The Dolomities

On seeing this title, many of my more lexically fastidious friends will be rubbing their hands with glee. “He’s done it again,” they’ll be saying to themselves, in their high-pitched, nasal voices. “This is like that time he wrote ‘knew’ instead of ‘new’, which I mocked him for because I’m sad and have no life.” Well I’m sorry, stereotypically nerdy friends, but this time it is deliberate.

‘Dolomity’ is a word I recently coined. You won’t find it in the dictionary just yet, but its definition is ‘a calamity that occurs in the Dolomites’. “But Alex,” you say, “this seems a bit unnecessary. Surely there can’t be much cause to use such an oddly specific word.”

I grimace painfully, my face contorted through the cruel patchwork of scratches and scars I still bear from my experiences. “That,” I say, “is where you’re wrong.”

DAY ONE

Interestingly enough, my troubles didn’t begin the moment I got out of bed. Usually when a day I’ve planned is horribly derailed, its due to my having woken up about five hours later than I intended. But in this instance I made the opposite mistake – I got up too early. I was up and about at 6am, a good two hours before my train left. Loads of time. So much time, in fact, that I was lulled into a false sense of security, and consequently missed the train. The train in question was one of three I was supposed to catch that day, and my having missed it set in motion an unfortunate domino effect. It meant I arrived in Padua an hour later than anticipated, in Montebelluna an hour and a half later, and that I didn’t arrive in Feltre until half-past-one in the afternoon, rather than at eleven o’clock in the morning.

That wasn’t an issue in itself. I had six hours of walking to complete that day, so I would have arrived at the malga at seven o’clock, had everything gone to plan. But sadly, everything did not go to plan.

The big wad of directions I had printed out the previous day told me I had to go to Porcen, a small village southwest of Feltre. This would have been fine, except the direction then told me I should take the road that led east in order to get there – in other words, the road that led directly away from Porcen. It’s worth pointing out that I was already sceptical of these directions, as flicking through them on the train journey I saw that they made a lot of references to building work that was ‘supposed to be finished in 2005’. I followed them east for about ten minutes before the nagging doubt that this was stupid grew to strong to ignore, and after a brief discussion with google maps it was decided I should probably go southwest – which led me to Porcen.

There is a saying that originated in Italy: “All roads lead to Rome”. In Porcen, however, it turns out that all roads lead to private property. I wasted another couple of hours wandering up and down people’s drives before I eventually landed on the right path. I then lost the right path, and ended up circling someone’s house for a while before a nice man on a lawnmower directed me through some woods to the path that officially marked the beginning of the Alta Via 8. It was four o’clock in the afternoon by the time I found the beginning of the trail.

By this stage (the beginning) I had been baking beneath the sun, and the weight of two backpacks in which I had all my hiking food and all my stuff for the trip to Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy I was planning on doing (and have since almost completed), for the entire day. I was supposed to climb a mountain and then find the accommodation on the other side, but it soon became apparent that there would not be enough light to find the accommodation. I didn’t bring a tent but fortunately it didn’t rain, so I spent a dry if slightly chilly night in my sleeping bag at the top of Monte Tomatico.

 

DAY TWO

You’ll notice over the course of this blog that I actually began every day by going in completely the wrong direction. The only day I didn’t do this was the fourth and last one – but I made up for this by going in the wrong direction twice on the second day. My instructions told me to ‘look out for a grassy saddle’ – which seemed less like a hiking direction and more like a message I might find in a fortune cookie warning me about a horse-riding accident. I went partway down Monte Tomatico, decided I couldn’t see said saddle, and went back up Monte Tomatico and partway down the other side before realising that maybe it was that way after all.

Then I sat down and thought about how I had survived this long as a member of the human species, and that if I had lived a few thousand years ago and David Attenborough had made a nature documentary about early humans I would have been the human who gets lost and ends up wandering alone through the savannah until it gets eaten by vultures or drowns in a bog, before a couple of Italian lumberjacks speaking a near-incomprehensible dialect finally sent me away from Monte Traumatico Tomatico in the right direction to the accommodation.

