Pilates

Once a week, I am going to a Pilates class with Alison. I signed up for the term.
The lesson is in Italian and the instructor (female, young and with a bum to die for) keeps up a continuous commentary, barely taking a breath, describing in detail what we are meant to be doing with our stomachs/pelvic floors/necks/legs/arms/rib cages etc at any one time. I have learned many of the names for most of the important parts of the body but have not learned the verbs of what she wants me to do with them.
So to me it sounds like this: blah blah blah blah blah umbilico (belly button), blah blah blah blah gamba (leg) blah blah blah blah blah inspiro (breath in) etc . I mostly just watch what everyone else is doing and try to copy them which becomes difficult when you can't actually see their pelvic floor.
Thankfully the room is not packed full with gorgeous, young skinny women. I am possibly the youngest and most are ordinary women putting some effort into maintaining what they have before it gives up altogether.
Same.
You may not recognise me when I get back. Or, in all honesty, you may not notice any difference but at least I will be able to name the parts of my body in italian. Including my pelvic floor.

Art and rain

An exciting weather forecast put paid to our plans to venture away from the cities and into the mountains this weekend. I have started to create a little wish list before we go (I think a mere 7-8 weeks away) and on this list was another sight-seeing weekend around Milan.

5 years ago when we were here I had a lovely day by myself, biking to the Brera gallery (the major Milano art gallery) and wandering around the rooms gazing at paintings I knew nothing about by painters I mostly hadn’t heard of. So it seemed timely (considering our Florence experience) to repeat it. This time, however, I sensibly left the boys to have a boys day and merrily caught the underground in to the gallery.

It’s lovely to consider how far I have come in a few weeks – to track the progress of stepping outside of comfort zones and gradually realising that I can now catch the underground without fear of getting lost or choosing the wrong stop or being mugged. It is great to feel the overwhelmingly unfamiliar become almost casual.

Anyway, the boys headed off to the castle and the small Aquarium and I hit the gallery.

It is a very large gallery, much like the Uffizi. Many many rooms of often enormous paintings. The religious themes are by far the common themes and I don’t think I need to see many more paintings ( from a particular era) of Jesus on the cross, Mary with the Christ-child or the adoration of the Magi (when the wise men came to see the baby Jesus) for some time. The other great theme is the martyrdom of the many saints. The scenes are violent and it seems we have spent a good long time doing lots of really really horrible things to each other – lots of severed heads, flagellation, shooting arrows into people and of course, later, war. I managed, as a bonus later in the day to go to the modern art gallery which was possibly more enjoyable.  Still life scenes of luscious vegetables, candlesticks and vases. Lovely scenes of children playing with animals or people working the fields.  Portraits which capture a sense of how the artist felt about the subject and gorgeous mountain scenes with lovely friendly cows who were not trying to hurt anything or anyone.

Today we have had a day with friends in a town near Bergamo. It has, as forecast, poured most of the day. We had been invited to lunch and it was a great day to spend in someones home enjoying good food and good company. They have a son exactly the same age as Silas called Damiano (Damian). After a long lunch we went for a walk up their local hill (they live semi-rurally) in the rain (with snow falling on the nearby hills).

Rory, Gwilym, Walter, Damiano, Paula, Jane and Silas

The boys had borrowed gumboots and they skipped and explored and stomped and shouted their way around the walk, happy as anything with sticks and mud. Beats the galleries anyday. On arrival back at the house, we had a simple dinner made sweeter with lego and a friend to play with.

Rory, Damiano, Jane with Gwilym behind and Paula

I think that is what we are missing – friends to play with and people to visit/hang out with. But we are also getting to that count down stage when every day is a day closer to heading home and we need to make the most of our time here. So the tick list goes on. But, for now, the art galleries can wait til next time.

Firenze and tips for taking small children to world famous art galleries (Uffizi)

Never-fail tips for taking small children to world renouned art galleries (like the Uffizi): by Jane and Rory:

Don’t.

Florence in a day.

Don’t.

And on it goes.

We found a park, we located the Uffizi, we made it through our small queue.

The rest is a little bit of a blur. The boys did relatively well – no melt-downs, constant wriggling by Gwilym on Rory’s shoulders, sighs of boredom, loud- inappropriate- I’m fed-up-noises, the odd close call with don’t  go too close rules.

