bye bye wi-fi

For the past year and a half, we have been using the internet for free. You see, we are fortunate enough to live near enough to someone, somewhere in our building or close to it, who is using wi-fi and has not bothered to do whatever has to be done in the Options menu to ensure that the nearby leeches cannot benefit from what he or she has paid for.

This all ended two weeks ago. Whoever it was has either uped and left or has figured out that others were getting something for free and has cut the connection. Waaaah! So now, we have to (gulp) pay for our internet connection. Heaven help us. It's so unfair.

Okay, it's not unfair but it sure sucks.

This stinks! in English, French and Italian

Back in May, I posted that I was worried that the Bambina would never really succeed in speaking English, French and Italian. Three languages just seemed like it was too much for her to absorb.

Well, now she goes to a French preschool (whereas back then she was attending an Italian nido) AND we have a French au pair. As could be expected, her French has picked right up and she is speaking it almost as well as English (English is still dominant, though, and I would like to keep it that way;-)) So I can definitely confirm that the Bambina is bilingual.

But the real surprise is that she is also speaking lots of Italian now. Well, three-year old Italian anyway. She won't speak it much with me but I hear her with other children (all the children in her French preschool class are Italian, for starters) and she is definitely speaking Italian with them. She doesn't really distinguish much between questa and questo or il mio and la mia but she gets her point across!

She does save some choice phrases for her parents, such as:

Puzza! (I had to look this up in the dictionary. It seems to mean "this stinks".)
Butta questa, non mi piace! (meaning "throw this away, I don't like it!" or something to that effect, although I wonder whether she should not be saying "Butta questa via).
Tu sei cattiva! (meaning "You are naughty!", usually directed at me).

I guess I won't hold my breath while I wait for her to tell me in Italian that I am her wonderful, beautiful, smart mommy. :-)

Binge

There was a classic study carried out a number of years ago on the eating habits of three- and four- year olds. In the study, children were given the choice of a whole range of food at each meal every day for a period of six months.

Within the six-month period, the children tended to “binge” on one food or another, be it bread, rice, meat or sweets, for periods of a few days or a week or two. However, when the scientists reviewed all the food that each child had consumed over the entire six-month period, they found that most children had a fairly balanced diet overall.

Back in France, the Bambina’s pediatrician used to refer to this study periodically to remind us that our job as parents was simply to offer the Bambina a range of healthy choices of food to eat at each meal. We should then leave it to her to decide what and how much to eat.

With this advice in mind, was I wrong not to stop her from finishing off a whole jar of (organic, no-sugar added) strawberry jam (without bread) in one sitting?

Whoever said that Italian administration was bad ...

has never had to deal with Canadian administration.

When the Bambina was 22 months, I figured that I might as well start looking into applying for her Canadian citizenship card and passport.

The French carte de nationalité and passport had taken something like one week altogether and was so simple. The Frenchman just went to our local mairie (city hall) in Paris, showed his carte de nationalité, presented the Bambina's acte de naissance and some photos of her and presto, we got the documents within a few days time.

So why does the Canadian process have to be such a nightmare??

Take the photos: it is not enough to just go to the little cabin in the subway station to get the photos taken. No, no. You have to find a photographer who will take the photo and then fiddle around on the computer for half an hour to make sure the head is no bigger than 36 mm and no smaller than 30 mm (and that is just the passport photo. The citizenship card photo has to have altogether different dimensions) and the picture itself is X size.

20 euro later, you finally have your photos, which the photographer had to stamp and date. Now you have to find a lawyer or doctor who has known you for two years and use their precious time (like they don't have better things to do with their day...) to act as guarantor and sign the photos.

Then you have to go to the passport office with everything filled out and wait in line for what, three hours I think it was the last time in Paris, when the construction works at the consulate in Paris were going on?

And once you get to the wicket, the exhausted officer tells you that it will take, now get this, ONE YEAR, to get the citizenship card.

Have they lost their minds??? What on earth could possibly be going on that it takes a year to get a plastic card with a photo on it??

In the meantime, you get an interim passport that is valid for one year. But wait, you have to wait three months to get that passport.

