I didn’t want this blog to become a kind of diary entry and I am pretty sure no one is interested in a blow by blow account of everything that we do. For that reason I have put together a few bits and pieces of the things we have been doing and some things which I think might be of general interest.
Modena
Modena is a small town close to Bologna, which is famous for its balsamic vinegar. Proper Balsamic vinegar is nothing like the product you can buy in a supermarket or what you have had on your salad. A small bottle of properly produced balsamic vinegar will set you back at least £60 and will be used by the drop mixed with oil. What you can buy elsewhere are usually let down “ready to use” versions. The ancient process involves specific grapes fermented over a number of years with the product being transferred to smaller and smaller vessels as the ageing and reduction takes place, until the final product is available in the small glass jar with the ball base, which is unique to Modena. In our story it is also the town from which we had to hire a car when we broke down. As we knew the van was not going to be fixed until at least Monday we decided it was more cost effective to return the car, which we did not need to use during the week and was costing us a fortune in the local carpark. When we hired the car, it was late on a Friday, we had spent two hours at the side of the Italian motorway by our stricken vehicle and we just wanted to get onto Bologna, so we had not spent any time in the town. Returning the car gave us the opportunity for a little visit, although it would have to be brief as there was more rugby to watch.
Saturday morning we headed out to the car park to collect the car for the last time. As we drove to the Avis rental office, we appreciated the relative luxury of the Kuga. The inbuilt sat nav and in car charging etc. We handed the car over without pre-amble and a very minimal review of the returned condition. We consulted google maps and planned a route to the station via the centre of the town. Modena is much like other Italian towns, we have visited, a great mix of old buildings through time and modern commercial architecture. There was a flower and herb market taking place which made wandering around the streets and piazza even more delightful. Eventually we wended our way to the station, where it appeared the whole Modena orchestra was waiting to get on a train. The automated ticket machine was broken so we waited in the queue, unfortunately missing the cheaper regional train, but we did not want to wait another hour for the next regional service, so we opted to pay the extra for the Freccia Rosso. These are clean, pleasant, fast, modern trains, but they are double the price. As we have mentioned to just about everyone who asked us why we have chosen Bologna, one of the reasons it that it is a central location from where it is really easy to get to multiple other places. It has the largest station in Italy with 27 platforms in use. Florence is 35 minutes away, Milan an hour and a bit, Rimini (nearest bit of coast) 1 hour, Venice 1 and a half hours etc. You can even get a direct train to Berlin! On this occasion the train was slightly late, but we were back in Bologna within 20 minutes so plenty of time to pick up some lunch before heading to the Cluricaune for more Rugby, where Wales delighted us with yet another win, setting up the possibility of their achieving the Grand Slam, which of course, they did.
Tandem (language) dates
We have retained our weekly Italian lesson with our usual Italian teacher over Skype to help us settle in. In our first lesson after we had been to school for the initial week, we were keen to show her how much we had improved as well as to discuss our concerns about what we were struggling with, namely listening and speaking. Elena had a great suggestion which was to see if there was a Facebook group for what she called “tandem” meet ups. This is where someone who wants to learn a language meets up with someone who wants to learn their language. The idea is that it is conversation in two languages so you can both improve as well as being social. We had never heard of this and were pleased to discover that there was indeed a Bologna tandem Facebook group, so Al put a message up. We were completely taken aback by how many people wanted to meet up and speak Italian/English with us. We had so many responses that Al spent a whole day composing Italian replies to each one. Within a day we had meetings set up on most available evenings and weekend days for two weeks starting from the first meeting scheduled for the following Saturday. As we were still fairly new to the city, we allowed the tandem partner to choose the meet up location. This way we get to see places that locals like and go to and improve our list of places to go to. We had already noticed that we were starting to go to the same places because we knew where they were and how they worked.
Our first Tandem, it is fair to say, did not go well. We felt very nervous as we had no idea what to expect. We worried about what to wear as if we were actually going on a date. We met the person who will remain nameless, because I have forgotten her name, at the feet of the two towers, a famous landmark in the centre of Bologna. She did not seem to have a plan for where to go but she just started walking and talking. It was hard to hear and speak while walking along busy city streets and when we asked her to suggest somewhere to go, she picked somewhere on the other side of the city near to our Air B&B. She could not hide her extreme disappointment that we were not American. She had an obsession for Americans and America and had put on her Facebook profile that she was from San Francisco, but she was born and bred Bolognese. She told us later she found our English accents very hard to understand and was critical of our Italian. We found her very impatient and unwilling to listen to what we were saying before talking again so she often misunderstood what we were saying in either language. When we made our excuses to leave it turned out she needed to walk back into the city too and so walked with us, it was quite awkward. She told us she was an Italian teacher for immigrant school children which made her slightly condescending manner make more sense and I felt quite sorry for them. She told us she would be able to help us a lot as we were like those children. As we left her, we said we would be in touch and as soon as we left her we agreed that we would not. We had two weeks of meetings to come and we began to think we had possibly made an error.