There are about 49 rooms of masterpieces to make your way through. I think we did quite well for about the first 20. Mostly they are a blur of Madonna’s with sad little, vacant Christ-children on her knee, adored by austere looking angels and surprised looking shepherds – on grand scales and on tiny, dainty, how can anyone hold a brush that carefully scale. And almost always embellished with luminescent gold.

Pearls before Swine is an expression from the bible – it means that you shouldn’t offer something that is really precious to a pig or to someone who just doesn’t care…we booked a couple of days in advance, have little or no knowledge of art history, have two small children in tow and probably qualify as ignoramus brutes. But one day, in the distant future, I may just study art history and remember the moment I stood before a Leonardo Da Vinci – and break down in tears at my lack of care or love or attention for the masterpiece. But probably I will remember that I couldn’t afford to lose Gwilym in the thronging crowds and that my head was already beginning to ache.

I remember one painting, another scene of Mary and Jesus etc but it had a little triptypt at its base and one of the images was of Mary being lead (by Joseph) on a donkey holding the baby Jesus under a starry sky with a small entourage. I remember it because it was an image that our church used on a postcard one easter and I loved it and it was wonderful to see it close up in all its detailed and magical glory.

We left thirsty (no water allowed) and tired, bustling our way through the gallery shop (which I later discovered contained much of the souvenirs of the gallery that we wouldn’t see again) and out into the heat of the day. We consumed a short lunch and my head began to hurt – I realised I hadn’t really drunk anything all day. By the time we had found water, bought panadol etc something bordering on a migraine had set in and I ‘sat out’ from the sight-seeing for the next 2 hours in the shadow of ‘The rape of the Sabine woman’ – as I have just discovered reading Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Loggia_dei_Lanzi_1.JPG

I also discovered that it is not ok to lie down here (I was roused by a guard) and sat trying not to throw up til panadol kicked in and the crying stopped and I gradually started to take in my surroundings (sort of like a drunk becoming sober) while the boys and Rory went off on a gelato mission.

I didn’t really take in the sculptures much. What really amused me were the people. Our society (and I am a part of it) has been reduced to a bunch of consumerists who consume not only stuff but also sights and art. I watched countless people wander up, click the camera (one-handed!) without even admiring the sculpture by the naked eye and move on immediately to the next sight to be consumed. It all seems so pointless and yet here I am/was a part of it all.

Fountain of Neptune in Piazza della Signoria - I have to admit that this statue was gob-smacking - it is huge!

When they finally returned, I was becoming more human but we sat out another half an hour or so, carelessly letting our precious sight-seeing time gurgle down the plughole while chatting to fellow tourists. I couldn’t have given a ….. They say to give Florence 4-5 days, Florence was going to get 4-5 hrs from us all up.

After being told by Rory that Florence was the place to shop for leather (and indeed it probably is – considering that almost all the leather factories are in a town just out of Florence), I attempted a few shoe shops and handbag shops and mostly failed other than a wallet. Rory did a stellar job at entertaining the kids and we finally made it to the Duomo (the big church of Florence) only to find that Peruvian National day had it booked out for a short time and we couldn’t go in.

The massive Duomo

We wandered the alleyways, finally finding a student haunt café where we enjoyed hot chips for the boys, coffee and some soccer on TV. You have to see the funny side of it really. We attempted the Duomo a second time and were thwarted again so our weary little family admitted defeat and made our way back to the car (a reasonable distance away) carrying Gwilym ( and also Silas for a bit who was sporting a fat lip from a fall on the pavement).

En route out of town and in the car,  Rory made a quick turn down a side street to grab some Turkish takeways (cheap) before we hit three hours of autostrada with two sleeping boys.

So, you won Florence. We admit defeat and will visit again when we have a) studied art or Roman history , b) the kids have grown up and we can join a bunch of oldies who wander around behind an engaging guide waving a silly flag and talking loudly at each point of interest with some equally silly looking audio-guide hung around our necks or c) the kids are old enough to go off by themselves for the day and I can stare at the paintings I like for as long as I like, eat a long lazy lunch and maybe do a spot of shopping with a bunch of friends who have won lotto like me.

Tuscany - unplanned

Our distributor (Alison) needed to have a package dropped to a customer in Tuscany so at the 11^th hour (eg Friday morning), we volunteered to go and hastily packed and planned a vague route. The navigation has been transformed by Satnav and finding a particular building a couple of hundred kilometres away, is simply a matter of plugging in the (right) address. This time I managed some of the driving for the first time since arriving in Italy and it went well.  