So when we finally got the temporary one-year passport and then the citizenship card, I didn't bother extending the temporary passport for the additional two years. Instead, I let the passport expire and set out to apply for a brand new five-year passport for the Bambina. I go through the whole rigamaroll: the application, the photos to the exact dimensions, the guarantor, and I trudge over the Canadian Consulate by bus yesterday.

And what does the lady at the passport office tell me when I arrive:

"I'm sorry, madame, but we cannot issue your daughter a new passport. This recently expired temporary passport must be extended for the time remaining of the three year period from when it was issued."

Arghhhhhh!

So now, I have to go through the whole passport application process AGAIN (oh yes, the application, the photos, the guarantor...) next year when this passport expires.

My conclusions from this whole experience:

Italian administration: inefficient but at least flexible (they would have given me the five-year passport)

French administration: not always flexible but at least somewhat efficient and when not efficient, at least flexible.

Canadian administration: Neither efficient, nor flexible.

Fa freddo!

I am starting to discover just how obsessed the Italian nation is with being cold, or should I say, not being cold. They are so obsessed with temperature regulation that they even wear additional layers of clothing for indoor sports.

Allow me to elaborate. Every Wednesday afternoon, the Bambina takes ballet lessons. Not real ballet lessons but what Maestra Simona calls giocho-danza or "play dance". The Bambina loves it. All the little girls, aged three and four, get dressed up in their matching leotards and wear their hair in a bun if it is long enough. Then the maestra comes into the changeroom, taps each little girl with her magic wand to transform her into a ballerina and the girls go running out on tip-toe into the dance studio. They have great fun.

There is just one thing that I don't understand: why, oh why, do the parents, grandparents and nannies of these little girls insist on leaving their child's undershirt on, underneath the leotard. For one, it ruins the whole dance outfit and the effect of uniformity. But secondly, I cannot believe that the children are actually cold when they are play-dancing. But the nonna (grandmother) of Juliette's friend Barbara doesn't agree. "The girls might get cold in just the bodysuit," she insists.

Maestra Simona concurs with my view. She explained to me that the undershirt is something molto italiano and that leaving it on is, in fact, counter-productive, as when the girls dance and run around, wearing an undershirt under the leotard will make them sweat more, which will make them cooler than they otherwise would be without the undershirt. But try telling Barbara's nonna that.

And so the Bambina is usually the only girl in her dance class who wears just the leotard, without the undershirt underneath. She looks sooooo cute in it, I have to say. And as Maestra Simona insisted that the leotard be made to measure, it fits perfectly. She sure is fussy about a leotard that most kids end up wearing over an undershirt anyway but she explained to me, "Le Bambine devono imparare che la danza è un' arte è una discipline." or something like that, meaning "The children must learn that dance is an art and a discipline." But she doesn't have the courage to insist on the girls going undershirt-free.

Our schools are better than yours and other cultural clashes

Lunch with the ladies at Rome Accueil yesterday. Most of them have older kids in elementary school or lycée who attend the Lycée Chateaubriand, the school for French kids in Rome. They go on and on about what a terrible school the Chateaubriand is. It has, if I understood the discussion correctly, been contaminated by Italian notions of going easy on kids.

"And do you know" Genevieve was saying as I was mowing down my lasagne, "that I called my son to leave a message on his mobile while he was in class, and would you believe it, he answered the phone while in class and then excused himself from class to talk to me on the phone?? And the professeur didn't care at all!"

There were many other shocking and funny anecdotes, but the best anecdote of all was the attitude of the Italian kids to exams. Apparently, there are three sets of exams per year at the Lycée Chateaubriand. The French kids diligently study and take all exams. The Italian kids diligently study and take the first set of exams. If their mark on the first set of exams is high, they skip the next two sets on the grounds that they are "ill" or whatever, so as not to lower their average. And the school buys into it. In France (as anywhere else, I would think) you would get a zero on the exams you did not take and your average would be the mark you received on the first exam divided by three. Here, you just get the mark that you received on the first exam. Amazing.

