Orecchiette/Orecchini

 My friend F.’s niece was getting married.  He was telling us about the upcoming wedding while his girlfriend was out shopping for a dress.

Periodically, she’d send him photos of the possibilities.

We were talking about the new dress, how she had to buy new shoes to match, how of course she’d need a new bag and a new necklace when I said she’d most definitely need some new orrechiette.

Puzzlement turned to amusement and he said, “Orecchini.” Then, he laughed for five minutes.

I had just suggested that his girlfriend get some new pasta to wear to the wedding.

 

Orecchiete—small, round pasta that kind of look like earlobes

Orecchini—earrings

US vs. Italy. Ibuprofen.

  

In the US, it is possible to by 1000 Ibuprofen for $20.98 or $.01 per pill.

In Italy, a box of 12 costs around €4 (or €.33 each).

Today, one dollar is approximately equal to €.74.

These four bottles of Ibuprofen would cost about $1680, if bought in Italy.

That blows my mind.

Also, if you're coming to Italy, remember to bring some Ibuprofen. You sure don't want to have to buy it here.

You’re welcome.

I've Got a New Oven, So Cookies!

 We got a new oven a few weeks ago which is awesome, as it now takes a reasonable amount of time to cook something. No more six hour chickens or three hour bagels. I don’t even care that my roasting pan and one of my cookie sheets don’t fit in it.

Even though it’s about 32ºC today, I thought I’d test it with some cookies.

Due to the rarity of such items as light and dark soft brown sugar, molasses, oats, etc., my cookie baking in Italy is somewhat limited. I had some peanut butter, eggs, sugar and mini dark chocolate chips, so I went with flourless peanut butter chocolate chip cookies.  I used Calvé brand peanut butter, which is typically pretty good, though a bit more on the “natural” side of the peanut butter spectrum. Skippy-type peanut butter definitely works better for these.

  

There are tons of flourless peanut butter cookie recipes all over the innerwebs, so I just kind of looked at several, saw what I had and mixed everything up.

Recipe I used:

1 c peanut butter

1 c sugar (some recipes use white, some use dark; I had some Chinese brown sugar, which isn’t really as squishy as it is in the US, but I used it anyway, and mixed it with white sugar)

1 tsp baking soda (bicarbinatodi sodio, if you happen to be looking for it in Italy)

1 tsp vanilla

1 egg

mini dark chocolate chips

Yield: approx. 3 dozen cookies

Preheat oven to 175ºC/350ºF.

Line a couple of cookie sheets with parchment paper.

Mix all the ingredients except the chocolate chips together in a bowl. Most recipes say to cream them until light and fluffy and some tell you to mix the peanut butter with the sugar and, I think, the egg before adding the baking soda and vanilla, but I don’t have a mixer and I wasn’t really reading anyone’s directions, so I used a wooden spoon and bashed it all around until it seemed pretty homogenous and I couldn’t really feel the sugar granules anymore.

Pinch off pieces of dough and roll into balls, about 1’ diameter and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment. This is especially useful if, like me, you don’t know that one of your cookie sheets won’t fit in your oven, as it’s super easy to just lift the sides of the parchment laden with cookie blobs off of the sheet and place it on another, smaller cookie sheet

If you want, use a fork to press them down. You don’t have to make the criss-cross pattern that signifies Peanut Butter Cookies—the cookies’ll kind of puff up and some of them won’t retain the crosshatch anyway—but I like to. At this point, I sprinkle the chocolate chips on top and sort of smoosh them into the dough since it’s pretty crumbly and doesn’t hold the chocolate chips well if you fold them in. You end up with most of the chocolate chips loose in the bottom of the bowl and have to smoosh ‘em in, anyway. My way annoys me less.

Bake them in a 175ºC/350ºF oven for 8-10 minutes.

Take them out and let them cool on the cookie sheet for a few minutes. Delight in the fact that the whole process took only a half an hour instead of the hour and a half it would’ve taken with my old oven.

Substitute (or How to Cook Indian Food with a Bunch of Wrong Ingredients)

 One of the things I find myself having to deal with here so much more than I ever did in NY is using up food before it spoils. In part because of the lack of preservatives or maybe the lack of a good seal on our ancient refrigerator but mostly because in NY, I didn’t cook, unless you count the occasional pot of rice and beans and I don’t, not really. After getting home between 7p and 9p most nights, if I wanted to eat anything more than a few handfuls of Cheez-Itz, we’d either order in or walk up the block to get burgers or burritos. Here, though, I cook all the time and since it’s usually not Italian food, whenever I find an ingredient that’s either hard to find or generally expensive, chances are I’m going to have to use it all week or else have to throw it away.

