Dog lovers at work

Baby Girl discussing animal husbandry with a fellow dog admirer. Honest, the leash was a one-time lakeside thing. . . Note admiring nonna. 

Halloween poster

A poster for a Halloween party in Laveno on Lago Maggiore. Chestnuts, mulled wine, gourmet delights. . . 

Halloween goodies

The pastry shops (each with a crew of pastry chefs working in the back) create season treats. In our building, here are some special Halloween, All Saints Day, Day of the Dead goodies at the pastry shop downstairs. 

Distant rumblings

There's a full-sized fighter jet, painted bright orange, in the square in front of police headquarters. I learned from one of the friendly and efficient people at the coffee shop in my building that the factory of Aer Macchi was in our very same block. Aer Macchi has a long history of making world class planes and builds them to this day in Varese, though no longer on this block.

On a hunch, I checked on line and learned that the B24s and B17s of the 450th and 463rd Bomb Groups (www.463rd.com, www.450thbg.com), based in southern Italy, bombed this plant on April 25th and 30th, 1944, the latter with "Good" results. Remember the single bombing mission success criterion fromCatch 22: a tight bomb pattern.

On both missions one bomber was lost. The names of the crew from the B24 lost on April 25 sound like the contrived-sounding diverse squad rosters from war movies from Wake Island to Saving Private Ryan: pilot Barry, co-pilot Proctor, navigator Dier, bombadier Miller, gunners Camera, Green, Gorel, Ramus, Kenyon, Leonowicz (let's see, WASPs, Italian, Jew, German, Polish. . .). And it was probably considered a "milk run" compared to missions to the Ploesti oil refineries in Romania, which the same groups attacked earlier that month. I strongly recommend A Missing Plane, by Susan Sheehan, the heartbreaking story of group of kids on another B24 on the other side of the world.

Of course the older people here remember. "Right here. On this very block. Many people killed." Airplane factory workers. Anti-aircraft gunners. Grandmas. 16 month old babies. . . And the kids in the B24.

I visited Italy for the first time forty years ago, in April, just twenty-one years after the bombing of Varese. I was stationed here in the Air Forece just four years later, flying a teletype machine, being and acting nineteen. It's strange to think that my block, with its coffee shops and pizza parlors and apartment buildings and beauty parlors, was, for a few minutes in April, 1944, the most dangerous place on earth.

Killer Bs

Italian is a chunky, chewy language. Unlike French or Portuguese or Chinese, which have lots of soft consonants and nasal vowels, Italian tends to be rhythmic and choppy, with most letters pronounced. You know, tortellini, carpaccio.

Place names are great. There are a lot of cities, town, and villages in this old land. And only 20 some letters. So you get a lot of permutations that sound pretty similar. For some reason Varese has several nearby towns that begin with the letter "B." They're confusing to learn but fun to try to pronounce. They include:

Barasso
Buguggiate
Brebbia
Bobbiate
Besozzo
Busto (a little too far from here to count in this group, too cool a name to ignore)
Bardello
Bregazzano

. . . and my current favorite

Bizzozero

Driving

My great friends Marion and Jonathan Cronk flew down from England to see us, Becky and Gino and Rich and Rosalinda Struckmeyer, whom they had met a few years ago. We rented a car for the occasion, my first chance to drive for any extended period on this visit.

In general, Italian drivers are - this just in - pretty courteous and competent. Of course, this is the sober, industrial North, and maybe it's a lot crazier round Naples way. The Autostrada - toll road - is well designed, except for one toll plaza where they cleverly put the cash lanes on the opposite side as on the rest of them.

The Cronks flew into Linate (Lih-NOT-tay) airport, on the other side of Milano from us. The main international airport, Malpensa, is halfway to Varese from Milano. Thanks to Gino I took the best route, including the Milano ring road, and got there just in time.

Over the weekend we drove to Lake Como from Varese. I'll write more about Como in another post, but it is a driving challenge. The road is perched between an extremely steep and high mountainside and the lake. It is very, very narrow, and very heavily traveled. We thought summer would be impossible traffic, something like Cape Cod.

We then traversed over to Lake Lugano, also beautiful. The road there was extremely, scarily, narrow. Jon was driving. At one point a bus came around a corner toward us. Jon inched over and we were scraping ivy on the rock wall, but it was all normal. Jon and Marion live in rural Kent and the roads are narrow there as well, so I guess he's used to it. I'm just glad he didn't revert to English left-hand driving under duress.

The cars are smaller in general. Many people drive diesels, because gas is at least double what it costs at home. In fact these are "turbo" diesels and drive really well.