"And do you know," Genevieve went on, "that we were at an Italian couple's home for dinner the other evening and they asked us if we had children and I said that we had three kids and that they attended the French lycée and do you know what the woman said to us? She was so surprised and she said, 'Ma è troppo severa, il sistema francese, sinora'."

The other French ladies around the table gasped. Too severe? Our school system? This was actually news to them. The Italian system mollycoddles children and gives them no sense of personal responsibility. How could they possibly judge us?

I remained silient through all of this discussion, thinking throughout that both the French and the Italians were 100 percent correct about each other's school systems.

New Year's Resolutions

I will:

1. Take one of those Rome tours put on by Rome Accueil (I am a member of the association, after all), no matter how boring I fear that it may turn out to be (my French expat friends tell me that I am crazy not to have attended one yet but come on, can one really enjoy staring at the art of Caravaggio for 90 minutes straight? While listening to a ten minute speech on each painting? In French?).
2. Listen to Italian radio instead of French or English radio (I may have to kill off this resolution, first of all because all I can get on my portable radio is Radio Vatican (no matter what frequency - very bizzarre - the Frenchman says that it is all part of the Catholic Conspiracy), secondly because the Frenchman has insisted on French satellite on our television, and consequently the only satellite radio we get is French radio and BBC World Service, and thirdly because, well, soccer just does not interest me that much).
3. Resist having my collazione (breakfast consisting of cornetto and cappuccino) at the bar every day, thereby saving about 30 euro per month (then again, when in Rome....).
4. No longer purchase one new outfit per week for the Bambina (she currently has a wardrobe that any 16-year old girl would envy).
5. Wear make-up, jewellry and fur trimmed coat when I drop the Bambina off at school every morning, such that staff and parents no longer assume that I am scruffy and unfeminine anglo-saxon mommy but instead just like the other elegant and sexy French or Italian moms (of course, then they hear me talk...).
6. Find the Bambina some English nursery music CDs that she will listen to (the one she has sits neatly on the shelf, untouched after one play. I am slowly facing the fact that English preschool music can't compete with il coccodrillo com'e fa and i due liocorni. Italian children's music is so good, it could be on AM radio).
7. Write a letter to the Economist. The Frenchman hates "that right wing neo-con rag" so lending legitimacy to the publication by getting a letter published in it will annoy him all the more. :)
8. Follow the American presidential election, firstly because, after all, it is history in the making and secondly, so that I will have some other subject to bring up when I become bored at one of the Frenchman's interminable evening company events or when a friend drones on about some obscure store that she has recently discovered in Trastevere (if there is one thing that is more boring than shopping, it is talking about shopping).

Outdoor Fun in Abruzzo

Sometimes the Bambina surprises me with her insights. After spending a supposedly fun-filled hour on the toboggan at an Abruzzo ski village, the Frenchman asked the Bambina once we were back in the car:

"Did you like the snow?"

The Bambina's response: "Not really, because it's cold."

And of course she was disappointed because all we could show her was icky powder snow layered with ice, instead of snow that you can pack together to make a snowman. But even if we had the good snow, I am not sure she would have enjoyed herself that much. She didn't seem into being outdoors in below zero weather, even dressed warmly.

Aside from the disheartening revelation that the Bambina does not aspire to become the great Canadian winter athlete that I had dreamed she might become one day, I have discovered that whatever charm lies in the Abruzzo countryside resides far far away from the ski pistes. Industrial skiing anyone?

Tanti Auguri!

Yes, it seems like a million years since my last entry but I am back again, determined to keep going!

We didn't bother going out on New Year's Eve. Unlike France, where the state seems to control everything from the sale of fireworks to your brand of underwear, in Italy, anyone can buy or sell fireworks. As a result, whereas in Paris, there is just ONE fireworks display that takes place on New Year's Eve (the state-sponsored one, obviously), in Rome, there are lots and lots of them happening all over the city. There is the main one at Piazza del Popolo, the one at the Vatican, the Hilton Hotel, other hotels, lots of private residences of course...

And since we have this fantastic view of the city from our apartment, we stayed home and watched all the fireworks displays going on throughout the city.

Very cool to watch twenty simultaneous fireworks displays, let me tell you.