Last night, we had a chicken we needed to cook and a bowl full of sad looking jalapeños and habañeros that were starting to wrinkle. We had already made burritos (twice. had to use the tortillas we found at Lidl on the cheap once we’d opened the package) and spicy guacamole (had to use those avocados before they got all brown and fiber-y) and were in the mood for something….other. I was thinking Indian. I would just substitute jalapeños and habañeros for green Indian chilies.

But I didn’t want to make yet another chicken curry. I checked the internet to find something else. 

There was this recipe for oven fried chili chicken. But I didn’t have any eggs. So I found a substitute: milk mixed with flour. It worked ok for double breading the chicken, but it didn’t help the batter stick that well. Noted.

Now, what to make with the chicken? I knew we had some spinach left in the fridge and it was wilting. We could make a spinach chickpea curry. But who wants a curry with fried chicken?

There was this pakora.

I substituted regular chickpea flour for besan, shallots for red onion, crushed chickpeas for potatoes, garam masala for chaat masala, fennel seeds for carom seeds. And it was good.

Now to find a way to include “cooking various and sundry cuisines using non-traditional ingredients because I couldn’t find them easily in Italy” to my résumé as a means of accounting for the past four years.

it tasted better than it looks. "giuro".

Ancona

Last week, we took the train to Ancona. It’s a port city about an hour and a half from here.

I think maybe because it’s a port city, it has a lot of immigrants and because of that, there are an abundance of markets—asian, African, eastern European—that cater to them. It was lovely to be somewhere I could find ingredients and treats unavailable here, but the main draw was a “kiosk” selling raw and cooked fish. Really, that’s why we went. Even though we’re near enough to San Benedetto, a beach town on the Adriatic, all of the restaurants there seem to offer the same stuff—fried fish, spaghetti and clams…..e basta.

We got off the train and meandered toward the city center, stopping to buy habanero and jalapeno peppers, chinese red bean cakes and a bamboo spatula/spoon thing for the wok.

Then, we headed up the pedestrian shopping street and across through the daily street market to Chiosco da Morena in Corso Giuseppe Mazzini.

It’s basically a hut, nestled between an ice cream shop/pizzeria and the fountain of the “tredici canelle” with a couple of high bar tables with chairs. On the other side of the street are a bunch of tables and chairs, sheltered from the sun by canopies.

The day we were there, she had some cooked stuff, like giant shrimp and “snails of the sea” (seashells, basically) in three different sizes, shrimp cocktail served in scallop shells and baccalà. We were there for the “unusual” by Italian standards, so we ordered a couple of hundred grams of the small and medium lumache and some raw oysters and what we thought were biggish clams, the size of cherrystones.

 To eat the small sea snails, you jam a toothpick in the hole, pierce the meat and twist it out. The medium ones have had their tips chopped off, so for those you cover the tip with a finger and suck on the opening, then cover the opening with your thumb and suck the meat out of the tip.

The oysters were French and so good, but unfortunately on the expensive side at €2 each and the “clams” that turned out to be cockles (fasolari) which I guess are some type of clams (what do I know about bivalves, really?) for €.50 each.

We were too late for the indoor market, so after lunch we headed back to the train station by way of the port, stopping in at the Lazzaretto. I think at times it was used as a barracks and also to quarantine immigrants but now it houses a museum where you can actually touch the artwork.

the hexagonal Lazzaretto from the "molo"

the temple inside the Lazzaretto

on the "molo" (wharf)

We stopped in the Mix Market, full of eastern European delicacies where I got a Russian ice cream cone and then got on the train.

Dirty Laundry

 There are so many things about living in Italy that can make you feel like you’re living in the middle ages and I’m not just talking about the architecture (ba-dum bum).

When I first moved to Italy, I didn’t have a washing machine. I know. I didn’t just move to the old country, I moved to the last century.

After working 12 to 16 hours a day, every day, in a pub/pizzeria in summer serving ice cold flavored vodka, pizza and cheese burgers and washing piles of  dishes, I’d lay down on the floor with my legs perpendicular against the wall, drink a beer and watch the shooting stars off the balcony before going to sleep knowing that the following day I’d have laundry to do. When you’re sweating half your body weight in a pizza kitchen during the summer in Italy, you always have laundry to do.

I’d haul the laundry into the utility closet that had a sink with the little grooves on the sloped front and wash our stinky clothes, our bath towels, our bedsheets by hand. Then I’d hang them out on the line on the balcony to dry, hoping no birds would fly over them.