 After dropping the package we headed for a town called Cararra. It is at the base of some mountains which have been spectacularly hacked into to mine the marble in them. Rory tells me there is evidence they have been mined for marble since around 200 BC. They make an impressive sight. Not much resource consent going on when they started clearly. But it does explain how the Italians managed to make so many enormous marble structures.

We found some accommodation and then headed on up into the hills (the surrounding hills are part of a national park) to poke around. You can go on marble cave tours – but we arrived in true Jones style, after most of the people had left, the sun was low and it was spectacularly beautiful and quiet, other than a jumpy mother ordering the boys not to coat themselves and everything else in white marble dust/paste.

 From here we headed further up the hill and as per usual found a stunningly beautiful little village (well truth be know, we haven’t found many butt-ugly little mountain villages) perched at the top of the road over-looking the nearby mountains, mines and lower villages. We found a great place to scramble at the top on lovely rock as the sun was busy setting. 

Village of Colonnata

Also as per usual, all the best places you find are always when you go poking around, off the tourist maps, after talking to the locals. It is so hard to get the right balance with planning and not planning. Not planning seems to work well for us although I live with more tension than Rory about finding a bed, finding food, getting lost, missing out. Getting the balance right is a dance I am mastering.

Back at the B and B we ate bread and cheese on the patio for a simple dinner (marble of course) and started to piece together the story of the house. The house is owned by a Japanese lady who has lovingly restored and added onto an old farmhouse. The project took four years and her husband obviously helped until his recent death. He was a famous Japanese sculptor and the house is surrounded by his modern and beautiful sculptures. His wife had some of them bought back from Japan to their house after he died. The house was lovely and like the Japanese are well known for, everything was beautifully simple and elegant but understated. I couldn’t help feeling the burden of sadness though at the thought of this woman without her husband, living in a large house by herself in Tuscany and surrounded by constant reminders of what she has lost.  The view was lovely – out over the nearby mountains of marble. The following morning, after a blissful breakfast in the open air (the temperature is perfect at the moment – enough cool to be pleasant, enough heat to make being outside lovely) we enjoyed a little walk up to a hilltop in the morning sun and started to wonder why we were punishing ourselves on a whistle stop tour of the sights when our little family seems to be happiest on a hillside.
see: http://www.g-arsapua.com/ebb.html

But duty calls and it would be rude not to so it was off to PISA (the leaning tower, that is) – just to say we have done it. Yes – we have done it. That’s about all. We hit our first lot of serious numbers of camera wielding tourists since arriving in Italia and Rory didn’t even want to buy tickets to go into the church so we just looked and left. Relatively painless and awesome but kind of crazy. Not just the angle of the building but the industry. Ship ‘em in, get the photo – move ‘em out. We followed all the rules.

Silas and Gwilym find more interesting things on the ground than the massive church behind them

 All the churches here are so hard to reconcile as places of worship or gathering because of the scale they are on. They are simply overwhelming and it is so hard to imagine gatherings in them other than grand celebrations, sumptuous ceremonies, showy services. There was nothing in Jesus’ life that seemed to attract this amount of opulence or welcome it – even if the old Testament has some exceptions to this. Jesus taught on hillsides, outside villages, sometimes in the old temple but stuffy religion made him angry. I know many churches were supposedly built as ‘acts of worship’ themselves, but they also allowed slavery and injustice, poverty and suffering to get the job done. I guess I can’t talk to the people who built them and question their motives or their relationship to God, so I will never know.

Next stop was Lucca - described in our guide as the 'most grateful of Tuscany's provincial capitals set inside a ring of Renaissance walls' – so wide that you can walk/bike on top of them like a road. After a takeaway pizza, some wandering the cobbled streets, we found a bike hire place and managed to hire bikes for us all: one with a kids seat, a small bike for Silas and a ladies bike with a basket for me. So we circumnavigated the city (central area) on our bikes which was lovely. It was uncrowded, Silas was in his element and it felt more purposeful than wandering. Lucca was readying itself for a buskers festival and were expecting about 13,000 people to turn up over the coming week. There was a groovy market of antiques and bric a brac in progress and a great selection of shops where I managed to buy a new top.

