Life here and now

A lot of friends have asked me how life is here and I have felt hesitant to post something that isn’t well written and is suitable for the public eye. Because I want to be able to be frank and describe what’s going on for us in the here and now.  

So please excuse the quality of writing.  This is for my friends and family in the USA, who want to have a glimpse into our life here. 

Honestly, much of the time I feel like I am Alice, fallen down the rabbit hole to Wonderland.  Where to start?  

SCHOOL

The town the kids go to school in is quite small. I won’t even say a “one streetlight town” because there are no streetlights. I think there is one stop sign.  That everybody ignores.  Isabelle’s class (2^nd) has 7 kids, They share a room with 3^rd who also has about 7 kids.  For whatever reason, Isabelle seems incredibly comfortable here. The only glitch is one teacher who is a bit strict. He dresses like John Travolta and goes out for a lot of smoke breaks (yes, very different from California) but I don’t think he is the most nurturing…Shockingly, Isabelle is top of her class. I am amazed since this is all in ITALIAN and she is one of the few non-native Italian speakers.  I don’t know how she does it. I am struggling to buy toothpaste and she is able to spend her whole days speaking and learning Italian. She has a knack. I don’t.

Azalia took a bit longer to settle in but she seems to have now hit her stride.  She had her first playdate at our house which went amazingly well. She seems suddenly comfortable speaking Italian, at least with her friends.  I have a basis in French, and I only lack confidence. In Italian, I am truly flailing.

I have to say that this entire experience is a very interesting anthropological experiment.  The villa is in the countryside between two towns. The town the kids go to school in is very tiny, picturesque and a bit more “removed”.  In the other direction, we have the “large” town of Dogliani. Coming from San Francisco, these are all tint country towns but I realize my life has truly changed when coming to Dogliani, feels like a trip to “the city”.

How to describe life here? Is a bizarre combination between having been plunged into a rural, agricultural, farming community, but then there are pockets of sophistication and culture that are foreign to me. And not because of the language. Like clothes. On one hand, there’s farmers dressed in old clothes, covered in dirt, and on the other, hand everyone in town looks hip and chic.  Not the casual, yoga pants, baseball cap wearing style of California.

FOOD
Food is very particular here, as I learned it was in France too. For one thing, meals happen at specific times, across the country. The entire country pretty much closes for lunch 12-3 or thereabouts.  Lunch is a multi course affair, even at school. Beginning with a pasta, then a meat course, and then a dessert.  Shockingly, Isabelle is actually eating food at school. This is a first.  Her school is catered by a local restaurant.  They prepare the meal and bring it over at lunchtime.  Snack time (merenda) is at 4pm and is almost always a sweet – chocolate, biscuits, something like that.  The kids also bring a morning snack to school.  Again, it’s usually cookies or chips or chocolate.  A far cry from Isabelle’s second grade class in the USA, where the kids earned points according to the health rating of their snacks.  We’ve gone from fresh fruit to chocolate bisucits.  Hmmmm….how are the Italians all so thin?  Even Isabelle commented on the frequency of chocolate as a snack. 

Dinner is normally served after 7:30, a problem for us since our kids are exhausted by then and Isabelle is ready to head to bed or risk a tantrum.  I’m popping my kids into the bath and then heading them for bed while other families are just starting dinner.  Every since Isabelle was a baby, she has been ready to go to sleep by 7:30 and even though she spent most of her life in Europe, I could never adjust her to the later schedule here. I honestly don’t know how other kids do it.  Or maybe they are just exhausted much of the time. 

Clay has delved into his passion of pizza making and is now hosting regular weekly or bi weekly pizza dinners.  We hosted one Wednesday night from 4-7.  The Italians thought we were serving a snack.  For our family it was dinner. 

The kids have recently started asking about sex and I’ve given them the blunt basics, which they find astounding, curious and bizarre.  They seem obsessed with whether or not the cats are “doing sex” and they just figured out that their parents must have done it twice to have two daughters.  Not my comfort zone to discuss this topic, but I know I have to remain calm and cool and not freak them out or squeal “Ick I don’t want to talk about this!”  Azalia is obsessed with mamas and babies (as she always has been) and babies in mamas’ tummies.  Isabelle wants an older brother or sister. I told her that’s not possible. She asks if we can adopt one for her.  She also wants a child size car that she can drive. Oy.