The next couple days were mostly rather uneventful, filled with sort of standard tourist stuff. I met up with a friend of mine who’s traveling in Europe and her mom, who took us out to a very nice lunch. Let’s hear it for traveling with real adults. Also, wonderfully, her mom was returning to the United States on Thursday (October 16), so she agreed to take my DoA laptop back with her and ship it domestically.
Stereotypical tourist shot in front of the Duomo
Ponte Vecchio
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I hung out with Stefania a bit, but she was sick for the first few days I was there, and then busy trying to get caught up afterwards. She’s kind of amazing in the amount of stuff she does. In addition to her Ph.D. research, she does yoga, soccer, pilates, salsa dancing, bike racing and she’s taking classes to learn German as her fourth language (after Italian, English and Portuguese).
We went to a talk given at EUI by an American sociologist named Kathryn Sikkink from the University of Minnesota. It was fairly interesting stuff, she talked about the impact of criminal trials for war crimes, crimes against humanity and human rights violations on the overall human rights situation in a country. Her work showed a positive correlation between holding such trials and improvements in human rights. It was unclear what metrics she was using as a measure of “human rights”, and I didn’t ask because it seemed like an unbearably n00bish question.
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I should say a few words about Stefania’s car. It’s a totally hilarious 22-year old beater. The roof leaks when it rains, so she has to always leave the windows open a crack so the interior can dry out. There’s a joint from a previous owner wedged deep in one of the air vents, so if you turn on the heater, the entire car smells like weed. There’s a broken radio from an even older car in the dash—when Stefania got the car, the radio didn’t work, so she replaced it with the radio from the car her father had owned when he met her mom, which he had kept as a memento (aww). Then that radio was destroyed by moisture after a few months. The back of the car is covered with tons of random bumper stickers, including a “01-20-09: Bush’s Last Day” sticker that an American friend of hers had insisted she put on the car. “It always confuses the Europeans, because they write the dates the other way,” she told me.
There was some question as to whether the car would make the 100km journey to Pisa without incident, but it performed like a champ.
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Blue skies over a threatened university
After the critical mass, Stefania headed back to Florence, and I went to back to the social center. They were having some sort of special benefit event to pay for the fines levied after a group of antifascist activists disrupted a speech by a right-wing, anti-immigrant Italian politician named Borghezio.
There was a very nice communal dinner that included a pasta course, a meat course, a desert, and an aperitif. I ran into Angelo, one of the guys I’d met at the hackmeeting in Palermo. It turns out he lives in Pisa and studies mathematics at the University of Pisa. He generously volunteered to let me stay with him.
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I had originally planned on hitchhiking north out of Italy to Berlin. However, every Italian I discussed the idea with thought it would either take forever or not work at all. Hitchhiking, or “autostop” as it’s known, has a bad reputation and is looked on quite suspiciously in Italy. I gather there were several high-profile hitchhiker murders in the 1970s. Many people suggested I take a train to the Austrian border and hitch from there. However, looking at train tickets, the cost of a train to Austria was almost the same as the price of a flight from Milan to Berlin, so I wussed out and bought a plane ticket instead.
Train along the Italian coast, somewhere between Pisa and Genoa
Monday afternoon I caught the train out of Pisa bound for Milan, changing trains in Genoa. The trenitalia computer kiosk had helpfully sold me an impossible itinerary: my first train arrived in Genoa after the train I was supposed to transfer to had already departed. While killing time waiting for the next train, I chanced upon a used bookstore that had a fairly good English-language selection at cheap prices. I went on a bit of a book-buying binge.
I got JD Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”/”Seymour: An Introduction” (I read this one already and it kind of sucked), “Sons and Lovers” by DH Lawrence, and “One no, many yeses” by Paul Kingsnorth, on the theory that it would be obliquely relevant to my project. I almost bought a fat history of Garibaldi on the basis that it was only €4 for about 1200 pages, but then decided that buying literature on the Costco principle would likely not make for pleasant reading.
I also played around with a machine that claimed to print stickers from various digital camera media. However, all it did with the xD card from my camera was corrupt the partition table, effectively erasing everything on the card. Thanks, Geneoese train station sticker machine. The lesson: be careful what slot you shove your memory sticks into. Luckily, some Linux hacker had already written “PhotoRec,” an absolutely wonderful application designed specifically to recover digital photos from camera media. It took a couple hours, but worked perfectly, recovering all the .jpg’s and even the .mov’s from the corrupted memory card.
Since my flight was early in the morning, I slept at the Milan-Malpensa airport, which was fine except for being very cold.
Boarding the flight was rather interesting. As previously discussed, the Italians don’t really ever see the need for a line. The Germans, on the other hand, are *exceptional* line-standers. Rivaled in Europe only by the British, who treat proper queue ettiqutte with a reverence reserved in most cultures for national war heroes. The flight looked to be about half Germans and half Italians, and except for segmenting the entire passenger manifest into either an A or B group, it was open boarding. The meant that the Germans for the most part lined up orderly along the wall, and the Italians exploited their northern neighbors’ line-standing impulses to merciless advantage, crowding by, cutting, wandering away from the line and then re-entering it. I saw many a stern disapproving look or head-shake, but nobody broke decorum to actually object. As for me, I decided to split the difference; half-cutting, but then courteously letting several old ladies go in front of me.
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