This was supposed to be my toughest day of hiking – eight hours in all – and as it was very warm on arriving at the accommodation I should have reached the previous night I bought eight small bottles of water, and strategically transferred the water to the larger, two litre bottles I had brought with me. Still well behind schedule, I set off for the second campsite, unaware of the disasters that lay ahead.

When the directions said ‘tough day of hiking’ I had assumed this meant it was very long. What it actually meant was I would be clambering up a verrrry steep mountain side covered in loose soil, clinging to a thin length of cable, wearing two backpacks (one on my back, one on my front) and four-year-old running shoes balder than Pierluigi Collina. It was tough. So I left my small rucksack balanced precariously on the mountainside and took my larger backpack to the top – placing my two litre bottle of water just next to it. When I finally got my rucksack to the top, exhausted, I hoisted my backpack onto my back, entirely forgetting the bottle of water I’d balanced next to it, and sent the water plummeting down the mountain.

Up until that point in my life, I’d always thought that people going ‘noooooo’ was just a trope used in films. But as I watched – or rather listened – to two litres of water bouncing down the hillside into the foliage, the word left my lips like it was the most natural thing to say in the world. I never saw that water again. I imagine it’s still bouncing down the mountainside even now. What it did mean was that I spent the next eight hours feverishly searching for water, and ended up drinking from a hose outside a farmer’s house.

That probably was the toughest day. I couldn’t move my legs by the end of it, and at one point I would have fallen flat on my face if it hadn’t been for the padding provided by my front backpack (frontpack?). But I did manage to catch up with my schedule, and spent the evening eating canned chicken salad outside a deserted cottage, where mercifully there was a water supply.

 

DAY THREE

On day three I was woken by the sound of an Italian family and their dogs walking by the cottage outside which I was sleeping. Having gotten myself ready I wandered down the path after them, and on catching up with them after about ten minutes or so the woman informed me that I would have been better off going the other way from the cottage, as it was easier and more scenic. By now used to this routine, I walked back to the cottage and started again.

If this new route was easier, I dread to think what the other route would have been like. By this stage my legs barely worked at all, and I kept myself going by imagining things I was walking like, including a scarecrow, an All-Terrain Scout Transport from Star Wars, and a person who was actually paraplegic. My listing was brought to an end when I hyperextended my right knee as a result of my newly developed walking style, which took the fun out of the game quite a lot.

Not that I’m complaining. An alternative name for the Alta Via 8 is the Alta Via degli Eroi, or the Way of the Heroes. The mountains I was walking on were the settings for a series of great battles during the First World War, and in 1917-1918 many Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers gave their lives here. The shelters and bomb holes are still visible, which put things into perspective. I later visited the stunning memorial atop Monte Grappa, where their remains are buried.

I was grateful to discover a restaurant at the end of the day’s walking, where I ate an enormous plate of bacon-and-tomato pasta and felt generally at peace with the world. Unfortunately there were no beds left at the hotel, which meant that after being welcomed back into civilisation I was cruelly ostracised once more, and went to sleep in my sleeping bag on the mountainside.

 

DAY FOUR

Fortunately my knee wasn’t too badly damaged, so after I visited the memorial I was able to descend from the mountains at a comfortable limp. In fact this was the most successful day, as I managed to get to my destination without asking anyone for help. I still got lost a couple of times, but I felt that was pretty good for someone who knows about hiking what a jumblie knows about sailing, and I collapsed into Bassano del Grappa train station in time for my train to Vicenza, feeling like I’d fully deserved a nice big meal and a good night’s sleep.

