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Under Pressure – The Truth About Stress

“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another,”

William James

One of the reasons Al and I decided to make this change was because we were both suffering with stress. Al from the stress of being a Chef and partner in a business and me from working in a management role in Information Security for an American bank. Our jobs were very stressful and meant that we had different days off and usually only saw each other for about an hour at the end of the day, when we would eat and catch up. We both spent a lot of time trying to ensure the other one was ok and had what they needed to get through, supporting each other during various moments of crisis, such as when I was being bullied by my boss or when Al worked every single day for 3 months. It was hard and we were tired.

I was approaching 42 with a decision to make whether to push myself for a promotion at work that would have meant even more stress or walk away. While we still had a plan to start our own business, we were too tired and strung out to know exactly what the business would look like or where we would base it. We had a lot of ideas, but no concrete plan. It still seemed like a pipe dream, a carrot to get us past all the sticks.

Like many people Al and I always want to be the best at what we do. We work hard and put all our efforts into what we are doing and we both thrive on a certain level of stress. I know that at work being able to stay calm and rational during a stressful incident or situation and being able to pull everything together to get through it successfully is not only something that I was able to do well, but something I actually enjoyed and in professional cookery a busy service is similar, so in many ways we are our own worst enemies. However there comes a level of on-going stress and anxiety, where you do not feel in control of it and do not know if you will be able to get through it, never mind successfully and that is very damaging. At various points we have both had prolonged periods of this kind of stress.

As chronic stress heads and anxious people with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome, we had tried many self-help solutions, with meditation, breathing exercises and Cognitive Behavioural therapy becoming occasional but regular parts of our lives, however we recognised that the only lasting solution was to change our lives. What we decided to do, potentially symptomatic of the people we are, was to quit our jobs, rent out our house and move to another country, with another language and to see how we got on. The idea was to change so much that we could focus on what really mattered to us and what we really wanted.

What became apparent quite quickly is that we found other things to stress about. On the drive through France, we stressed about keeping to our timetable and driving on the other side of the road. When we arrived we stressed about our broken down van. Then Al stressed about not finding a job in the first 3 weeks we were here, we both stressed about our level of Italian. We stressed about not being the best at language school.  I stressed about how I would be able to get a job, we stressed (and still stress) about not having an apartment. We stressed about having to move all the time. As each stress was resolved, we found new things stressing us out. At one point I had a panic attack about having periodontitis because I was convinced my gums were receding. We had made real change but we were still stressed!

The truth is, so far as I have observed, that while work and other things can put you under stress and put you in stressful situations, you can also get dependent on the stress. Dependent on the adrenaline flooding through your body when you are managing a difficult situation and then the escalation to panic when you don’t feel in control and don’t know if the outcome will be successful. When you cut off the source, if you do not deal with your own responses to stress, you can start to generate the stress yourself. It’s like your body craves the feeling of the response. You stress about things that would otherwise bounce off you. Your body is like “What happened to all my stress hormones man, I need that shit to function.” You find yourself in a cold sweat because you can’t remember the Italian word for the thing in your dream, which when you really concentrate on it, was not a real thing anyway. You have built yourself for stress. Your systems are optimised for cortisol and then you turned off the tap.

Often children stress about things and we think, ah bless them, they think they are stressed but this is not really a problem. I think this is wrong, the stress is the same, it is relative, but this is our first opportunity to teach them how to deal with it in a healthy way. I do not pretend that I have conquered my stress or that I can point you in the direction of a cure. What I can tell you is that when you take yourself out of a stressful situation you take yourself and your existing response with you. You need to think about how you can manage your stress better so that when you are in genuinely difficult situations you are more resilient and have healthier responses. As I have learned this is not as simple as removing a specific stress stimuli, although this is helpful in the short term, it is about facing your problematic responses and identifying a better way for you to respond.