My first Italian clothes dryer

It got worse as the weather got colder. I still had to hang everything outside or across some chairs in the living room, but  the house was just as cold and damp as it was on the balcony. Besides having no washing machine, we had no heat. The apartment did have a, um, heating system. It required a fire to burn constantly in the living room fire place. This fire could, in theory, heat up the water running thru the pipes that ran across it which would then carry the hot water thru the apartment to the radiators. As long as you were home all day to make sure the fire was going, you had heat. If you had wood. And we didn’t. After washing, rinsing, wringing, repeating with all our dirty clothes, I’d lug them outside and string ‘em up in the damp mountain air, bundled up so I wouldn’t get hypothermia.

In December of that first year, we moved to a different area and rented a furnished  apartment while we looked for another place that could hold all our furniture. This apartment had a washing machine, but the heating situation was only slightly better than the first place. There was a fireplace, but no pipe system, so unless you were standing directly in front of it, a risk to both you and the furniture as there was no screen on it, you were cold and your clothes still took days to dry outside.

I would put the laundry in the washing machine, wait an hour and a half for it to be done and drape it all over the cold, damp house. Three days, one hour and one half later, the laundry would be done.

I started to notice that I wasn’t the only one wearing my jeans and sweaters many times in a row. Some people, I noticed, wore the same entire outfit for days on end. Med-i-e-val.

When we found the place we’re currently in, I was delighted by several things. It could accommodate all of our furniture. It had gas heat AND a pellet stove (much cheaper than gas). It had a clothesline that was covered and it had a washing machine. It was thirty years old, but it was a washing machine. It took three hours to complete one load of laundry.

Swish, swish. Wait. Swish, swish. Wait.

This is what a 30 yr. old Italian washing machine looks like

The other notable thing about this washing machine is that it just had a dial with numbers. Nothing about temperature. Nothing about speed. Just numbers and lines, like some sort of timer. For laundry.

The first time I used it, I noticed two things. One, there appeared to be steam rising up from it. Two, my very expensive, fancy eggshell-colored underwear bought in my previous life were now a very strange dark grey/purple color from either the lavender scarf that is now half its original size or from the t-shirt with the photo of the Hong Kong skyline that is now a dingy grey. It seems I had boiled my clothes. The Italians thought this was hysterical. The Americana doesn’t know how to use a washing machine. Didn’t I know that I had to push the button that looks like a snowflake for cold water? I thought it was bizarre that my washing machine could heat up the cold water that ran into it. How was I supposed to know?

One day, the machine just stopped. The front loading washing machine just stopped mid-cycle, full of water and clothes and would not move on to the centrifuge/extraction step. Apparently, there was a filter that needed to be cleaned out periodically. Who knew washing machines had filters? Of course, it was located a centimeter off the floor and when opened, water would pour out of the machine.

The detergent dispenser was broken, so I couldn’t put fabric softener in it at the beginning of the wash, and besides, I had to keep checking to see that the filter didn’t need cleaning (swish, swish, wait. wait. wait. swish) or worse, that it had just finally given up and stopped working entirely. I would set the kitchen timer and cross my fingers that I could run upstairs and dump the fabric softener down the dispenser right as the water started to run through before the second rinse. If I did a load of wash, I had to be sure I’d be home for the three hours it took to do it and I had to start it at early enough at night to avoid the high day time energy costs yet early enough to put in the fabric softener before falling asleep. When I took the clothes out, they’d be sopping wet.

I’m not sure why, but after three years, the landlord bought us a new washing machine. I am delighted. It has a dial with words! They’re Italian words, but I get the gist. “Eco 20’” must mean “energy efficient, 20’ water temperature”. It has a “hand wash” cycle. There’s an option to do a “rapido” load in fifteen minutes. It has an LED panel with buttons. One section has hours listed. One has centrifuge speed and one has an iron. I think that last one is like a “fluff” cycle to make ironing easier. I don’t know. I don’t iron. I don’t really care, either. I don’t even care that the instruction booklet is in Italian only or that we couldn’t find an English manual online or even find the brand being sold anywhere but Italy and India. I have a washing machine that goes “swish, wait. swish wait”, that I can set at 8pm to start at 2am and that I can dump my fabric softener in right at the start. It still takes about an hour and a half for a normal load of laundry and I still run the risk of accidentally boiling my clothes if I’m not careful, but at least I’m not scrubbing my sheets in a utility sink and when I take them out, they’re almost dry. Progress.

Getting an Italian Passport

 Last Wednesday, I went to the Questura to get an Italian passport.