Needless to say the train was delayed by forty minutes due to an ‘incident with an animal’ so I missed my connection, and ended up having McDonald’s at midnight in Venice Mestre (which, incidentally, is about as different a place from Actual Venice as you can imagine) where someone stole my meal, and I got to Vicenza at 2am where I was able to enjoy being told how grateful I ought to be that I was able to check in at all by a man who, presumably, had spent the previous three nights sleeping in a bed, on a mattress, and as far as I was concerned didn’t know he was born.

C’est la vie. It was tough, but I am now on the shores of Lake Como, enjoying the cool breeze that wafts in through the French windows, so I accept these vicissitudes of travel. If I get a moment I’ll try and write about Austria and Switzerland, but I’ve got a few things to do before I head home on the 18^th – and besides, it might be nice to have something to talk about when I get home, rather than everyone already knowing because they read it here.

Anyway, Vicenza is the city another blog ends in, so it’ll have to be the pun vicenzanother blog. A big shout out to the man in the lawnmower, the lumberjacks and the hiking woman. Ciao!

Ven in Venice, Flo as the Florentines Flo

It’s a long time since I started this blog. Many of my younger readers probably won’t remember its origins, but if you ask your grandparents they’ll tell you that it was originally intended to help people going on their years abroad, as well as being about travel*. Doubtless your next question will be “Well what the hell happened?” in response to which your grandparents will mutter something about coca leaves.

It’s true few people who read this are prospective year-abroaders, and I doubt any of those who are consider it particularly useful, but I like to think it is still, by and large, about travel, even if on occasion that just means me travelling to the supermarket and then writing it up with as much prolixity as I can muster so that it fulfils the recommended minimum word count for a blog post. Anyway, in the spirit of these origins I decided I would write about two places I’ve travelled to recently: Venezia and Firenze, or Venice and Florence.

First of all it’s important to point out that both these cities played an important role in my choosing to study Italian in the first place, because they both feature in Assassin’s Creed II, a game I played a lot over the summer of 2014 before I went to university. I had originally enrolled to study Ancient History and Spanish, but on arrival was told that I needed to pick an extra subject to study during my first year, and could then drop one of my three subjects at the end. It was after casting my mind back to those many happy hours I spent clambering across the scaffolding of Florence’s Duomo and the Doge’s Palace in Venice that I plumped for Italian.

Overall I enjoyed the course, though I did consider the emphasis on grammar over parkour skills a flaw in the syllabus. But come the end of that year I decided I liked it more than Ancient History – and of course it offered me the chance to visit Italy, something Ancient History couldn’t do. Which I suppose is how I ended up here, touring these beautiful cities.

I’ll start with Venice. Venice is about one-and-a-half hours away from Ferrara on the train, and consequently I have visited it five times this year. This may seem excessive – but then they say life is about balance, and if life is about finding a balance between time spent in cities that are not constructed upon an elaborate canal network and cities that are, you’ll realise that actually I haven’t visited it enough. And if that logic isn’t enough to sway you then know that every time I go it’s been beautiful.

The first four times I went with friends and/or family to do the usual tourist trail to the Rialto Bridge and Piazza San Marco, both of which are must-sees, but this most recent time I decided I’d spend the day looking at the lesser known sides of it. I spent a lovely morning watching the above men wax their gondolas (not a euphemism), before heading off northwards to some of the less-pounded backstreets. With fewer tourists it’s easier to get an idea of what it might be like to live there (not that I’m planning on doing so, I don’t quite have the money), as I think these pictures show:

You’ll also notice the large grey swirling mass of clouds above the lagoon. I noticed it too, and thought nothing other than that it would make a great dramatic backdrop for my photos. I like to think I was right about this, as my photos are dramatic…

…but I didn’t factor in quite how torrential the rain would end up being. So torrential, in fact, that the water got into my phone and caused it to turn off, meaning I don’t have any pictures past the one of the street above. At that point I was at precisely the opposite end of the city to the station, about as far away as you can get without swimming – but considering how wet I was by the time I got back I might as well have tried to swim to it. Whatever the weather though, Venice is a stunning city and I was sorry to leave.