Silas on city walls looking down into Lucca

In a Piazza in Lucca on the bikes

We finished the day about 40 kms outside of Florence since we decided to stay in the country (considering the cost of accommodation and parking in Florence). Again, Rory’s call was a good one and we found an agriturismo (accommodation on a farm..??) busy harvesting their olives. The boys were so happy – busily picking olives and running to put their small, fat handfuls in the huge buckets, sincerely believing they were being a big help. They literally skipped around like lambs and I worked hard at enjoying the moment, the evening Tuscan sun dipping over the olive groves while also making sure the boys were not a nuisance to the serious work of harvesting. Rory ran to the supermarket and we ate a simple dinner (as we do a lot over here: pasta sauce out of a jar, pasta…’basta’ (that’s enough, finish in Italian!). Rory enquired after a local wine and managed to buy one produced a hundred metres from the supermarket!

Following dinner, the farmer had recommended we check out the central piazza in Pistoia. As Rory says, Italian cities are almost always better by night when dirt becomes dark and the moody street lighting makes it magical. Though our evening was ending, the restaurants were just starting and the shops just shutting. We enjoyed gelato in an alleyway and admired a bride and groom posing in the piazza beside another spectacular church.

The workers

Nets laid on the ground to catch the olives once they are shaken off the tree

We spent the evening (my choice) dutifully reading our Lonely plant, trying to work out where to park and educating ourselves on a few hundred years of art history in a couple of paragraphs to brace ourselves for the onslaught of the Uffizi. Pearls before Swine…pearls before swine.

The next day was Florence and I will am going to write a separate blog for Florence simply because it was a tradgedy/comedy and so different from the rest of the weekend.

Birth-days

In Milan, the central heating has come on in our apartment. Rory and I sleep with the doors open. I’m starting to put away sandals and get the woollen singlets out. The leaves are falling and the days are often gloomy and threatening rain. Milan has a pretty bad reputation in terms of pollution and it is hard to tell what is smog and what is fog.

Back in New Zealand  my sister and my mother-in-law are turning another year older (and so is Kaaren in India).  We lost 2 babies to miscarriage this year and the first would have been born about now.  My situation brings to mind a favourite Michael Leunig prayer:

God give us rain when we expect sun.
Give us music when we expect trouble.
Give us tears when we expect breakfast.
Give us dreams when we expect a storm.
Give us a stray dog when we expect congratulations.
God play with us, turn us sideways and around.

~ Leunig

Just when I thought I would be cradling a new born, tender and sore from breasts and birth, I instead find myself ordering caffe macchiatos, making new friends in random places and mastering apartment life.

This new arrangement is surprising when I reflect back on a year of unexpected changes, on abrupt changes of direction. A strange mix of comedy and tragedy like Leunig’s prayer suggests: dreams instead of storms…and in bad moments, tears while ordering a coffee.

But this is life in all its richness (and pain)  and for those of us from Christchurch, if anybody could have told us before the fact that our city would rock and fall and people would die crushed in the rubble, we would have lived our lives paralysed in fear. Instead, we got up, ate breakfast, admired the morning sunshine and went about our day without the burden of knowing what was about to befall us. And for me, not knowing is the better way, since as Jesus so clearly taught us: worrying about tomorrow is pointless, today has enough worries of its own.

And most of us learn that when we get exactly what we want, it comes with its own unpredicted problems and unforeseen issues and when things land in our lap that we never thought we wanted, they come with gifts that we could not have guessed at.

Rory on business in Lyon

The DRAM stand at Lyon: Alison (our distributor), Katia (an employee of DRAM and technical person) and the French translator for stand - note La Plastecnica banner at top!

The entertainment provided spared no expense!

Katia and Rory head off to the banquet held at the Castle pictured

The opulant Chateau

Fresh mountain air and cheese galore

In Scaiano's cobbled alleyways

Ah Switzerland. Do people really live like this for real? Amongst cobbled streets, ancient stone walls, muted pastels and vibrant window boxes. Perched on ridges with backdrops of mountains, old paved footpaths, flaking frescos and always a church spire. In villages with families that have called this village home for generations, bolstered by old money and new technologies. And milking their bell-laden cows fed on lush wild flowers in alpine fresh air beside crystal clean mountain streams, tended by heavily subsidised mountain people who make boutique cheeses for the wealthy consumers at low altitudes.

In Switzerland the buses run on time and the trains have clean toilets. The taps and locks work. The people talk with their mouths and not with their hands. They are more measured and exacting, contained and clean. They have the security of knowing their country is not about to go under, their money is not running out. They have the pride of knowing their country is beautiful and it will be kept that way because they have the resources and the strategy. They are not overrun with people (although this issue is debated and is a rising problem) and their systems are such that they can efficiently and effectively exclude people without developing a mean-spirited reputation while looking after those they have chosen.

