Napoli

I sent this out in an email to everyone back in March but figured I'd go ahead and post it here...you know, for posterity. Whatever that means.

                                                      ***********

I’ve been in Italy for 2 months now & figured it was time for a mass email detailing the goings on here & other assorted tidbits.

Ever since I arrived in Naples in mid-January, Harry & I have been waiting for the green light from our company, inlingua, to move down to Grottaglie near Taranto in Apulia in the south of Italy to teach English in company to employees of Alenia, an Italian company who manufactures airplane fuselages for Boeing’s newest plane, the 787 Dreamliner. This company works closely with Americans so they want their employees who deal directly with the Americans to be taught English. Supposedly the Americans have been learning Italian for the past several months but without much success & Alenia wants their employees to have a go with English. Inlingua has found us an apartment in Grottaglie & bought us a car (a piece of crap I’m sure but at least we’ll have wheels) for use to & from work, but the start date for the English courses keeps getting put off. In the meantime I haven’t been given much work since we’re supposed to move any day now, although last week I had a 4 hour/day Business English crash immersion course in Caserta, which took me 2 hours to get to one way. Luckily inlingua pays you for doing 80 hours of work each month even if you don’t meet that minimum because they guarantee you at least 80 hours of work each month in the contract. So even though I'm not doing 80 hours of work a month I'm getting paid for it. Booyakasha.

In the meantime…we’ve been sharing a super small room in an apartment with 3 other guys (2 Italians who fortunately aren’t here much as they go home to Sicily on the 9 hour one way ferry every weekend & 1 British guy who also works for inlingua) who each has his own room. The kitchen is tiny & crappy – only a gas stove & a fridge; no appliances save a blender Harry & I bought – as is the one bathroom we all share. Generally no one bothers to clean so as you can imagine, it gets pretty nasty. Three cheers for shared accomodation. Not.

Other than that life here is interesting. In many ways it’s the total opposite of living in Japan. The Japanese are not very excitable, calm, follow the rules, & are polite. Italians, or rather, Neapolitans, since they are who my experience has been with, are extremely excitable, dramatic, don’t follow rules & can come across as very rude. As a general rule of thumb most Neapolitans have distaste for any kind of authority & show it in any number of ways (rarely paying for public transport, never cleaning up their dog’s shit but instead leave it in the middle of the sidewalk for everyone else to step in, etc.).

Naples is a chaotic, crowded city (the population density reminds me of Japan) & people spend a great deal of time outdoors just walking or hanging around, presumably to escape living with all of their family & extended family in the apartment. The pace of life is markedly slower here than anywhere else I’ve lived, even though it’s a city of at least a million people. Everything shuts from 1pm until 4pm everyday & then for good around 8pm (talk about inconvenient!) & on Sunday virtually nothing is open. People gather in the piazzas or in the streets or in the small parks to just talk. I’ve never seen a people who like to talk so much! If they’re not talking to someone in the flesh they’re on their cell phones. Of course this makes it ridiculously easy to get them talking in English lessons as they’re falling all over themselves to give their two cents (the complete opposite of Japanese students!). Italians seem to have a great deal of pride in their country & think it’s one of the best places in the world to live & that their food is the best (I can’t argue too much – pizza & pasta are pretty tasty!).

Oh yeah, I just got finished reading Donnie Brasco: My Undercover Life in the Mafia so when I walk around I keep thinking, ‘oh, they look like Mafia guys’. Completely unfounded but fun to play with the idea. I know there’s a huge Mafia (or Camorra as they call them here) presence in Naples & around southern Italy.