve taken six semesters of Italian, had some Italian friends, made a 30 min movie in Italian, and eaten tons of spaghetti – the recipe for a trip to this wondrous country (not spaghetti, sorry). Now we will take a few steps away from Finland, which of course we’ll come back to in the future, and focus on a country that I would call very very different from Finland if I didn’t know about the East side of this Earth, word up.
So Maija and I decided to head on out from Finland to Italy to try this program called World Wide Opportunities for Orangic Farming, or made into a verb WWOOFing. We decided to go WWOOFing. That is opposed to BARKing…okay horrible joke. Anyways WWOOFing allows you to go to many many different countries, travel and remain in them for incredibly little money(at least compared to a vaction). The program works like Craig’s list (w/out the prostitution), you join the program for a small fee(25e) and some paper work, then you get access to a list of farmers who need help, you choose a farm that can speak a language you speak(sometimes they speak as many as four), then after some emailing with that farm you go there. The cool thing is that in exchange for your work on their farm, they give you a place to stay along and all your meals. This allows you for starters to meet other WWOOFers from many different countries, experience different countries for cheap, and sharpen you language skills – a really cool idea. Many farms also accept couples and children as well. This is not to mention that you get some hair on your chest, it’s free of charge.
Enough exposition, let’s begin a nice impression of Italia. I first experienced Italians while I was still back in Finland at the airport. If I’ve learned anything about Italians, or at least Sicilians, it’s that their manner of speaking is very comparatively intense than ours or any of the countries I’ve visited so far. They seem very much like I imagined Grecians to be, at least my impression of Grecians I got on exchange. Grecians were intense when they spoke but maybe even less intense than these Italians are, we’ll see when I go to Greece.
One of the first ways I could tell I was flying to Italy /Sicily and not somewhere like for instance Germany or Finland(both of which I’ve ridden with on an air plane) was on the air plane itself. It was the time when we were in the air and the captain turned off the fasten safety belt sign because we were in clear skies. I think most people who have ridden on an airplane know what I’m talking about. Generally they tell you when the captain turns off the fasten safety belt sign that means you can go to the bathroom or get up and go to another part of the plane if that’s necessary, but in the meantime keep your safety belt buckled because turbulence can occur unexpectantly. Apparently those instructions mean different things to people from different cultures. For Finnish people those instructions seem to mean sit down with your safety belt buckled, don’t move or talk, and use the bathroom if it’s an emergency. Now for a plane full of Sicilians that means get up and wonder around the cabin aimlessly, stopping to chat with anyone who will speak to you.
The whole plane is loud and chattery the whole time, when the safety belt sign goes off you can hear a synchronous unclicking of everyone’s seatbelt on the airplane – you can hardly hear announcement over the loud speaker over the chit chat! So then we arrived in Trapani, Sicily, which is the place where our adventures started. Our plan was to take ryan air to Trapani, then traverse the entire island to get to where we’re supposed to be WWOOFing at….haha WWOOFing at, sounds so strange. Anyways, let’s just get one thing straight right now: I don’t know about the rest of Italia but at least in Sicily THEY DO NOT SPEAK A DAMN LICK OF ENGLISH. Now I’ve taken six semester of Italian, or at least that was two years ago…so I figured I would be maybe okay, well I started to realized when I arrived in Sicily that coming here was a dive straight into the lion’s den. We ended up deciding to WWOOF somewhere where there are almost absolutely no international tourists, so people sometimes at least have not the patience for foreigners, nor the ability to at all communicate with them in English. These people apparently speak in some places (I can’t discern yet where) a hybrid of a Sicilian language and Italian. Of course everyone here knows standard Italian in some way(I think), but the dialect is actually partly an entirely different language in the countryside. It doesn’t matter to me, they speak so fast I can hardly catch at all what they’re saying anyways. I’m just now really getting actually used to how it sounds and am getting some sort of idea of what conversations are about.
You know I used to kind of lump Europe into kind of one big entity, kind of in the same way I’ve heard a lot of Europeans talk about how they lump the US into one entity, regardless of state or region. Now that I’ve been around even a little bit, I can go ahead and say that I was pretty much just incorrect about my lumping. At least when you go from one of the most northern points in Europe, aka Finland, to one of the most southern points in Europe, aka Sicily Italy, it feels like an entire different world. Now I know from what I’ve been told and taught that the eastern countries are quite different from west, but as of now having not been to the east at all, this difference was like night and day. Now I went about a month ago to Berlin, and I didn’t really feel such a difference…the same with Cambridge. Berlin, Cambridge, and cities I’ve been to in Finland all seemed well not so much the same….but not so different. Coming to Sicily was a completely different story.
The traffic in Sicily is a NIGHTMARE. To rent a car here is through the roof because it’s bound to get hit at one point. People very very often just use the oncoming traffic lane to drive in if the other one is too full, then scramble to barely fit back into that full lane when they see someone coming from the other direction. If you remember the first pirates of the carribean movie when they say the pirate codes are more like “guidelines,” then that is the exact meaning of the lines drawn on the road here. People squeal around curves, and use the whole road if no one is around or they don’t think anyone is around. I’ve seen many go across the line on a blind curve, just gambling as to whether someone would be coming the other way. Horns are a standard here in the same way they are in New York City, except it’s like this across the entire Island. A lot of the public buses literally have clown horns instead of normal horns on their buses(?) for no other reason I can think of other than the bus drivers probably used them so much that public/city planners wanted the them to feel embarrassed to use it all the time.