I allowed myself a few days to get thoroughly dry, and then headed off to Florence. Florence is a bit further away so I booked into a campsite to stay there for a couple of nights. I was very impressed by the train I got there. At one point it claimed to be travelling at three-hundred kilometres an hour, yet was somehow also twenty minutes late. I wondered whether the train might be lying to me, but then I thought about how I often cycled at what felt around three-hundred kilometres an hour to all my philosophy lessons and was always late for them, after which I decided the train was actually quite relatable.

I’ve been to Florence before, but only for a couple of days which in Florence is not nearly enough time to see everything. I reckon I could spend around a couple of days just staring at the Duomo which is easily the most incredibly detailed building I’ve ever seen – and made more amazing when you think that it was once climbed by Ezio Auditore da Firenze himself. Seriously though, I reckon I could do 48 hours just standing there, hands on my head, mouth slightly open, marvelling. It took 150 years to build, and you can tell. I don’t have photos, none of my photos could do it justice. Even Assassin’s Creed II couldn’t do it justice. It’s one of those things you have to go and see if you get the chance.

Anyway, while I could have done that, there are other things to do in Florence as well. In a moment of uncharacteristic cunning I had booked ahead for visits to the Accademia and the Uffizi galleries. The Accademia is most famous for holding Michelangelo’s David.

I once did a module called History of Art, and it would be safe to say that I didn’t really ‘get it’, but that David was a good-looking guy. A work of art, you might say. A sculpture, even.

That said, as someone who doesn’t really get art in an art museum, I wasn’t so keen on some of the other art on display. I mean, I love a good gold-framed triptych in which a blue-shawled behaloed Mary holds a nude behaloed baby Jesus as she sits on a throne in a room that has no other distinguishing background features while various assorted saints and other people gaze at them with meticulously detailed deferent adoration as much as the next guy, and I’m sure they’re very difficult to draw, but surely it wouldn’t have been so difficult for some medieval Italian artist to maybe say “you know what, I think I’ll draw a nice landscape today”. One of the few bits of information I took away from my History of Art module was that if the content of the essay I submitted was found to be similar to that of someone else I would be disqualified for plagiarism and potentially kicked out of university. These artist guys go about drawing the same thing, and they get their art hung on the wall of the Accademia.

I apologise, I’m probably coming across as quite judgmental and bitter. What I’m trying to say is that I think my History of Art essay should be hung on the wall of the Accademia.

Then to the Uffizi, said to be the finest art museum in Italy, home to works by Michelangelo, DaVinci, Botticelli and many more. In the Uffizi I was actually quite glad I did that History of Art module because it meant I could be silently condescending every time someone approached Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and muttered “So this one’s quite famous, is it?”

I particularly like the above half-finished piece by DaVinci. Mostly when I go to art museums (in between judging medieval triptychs and being condescending) I just stand looking at the art thinking things like “Whoa…” and “There is no way I could ever draw anything this beautiful”. But they also had a couple of the earlier sketches he did of the piece, and you can see various figures at various stages of completion. You see that he doesn’t just paint pure genius onto the canvas, but it’s actually a process with many stages that requires a huge amount of work. Having said that, my favourite picture was definitely this one:

Every time someone flips me off I will now react like this.

I went to three open air concerts in my short time in Florence – one on the Ponte Vecchio, one in the Uffizi square, one on the beach by the river. I hadn’t realised you could walk beside the river, but it allowed me to get some lovely pictures of the Ponte Vecchio.

I am going to wrap up there. I was originally going to post this before I went to the Dolomites, but due to circumstances within my control I failed to do so and am instead posting this from a restaurant in the Dolomites, and will shortly have to leave to find a nice hill to sleep on because they’re out of bedrooms. I could say a lot about my travels so far in said Dolomites, but I’ll give them their own blog. They have done plenty enough to earn it.