In the US, when I last renewed my US passport, I’m pretty sure I got some photos, filled out an application, either wrote a check or provided credit card info, mailed everything to New York or Albany with my old passport and waited to receive my new one. Ten minutes to put everything together, maybe, plus the wait for delivery. In Italy, it went like this:

I arrived at the Questura around 10am and took a look around the room to note all the folks who were ahead of me. Once they’d all been helped, I’d know it was my turn.

“Y’know, “ I said to V. “They should really have the applications and the information sheet with what you need out here on the shelf so people don’t have to wait on line.”

“Why? So it could be more convenient for people?”

“And if they just took credit cards, this would take no time at all.”

V. rolled his eyes, weary of my refusal to just accept things in Italy as they are. “They don’t care how long it takes you.”

Thirty minutes later, I walked up to the window,

“I would like an application for the passport.”

The man leaned over, his stick-straight brown hair swinging forward from behind  his ears, and he said something very quickly which I didn’t understand. I stared back blankly, distracted by his dress shirt unbuttoned part way down his chest.

He handed me a square of paper that detailed everything I’d need:

• a money transfer payment or “versamento” at the post office, made to the Minister of something for €42.50
• a government tax stamp in the amount of €40.29
• a copy of my identification
• 2 photos

“And the application?”

“When you return, “ the man with the hair responded.

We walked down to the post office. It’s a large one, larger than the one in our town, so instead of the usual “chi è l’ultimo?” they have a number system. A machine dispenses these numbers, based on what type of service you need. I located the button for “versamenti” and waited for my letter/number combination to appear on the overhead screen, worrying that I’d not make it back to the Questura before it closed at 1pm.

Forty-five minutes later, my number appeared and I paid my €42.50  plus  €1.30 in “tax” or service fee, got my receipt and headed over to the tabaccaio. Now, the name “tobacconist” is a bit incomplete. Sure, they sell cigarettes, but they also sell lottery tickets, newspapers, magazines, candy, small gifts, the ever important tax stamps and will also send a fax and make a photocopies for you.

At the tabaccaio, I got my “marco di concessione” and a photocopy of my carta d’identita and headed back over to the questura.

The line was much shorter and after five minutes I handed over my marco di concessione, my proof of payment receipt from the post office, the copy of my carta d’identita and the sheet of photos I’d gotten last week from a photo booth at the mall.

The man behind the window handed me the form and I filled out the usual “name, address, birth date, birth place” info required on every single form everywhere in Italy while he entered my info on his computer.

He took electronic imprints of each of my index fingers and told me to come back in three weeks to pick up my passport, handing me a piece of paper to show him when I return.

It only took a little over two hours.

I Swear (Becoming Italian, part 6)

 I continued to check the website of the Ministero dell’Interno almost daily. Once I’d deleted my old profile that had the wrong K-number and wrong submission date, everything was as it had been.  In other words, nothing had changed. The application was still being reviewed.

Then, A. texted to say that she’d gotten a call from R.. My documents were ready. R. had tried to call me, but the number didn’t work.

We went to the Prefettura where R. showed us the decree. She thought that it’d take longer if she mailed it, so she tried to call to tell us to come see her but our phone number didn’t work. Turns out, she had misread my phone number on the application. They don’t just speak differently in Italy, they write their numbers differently, too. Always mistaking my “6”s for “4”s and stuff……

I took the decree to the Comune, made an appointment to take the oath, went back a week later, the mayor read the decree and I  took the oath, signed my name on the giant pieces of paper that go in the large books in the town hall, handed over my Permesso di Soggiorno and got my new Carta d’Identita. And popped open the bottle of proseco my friends had brought with them.

One year and three weeks from the date I submitted my application, I was granted citizenship.  They still had eleven months to decide, according to the law. Not bad, Italia.

Now, to get a passport.

Everything's Green (Becoming Italian part 5)

 For a year, I was checking the status of my citizenship application online.  Every day, the status was the same: L'istruttoria è stata avviata. Si è in attesa dei pareri necessari alla definizione della pratica (The preliminary investigation is started. One is waiting for the necessary opinions to the definition of the request) until one day, it wasn’t.

The first week of February, a year after I’d submitted my application, the status changed. It now said “The request is not accepted. Check with the Prefeturra.”

I freaked. It was a Thursday afternoon and I couldn’t find anyone to come with me to the Prefeturra to find out what the problem was. I didn’t trust my lack of Italian skills.

On Monday, armed with copies of all my documenti, two Italian friends and their friend who works somewhere in the Prefeturra or the Questura, we went to find out what was up.

Our first stop was in the Questura. The uniformed woman behind the counter listened as we explained what we saw on the website and proceeded to ask the following questions.

“You were born on January 17^th?”

Um, yes…..