Many of the roads are much narrower than we're used to, and also twistier. It's very funny to turn off a road and into a street that was built hundreds of years ago, with cobblestones, no sidewalks, many jinks. In one little town it takes something like four forwards and reverses to negotiate a corner. Our Italian friend Ezio says that's bad, even for Italy.

Ah, roundabouts, rotaries, traffic circles. Over the past few years our town of Bend has gotten roundabout fever and installed a dozen or more. They're all over Italy, and are usually very helpful. The signage is another story. Before each roundabout there is a schematic, showing towns in the various directions. Sometimes a roundabout might have four or five exits. The signs are small, the names are long, the abbreviations are frequent, the paths between point A and point B are often redundant, and the confusion happens. Plus, individual businesss are allowed to post their own signs, which have a uniform size and color scheme. So at the entrance to a roundabout you might see fifteen or twenty signs.

You see many kinds of car here. I remember in the past that Fiats were everywhere in Italy, but today you don't see that many. (There are some classic Fiat 500s around). You do see Alfa Romeo and Lancia quite a bit, both missing in the States for some years. The rest are German, Japanese, Spanish (SEAT, a Fiat spin-off) and others. There's something called a SmartCar which has no perceivable trunk and must get extremely good gas mileage, because it sure looks unsafe and uncomfortable.

We plan to rent cars again from time to time. Public transportation is fine day-to-day. We took advantage of having the car to do some shopping at an Ikea in Lugano, Switzerland, and a large "hyper" market in Varese. Coming back from Ikea, the Cronks phoned us from on the train from Milano, where they had spent the day chasing pigeons around the Duomo. We were a little concerned about making a rendezvous at their train station, because of heavy traffic and my unfamiliarity with the streets. In the event, they walked out of the station, across a "zebra" crosswalk, around the trunk of our car, and got in. Our timing was absolutely perfect. It's better to be lucky than to be good, right?

Read fast! 

Several of the Killer Bs at a bus stop. 

The Daily Dose

One of the best ways to learn a language is by reading the daily newspaper. They use mostly everyday language, and there's often enough context to help translate words you don't know.

Each day I buy the mainstream Corriere Della Sera - Evening Courier. Here's a partial list of words I've learned just this week, itself a chronicle of the times:

Massacre
Challenge/Challenger (as in John Kerry)
Army
Recruit
Championship
Fan (this one is great - tifoso, originally a typhus victim, get it?)
Voter
Undecided
Swing state
Disadvantaged
Slow down
Curse (as in the curse of the Bambino)
Poll

Adaptive learning

I'm a physics guy. I love reading about quarks and neutrinos and so on. I think I even "understand" that photons whiz back and forth between electrons carrying the force we call electromagnetism.

But I've never gotten the whole volt/amp/watt thing (let's not even start with metric equivalents). Everytime someone starts with "It's just like a pipe. The water can flow through the pipe at a certain velocity, which can. . ." I think "But it's not a pipe, and aren't all the little minus signs flying at the same speed?" Ohms I get - the more resistance, the more ohms.

So Europe is 240 volt, versus 110 in the U.S. But is there 2.4 times the "power?" I don't think so. Your power strip might pop and smoke and stop working. But your laptop will work. You learn to read transformers because some work just fine. But light bulbs are still in watts. Quite confusing.

We've blown the circuit breakers in the house several times. The loud and grouchy "super" stalked up, showed me that I have to switch the breakers up and down at least 15 times, not too fast, before expecting results. Then he led me to the dark basement where we found and reset the main circuit breaker for the apartment.

Then there are the prongs. Italy has scary wide ones. Our friends Becky and Gino have three different standards in their own home. England has fuses built right in. Others are different.

We adapt.

Rich and Rosalinda at Como

Rich and Rosalinda at Como 

Funiculi, funicula

On the Como - Brunate funiculare with Gino. Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to see the beautiful lake below. 

Sunset at Como

Even cloudy days have their advantages at beautiful Como. This is about 20 miles from Varese. 

Bath time with Blue.

Blue is the animated the doggie from Blue's Clues. This is in our apartment. 

In the eyes of the beholders

Any baby belongs to any Italian grandmother, regardless of shared DNA. Actually, I read somewhere that we share something link 87% of our DNA with yeast or sponges or something, so the grandmas may have a point.

This assertion might be generalizable to all grandmothers in the world, but most of my recent data comes from the Italian cohort.

One day, as I was pushing Mirella in her stroller down the busy street, a grandmother stopped us, pinched the baby's cheek in classic fashion, and said "Oh yes, this is a naughty one. I can always tell."