Our second meeting was much better. We met Myriam at Caffe Zamboni where we were going to have Aperitivo. The food was plentiful and included hot food trays as well as cold. Myriam was very interesting, she translates and adapts the vocal scripts for television and films in English. Obviously, her English is excellent, but she wants to keep her speaking practice going which is why she was looking for a tandem with English speakers. We spoke mainly in English and broken Italian. She was very patient and helpful. The meeting felt relaxed and social. At the end we were happy to meet with her again. Our following Tandem meetings have been similarly successful and all the other people that we have met we are planning to meet again, although we have not met with everyone who replied to the message yet!
Talking Italian (Robert De Niro is not waiting)
While I was glued to my laptop for the last two weeks of work in the old career with JP Morgan, Al was using MO bikes to tear around the city trying to get us “legal”.
This started with something called the Codici Fiscali which is the Italian equivalent of the National Insurance number. You need this for just about everything, but luckily it is listed as one of the easier Italian bureaucratic hurdles to overcome. MO bikes, as you might have guessed, are city based rental bikes like the Boris bikes or other local equivalents. While the van was still in the garage, they were invaluable to Al for getting to the various far flung civic offices he needed to visit. His trip to the out of town office to get his Codici was difficult and he struggled to pull his Italian together. He was interrogated by a rude civil servant about why he was in Italy and why he couldn’t get a job in his own country, once Al managed to explain that he was able to get a job in England, but he wanted to learn Italian cooking the atmosphere thawed considerably. Italians generally and Bolognese in particular, love their food. The next day Al was able to go and collect the van so when I went to get my Codici we were able to go in that and the office was less busy, the receptionist told me which bits of the form to fill in and the civil servant was lovely, he even made a little Brexit joke.
Al was desperately trying to get us on a more permanent footing with the original 29th March Brexit deadline looming over us. We had been given the idea that we needed a permesso di soggiorno, which could be submitted to the Post office for processing. The form required could also be picked up from the post office, however not all branches had them and the branch that did would not let Al have two. Eventually after much blood, sweat and Mo biking Al managed to score two forms and we set about completing them. We needed to copy the Codici, bank records to show we could support ourselves and every page of the passport. Al went to submit his first as I was still working and you needed to present some of the documents in person as well as provide copies. After a lengthy discussion with the woman at the post office he was able to submit this and he was provided with an appointment at the Immigration office. When we went together in my lunch break the post office would not accept mine because as we are EU citizens, we don’t need the permesso. They understood our Brexit concerns and apologised that Al’s application had been accepted but insisted I could not submit an application. They directed us to the civic office in the city centre for a different form. The next day we went there and were directed to the Immigration office, we went there and spoke to a lovely policeman who told us not to worry, we didn’t need anything right now, we were EU citizens we had the right to stay and if a no deal Brexit did happen, something would be arranged. We went home a little confused and despondent. On speaking with our Internations EU friends we discovered what we needed was residency. Residency is granted by the local council where you live, but in order to get this we needed an address, so the hunt for an apartment was stepped up. Luckily about this time the Brexit deadline was extended to 12th April, giving us a little more time, which has now morphed into sometime before October 20th.
The bank provided Al’s next language challenge. He had researched on line and identified that there was a non-residents account which foreigners could get, however the bank agent Al spoke to originally didn’t know how to open it, so she made an appointment for him to come back. It took two hours for them to go through all the paper work, but he walked away with account details and a cash machine card.
Getting an Italian mobile proved to be the least difficult of all Al’s herculean tasks. He was able to get a basic contract fairly cheaply and they were not bothered about an address. Al bought a really old phone (8 years vintage) from the Bologna branch of CEX and we have had much hilarity remembering a time before touch screens when all sites look like text messages and you had to use the scroll bar to navigate the, limited, options and there are no apps. However, it has meant we can put an Italian phone number on our CVs and documents rather than our UK ones, although we are terrified of someone calling us because our Italian listening and speaking skills are not great.
Internations
Internations is an online ex-pat community, they have branches in 432 cities worldwide where people who have relocated to an area can meet each other and locals. They provide online guides and help with the issues new arrivals might face. The Bologna branch is quite active and has at least one social event per month at different venues in the city. When we went to the first meeting we prepared as best we could, learning some sentences to describe ourselves and why were in Bologna in Italian as best we could. Luckily there were a number of English-speaking people there and at this initial meeting we mostly spoke English. Some of the people at the meeting had been in Italy for decades and others for only a few years. The ability to speak Italian varied a great deal with the English speakers, some were fluent, and others had less Italian than us, which gave us a degree of comfort about our language skills. We were speaking to an American who teaches English as a foreign language and he thought I would not have any problems getting a job as an English teacher. This became a theme at many of our meetings, indeed at the next meeting an Italian asked me why I wasn’t an English teacher, I explained that I had not completed the qualification, but she thought my degree would be enough, so the next day I enrolled on the online course and started applying for jobs.