“Your husband is an Italian citizen?”

And on, and on, as though this was my first time meeting someone in the citizenship office to discuss my application.

I wanted to say, “Uh, yeah. That’s why applied. And why my application was accepted by the people in the citizenship office. Why are you asking me these questions? Why are we even talking to you?”

I decided instead to smile pleasantly and let all the Italians do their thing where they answer such questions as though they’re not redundant and imbecilic and trash talk the bureaucratic system and the bureaucrats themselves.

She made a phone call and we walked over to visit R. in the citizenship office.

“Why you didn’t call me? Why you go to the Questura?”

“Because, if I call you, maybe I don’t understand what you say. I no speak Italian well and on telephone is more difficult for me,” I replied.

She tapped her keyboard with her fuchsia fingernails and declared that according to the internal website,  “everything is green”.  All of the Italians seemed pleased. I was not.

“OK, but on the website where I check my status, it is written my application not accepted.”

After ten minutes of “but everything is green” and “but the minister’s website says it’s not”, she finally logged into the website as me.

“The application number is wrong. And the application date.”

The Italians all smiled knowingly at each other. Obviously, the straniera had screwed up and caused all this drama for nothing.

I knew I hadn’t screwed up. I knew I’d taken the number straight from the letter they’d sent me and quadruple checked it when I set up my profile.

“Here. Here is my letter from the Ministry. See? The number is the same.”

Turns out, whoever had typed the letter had typed the number correctly at the top of the letter but incorrectly in the body of the letter. Guess which one I’d used for the profile?

So, everything was indeed green. For me. I was told the investigation should probably be complete by May or maybe June. Some other poor soul, however, with that other k-number was sadly not as lucky.

What Halloween Tastes Like

According to the carton, this juice tastes like Halloween.

I always thought Halloween tasted like candy corn, Smarties and mini Butterfingers but since I can’t find those here, I’ll give the blood orange and pumpkin juice a shot. 

The Sagra

A friend asked me recently what a sagra is. Now, I know what it is to me and I’m pretty sure that this varies greatly from what it is to an Italian, but here goes....

To me, a sagra is kind of like a New York street fair.  But different. Like a street fair, it takes place in a neighborhood, but in Italy, this neighborhood is sometimes an entire town and there are usually some interesting things to see that you might not otherwise, be it ancient graffiti on a church wall, a natural thermal pool, or locals doing line dances.

It is often organized by the town’s Pro Loco, which as far as I can tell is a group of people who live in the town and try to make it better for its residents, who organize events to try to raise money. Towards that end, they organize things to get folks to come spend money in the town, a population which is increasingly often non-townfolk. A good way to do this is to gather a bunch of vendors to sell stuff to the folks who come to check out a particular food the area is known for.

Some sagre feature an ingredient like polenta, porcini mushrooms, truffles, mussels (cozze), wild boar (chingiale), a specific pasta. You get the idea. Typically, the people of the town will cook various plates, typical of their area, using the featured ingredient and sell them from stalls. Sometimes, they’ll hire professionals to do it.

Other sagre may feature a particular dish. Spaghetti all’amatriciana, lasagne, arrosticini.

The idea is always the same. Go to a town, eat a bunch of food, drink some wine or beer and listen to the (often) live music provided.

Most sagre have one area where you look at the list of food available, make your selection, hand over your euros and get a ticket or tickets. You then stand in line in another area, hand over your tickets and get your plates of food.

These events take place yearly, around the same time each year. For instance, the Sagra della Porchetta Italica of Campli in Abruzzo is always around the 2^nd or 3^rd week end in August. Some sagre are tied to religious events and these are governed by that calendar.

Some of them have live bands, some DJs, some folk music with dancers. Some, all three.  There might be carnival rides and cotton candy.

There are also Feste. These are much like sagre. Sometimes, exactly the same, but sometimes, there is a theme versus an ingredient.

Roasting chestnuts, Acquasanta Terme (AP)

In Acquasanta Terme in the province of Ascoli Piceno, there is the Festa d’Autunno. This is typically held the third weekend in October. There are vendors roasting chestnuts and selling vino caldo. Other folks sell sausage sandwiches and fried pizza dough (known, variously, as fritelle, crispelle and I’m sure several other names). Street performers roam around, market vendors sell everything from truffles to skeins of wool. The local group of Alpini, retirees from the army’s mountain division, open their lodge as a restaurant. The restaurants in town offer special menus featuring fall recipes of tagliatelle with chestnuts, roast pork with apples, etc.