Chris and Emily (friends from Christchurch) and their kids, Ngaire (7) and Hannah (4) are living near Zurich for 6 months  (their kids are in school there) and we joined them along with Emily's parents, Dick and Nell, who were doing a grand tour of Europe and visiting Chris and Emily at the same time.

Turns out we were not staying in Lugano - for those of you who checked the map. Chris and Emily had found (online) a stone house in a small mountain village called 'Scaiano' (sky-ahno) - and the house was aptly named 'La Tortue' - The tortoise. This turned out to be an apt name since the only really practical (car-less) way to get to the tiny village was to wind our way up a small ancient path littered with chestnut shells and falling leaves from the main road at the pace of a tortoise (the road was much longer and probably more dangerous with small pedestrians).

The house was gorgeous - restored about 7 years earlier, it had white washed walls, a modern kitchen, 4 bedrooms all decked out with comfortable ikea beds, exposed wooden beams and polished concrete floors. We had the choice of three dining areas and ate out on the stone deck (which sat on top of a lower floor) most nights, accompanied by the odd bat flittering in the street light. The view looked over Lake (Lago) Maggiore and across to the towns of Locarno, Ascona and the villages inbetween.
Scaiano was the 'real Swiss deal'. Ancient stone houses, a warren of tight little alleyways, surprisingly steep old cobbled 'roads' (or 'ways'), no shop/bar/restaurant and many hundreds of steps. A favourite old lady of the village had died the month before and a 'shrine' type corner had been arranged with flowers and pictures and lit candles to remember her.
Some of the houses lacked inhabitants and had been left to degrade, but one or two were in the amazing process of being restored - it was a beautiful sight to see: something old being given new life with high quality materials and craftsmanship.

Turns out we were amazingly close to the Italian border - so close that Chris, Emily, Rory and I went out for Pizza one night in Italy (we walked) while Emily's parents (Dick and Nell) babysat the kids. We even ventured into Italy for a day at the Luino market - a relatively overwhelming experience with possibly thousands of people bustling between many many stalls to buy clothes, shoes, food (meat, cheeses), handbags and other wares.

On our first full day, we walked to the next village for the 'Chestnut festival'. Being Autumn, the chestnut season was in full swing and we joined the locals for roasted chestnuts (see photos), wine and cakes made out of chestnut variations. 

Festiva da Castania (Chestnut festival)

Probably the highlight of our week was our 'mountain day'. We left in thick fog (Rory took an advance party of the four kids at 8.30am) to head up to the high village (Centro Campi) which is inhabited during the warmer months and mostly abandoned for the winter. The cobbled road was amazingly steep but the kids toddled up the hill - bouyed by the excitement of finding a 'fire salamander' (a toxic amphibian coloured black and yellow) which Silas picked up before being given strong directions to put it back down. We reached the village still in thick fog and all wondered whether we should abandon the plan but took a cheese, bread and salami break in a thatched roof hut to boost the energy levels.  As we headed up out of the village - the sun started streaming through the fog and we could look across to the mountains across the lake - it was gorgeous .....its gonna be a bright, bright sun shining day....and it was (see the photo). 

From here we traversed around the side of the mountain through regenerated (but large), surprisingly open beech and chestnut forest. Eventually the track started to descend to another high village - seemingly uninhabited other than two men who were clearing the track (we later discovered the track was 'closed' because of this!) and two bell-jangling friendly cows. At this point we stopped - illegally lit a camp fire and learned the fine art of whittling sticks with swiss army knives in order to cook sausages over the fire (Swiss kids have a forest day once a week when they are younger and they cook sausages over the fire for morning tea!).

Have to admit – that yes I was wrong about wanting to be in old towns, surrounded by tempting shops with no money to spend in them and the hazards of losing kids, tired kids who don’t want to sightsee and the pointlessness of wandering that you sometimes feel. It was our best day in the mountains – full of beautiful views, getting a feel for the Swiss forest and swiss mountain village life. And most of the all the kids were happy almost all day (Gwilym tired by the end of the day but only after about 7 hours walking). And also ironically - the worst injuries the kids got were while playing in towns not skipping down steep mountain paths. 

