Alright so I woke up at 9 to find myself home alone in Torino. The dog isn’t even here. I showered and ate breakfast and am now sitting here, swatting these stupid flies that look just like flies but bite really HARD and reading French reader’s digests and finding that their little “funny” blurbs are actually pretty interesting.
Au rendez-vous des animaux
Que vous soyez fier comme un coq, fort comme un boeuf, tetu comme une mule, malin comme un singe ou fine mouche, vous etes un jour ou l’autre devenu chèvre pour une caille aux yeux de biche. Vous arrivez frais comme un gardon à votre premier rendez-vous et là, pas un chat ! Vous faites le pied de grue, vous demandant si cette bécasse vous pose réellement un lapin. Elle vous traite comme un chien ? Mais non, elle arrive. « Bon, dix minutes de retard, il n’y a pas de quoi casser trois pattes à un canard. » Sauf que la fameuse souris est, en fait, plate comme une limande, myope comme une taupe. Elle souffle comme un phoque et rit comme une baleine. Vous restez muet comme une carpe. Elle essaie bien de vous tirer les vers du nez, mais vous noyez le poisson. Vous avez le bourdon, une envie de verser des larmes de crocodile. Vous finissez par vous inventer une fièvre de cheval qui vous permettra de filer comme un lièvre. Vous avez beau etre doux comme un agneau, faut pas vous prendre pour un pigeon !
De gauche à droite
En italien, sinistra signifie « gauche ». En italien et en portugais, sinistro désigne également la perfidie, le mal, le sordide, l’accident, la catastrophe. Il en est de meme pour le mot français sinistre, qui, comme les deux précédents, vient du latin sinister (gauche). Toujour en français, le mot gauche désigne ce qui est tordu, mal adapté, malhabile. La langue anglaise, a, elle aussi, hérité du mot latin sinister. En revanche, les mots droite, dextérité, ont des significations positives dans toutes les langues d’origine latine.
Par ailleurs, de nombreuses expressions évoquent la connotation négative de « gauche ». Si on se lève de mauvaise humeur, c’est parce qu’on s’est levé du pied gauche. Alors que devenir le bras droit de son patron est une preuve de compétence. L’usage prédominant de la main droite chez l’homme a donné naissance à toute une symbolique dans laquelle la main gauche est associée au mal tandis que la droite évoque l’idée du bien.
(I can’t find the accent circonflexe for any of the letters :()
Anyway, everything’s going well. I’ve relaxed since coming back from backpacking. I couldn’t update much in the process because I preferred spending time exploring and Internet was rather expensive anyway. It was great, though, and I met a lot of really interesting people. In Vicenza, a Norwegian couple in their seventies; a German couple with their five kids; and a Spanish couple. In Venice, an Australian guy who popped into my life right as I was getting mopey about being on my own and talked to me for five hours straight about... everything, but mostly about how happy he was to have taken the opportunity to take off and travel on his own (and go canyoning [jumping off waterfalls] in Switzerland) as well as three girls from Tibet who spoke French. There were three French girls in Bologna who were all looking for apartments because they were planning to study there (one law, the other two from Nantes pharmaceutic..als) who I stayed up talking to all night (yeeeah people my age!) and a guy from Tunisia in Engineering who spoke English, French, Italian, and Arabic. Then in Florence this French woman in her fifties, Christine, who was OCD to the max. She had six different moisturizers (under eye, face, neck, elbows and knees, feet, everywhere else) that she’d put on three times a day starting at 5:30 in the morning before her shower to protect her against the hard water. She also had to have her sheets perfectly unwrinkled and straight and would spend half an hour morning and night adjusting them.
Also in Florence I met a really cool chatterbox Australian woman in her forties, Wendy, who would speak to anyone and everyone who spoke English. I liked her, it was just hard waking up and having to face chattyness two mornings in a row.
Alllsooo in Florence was Daniel from Ecuador who was my exploring Buddy. We did all of Florence, pretty much, including the Duomo (a huge church. He died laughing at me because the men at the entrance made me wear a sort of toga, apparently tank top-clad boobs are unsightly in the eyes of the lord), a beautiful hill with a great view of the city, and Ponte Vecchio! I took pictures of everything of course. We also went to Pisa and saw the tower of course, as well as the churches around it (and the bathroom haha. God the bathrooms here are terrible). On our last night Daniel got himself a goodbye-ice-cream-cone that was HUGE and turned out to cost 8 euros. He really enjoyed it though haha, but it ruined his dinner appetite so I ate some of his food.