Win a prosciutto. Castignano

Castignano, also in Ascoli, is a walled medieval town that capitalizes on its connection to the Knights Templar with their yearly Templaria Festival in the middle of August. Legend has it that some Knights lived there and each year, the town is transformed into a medieval village, with minstrels and Templars roaming about, market areas with vendors selling handmade leather goods, wooden items, jewelry and more. There are stages throughout the town featuring jesters and dancers. Churches and museums are open, showcasing various items from times gone by. Palm and tarot card readers tell the future. Themed restaurants open, showcasing soups and stews of rabbit, deer and wild boar. While you’re eating, performers might come by talking of their poverty and the wife might complain of the scrawniness of her husband and her daughter could take a look at your husband, commenting on the size of his belly at which point the wife might ask if she can take your husband home, promising him to return him shortly. You might consider it.

Some of these events, like the porchetta sagra/contest in Campli and the autumn fest in Acquasanta have been happening annually for more than forty years. Others are in their second or third edition.

The strangest thing to me about these sagre and feste is how hard it can be to find information. As you drive around, you’ll signs posted announcing a sagra. Usually, the town, the dates and the theme or food is announced. Sometimes, the name of the sagra gives no clue to the non-local about what food’s being served or the signs featuring the local dialect mean nothing to you. This can be a drag if you’ve, say, driven an hour to find that the annual fried frog sagra in Atri has been canceled this year and as you’re driving home, you’re passing sagra after sagra but don’t know if it’s worth it to you to stop. The signs rarely say specifically where in the town the sagra is or the starting time. Internet information is often just as limited. I guess it has to do with these parties originally being for the locals and the locals all just know, inherently, the details just as they know that you can pay your water bill at the newsagent or where it is you go to buy cheesecloth (for the record, I think it might be the hardware shop). Thankfully, this is starting to change, but I think I’ve cracked the code.

In summer, most sagre start at around 7pm. As the sun starts to set, it’s actually cool enough to contemplate eating food. As this is also the time that your house, which was almost cool during the day is starting to heat up, it’s the perfect time to go for a drive or take a walk into town, get a drink, find something to eat and be entertained.

Many feste towards the end of August and into fall, may start in the morning or early afternoon, especially on Saturdays and Sundays. The Festa d’Autunno and the Sagra delle Patate in Leonessa do this. Sometimes, they’ll say they start at noon or at 3p but if you’re thinking of going the first day, you might not want to believe them. They may still be setting up at 5p. Like many things in italy, it depends. Like most things in Italy, on what, I don’t know. But if you’re driving around and see a sign for a sagra, you should probably stop to check it out.

Ch-ch-changes

I’ve been watching Gossip Girl lately, which is possibly not the best thing to be doing while in my current nostalgic funk but I’m kind of afraid to take a trip home, not only because of the price of the plane ticket. I’m afraid to see how much has changed.

The past twenty years of my life have been passing through my memory: places I’ve lived and sometimes-questionable things I’ve worn, haircuts I’ve had but this program, with its smash cuts of Manhattan streets I walked and stores I shopped at, delis I grabbed soup & sandwich combos from, and martinis I drank just hit home in a new way with an episode shot outside the bar beneath my onetime home in Brooklyn.

That apartment is now a landmark building in an ultra-hip area. The bodega across the street where we could only afford one sandwich for dinner to share, with the kid who used to make our salami, cheese and pickle sandwich into a poor man’s Cuban by placing it under the Pyrex coffee pot on the coffeemaker is gone. It’s now someone’s fancy-schmancy apartment. The Macy’s where I bought two pair of Converse one-stars (one pink suede and one mint green pearlized leather) for ten bucks doesn’t exist. Instead of bodegas, there are boutiques. Instead of bodegas there are more renovated brownstones. It’s not the same. The things I loved about the neighborhood—the amalgam of classes, the Goodwill and the sushi joint, the arab deli, the salvage warehouses and the housing project—have undoubtedly been cleaned up. Gentrified. Pushed out to make way for chic shops filled with things I once again cannot afford.

The midtown Manhattan where I worked has been Disney-fied and green-ified—the falafel cart in front of my office building shooed away in favor of green bike lanes, the Thanksgiving parade route altered. I’ve even heard you can get cell service in that once-upon-a-time place where no one could reach me—the subway.

The restaurant from which I got the best burger in Larchmont after running the NYC Marathon has closed, my friend from the burrito joint has moved to Belgium, one of my best friends is painting her house to ready it for sale. If I go back, she might not be there.

Things change.

Living in this place where some things haven’t changed in thousands of years, it often feels like I could wind my watch back three years and be right back where I was. But I can’t. I made choices. I’ve changed. My apartment is filled with someone else’s furniture. My job no longer exists. I won’t fit there anymore.

