22 months old
It’s just not fair. My son is 22 months old and he understands English as well he comprehends Italian. It took me ages to learn Italian and I had to read books and watch hours of dull TV. Baby on the other hand seems to be doing much better than I did and in only 22 months, although he does watch lots of TV, well lots of DVD’s actually.
You can ask him to put stuff in the bin in both languages, and he dutifully obeys. You say ‘Marty, turn the light off please’ in either Italian or English and he goes and does it. When you tell him to put his hands under the cover on his pushchair (stroller), in either blasted language - HE DOES IT. Hot diggity damn.
Right I thought, 22 months old and you blasted well think you know it all. I’ll fix you. ‘Go and get the Izuzu, please Marty.’ He has lots of little toy cars and I’ve been telling him the names of the different models, you see, but I was not that convinced that he would be able to associate the names with the models. So what does he go and do? Well, yes, I admit it, I was beaten by my own 22 month old son who wandered, or rather toddled off, as toddlers generally do, and came back with the Izuzu.
I guess I’m quite a lucky parent, I mean it’s not many fathers who get to see their offsprung learning two languages. Bi-lingualism, if the expression exists, has always been something that has amazed me. Probably because I used to struggle with all the foreign language classes I went to at school. Having the ability to use two languages interchangeably always struck me as being about as inconceivable as my leaving the UK and going to live in a museum. I don’t know why exactly, maybe because the concept was so strange, or because my youthful naievity caused me to believe that nobody could really need two languages. Odd thoughts, when I think about my parents who used to jabber away in French to each other to stop my brother and I from understanding what they were on about. Until, that is, yours truly found that he knew just about enough French to pick up what they were saying. Could not respond in French, though, if I remember.
22 months old….22 months old….22 months old…..get the message? Wow!
The post forwarding service that doesn’t.
Just before Christmas we changed house - moving from a matchbox to shoebox sized appartment. Anyway, as is often the case you need some way to ensure that your post finds its way to your new address. So, what do you do? Easy! You wander down to the local post office, stand in a very long queue of almost irate people and when your turn finally comes and you have selected the right queue, you ask for the requisite forms. This I did, well, both my other half and myself did, seeing as the forwarding service works by person and not by address. I filled in my form and wandered back to the post office, waited some more and paid the 8 Euros for this service. Good, I thought, another little chore sorted out.
Well, the forwarding service does not really live up to its name. Maybe it would be better named the ‘partial post forwarding service’, because that would be a more accurate description of how it works. Some of the letters addressed to me have arrived at my new address, but others, for some reason or other, have not. I did speak to the caretaker bloke at my old address about this and he kindly informed me that of the two postmen involved in the delivery of letters to our old appartment block, one knew about the change, but the other did not. Communication between postmen is obviously not one of their strong points. Different shifts, I imagine. ‘Post-its’ are not, it would seem, widely employed in the post office here, despite their name.
This situation becomes even more curious when you find out that the Italian post office does not deal directly with this forwarding service, instead, the service is outsourced, or should that be forwarded, to another company, who would seem to be some kind of private postal service. This operation presumably comes into play when the Italian post office finds that thay are snowed under with letters. Rather odd this, seeing as the post office here does seem to have zillions of employees and the post vans zip around carrying three post office workers no less.
It’s all part of the game here, as I have commented on more than one occasion; you never really know how anything will function until you give it a go. At times the service is all you would expect, other times it lives up to the Italian reputation for disfunction. Just to make life yet more interesting, the same service may function fine on one occasion, but then turn out to be a dead loss on another. Hey ho. I blame Niccolo.
The View from Bologna
In my quest for blogs in a similar vein to my own little blog, I signed up with Blogwise and came across ‘The View from Bologna‘ which is part of the intriguingly titled ‘Three Monkeys Online Magazine’. The content of this blog is related more to the political shenanigans and other things which go on here in the living museum, than my own rather personal scribblings about life here.
You may find that this blog will give you a different viewpoint on all things Italian. Check it out and see what you make of it.
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Photos from Flickr
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