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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