Becoming Italian, Part 4.8

I was wearing heels. And make up. And even a jacket with subtle, sparkly gold threads woven through the green-beige-brown tweed and absurd, fluffy, eight-inch re-cycled vintage raccoon fur cuffs. I was doing my best impersonation of una donna italiana and hoping my translations would be accepted.

You see, I wasn’t completely clear on what made a translation “official”. Last time, Signora R. told me to go to the tribunale where they had a list of official translators. Two weeks ago, that’s what I did. Only they told me to go to the giudice del pace. At the justice of the peace, they guy looked over my translations, used his rubber stamp all over them and told me to get a couple of tax stamps worth about $35, had me sign a declaration that they were true to the best of my ability and sent me on my way. I wasn’t sure if that was official enough.

Despite my attempts to look the part, I was no match for Signora R. . Her fuchsia dress, fuchsia fur stole, dark pinkish-red 3D manicure, armful of rhinestone bangles and be-jeweled eyeglasses topped with a cascading explosion of blond hair, she was truly an Italian woman and quite possibly the personification of one of my favorite Italian expressions, an albero di natale or “Christmas tree”.

It was my third time meeting with her, but it may as well have been the first. Armed once again with the wonderful distraction that is A., another chatty, done-up Italian woman, as well as my armload of documents, stamped and taxed and apostilled, we went through it all from the beginning, as if we’d never done it before.

“Is your husband Italian?”

Duh. Of course he is. If he wasn’t, why would I be applying for citizenship through marriage? I shook the thoughts from my head, hoping the smile accompanying my “Sì” was convincingly pleasant.

She turned to him. “Do you have carta d’identita?”

“No lo so,” he replied, looking at me.

“You don’t know if you have? Maybe an Italian passport?”

“Sì, sì. Ce l’ho.” I pulled out his carta d’identita and his Italian passport.

Oh, how the Italian ladies chuckled. He doesn’t know if he has these things! No, I wanted to say. He knows that he has them, that they’ve been issued to him. He just doesn’t know if they are here with us now because I always have them. But I didn’t. Mostly because I didn’t know how, but a little bit because she’s the one who takes my application, the one who has the power, and I didn’t want to seem  rude so I didn’t even try. I just tried to smile pleasantly. Again.

She picked up my application form. “There is a new modello.”

Of course there is.

And then she proceeded to fill in the blanks I had left, things like what type of degree I have (she couldn’t find a good translation for BA in English/Secondary Education, either, choosing just “college degree”) and what I do now (we decided on “housewife” and everyone chuckled again).

Next, she fondled the sheaf of papers from the Comune. Things like the marriage “extract” (a copy of the page in the book of the town hall in which the marriage was registered), the piece of paper confirming V.’s citizenship, and the one that proves I’m resident in the town.

“Oh. You need to be resident two years.”

“Yes. I am,” I said, still trying to smile, fearing that maybe the new modello came with another change to the law that I hadn’t yet heard of. “Yes. Married 2009. Living here since January 2011.”

“Not from marriage. Resident.”

“Yes. Is now January 2013.”

Giggling and chirpy Italian abounded. So silly. Yes, is now 2013. She looked down again.

“Oh. Trentuno gennaio. You must wait.”

Of course I must wait. It’s only quattro gennaio. They didn’t put me in the book until the thirty-first, even though our lease was dated the first, the vigili came to confirm we lived in our apartment on the tenth and really, what else were the people who work at the comune doing that they couldn’t get me in the damned books sooner?

I tried not to roll my eyes. V. said, “Oh, OK. We come back primo febbraio.”

“No, no, before that.”

Um. What? My residence is dated January 31^st, but we don’t need to wait until February 1^st. But we can’t submit everything today. When exactly is a good time? Oh, never mind. Va bene.

On to the translations.

“Who did these?”

A. did not say, “I told you two days ago on the phone. She did them. And the guy at the Justice of the Peace read them, said they were fine and stamped them.” She wisely left out the first part, embellished slightly on the second part adding something about a teacher helping me (yes, my teacher, whom I call Google) and Sig.a R. nodded appreciatively at the stamps and signatures.

Then she said something very quickly about the Embassy in Rome and dragged a sparkly, depth-enhanced claw under the part of the instructions on the application that say things need to be legalized by the “competent authority” where the documents are from or at that country’s consulate in Italy.

I looked at A., confused. “Ci sono apostilli,” I ventured. Right there. The first page is one, with that big blue seal of Secretary of State of New York, followed two pages later by one from the Secretary of State of the USA.

A. read my thoughts and kindly, politely pointed them out.

Va bene.