There is trash everywhere, at least in the small city I’m close to and the big city it’s close to as well. As you walk the streets you see everything you might think of from broken glass to used condoms, even near the city center! We’ve come across some of the nicest people ever to some of the most dickish people ever just on the streets, public transport, and around as we’re trying to find our way. I would always go around trying to use my broken Italian, and well, maybe my Italian isn’t –so- broken as much as my ability to listen and understand having never been to Italy before. Usually I ask a question about where to go and they reply some garble of something that I have no ability of understanding. Short conversations I can totally understand, but any explanations or directions are completely up in the air unless the person speaks sloooowwwwwly.
If there’s anything that is for sure, Italians or at least Sicilians have straight up, personalities. A lot of the older folk just love love love to see that foreigners have come to visit their little city and will talk to you with a smiling loving face, and have an hour long conversation with you even if there is only about 15min of understanding in total. I’ve had some Italians speak, and very effectively might I add, with their hands and words to tell me the answer to what I ask and seem to absolutely enjoy every minute of it. On the other hand some that we’ve come across have had little to no patience with us. If we can’t quite understand something, or there is some sort of mix up because we’re idiots who can’t communicate, we’ve gotten really mean or sarcastic faces travelling around here. I tried to go up and talk to one girl about my age to see if she could help us. I spoke to her in Italian and asked if she spoke English. She said no she doesn’t and I said okay that’s fine in Italian and started to ask her in Italian. She literally just says “I don’t speak English” to everything I try to say(in spite of speaking in Italian). I said I’m trying to speak in Italian and she just says in Italian back “I don’t speak English, fair?” I was like uhh okayyy then I’ll just go and try to figure it out then. Luckily a few minutes later we met one of the older folk types that just loves us and he was totally able to help us out.
There was another typical and almost loony toons like moment when I walked into a Bar to buy a bus ticket…wait, let me explain something else….you don’t buy the bus tickets on the bus here, there are these random stores called tabbachi you can buy them from, then you get on the bus. Weird thing is that there’s not always one of those places around when you wanna get on the bus. There is an odd solution to this though, just walk into the nearest bar or café. Chances are that they sell bus tickets too. Not all places have them but I guess if you happen to be a business, there is some way that you can obtain and start selling public bus tickets. Actually I don’t think they’re public now that I think of it, there’s all kinds of difference buses with different names……anyways back to the story……So I walk into the bar to buy a bus ticket, it’s fine and everything goes well. My mistake was asking where the nearest bus stop was. At that time like 5 other Italians walk in the bar then plus the 2 people at the counter are there, and they all know where the bus stop is and want deeply to explain it to me. I ask and the whole room erupts with voices –“Hey I’ll explain it to him. No let me explain it to him! No I’ll explain it to him! Hey, they don’t know what they’re talking about, I’ll explain. No, he’s dumb, you go out this door and to the left…etc etc.” Soon some girl just grabs my arm and takes me outside to point and explain slowly.
Sicilians(which I right now use interchangeably with Italians because I don’t know any different yet) to me seem like very clever people, always making quick jokes and smart comments. Some of the names of the places I saw were clever. For instance a bar with a sign that said “beer in progress” or another place with a sign that said pizzeria and under it also said “birraria.” Haha. Beer = birra in Italian. There was another really funny one in English but I don’t remember, it was the best one.
Also, in spite of their crazy crazy traffic, they seem to have come up with a really clever way to travel around this near desert of an Island. The public transit way to go is bus, because trains are out of date and always late(date late haha). The guy who owns the farm here says that every train is two hours late, so if you want to catch the train at 11am, you always go to the station at 11am to wait for and get on the 9am train. And it seems right that the buses are the way to go, because the highway is very interesting. The highway we took on the 5 hour ride it took to get across the Island was almost entirely a bridge. That’s right, a bridge. This seems, although who knows maybe there is some other reason, like it’s to save energy. You see, Sicily is a bunch of almost dessert, some vegetation, and big hills. If you go straight in a car instead of changing your vertical position, and I won’t go into a lengthy explanation why, you save gas. If you make a bridge over and around a hilly landscape instead of putting the road on that landscape, the cars that drive on it will save gas and not change their vertical position as much. This is a really interesting way to rethink a “bridge.” A bridge put in place because it’s more efficient for the cars that drive on it, rather than just to get the cars over something they couldn’t drive on anyways like water. That’s pretty freaking clever. Or maybe they did that for another reason, I coined that idea, and I should go cash in on it.
Italians when they speak to each other can seem really angry, which is a shame because such a beautiful language doesn’t seem meant to be spoken in a harsh way. In the end it doesn’t matter, the language is still music to just about anyone’s ears it would seem. This place is also super super hot by the way, if you look on the map Sicily is really really close to North Africa.
Okay this blog begins to grow lengthy, so I will end with a note from the back of my mind and I hope you can keep it in the back of yours after you’ve read this: This is just my impression of Sicily near a small town called Paterno and a big city called Catania. Haha maybe some of the things I wrote up there sound bad to some extent, but don’t be phased by them or let them shape your opinion of Italy. This culture is quite different from others I have experienced, and it’s also my impression that Sicily kind of has a culture all of its own. Even if this were the culture of all Italia, it’s just something I’m not, or maybe we’re not depending who’s reading this, used to. This is on top of the fact that I don’t speak the only language they know very well and they don’t speak a bit of the only language I know well. That puts me in a position to get some frustrated vibes from some people in the first place, because situations where you can’t communicate are just plain frustrating. Either way, anything negative I said is through my cultural lens which has never seen a culture quite like this one. It could be completely different in other places in Italy as well. Either way, these are my perceptions of such a place. PEACE YO!
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