When you are busy and your body has stepped up its stress response, the temptation is to put your head down and “get through it”. This often means you will not sleep properly because your thought patterns will be in cyclical phase so you constantly obsess about the same worry or comment you made or how you will deal with tomorrow etc. The lack of sleep will mean you are more likely to make mistakes or take something personally or feel like you are not doing a good job. Your brain will reward you by negative thinking about you and your situation. You are going to be found out, you don’t have the skills, you are rubbish because you are tired, you are rubbish because you’re rubbish. You will be sacked, everyone knows you are rubbish, everyone hates you. Why did you think that you would be able to do this etc.? Situations are blown out of all proportion and you are not able to think clearly and logically.

Something which is completely counterintuitive to the “head down, get through it” urge, which I think is natural and culturally persistent, is to breathe and step back. . There is a reason why all the advice is about deep breathing and walking away to get perspective. When I realised that I was essentially having a panic attack about a non-existent problem with my gums, I knew it was about my body’s cold turkey of other stress, but and I can’t emphasise this enough, it did not make any difference to how I felt. The panic was real, the feeling was real. When I looked into the mirror I saw receding gums. I had to find a way to address it that my mind would find acceptable. I tried to be rational about it and I found an English speaking dentist on line, made an appointment and he was indeed able to re-assure me. It seems simple, but it took me weeks of stress to do it, and truth be told Al phoned the dentist for me.  This stress/panic cycle was ended, but I knew that it would be replaced by something else if I did not use the time now available to tackle the response to stress which I had spent years building and reinforcing with my behaviours.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way sorry about the decisions I have made in relation to this. I haven’t thought, well if I’m going to be stressed I might was well be stressed doing something I know well that pays better. Life is too short to be in a career you hate or working a job that you don’t like, because you are afraid to leave or scared by the uncertainty and insecurity that would bring, but changing it is only the first step. When you leave you have to take you with you, so you need to step back and really identify what the issues are for you,  listen to what you need to change and be prepared to take those steps, including ones you could not have imagined when you set out.

However, the realisation that I was stressing partly because I wasn’t being stressed by work, was a revelation. When I voiced this to Al, he agreed. Our bodies were so primed for stress that they were essentially having to generate it. We were able to step back and consider our successes and what we had achieved given the gamble we had taken. Now we make an effort to regularly recap on how well we are progressing and what we have managed to achieve, as well as if there are any learning points we can take away from things that have not gone as well as we would have liked. We actually make time to stop and to discuss this with each other to prevent any build up of negative thinking and self-doubt. We take the time to be grateful about what we have. We stop and ask ourselves why we are getting emotional about things that are beyond our control and ask ourselves if they really matter.

We have started with lower level jobs and still have to remind ourselves that we are not being held responsible for the overall success of our organisations, only the parts we directly impact, but we are learning how to recognise the old responses, to step back from them and find another way. I do Yoga most days which I find really helpful after sitting cooped up at a desk with a stooped back for too many years. I also find the focus on breathing and being present very useful in helping my sub-conscious process things while my conscious mind is busy. Like many people I find meditation useful, but I struggle to fit it in everyday, although I am working on it. Although I am in a less stressful job I am building my resilience so when we are in the situation where we are ready to take on our own business, which will be very stressful, I don’t fall into the old patterns and negative behaviours which have impacted on my health and confidence.

As I said this is only my observation but if it resonates with you, I hope you will find it useful and remember it’s not ok for people or organisations to put you under stress or into stressful situations but to take heart from the knowledge that you can control your response.

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

Epictetus
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Air B&B Life

So far in our Italian adventure we have not been able to get a permanent apartment. Like many other cities in Europe the rate of house building has not kept pace with the rise in population. Although work can be found, accommodation can be more difficult. Also like many other European cities the supply available to rent to ordinary workers and residents has been hit by air B&B and other holiday let websites. This means we find ourselves in a paradox, using the available holiday apartments to rent for short periods on a strictly no residency basis, while we search to secure a permanent apartment from which to base ourselves. The holiday apartments are more expensive than ordinary rentals and we can’t afford to keep staying in them forever. Add to this the fact that we have no official residency, because we don’t have an address. The address is an incredibly important part of your Italian identify not least as it enables to have post delivered to you. We are not able to have post or parcels delivered, buy a car, moped, get phone contracts, unlimited wifi etc. Many people find renting with Air B&B favourable because as well as the increase in rental value presumably the legislative requirements for holiday rentals, if they are declared, are considerably less than those required for residences, and if they are not declared, fairly non-existent.