Rory, Gwilym and Chris near the end of the mountain day - heading for home

On two other days - we did however, hit the towns. On one day we caught the bus and train to Locarno (a pretty lake-side town and holiday destination) and we met up with Emily's cousin (a kiwi with a swiss partner) who has a holiday (weekends etc) apartment right next to the train station. She was being visited by her brother and his wife from Tauranga. We all walked up a steep winding cobbled track to see Madonna da Sasso ( a famous church perched precipitously on a hillside). We enjoyed a lunch of cheese, bread and salami - like all of our lunches except the selection included: Roquefort and Tomme from France, Emmentaler and Gruyere from Switzerland, Parmesan and gorganzola from Italy....was that all? 
It was a fabulous view of the Lake below from the courtyard and accompanying adults (excepting Chris, Emily, Rory and myself) volunteered to take the kids back down while we went for a stomp up the hill. It was a lovely walk in the sunshine but I spent some of the time reflecting on Gwilym and realising that I have a relatively chronic level of anxiety about Gwilym here (losing him, injuries, poisoning - he still puts everything into his mouth, dealing with melt-downs). Leaving him with adults who didn't really know him didn't remove that although it was nice to have a break. 
On our reunion with the kids it was such a boost to come back and find out that they had really ENJOYED him but they had been amazed at his energy and his ability to run away, get into mischief. He had kept a pile of adults intensely busy, entertained and amazed (all the adults were older and had grown up kids) and best of all, I felt like I had been given some recognition as his parent for the level of energy required to be with him all day!
The quote of the day came from Gwilym who was asked by David (Emily's cousin from NZ) what he wanted to be when he grew up? "Three and a half" replied Gwilym.

Our other town day involved a day on the ferry boats. Our village lay on the opposite side to the big tourist towns so we caught a bus to the ferry and spent the day shuttling back and forth across the lake and visiting the two main towns. Ascona was the first stop and it turned out to be a beautiful place. It is well known as a shopping destination for those with piles of money and a mecca for successful artists. There were many lovely galleries with original paintings and sculptures for sale and the main street was lined with some amazing sculptures.

It is definately a balancing act travelling with kids. Mostly it is not ideal to drag small kids around cobbled streets and through awe-inspiring churches but then, why not? If you only ever take them to practical places that are safe, we would spend all of our time doing tours of universal playgrounds and we may as well be in New Zealand.

 But taking them into shops with too many expensive, breakable items of beauty is just plain stupid. I am gradually learning to relinquish my desire to 'shop' and questioning the point of it all although it is a powerful attraction that takes some prising out of my stubborn hands. I'm not letting the coffee-drinking habit go yet though. Its cheap here and for the price of a coffee (90 euro cents in Italy) you get a toilet as well!
Sadly our two worst injuries occurred in Ascona - a head injury for Silas and Gwilym. Gwilym slipped off Rory's piggyback and clonked his head hard on a stone step. No head injury signs, so once the crying settled down, we carried on. Silas, however, fell off a sculpture we had already identified as a hazard, and neither of us saw his fall. It was a metal sculpture and he had a cut to his head which hadn't come open but very close to it. It was a sickening feeling to round the corner with Emily to a distinctly worrying cry and find him been surrounded by a group of women and cradled by Rory. He cried for a long time and had a big bump at the base of his head but again, no other worrying, ongoing signs. As a mother, I spend a long time kicking myself but have to accept that these things can and will happen.

Ascona Lake front

But, thank God, the week was free of injuries other than this and full of happy times and memories. Watching the kids play together (and for both lots, enjoying chatting away without language barriers), having good conversations with friends, sharing meals and food in some lovely settings and being in the mountains rather than a smoggy city were highlights. Also, it was wonderful having Dick and Nell as extra pairs of hands and they did a stellar job at allowing us little breaks - even to look in a shop or examine a stall in peace, as well as being an extra pair of eyes for our boys!

To see photos of our recent trip to Switzerland - click on the link below to take you to an album!
https://picasaweb.google.com/102294631942077613955/SwitzerlandForay?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCMqnxrrJuunUEQ&feat=directlink

Andiamo in Svizzera

We are off to Switzerland tomorrow to hang out with Chris North, Emily Lane, Ngaire, Hannah and Emily’s parents in Lugano. We will be there for about a week – hopefully taking in some mountain scenery, some fresh air, some good conversations with friends, some playmates for the kids and a break from Milan.

