Italy: Where greeting never ends

By Laura Musana

IT was the Easter season so, naturally, I wished I was at home — mostly because I was craving kabalagala (local pancakes). However, because I am stuck in Italy, have exams in two weeks and have to walk miles to find the Internet, here are some annoying/traumatising/bad things you never hear about Italy.

Normal people here komba (lick) their plates after they have cleared all their food. I know they use bread and not their tongues, but still! Imagine how shocked I was to see masses of seemingly normal people unashamedly clearing their plates like we were in a camp in Darfur and the World Food Programme had said they would not come again.

I am still traumatised. They also dip their biscuits in tea, coffee, milk or whatever and eat them soggy. And I looove it! I swear you have not eaten biscuits until you have eaten them dipped in tea or coffee or just anything hot.

So that is what I will bring back home with me. I will be that girl at Café Pap wearing a straight face and bending over her coffee cup to catch the wet biscuit before it falls back into the cup. It looks disgusting, but it is so yummy, it really does not matter.

Italians wake up in the middle of the night to go out on the streets and spit. And not just the

I’ve-unknowingly-drunk-spoilt-juice-so-I’ll-have-to-spit-it-out-right-now-on-the-street kind of spit, but the kind that comes from a deep dark place in the digestive system of a rotten person. The reason I say they do it in the night is you will never see anyone spit, but somehow there will always be some spittle on a street somewhere.

Always! I once asked a friend of mine in my most polite tone about it and you should have seen the look on his face. You would think I had just accused his family of masterminding every African genocide. So, see, they will not even own up.

I have also discovered (and when I win a special prize for this, you guys can say you heard it here first) that Italians are really Japanese in disguise or in the early stages of evolution.

According to my Kyrgyz classmate’s expert opinion, Japanese will stop to greet a person they know and do it with such politeness that you will not believe they are the same person when two seconds later, they are elbowing another person in their way.

So the case of our Italian friends is this. (This only applies to the Italians in my little town). The average person on the street walks around with a straight face, talking to the next person or generally just going about their business, brushing past other people and generally looking like they are rushing off to an emergency room to save someone dying of Ebola, mad cow or some other rare disease.

That is until you stop them to ask for directions, the price of coffee or anything. Then you realise that while there is an idle person in all of us, there are maybe three idle people in these Italians.

Sometimes I even regret asking because people get carried away and go on and on about the price of coffee, the soil in the plantations it grew, the coffee pickers, the level of rainfall, their uncles...

Another thing you never read on the Internet or get told is that Italians who know you are programmed to say at least 300 “ciao’s” a day to you and will not sleep until they have hit the target. In the first months, it drove me crazy because every time someone saw me, they would say “ciao”.

The same person would see me say, three times in the space of five minutes and still say three different ciaos. And the worst part is that it is rude not to ciao back.

What is worse is that it is almost always done with a smile, whether or not it is a particularly smile-worthy moment, for example, first thing in the morning when you are coming to terms with the fact that you are about to spend another four hours learning econometrics.

So, clearly after a few days, I was ‘ciaod’ out and started avoiding my neighbours. I even started dodging the reception area and exit because the doormen would say: “Ciao Laura.” I could not pretend that I thought they were ‘ciaoing’ someone else.

Needless to say, I have joined the bandwagon and faithfully say my 300 ciaos a day, with a smile.

I have just remembered something to prove that Italians have a special level of internal idleness. One day, I was coming back from the supermarket at about 10:00am. I saw a crowd of people all staring in the direction of a certain building.

The street had been closed to cars by the police, so obviously I was curious to know what was happening. These were not your typical idle and disorderly people.

They were dressed for work (which had started an hour ago — work starts at 9:00am here and lunch break is two-and-a-half hours). I asked at least 10 people what was going on and none of them knew why they were standing there.

They saw a crowd staring at a building and thought they would join in. Finally, the last person I asked said there had been a bomb scare in that building. I was forced to ask myself, for those who knew what was going on, what on earth were they doing there?!

Were they hoping for an exhibition of the bomb? Or did they want to see how far the building would explode?

Back to what you do not know about Italians. The Italian embassy will not tell you this, but when they give you the visa, they seem to also use special, hidden, highly advanced technology to print a sign on your forehead only visible to African immigrants that reads: “Yes, I have all the time in the world, bug me.” But I will have the last laugh.

When I finish my upcoming exams, I will be sufficiently idle and promise to revenge on every African immigrant I meet. Let me share my experiences.

I went to the supermarket (now it sounds like I go there often, but I do not!) and while I was looking for kabalagala-friendly flour, someone said: “Ciao.” I did not see who it was and had already walked away, so I did not reply.

(I say ciao back indiscriminately, even to those nauseating old men on the streets who make “ciao bella” seem like bad words).

Anyway, this guy, who is an African immigrant, was not going to allow his ciao to go unanswered. He started shouting and must have screamed about five ciaos before he realised I was not going to reply.

So he thought it was a brilliant idea to follow me around the supermarket shouting “Bella! bella! bella!” As if this trauma was not enough, another immigrant from Senegal who sells bicupuli (fake) bags outside the supermarket, decided to greet me extensively in Wolof (They all do.

I usually smile as a way of politely saying “no, I am not your long lost relative from Dakar!”) However, this Senegalese did not care about language barrier and switched to Italian. I was carrying a bag that probably weighed five kilos and had no plans of stopping to make small talk.

Then he switched to French. At this point, he had abandoned his bags and followed me. When he eventually asked what language I spoke, I quickly said English, crossing my fingers and hoping he could not speak a word of it. As luck would have it, he could.

So, while I hurriedly crossed the road, he shouted loudly enough for other people to look at me like I was denying my baby’s father: “But ewe are so lovvv-ly.” That is why I say, vengeance is mine!

Nonetheless, despite the fact that I must have sustained some kind of brain damage from the effects of this kind of trauma, I still recognise that this is in many ways a beautiful country.

Unfortunately, I cannot go into the details of this without sounding like one of those annoying tourism adverts where everyone has smooth skin, wears brightly coloured clothes and runs through fields of flowers singing in tune.

The writer is a Ugandan exchange student in Italy