Everyone here is looking for an apartment, or that’s what it feels like. Agencies rarely have rentals in the windows because they go too quickly. We have been told you have to call as soon as you get the notification to your mailbox. We have personally visited multiple agencies who have never contacted us and had nothing to show us when we were in their offices. We have seen notices pasted to lamp posts by people also searching for apartments. We have joined Facebook groups and watched other people posting adverts almost identical to ours. We have told everyone that we have met that we are looking for apartments and they have promised to let us know if they hear anything. Some people have told us we will not be able to rent while we are on temporary contracts, but initial temporary contracts are standard for new jobs in Italy. Others have said we will not be able to rent without references; how will we be able to get references when we can’t rent. Still we are searching.

In the meantime, we have lived in 3 very different air B&B in 3 beautiful parts of Bologna. The first was just outside of porta San Malmalo. It had a good-sized entrance hall, a reasonable sized double bedroom with lots of built in storage. The living space was nicely separated into kitchen dining and lounge zones. We had a set of French doors leading onto some private outdoor tiled space. It was smaller than we were used to but, in all honesty, there are only two of us and we need to be more disciplined about use of space so it was encouraging us into good (tidier) habits. The apartment was only 30 minutes walk from the centre of Bologna (as are most places). The only downside of this apartment was that there was no guaranteed parking and we were using a public car park nearby which charged by the day. However, it became apparent that a month would not be enough time to secure a permanent apartment. We could not extend the apartment we were in as they had another booking, so we looked for another air B&B. We found a place that had a 50% discount for booking for a month and we took it.

  • Apartment San Mamalo

The new apartment was considerably bigger than the first and this one had loads of storage. It had two large bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was on the 7th floor and offered incredible views of the city. The floors were marble everywhere except the bedrooms which were wooden parquet. The kitchen was in a separate room and there was a separate study. We were certainly living in luxury and the apartment included a garage under the apartment building. We had a balcony that could be accessed by the French doors in either the lounge or dining room areas of the open plan living space. This apartment was close to the portes of Santo Stefano or Maggiore in the Murri district, a very popular residential spot, so we had alternative walks into the city each with their own pros and cons. Maggiore, for my money, was the prettiest walk in and led directly into the main high street in Bologna. It has porticos almost the whole way along it’s length so from where we joined the road from the apartment all the way into the centre of the city. Santo Stefano has porticos from the porta into the centre and the shops were more interesting. The end of this route brought you through the square of the 7 churches or if you preferred onto the designer stores of Piazza Cavore and via Farini. We loved the area here and the walk was a similar 30 minutes in. There were more shops near to our apartment, so we were spoilt for convenience. This is a very leafy area with tree lined avenues, and it’s close to the Giardini Margherita. Sadly, as we realised that we would not be moving into a permanent home any time soon we also had to leave this apartment, knowing we would probably never live anywhere so luxurious again.

The new apartment was considerably bigger than the first and this one had loads of storage. It had two large bedrooms and two bathrooms. It was on the 7th floor and offered incredible views of the city. The floors were marble everywhere except the bedrooms which were wooden parquet. The kitchen was in a separate room and there was a separate study. We were certainly living in luxury and the apartment included a garage under the apartment building. We had a balcony that could be accessed by the French doors in either the lounge or dining room areas of the open plan living space. This apartment was close to the portes of Santo Stefano or Maggiore in the Murri district, a very popular residential spot, so we had alternative walks into the city each with their own pros and cons. Maggiore, for my money, was the prettiest walk in and led directly into the main high street in Bologna. It has porticos almost the whole way along it’s length so from where we joined the road from the apartment all the way into the centre of the city. Santo Stefano has porticos from the porta into the centre and the shops were more interesting. The end of this route brought you through the square of the 7 churches or if you preferred onto the designer stores of Piazza Cavore and via Farini. We loved the area here and the walk was a similar 30 minutes in. There were more shops near to our apartment, so we were spoilt for convenience. This is a very leafy area with tree lined avenues, and it’s close to the Giardini Margherita. Sadly, as we realised that we would not be moving into a permanent home any time soon we also had to leave this apartment, knowing we would probably never live anywhere so luxurious again.