Basic membership is free but does not give you full access to the site so we decided that Al would take the subscription membership and I would stay with basic. It means I pay more when we go to events and I don’t have the same access to messages and to invite others into my network, but otherwise I can usually see events and accept invitations. Event fees usually include your first drink and a buffet, but you need to be quick with the food as it soon goes. One of the Italians we met told us that she looks up the nearest branch when she goes abroad on holiday and if they are having an event while she is visiting, she goes along to get local top tips. There is a Southampton branch if you want to check it out. It’s been so useful for us I am going to upgrade my membership.
These events are definitely helping us to get settled in a set up a new network as we have met many interesting people from all over the world that live here. People are interested in our story, our desire to make such a big change and are really supportive. We are getting a core set of friends we meet up with at the events and then go onto other venues with. Everyone sympathises with the apartment situation and give us what advice and contacts they can, but the cold fact is it is hard.
Where we have been visiting
Giardini Margherita
We paid our first visit to the Giardini Margherita on the Sunday before I had to return to work (alright working from home). For Southampton residents the Giardini is like a slightly smaller version of the common with a cafés and bars scattered across it, a basketball court and there is also a beautiful set of buildings converted to artists working space with a restaurant and bar. The park is surrounded by some of the loveliest old apartment buildings in Bologna
MAMbo
Mambo is the name of the Modern Art Museum of Bologna. Each city has a regional code which you need on all official documentation and for Bologna it is BO in the same way that Southampton uses the SO post code as an identifier. This gallery has art from 1945 to the present. We only visited the permanent collection as the temporary exhibitions cost extra. We also ate brunch in the Gallery restaurant before we went it, this was our first experience of a brunch buffet and we nearly managed the whole thing in Italian but let ourselves down when we were not sure where to pay.
FICO (Eataly World)
Fico means fig in Italian, but it is also the name of the Eataly world food park. Eataly is an Italian produce chain that specialises in finding and selling excellent examples of regional sustainably produced foods at prices for everyone. They seek to retain the link between the produce, the production process and the producers (Italian agri-food biodiversity). FICO is the physical manifestation of its desire to keep these concepts together in the mind of the consumer. It’s hard to explain what FICO is, but it has a sort of derogatory nickname of the Disneyland of food, which does mostly cover it. It is on the outskirts of Bologna and includes livestock and agricultural zones on the outside and produce zones on the inside. At the entrance you can hire tricycles that have large food baskets on the front and back or you can just get a trolley. Entrance to the park is free and when you go in, there are large signs to show what each produce zone is and they have production areas or “factories” with glass walls and schedules of activity so you can watch pasta being made, the production processes for mortadella, Parma ham and parmesan etc. You can also attend courses and workshops if you pre-book. Each zone has one or two restaurants or outlets where you can get samples or buy taster sets or full meals. There are also shelves of produce available to buy. While you pay for the ready to eat food at each outlet, produce is bought from the giant store at the end of the complex. So, like all other modern museums and spectacles you exit via the gift shop, although in this case it is a massive Italian produce store, but don’t worry you can buy branded merchandise too.
Apples 
Say cheese 
Where we’ve been eating
Mercato Delle Erbe
This is an indoor food market with stalls selling fruit and vegetables and even real balsamic vinegar in the middle and then more permanent stalls/shops around the interior walls with fresh pasta makers, cheese shops, butchers. There are two sort of wings coming from the main market area, these both contain food and drink outlets, restaurants and seating, it’s a great place to eat and relax with friends as well as to pick up some food to take home. The area around the market is buzzing with restaurants and bars in the evening.
Tamburini
I have included information on Tamburini before, but now we have also discovered the delights of their self-service restaurant inside. You have to walk through the delicatessen to get to it, then get yourself a tray. You slide your tray along counters where there are salads and other first course goodies, fridges with water and bottles of beer, past the wine on tap (a spina) which is available in quarter, half or full litre carafes, to the hot food counter where you can choose from the options available, which will always include the bolognese specialities; lasagne and tagliatelle a ragu, but there will be other options to, on to the deserts and then to a till to pay, before finding a table to sit at. It reminds me of the old cafés in Bhs stores but about 1000x better. The staff are well used to tourists, but it can still be a little daunting.
Caffe Zamboni
Already referenced above in our Tandem dates section, but a great place for a large quantity of aperitivo/aperacena at a relatively low cost. It is also in a great central location in a lively area of Bologna.