In Genova I met a girl from Madrid named Gemma (or maybe Jema?) who only spoke Spanish and Italian. She was looking for an apartment or an habitacon because she, too, wanted to study. She’d found a really good one but one of her roomies was a fifty-year-old single woman with no kids, which is admittedly kind of strange for a country as traditional as Italy.
Oh god, the highlight of Genova was this Italian woman I was sharing a room with – our room held 8 girls. Our windows overlooked the entire city and port (the hostel was at the top of a mountain) and a terrasse where all the teenagers would stay up until the early hours of the morning laughing and yelling, talking to each other. This woman got out of bed around 11:30 when the volume was getting to be waaay too much, piled all of her hair onto her head like a crown before clambering up onto the windowsill and pulling open two windows her height to shout down at them in a regal tone, “Scusa! Scusa me! SCUSA TI ME!” I was laughing so hard in my bed. You would’ve guessed she was a queen reprimanding her nobles in the courtyard underneath her palace balcony.
In terms of the hostels, Venice was pretty interesting too because it was essentially sixteen people in one big room divided into smaller rooms by using eight-foot high walls in a place with roughly 15-feet high ceilings. I arrived at 1:30 to drop my stuff off before going exploring only to find that I was sharing a room with four other people who’d already arrived. They’d put makeshift clotheslines between their beds and hung up all their underwear on them.
I for sure had bed bugs, and the showers were nothing special - in Florence it was a long rectangular room with a row of showers opposite a row of hooks on the wall. Each shower had a curtain to shield you, but that was it. There was no place to put your clothes or your towels other than the hooks on the opposite walls, so you were essentially forced to undress in front of anyone else in the shower room. ...I showered before anyone else in my room (except Christine, of course -_-) and emerged to find them all awake and naked in front of me. What a way to introduce yourself.
Breakfasts were consistently an unbelievably hard bread roll with a packet of jam and butter, with a free glass of multi-vit citrus juice and a mug of hot chocolate or coffee. In Vicenza it was melba toast, so I quickly learned to eat breakfast and leave in search of better food. Thank god for McDonalds... I can now order from Mcdonalds in English, French, and Italian!
Overall the hostels were very good, though. For fifteen to twenty euros a night, I wasn’t expecting anything special.
There were times when I didn’t quite know what to explore in the cities, so I wandered cities like Bologna and Venice a bit aimlessly but enjoyed tehm regardless. Well, Bologna was my least favorite of them all, but everything was closed because school was starting.
I didn’t find too many affordable restaurants but Daniel and I found a place in Florence where you could get a pasta dish and then a second thing, so I got ravioli (loooove ravioli) and chicken on toothpicks, stuffed with prosciutto crudo. Mmmm.
I discovered the different iced teas, including a mint one. At the train station on my way to Florence I got one out of a vending machine and on its way down it knocked a coke out of its place haha. So I gave the coke to two ladies from Kansas I met on the train who warned me that if someone came up to me and tried to pass me a baby, NOT to take it because the gypsies do that to distract you so they can cut your purse strings while your hands are full and steal your bag. ...to use a BABY is so low. -_-
I also did the aquarium in Genova. :) I saw a pregnant male sea horse, turtles, crocodiles, tiny orange frogs, big tomato frogs, at least two hundred different kinds of fish, dolphins, sharks, spiky things, jellyfish (from birth to maturity), and.... I patted a ray. Hehehe it was like a ray petting zoo. It was great!
Anyway, here in Torino we’ve gone to see a church (it was closed haha) and a park, as Jacky put it to Cristina, where “we loved each other.” It had an incredible view of Torino... and an ice cream parlor. I’m going to miss Italian ice cream, oh man. We’ve had amazing lamb, omelets with verdura (verdure, but.. greenage? Haha veggies), different kinds of ham... I like Cristina’s cooking. It’s just less fattening than Tata’s. I miss Tata’s charcuteries. but I'll be in Paris in... about 7 hours. so.
aww I love my family. They're all so different and interesting. I had a lot of fun with Jacky and Cristina. We laugh a lot.
Including today I have twelve days (I’m not counting the final Sunday since with the décalage I’ll be spending most of it in Montreal), two museums, the eiffel tower, and some wandering left to do. And also some people. Martine, Nicole, Julie and Méline, Antonia. ...and of course some eating. Ohhh I love Paris and its cheap cafés and restaurants.
...My suitcase is very nearly full and I still have stuff at Tata’s. :S what am I going to doooo
kay so they’ve been gone for two hours with the dog and I know Jacky went food shopping yesterday. I’m a little confused but I guess I’ll just go for a nap. Story of my life in Torino, heh.
TWELVE DAYS!
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