The third and current Air B&B is in a very exclusive location. Located outside the porta Castiglione, which is between San Mamalo and San Stefano. The area is known as Colli, which means hills, and the road to San Luca (an important local site) runs up from porta Castiglione. The apartment buildings here are generally old and can be entirely private homes. I like to see how many mailbox names are listed as this indicates the number of households’ resident in the building. All the apartment buildings here are accessed by gates, usually automated. It is leafy and private. The apartment building, we are in has 7 households in the main building accessed through an imposing front door. We are down the gravel track around the back of the building in an apartment next to the garages. Many apartment buildings here include a custodian flat where the custodian’s family would live, looking after the maintenance of the building and grounds. We believe our apartment is the converted custodian flat. We have beautiful big windows and high ceilings. The owner has converted it tastefully with carefully selected antique furniture and light fittings. We have a private outside seating area and look out over the garden of the apartment building which itself looks over the tennis court of a neighbouring building. It is small so we are back to self-discipline and space management, but it is a truly beautiful apartment and location. Once again, we are 30 minutes’ walk from the centre along a new route, with new shops and sights to learn. We have been incredibly lucky and there is virtually no chance that we will be able to find or afford an apartment in any of the locations that we have stayed in so far. We have been very privileged to be able to stay in these places and have these experiences and we are just trying to relax and enjoy them while we can.

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Stuff and things

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.

Santa Stefano

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

Bolognaise speciality: lasagne

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.

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Our first week in Bologna

After our arrival late on Friday we had to go back to Campogalliano on Saturday to retrieve the remainder of our possessions. Once the van was emptied, we thanked Massimo, wished him luck for the repairs and headed back to Bologna. We parked up at the air B&B again and ran in and out with our belongings.

  • Our bedroom
  • The living space
  • Al’s domain
  • Our outside space

When we returned to the car park, we found it was full and backed up the road with entry on a one in one out system. We drove around and found some on street parking nearby. This had all taken longer than we had anticipated so we walked into town to grab some lunch in the centre and then headed for the Irish pub so we could watch 6 nations rugby. We found a good table at the Cluricaune, which was advertising that it was showing the rugby, but it was currently showing English premier league football and we were not sure if the Rugby would be put on after. A group of annoying English people came in and sat at a table nearby.  From their ever so audible conversation they clearly lived and worked in Bologna. To be fair only one of them was really annoying but she was loud and ignorant and seemed to think we all wanted to know. We anxiously looked around as it was only 5 minutes to the start of the six nations match but the TV was still showing football. We were relieved when the barman changed the channel, but he didn’t turn the volume up. We heard Rugby pre-amble coming from another part of the bar and on investigating we were delighted to discover in the next section that a projector screen had been pulled down and the room was full of rugby fans. We managed to get a space at a table but we felt frustrated that when we arrived this had not been set up so we had sat by another screen, however, now we knew this was the place to be. The atmosphere was great, we couldn’t hear the annoying English girl anymore and we were rewarded with a win.

Good result for Wales!

It has occurred to me that I have not really explained what Bologna is like. One of the names by which Bologna is known is “the red one”. This is for two reasons, the first is because it was communist until quite recently in an otherwise conservative right-wing region, the other is because the local building materials give the old buildings a red colour. It is known for its many miles of porticos which line most of the streets. Bologna, like many other Italian towns, used to have a canal network through the centre and many of the roads cover the old canals. It is presumable that some of the upper stories were originally built to “overhang” the canals, being extended and supported by pillars once the canals were built over, but we have also been told that there used to be a building tax that covered everything built at street level, which meant that people built bigger at the second floor and then just had supports built on the street below. There are probably a lot of reasons, but the result is pavements protected from the worst of the weather and with various levels of ornate support structures for most of the centre of town.

Bologna has a number of gates or “porte” which used to provide access to the old city and prevent marauders from attacking. One of the questions you get asked is if you are staying inside the gates or outside. Our apartment was just outside the gate of San Mamalo. Bologna has one of the oldest universities in the world so there are many campus buildings and hoards of students kicking around all the time. When we first arrived, it was graduation season, so we kept seeing groups of students with one of their number with a literal laurel wreath on their head (the graduation season is called “Festival of laurels”).