I’m not in Ferrara so you’ll have to spot the diffirenze in how I finish the blog – but I hope you enjoyed it and I will post the next one venice ready.

 

*one thing your grandparents will attest to that you won’t have trouble believing is that the titles have always been horrible.

Where the Winds Converge

Legends tell of a sacred place.

It lies beyond the murky, sunken ruins of Atlantis. It lies all the way down the unkempt road that leads to El Dorado and onwards up the unkempt road that leads away. It lies past the tea shop run by Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, where the scones are grainy and out of focus; past the competing tea shop on the same street run by the crew of the Mary Celeste, where the scones look delicious but there’s no-one there to take your order; past a third tea shop run by Schrodinger’s cat, closed down by safety inspectors after a radioactive substance was found in a pastry, the shutters pulled down so no-one can tell whether the owner is alive or dead. Past every strange and surreal place on the Earth, you have travelled to find it.

It is the place where all the winds of the world converge.

As you stand at this impossible place – and I hope you brought a cagoule because it gets quite chilly – you realise you can hear all the sounds of the world. Each and every one, from the loudest jewellery merchant in Iran’s fading bazaars as he seeks to sell one last trinket, to a tiny splash as the hook of an Inuit’s fishing rod sinks beneath the indigo surface of his ice-fishing hole and into the depths below. Every sound is carried on the wind to converge here, a steady, infinite rhythm that beats, beats, beats against your eardrum, as though you are standing at the core of the world, listening to its very heart.

Yet you did not travel all this way to hear an Eskimo fishing. You travelled at this very specific time, for a very specific purpose, and now you close your eyes and concentrate, in order that you might hear it. For a while, there is nothing. An elephant is giving birth in Africa – to quadruplets, though you don’t know it. A terracotta roof tile, baking hot beneath the fiery sun, falls from a roof in Sicily and shatters on the cobbles below. The Eskimo is whistling, and you are surprised to find that he shares your music taste. And then…

You hear it begin.

It is not the noise you are here for – not yet – but these are the noises that you know to precede it. They arrive on many winds, from many continents. For now they are fragmented, apart. You would not think they had anything to do with each other if you did not already know that they did. Shoes being kicked off at doorways, cups of tea being placed on tables, sofa springs squeaking as tired bodies set themselves down after a wearying day. They seem unconnected, mutually irrelevant… yet you know their fates are entwined, that they can culminate in only one eventuality, because you arrived at this specific time to hear them do so.

Through the swirling fray you gradually pick up on more and more of these sounds. There should not be many – rarely less than twenty, rarely more than forty – yet they are spread across many countries on almost every continent, the winds that bear them peppering you with scarlet sand and powdered snow in equal measure. This sparseness makes it hard to tune into the correct ones – but you strain your ears, for the moment draws near. The sounds are beginning to converge. You hear the tiniest rustles made by the fabrics of pockets as phones are retrieved from them, laptop lids lifted, the clicking of keyboards and the scrolls of mouse wheels. Tiny sounds, yet even as they diminish the tension only grows because you know that this is the moment you have been waiting for, the inevitable outcome of the thing you already knew, the thing they are about to find out…

All the sounds you were listening to stop.

The winds that once were so rich with sounds now bring only silence. Silence, as you knew there would be. Across the world these people, these few, beleaguered people, are squinting at their screens. Their mouths are turning down in surprise, their resolve is hardening as they realise what they have to do. You hold your breath, as the silence builds to a crescendo. And then, each of these people, in their respective chairs, in their respective homes, in their respective countries, in their respective continents, in their respective languages, in their respective incredulity…

…utters one single statement.

Just as you knew they would.

They will never know that what they thought was a singular exclamation born of unique frustration was in fact uttered by many others. They will never know that in that brief moment their free will was ripped away, their actions guided not by themselves but an external, inexorable force that instils such frustration as cannot be surmounted. Nor will they ever know that, as with all things, the winds of their respective continents took up their voices, carrying them across vast ocean and desolate tundra, vibrant jungle and lifeless desert to this legendary place, where they met with all the voices upon all the other winds. Only you will know, because only you were there at this place, at this point – this point that, incidentally, occurred precisely after this blog was posted – and so only you heard those lonely voices converge into one and say in exasperated unison, “Oh god, he’s written another one?”