In the last day or so we have managed to make contact with a young woman who is going to be able to help with language and childcare. We got her contact through word of mouth at the café. She is local, Italian, completely gorgeous and speaks some English. Alice is studying interior design and is able to help out when not at university. So I am looking forward to the boys building a relationship with someone that will mainly speak to them in Italian and for me also.  When we get back from Switzerland, Rory will go away almost immediately for most of the following week.

We have made a few acquaintances at the local park. The local park (I guess being a poorer area) is like the United Nations. Hard to guess all the nationalities but I have got talking to a guy called Haile from Eritrea who came here on a boat (you know those boats where people die or they sink or starve) with nothing about 10 years ago. He comes to the park with his son Ulyel (?) each evening who is somewhere between Silas and Gwilym’s age and likes playing soccer (Calcio) like Silas. I love the fact that the boys mooch around trying to find some fun or someone to play with and despite having no real friends and language barriers, they usually don’t feel sorry for themselves but just enjoy whatever is going on.

Silas’ ‘best friend’, as he calls him – is a boy called Mateo, four years old, who lives in the same apartment block on the ground floor and has a border collie called BooBar. He doesn’t smile much, doesn’t understand English but is pretty good at soccer and Silas thinks he is awesome.

When you're smiling, when you're smiling, the whole world smiles with you

When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you….and the converse, of course is true.

This morning thick fog engulfed Milan and with it, the hostile reality of living in a foreign country. Nothing appears to be easy and every time there is a language barrier, I am never certain whether the people helping/serving me are being un-necessarily mean and intolerant or whether, the fact that I am defensive, unsmiling and decidedly fragile is the source of the problem.

It is great to experience being ignored, being talked loudly to, being presumed stupid (STUPIDO in Italian!) and being scorned at with the complete inability to work out why. Much of the worlds population experience this daily or at least when they travel. As an educated, white, middle-class New Zealander, I am not used to being ignored a lot. It’s probably time I learned to be.

 If you are in a good space, you presume the scowling person you are looking at is having a bad day or is a generally grumpy person. If you having a bad day, you presume the scowling is related to some unwritten rule you are in the middle of breaking, the fact they hate children or foreigners or some other indecipherable reason. Whatever the cause, the ability to fake-it-til-you-make-it and smile anyway must go a long way.

Our bus travel is always an interesting study in human behaviour (as it is in New Zealand for those who do much travel on buses!). We are spending considerable time on city buses and we get to see the worst and the best of people. Often there will be someone who takes a great interest in the kids, smiling at them, talking to them, pinching their cheeks, offering us their seats. But sadly, there will often be a grumpy old woman (there are alot of old people here since the birth rate is very low so it is an aging population) who just scowls at us from the first moment. The kids can't seem to breathe without them muttering and moaning and finally, when their patience has been tested beyond what they can cope with, they turn and have a little spat at the kids. I long to be able to say loudly in Italian: Oh, I'm sorry you have to tolerate children in the world. It would be so much better if they could all be silent and kept in boxes at home until they grow up enough to be silent, solemn adults like yourself' - in my most sarcastic voice. I realise this is not a loving thing to think and their lives must be reasonably miserable to respond to kids (who are really not doing much other than chattering) like this. Thankfully my italian is not good enough yet to be tempted to say it. 

Today I am exhausted. That deep tiredness that comes from having your guard up for too high for too long and I wish for somewhere safe to retreat to where I can literally let it all hang out. This (hanging out) by the way, does not include the jeans shop I visited yesterday where I managed to squeeze into their LARGEST size available and decided that I was kidding myself.

On a good note, I managed to enlist the help of a babysitter called Amy. I met her coincidentally at a park a couple of weeks ago and we got chatting. She is from the Philippines, has grown children of her own and works as a full time babysitter (this means nanny in NZ). She is on a month’s holiday while her employer has gone back to France to have baby number 2. The first baby is under a year old (whoops). So she had some free time and was happy to help me out.  I liked her immediately and it has been great to have a hand.  Being a foreigner to, she understands far better than me, the challenges of living and working in a foreign country (although many of her family are now based here).

And finally – Rory has indeed arrived home after a good conference. There was a lot of interest in SUPACOOL – so much so that the morning after he arrived home he headed off to a factory to run a trial for some interested Chilean customers! It is great for us to be here to get ‘Supacool’ up and running in the market after Rory has poured two years of time and creative energy (and considerable funds)  into coming up with the idea and making it happen. There hasn’t been a lot of pay off as yet in dollar value but hopefully we are sitting on the cusp of seeing it start to sell.

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