Porta(l) Maggiore

We spent Sunday settling in and unpacking. Al set up the stereo, speakers and printer. We unpacked our suitcases and toiletries and ventured out to local shops to get basic food and drink. There is a fresh homemade pasta shop at the end of our road, but we did not have the confidence in our language skills to brave it. We had signed up to an intensive language course for the next week and we wanted to get settled in and have an early night ready for that.

Monday morning saw us struggling to get up. We had put our own bedding on the bed to make the environment more familiar, but we had difficulty acclimatising. We ensured we left early enough to get a coffee in Aroma before our 9am start at Madre Lingua school. Usually we like to have their speciality coffees but today we needed the pure coffee fix. We arrived at the school, paid the balance for our courses and bought a text book. Several teachers came and introduced themselves, in Italian.  (Boring factual bit – language is measured by 6 levels, A1 – complete beginner, A2 – Beginner, B1 – Intermediate, B2 – advanced intermediate (can understand a news story), C1 – fluent speaker, C2 – Native speaker). We had been sent and completed an online test before we set off and told we would be tested again when we arrived. We were pleased to discover that we were not to be tested again, we were going in to a B1 class as we expected and in line with our level of reading and writing. However, being fully immersed in a class where only Italian is spoken and where all the other students have been learning at the school for at least one or two weeks, it quickly became clear our listening and speaking skills left a lot to be desired.

Our class consisted of two retired teachers from Germany, two Brazilian students, an American student who seemed to have lost all trace of her accent, an American man whose wife was an Evangelical missionary in the more advanced class with their daughter and a priest from Benin, who was working for the local diocese. We found the actual assignments ok and once we managed to work out what we were being asked to do, knew the grammar, but we struggled to understand what we were being asked or to respond to questions. The others were better at listening and speaking but had less grasp of the grammar.

Our school days were laid out as 2 hours of grammar, followed by a coffee break (organised in a local coffee shop by the teachers and with the idea of the school all socialising together in Italian), followed by 1 hour of conversation. For most of the school that was the end of the day, however as we were booked in for the intensive course, we had only 30 minutes for lunch followed by 2 hours of conversation class. This group was for all the people doing the intensive course, so it was mixed ability, but this meant us, one of the Brazilian students, the American student and an American woman from the advanced class whose grasp of Italian was good but who seemed to be completely unaware of her heavy New York accent. There was no trace of an attempt to say any of the Italian words in an Italian accent. She used the word “Cellulare” which is an Italian name for a mobile phone, but when she said it, I thought it was two separate words “Cellu-laaarrray”.

While in school we kept being asked if we had struggled to get an apartment and this had led to many discussions about how hard it was to find somewhere. This alarmed us a little as we had not thought about whether this might be an issue and while we were in an air B&B for the month our plan had been to get an apartment after that. We decided that we had better start looking sooner rather than later although we didn’t have jobs yet.

We were completely exhausted after our first day so we went to the nearby Mercato di Mezzo to get a drink and do our homework, but we ended up eating our dinner out too as we couldn’t decide what to buy. The Mezzo is an old market building, off the Piazza Maggiore (main square). It is an indoor food stall complex with a central bank of chairs and tables. You can go to the beer stand to get beer, the pizza stand to get pizza and the sit at a table and eat. There is seating upstairs and some of the stands have additional seating for their customers. It is good if you all want to eat and drink different things and still sit together. It also has a bread stand, a cheese stand and a butchers so you can get your shopping in too. We ate at a restaurant in one of the nearby lanes, where we both had the lasagne, a regional dish for Bologna. We went home and suffered from a night of broken dreams and Italian words spinning around our heads.