After that, it’s a bit difficult to make out what they say. The forces of fate subside and the world is returned to its usual singular chaos. You might catch snippets of phrases like “Why doesn’t he just stop?” or “It’s not even about anything, it’s literally just an elaborate setup with no actual information about Italy or anything he’s doing” or “He’s such an idiot, I wish he wasn’t my son”, but it’s pretty windy, so you won’t be able to hear with much clarity. And you might hear one voice, apart from the rest, saying something along the lines of “About bloody time” – but ignore him, he’s deluded, and it’s his fault this got written anyway.

Thanks for stopping by ferraread.

My Most Boring Blog Ever, Probably

Ciao from Italy! The sun is blazing in the sky with a searing, soporific warmth that means it can only be one season. That’s right! It’s…

Exam season.

Which makes even the most interesting things seem dull – especially when you’re studying logic. Allow me to demonstrate.

Take my first sentence – “the sun is out”. As we all know from the ancient proverb, if the sun is out, the guns are also out. We can assume this premise to be true, because Channing Tatum once wore it on a vest.

Logic tells us that if A symbolises the sun being out, and B symbolises the guns being out, then we know that A→B. To make things clearer:

A = the sun is out

B = the guns are out

A→B

Yeah. Not such a cool thing to say anymore, is it? Not when you break it down into its component enunciati.

Mind you, I say it’s dull, but this is in fact how Sherlock Holmes operates. One of my favourite books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is the one in which Holmes sees the sun in the sky and instantly deduces that the guns, too, must be out. Sherlock Holmes and the Out Guns, I think it was called. By using these skills, you too can think like Sherlock Holmes. You’re welcome.

So, in the spirit of this most festive of seasons, I’ve set you some questions to see if you understand logic, because I know everyone loves a good exam. Anyway here goes:

1. During the exam season, Alex has two exams. Given that the exam Alex has just completed is female, what is the probability that Alex’s other exam is also female?

The answer is 1/3. This is because there are four combinations of gender for my two exams: MM, MF, FM, and FF. However, because we know that at least one of them is female, we can eliminate MM. However of the remaining combinations, MF, FM, and FF, there is only 1 of the 3 in which a second F is combined with the first F that denotes the exam I have already taken, so therefore-

Yes, yes, ok Alex, I hear you cry. We all did probability in school and it was just as boring then as it is now. Can we just go back a bit and ask how, on God’s green earth, in the Year Of Our Lord 2017, an exam can have a gender?

We may, I say graciously. If you study Italian, you’ll see that philosophical logic and moral philosophy become la logica filosofica and la filosofia morale. Which, yes, you are correct, is entirely illogical, and begs the question of how anyone could possibly be expected to pass a logic exam in Italian.

Anyway, as you can see, my exams were both female – but the probability was still only 1/3. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. Bayes makes the rules. At least I think he does. That was the question I couldn’t answer because, sadly for Bayes, he appeared in the penultimate chapter in the book and I didn’t quite leave myself enough time to read about him.

The question in question was “What is Bayes’ Theorem?” Philosophical logic bears a strong resemblance to maths in that, rather irritatingly, it requires an actual answer, and you can’t just use vague mumbo-jumbo that culminates in you saying you don’t know but that technically the examiner also doesn’t know and therefore can’t mark you down. This meant that I couldn’t use my go-to template for answering philosophical questions and say one of either:

• “Can anyone truly claim to know Bayes’ Theorem?” (This one works best if you stroke your beard and look pensively into the middle distance.)
• “It is my belief, examiner, that on some level we are all Bayes Theorem.” (This one works best if you gaze into the examiner’s eyes as you say it, and try to look heartfelt.)
• “But is the Theorem Bayes’s… or was Bayes the Theorem’s all along?” (This one works best if you say it in a deep voice, beginning by looking at the floor, only to look up dramatically and meet the examiner’s eye. You’ll know it’s worked if the examiner responds with something along the lines of “My God… the Theorem’s been playing us like fools…” mirroring your tone of voice and dramatic posturing, and then you both jump out of the window as the building explodes, as do several helicopters…

No wait, that’s Michael Bay’s theorem.