A flurry of grazie and handshakes and kisses on all of our cheeks and we were sent on our way to fill out the new form and return in three weeks. Before buying a tax stamp worth €14.62 and paying the application fee to the stato via the post office of €200. You see, Rosalba wants to look at everything before I do that.

Question of the Day

In Italy, why does a box containing twelve 200mg ibuprofen cost €4, or approximately $5.50, but a week and a half worth of antibiotics are free?

Very Big Sorry

I was walking towards the Anonymous statue near Vajdahunyad Castle in City Park when I noticed the guy playing the violin.

The sun was shining on him in his shortsleeved shirt, his blue eyes glinting above his thick blond mustache framed by dimples as he busked.

He’d left the case filled with change a few meters away and was approaching tourists as they touched the statue’s pen, rubbed golden by those before them. Trying to guess where they were from, urging them to take a photo with him while I kept my distance and willed them all out of the way of my shot.

“Where are you from? Spain?” he asked.

“No, no,” I replied, edging away.

“You speak English? Here. You take this,” he said, offering the violin and bow. “Take picture.”

“No, no thank you.”

I tried to walk off, V. stopping as the man chatted him up.

“Here. I take picture of you. Nice photo to remember Budapest.”

I can’t help it. I inevitably imagine the worst. The man taking my camera and holding it hostage for some euros or forints regardless of the fact that I have his violin because it’s not even his, he doesn’t play, he picked it up out of the trash. And I don’t really like having my picture taken. It makes me uncomfortable, trying to pretend the camera’s not there or worse, trying to smile and look like I mean it. I’d like to be different. I’d like to be spontaneous and less cynical.

I do the same thing to the woman who walks around Ascoli asking for cigarettes and the people trying to sell me socks or pirated CDs outside the mall. I’m not so worried about the Cigarette Lady but I do always think the socksellers might take out their frustration on our parked car.

“No thank you,” I called out, hoping V. would start walking away.

He turned to V. and shook his head. “I feel very big sorry for you!”

We laughed about it afterwards but I kept thinking about it. It would’ve been a nice picture to have, me pretending to play while standing in front of the slightly creepy old statue. Maybe I’d have busted into “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, the only song I remember how to play, delighting the man. Only, I didn’t do that. I just walked uncomfortably away.

Last month, we were back in Budapest. High up on Castle Hill, on the Buda side of the river, on the other side of the city from the park, We exited the funicular that whisks you up the hill.  There was the violinist, this time in a trenchcoat, his bushy mustache looking paler in the grayness of the early winter day. He was playing Brahm’s Lullabye, a song my grandmother used to sing to us at bedtime.  He stopped and approached a couple looking over the wall, down across the river.  I flipped a few forints into his open case and walked on.

Budapest Day 3 - Memento Park

Outside of central Budapest, in  the suburbs, in a sweet little neighborhood with  some half-timbered houses with gardens and (strangely) barbed wire-topped fencing is a park filled with statues of the Soviet era.

For a girl brought up on the other side of the Cold War, outside the Iron Curtain who’s only read about Soviet oppression and only seen photos of such statues, the literally giant reminders of the vast reach of the State, the every-day people as hero, the dead-eyed stone soldier, being up close to them is truly awesome. Spread throughout the park are smaller sculptures and plaques, honoring various party “heroes”.

It’s easy to understand how some Hungarians wanted these sometimes-hulking hunks of granite, concrete and steel that had been set about their city to remind them of the power and ubiquity of the Soviet dictatorship to be destroyed but it’s impressive that they weren’t. They were instead set up in what would become a park, a reminder and a tribute to all of the revolutions in Eastern Europe, in Berlin, in Prague, in Poland.

As we got off the bus and headed back toward the park, the silhouette of the reproduction of Stalin’s boots, all that remained of his statue before crowds tore it down during an uprising in 1956 that started out peacefully but ended with tens of thousands sentenced, imprisoned and hundreds killed, a stocky older woman was walking behind us.

I saw the statues in the brick arcades by the park’s entrance at the same time that I heard some old-timey planes high above. As I started to run towards them in hope of getting a shot of a biplane in the background and Lenin’s face in the fore, the woman, white hair pulled back, sturdy stockinged legs carrying her up the road, eyes crinkled in a smile or from the sun, said, “Lenin.” I nodded. She pointed a bit further ahead. “MarxEngels,” in the way that people do, as if they were one person. I smiled and waved as she walked on up the hill, wondering what she’d lived through, what she’d seen and what she thought about it all.

Getting there: http://www.budapest-tourist-guide.com/budapest-statue-park.html