Yesterday, another nonna stops us. "Little boy or little girl?" "A girl." Grandma bends over, pinches cheek. "Oh, how beautiful." Grandma stands up, looks me in the eye: "The baby. Not you."

Looking west

The view looking west out our window on a rainy day. 

The Paris gang reunites

My grade school buddy Rick Nopper, Rich Struckmeyer, Susan and Baby Girl between our hosts Gino and Becky Isla Nopper, Ellen Nopper, Rosalinda Struckmeyer. This group first got together in Paris a few years ago. 

On the marble

We had Jean send the letter tiles in part to try to protect Baby Girl from falls from furniture. Marion Cronk got an excellent refresher on all her letters. 

Juventino

We got this dog at a street fair. She loves it, along with all other dogs in the universe. Juventus, the legendary Torino soccer team, are the bianconero, so this dog is Juventino. 

Combatting global warming, one gas guzzler at a time

Susan and I own five cars. This is, by my count, three more than the maximum we could be driving at the same time. OK, my eldest daughter is driving one. And they're all eight years old or more. But still, five.

None of them are in Italy, nor do we have one. We plan to rent for some trips, our friends give us rides, but in general we get around on foot, via public transportation.

So, instead of driving to the Big Box three times on a Saturday to try to get the right size shower handle (Yes, I am quite the repair man), every trip requires a good degree of planning. The local hypermarket (Fred Meyer in Bend would be the best equivalent) is a mile or so down the road, which is near the operational limit of a baby-enabled stroller with parental units. Fortunately, we live right on the bus line and it goes right to the store. Even more fortunately, a very good grocery store is next door.

Of course, we're living the way most of the people in the world (at least those that live in cities with busses or subways) have lived since the invention of the bus. We're adjusting surprisingly easily.

If you do a careful analysis of Costco Bend's parking lot load factor you should see a decline of about 2.736 car hours per week.

Little differences (continued). . .

Doors always open in from the outside. You'd be surprised how surprising this feels.

When you buy a coffee, you pay first, get a receipt, then order at the coffee bar.

Italy now has "zebra" crosswalks, but still a game of chicken. Using the baby in her stroller as a decoy seems to work pretty well. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. . .

Translations

I've always believed that there is an inverse correlation between the accuracy of a Chinese restaurant's English and the quality of the food. These menus are similar. It seems like they could feed a starving English kid one meal a week for a little editing, but that would miss a lot of the fun. A recent sampling:

Belty pork. This was pork belly - a delicious version called lardo.
Gilhead. Some kind of Mediterranean fish.
Ceps. These are porcini mushrooms, which the French call cepes.

Then there are the items which Americans just never see. A bavarese, which I've seen called a bavarois in French places, is a kind of pudding made from egg white meringue. Gnocchi, potato dumplings served like pasta, get their own restaurant (a Gnoccheria). And there's a whole category called salumi which the French call charcuterie that doesn't translate at all. I think it is something like "cold cuts, mostly based on pork." Includes prosciutto, various salamis and other sausages, etc.

Talking shop

We've been to two large markets, one right across the street from our place, the other about a mile down the road. Each has an in-house bakery. There is a large selection of breads that, so far, I can't really tell apart. Arab bread (looks leavened, not like pita), Greek ciabatta, bonconccini, several French something or others.

When you buy produce, unless it's in a shrunk-wrapped package, you first don a glove, weigh your stuff, print a bar code label, seal and put away.

Great selection of fish and other fruits of the sea, including species such as red mullet that we never see in the states.

The baby food section, where I spend some time, has not only strained peaches and so on but also, I'm not making this up, strained prosciutto and strained horse. I checked to make sure it wasn't Little Horsey brand or something. I mean, people eat horse here as in most countries, and babies are people. . . but I'm still not telling Mirella, or Susan for that matter.

Stores sell beer, wine and hard liquor, like in some U.S. states.

You make a deposit to get a shopping cart, which is refunded if you hook the cart back to the chain.

People reuse shopping bags. If not, you estimate how many you'll need and purchase them (4 Eurocents each) from the cashier. You bag your own groceries as well, which can be quite a juggling act.

There are many smaller specialty shops for wine, mushrooms, etc.

Our building

Our apartment building. We're on the second floor on the far left. Note the grocery store just across the street, bus stop in front. 

Varese facts

Varese is a town of about 100,000, 40 or so miles northwest of Milano. The Swiss border is only ten miles away. The nearest big Swiss town is Lugano.