On Tuesday we had our classes and went through our homework. We had not received a call about the van, so Al sent an email to Massimo asking for an update. Al and I spent the week with one or both of us completely unable to understand what was going on in class. On Tuesday I was more on the ball, On Wednesday it was Al etc.
We had signed up to a visit to a local Enoteca (wine shop) after classes, poor us, but we were really exhausted. The visit to the Enoteca was good as we were a small group with no Italian teachers, so the Italian only rule was quickly thrown out the window. We met someone from the WI we could talk about Brexit with and an amazing woman of 23 who had lived in 5 countries and spoke about 7 languages. It is difficult to understate how the on-going non-movement and lack of clarity on Brexit was punctuating our experience and exacerbating our fears for the future but more to come on the Brexit effect in future posts. The Enoteca was one we had stumbled on by accident in our last visit. They sell only biological wines. These differ from organic wines as the whole process must meet certain standards as opposed to solely organic grapes being used. The Proprietor told us about each glass of wine while she was pouring them and brought us what they call “tagliere”. This means slices of meats and cheeses. You get them everywhere here, served on slate or wood boards. Mortadella, Parma ham, parmesan and pecorino are all local products. Parma (for the ham and cheese) is nearby (where we stopped for a break just before the van broke down). This area is a centre for pork and pork products. Each cured meat being made in traditional ways from various parts of the animal.

On Wednesday we heard from the AA that Massimo thought that the van was saveable and needed a part, so they asked us to approve the quote. It was around £400 so we were quite relieved and agreed. After school we went to the herb market to get our dinner and returned home with our purchases. 5pm is quite early for Italians to be around about and looking for food as they generally take a longer lunch and work later so we went home to refresh ourselves and do homework before heading back into town looking for Aperitivo. We found a place that was recommended and although it served great wine, we were disappointed to be served “only” crisps and nuts as complimentary snacks instead of the finger foods synonymous with the Aperitivo experience we were looking for. We knew at this point that we were going to need more Italian schooling, so over drinks we agreed to sign up for an extra week. Unfortunately, I was committed to two more weeks at work so we would not be able to attend more classes until April.

Thursday morning brought us to another coffee shop near the school. For those not acquainted with Italian coffee bars, these are usually fairly small with counters and high stools. Coffee is served in a tiny cup and most Italians drink them at the “bar” served with a small glass or water, sometimes fizzy. These shops often sell a range of “brioche” which is a classic Italian breakfast, these consist of croissants with sugar sticky outsides and cream of pistachio, almond, chocolate or custard inside, or fruit jam for the health conscious or there are a multitude of cakes. Terzi sells incredible coffee in exquisite tiny cups, with a tempting range of breakfast pastries. In a beautiful counterpoint to Starbucks which failed to find a foothold here, genuine coffee professionals sell you beautifully made coffee in real cups to drink in for 1 euro 10 cents and this is a high-end retailer. We were beyond exhausted by this point so burned the coffee off in no time. After class we went to a pub to do our homework before heading home to make ourselves some dinner.

It was finally Friday and we decided to treat ourselves to dinner out. The AA had called again to say that the part would arrive today or on Monday, but we had not heard anymore so we knew we were not going to be going to collect the van today. We finished at 4 and even after we completed our homework it was too early in the Italian evening for dinner. We didn’t want to walk back to our apartment and come out again, although in hindsight we should have, so we lingered about looking for Aperitivo. We were a little demoralised by our school week. We knew we had improved but it had been unbelievably hard. We felt self-conscious going into bars and restaurants. As I wrote when we made our victorious arrival against the odds, Bologna is alive in the evening and especially at weekends. Every restaurant was heaving with people and we felt like outsiders. We were exhausted and could not think clearly or decide what we wanted to eat. We ended up choosing at random and had a good meal, it is still Bologna, but felt a little disappointed that we were not in the swing of things yet.

Something that we had been vaguely aware of about ourselves was becoming more apparent: we are not very patient. We are not patient with ourselves, we are not patient about how long it takes to learn a language, not patient about how long it takes to learn the ropes, not patient about how long it takes to find an apartment or jobs etc. However, one of the reasons we chose Italy and Bologna was for a different pace of life here, for a different attitude to time. Patience is something that we have come here to learn, and it won’t be quick, and it won’t be immediate, and we will find it hard at times, but we will learn.

“Have patience with all things, but, first of all with yourself”

Saint Francis De Salles