2. Alex goes to the shop and buys 5 apples, 6 bananas, a punnet of cherries, and a quarter of a watermelon.

Trick question! In fact it’s not actually a question – so I don’t know whether that counts as a trick question or not. The point is that, like a typical member of the ethnically diverse, scurvy-free cast of a GCSE maths paper, I really did buy 5 apples, 6 bananas, a punnet of cherries and a quarter of a watermelon. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned Fruit Lady before in a blog, but she sells a wide variety of fruit from a stall close to our house, and it is divine (I’m pretty sure there are already many pictures on Facebook of me gorging myself on watermelon if you look hard enough). That’s one of the reasons for eating so many apples – the other is that my mum recently became a doctor, and I’m hopeful it might scare her away. And I also quite enjoy the fact that I recognise fruit now, which was rarely the case in Peru.

3. What properties of the sun can be inferred from this picture?

Guns ©T. Craig

 

Hint: if you need additional information, refer to the opening section. But beware…

Trick question! Again. And actually a question this time. You will notice in the above picture that the guns are out (incidentally they are not my guns) and, fool that you are, likely assumed that this meant the sun had to be out. If you did this, you are wrong, and I, who learned this a full twenty-four hours ago, scorn and deride you.

Given that A→B, we cannot infer from B that necessarily A, because although guns must be out if the sun is out, the sun doesn’t necessarily have to be out if the guns are out. The guns might be out because you are taking a shower, or because you’re performing a war dance, or because your exams have driven you insane. While in this case the owner of the guns has assured me that the reason for the guns being out was that the sun was out, it was nonetheless an invalid inference and a fallacy.

4. Prior to his exam, Alex has 1 bicycle. When he leaves his exam, he has 0 bicycles. How many bicycles did Alex lose during the course of his exam?

Yeah someone stole my bike during my exam. The answer is 1. I think I forgot to lock it because I was so preoccupied with Aristotle and Frege and Bayes and their probabilities, and some opportunistic fellow decided to steal it. It’s still very annoying though. I mean, what are the chances of that happening?

“Well…”

Okay, quiz over! Add up your scores and post them in the comments, and the person who posts the highest number wins a free bike, provided they can find the man who has it. I have a hunch he lives in Cartagena, and his name rhymes with Bodrigo…

I apologise if you were expecting an interesting blog; it seems that this logic course has ruined me. But this is what my life has been like for the last two weeks. Anyway look out for my next blog, which if I continue on my current trajectory of boringness will probably be written in binary.

Thanks for stopping by ferraread! 01100011 01101001 01100001 01101111 00100001

 

Alex, Alex, wherefore hast thou not written any blogs recently?

A few days ago, upon logging onto Facebook after a wearying day of tearing my hair out over my year abroad essay, my eye was struck by a piece of correspondence sent to me by a relation of mine. This relation – whom I had assumed long lost to the snowy climes of the Himalayas – was keen to bring to my attention the fact that I have been remiss in my blogging duties, and exhorted me to take up my laptop again. Admittedly he didn’t say so in so many words – in fact the general tone of the message was decidedly threatening, and a lesser person than I might have been troubled by its intimidating nature. Fortunately, seasoned traveller that I am, I have seen worse, and it helps that I’m also certified taserproof. But I am not so foolish as to ignore such an ominous hint, and it is with this in mind that I write this, in an endeavour to sate his thirst for insight into my life, and the hope that it might sate his thirst for my blood.