Here's a good site (except for the part where it's in Italian): http://www.varese.net

Varese is in the region of Lombardy. Italy as we know it is surprisingly young - united in 1861. Before it was a group of balkanized nation-states with some with familiar names, some not: Tuscany, Calabria, Piedmont, Sicily. Lombardy is one of these. Here's a map of regions: http://worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/europe/special/italyreg.htm

The regions have strong identity. More than many European countries, Italy is a land of dialects, although all kids learn "standard Italian" in school. Dialect is widely spoken among locals in a community, and dialects can vary substantially over small differences. In Italy dialect means much more than "regional accent." There are different words, pronunciations, and spellings.

Culture chic

I haven't been to Europe for two years. Each time I return I'm struck by how culture (in the broad sense) here is the same and is different than back home. Italy is prosperous, wired (DSL, CNN and Fox, which my friends here call "Al Jazeerah", cell phones), tired (lots of non-Italian nice cars), definitely first world. But many, many little things are different. A sampling:

Many retailers close for three hours midday. There seem to be many more "non-chain" retailers in any case.

People walk a lot more. This will be good for me, right? As long as I have enough gelati to keep my strength up?

This medium-sized town has a Velodrome - indoor bike racing arena.

Shopping involves putting on a disposable glove before touching produce, wrapping, weighing and labelling each produce item, not just dry beans and such, bagging everything yourself, paying for new bags (bring your own from last time).

Thorough recycling, especially of plastics.

Different unwritten rules about greeting people on the street, averting eyes, etc.
Dogs welcome in all restaurants. As guests, silly.

Different road signs. A sign with a red diagonal bar through the town's name means "leaving."

The Grateful Dead (tired)

I have travelled more than most people. For most of my 23 year (so far) consulting career I was on a plane, or rather several planes, every week. I learned the Road Warrior skills, and am fairly immune to jet lag, red eyes, etc.

Travelling with a 15 month-old is an entirely different kettle of fish. Your typical (if that word applies at all) 15 month-old is mobile, vocal (God knows what language they're speaking, but it's definitely vocal), curious and impatient. These are not qualities that a jetliner is designed to cater to. So I was quite afraid of the long trip from Bend, Oregon to Varese, Italy. It involved a three hour drive to Portland, a short night at an airport hotel, schlepping too much luggage, including carrying on a baby seat and stroller, a 4 1/2 hour flight to Atlanta, changing concourses in the notorious Hartsfield International (beware of airports that require trains!), then 8 1/2 hours more to Milan, then ground transportation to Varese.

Susan happily cashed in a six digit number of frequent flyer miles to upgrade us. We decided to get the baby a seat even though she could fly in our laps until the age of two. Delta's people were really helpful and thoughtful. Our fellow passengers were good sports (it was fun to see the looks on the faces of the people in the Atlanta business class lounge when they saw their little business classmate and wondered if she would be in the seat behind). We made and arrangement with Ezio Paroni in Varese, who rented a car that was (just barely) big enough. The skycap at Malpensa was great, and Sunday morning was quiet (most Italians saving their strength for screaming at the TV during the afternoon soccer matches), and here we are.

The only downer was Delta in Atlanta. There are none of those rentable baggage carts. The agent I spoke to gave me a lengthy explanation about why this was a good thing. I think we had different perspectives on the matter.

Let's call it 29 hours door-to-door. Italy, are you ready for Mirella?

You call this a plan?

Susan Straub and I have both lived in Europe before. As parents of the beautiful Mirella CaJacob, all of 15 months old, we talk often about finding some way to live there again, beginning with a long visit to do some site selection and so on. My work has been very busy, so taking several weeks of vacation isn't feasible.

For most of my 23 year consulting career I've been on the road almost every week. Over the past year or so, more and more meetings have been on the telephone, and I've had to travel much less. This has happily coincided with the birth of the little one, so she has seen much more of me than did either of her sisters, Denise or Elena.

It ocurred to me that if a call center can be "off-shored" to India because of telecommunications, it might be possible to do that with my work as well. The criteria: communications must be as clear as from my Oregon office, I must have all the same technological tools (web meeting, conference calling, etc.), and clients must not pay any penalty. And, I must be prepared to travel to meetings in the states when necessary.

We had a short list of countries. Italy was always a contender. My old friends Becky and Gino Isla live near Varese, in the north of Italy, near the Swiss border. Becky had some contacts, she told me about a friend who has an apartment to rent, Susan has many frequent flyer miles from her days of travelling from Oregon to Atlanta once a week. After that, we decided if not now, when?