All’s good in the city of bicycles. I think the biggest news is that I can now ride my bike with no handlebars (no handlebars, no handlebars). After three humiliating months of watching children and adults cycling smugly past adjusting their hair, playing candy crush, and making a variety of complicated hand gestures, I can now join their exalted ranks and consider myself a true citizen of Ferrara. Interestingly though, on neither of the two occasions on which I’ve fallen off my bike was it because I was trying to ride it senza mani. On the first and more damaging occasion it was because of a very intense race and an unexpectedly sharp corner; while the second was because I was trying to ride it using both feet on the same pedal and, in the excitement of this revolutionary endeavour, forgot to include balance in the equation. Remember children, it’s quite difficult to prevent yourself from falling right when both your feet are on the left.

Over the past few weeks I’ve also found myself entertaining quite a few guests. I say I entertained them – in truth it was probably fair to say that Italy did most of the entertaining, and I just happened to be present at the time. Regardless, they all seemed to enjoy it, be they sisters, aunts, or a group of people I used to hang around with last year in Cardiff and occasionally dress up as cartoon characters with. Italy is quite an entertaining country.

One of the nice things about my sisters (Sarah and Amy, for those who haven’t had the, uh, pleasure) coming was that it was an excuse to do a bit of travelling, and I’ve decided to make our trip the main focus of this blog. I say ‘one of the nice things’ – of course it was also quite nice to catch up with two siblings whom I hadn’t seen since August (I have to write this. My mum reads this blog.) but the enjoyableness of that experience was certainly amplified by its taking place in part in Fair Verona (copyright W. Shakespeare), and in Fair Peschiera del Garda (copyright pending) on the shores of Lake Garda. Both of these are beautiful places – alike in dignity, you might say.

Verona is world-renowned, as everyone knows, for being the historic city of love that was birthplace of the two star-crossed lovers, who served as protagonists in a middling 16^th-century play later credited as the inspiration for the hit animated movie Gnomeo and Juliet. There we stayed at a slightly strange youth hostel which turned out to be a mansion on a hill north of the city centre. Breakfast was jam, bread, and a bowl of coffee. In fairness the bowl of coffee was a useful source of energy, as we only had twenty-four hours in the city and were therefore determined to see everything we could. We went to the Duomo, the Castelvecchio, the Ponte Vecchio, a variety of churches, Juliet’s house and balcony, and topped it off with a trip up the Lamberti Tower. Despite fears over potential vertigo suffered by some of our number, we all made it to the highest storey, and never was there a storey of more ‘whoa’ – it offered some spectacular views of the city.

Wherefore art thou RAINING

Mind you, I was quite disappointed by Juliet’s house, chiefly because it was very sparsely furnished. There was one room which was entirely empty, save for a jug in a sort of alcove. My understanding of Juliet is that she’s a fictional character, which should have meant that they could put anything in there, so quite why they skimped out on an entire room doesn’t make any sense. If I were in charge of Juliet’s house I would have filled it with all sorts of stuff. Tourists would travel from far and wide to see Juliet’s floor to ceiling lava lamp and goose sanctuary. I voiced these concerns to Sarah and Amy, neither of whom seemed particularly interested and even went so far as to suggest that I was “ruining it”. I was then told off by a security guard for sitting down on one of Juliet’s chairs, because apparently it was very fragile. It didn’t seem particularly fragile, but the guard was keen that I maintain a safe distance. Presumably this susceptibility to collapse at the slightest human contact is the cause of the absence of furniture. In hindsight one can’t help but wonder whether the constant anxiety she suffered over the structural integrity of her possessions was a factor in her long-lamented decision to take her own life. I was tempted to suggest this theory to the guard, but instead elected to bite my thumb tongue.

The three Juliets. Originally we got Juliet’s father to take one, but they all came out black. Then we asked Romeo’s father, but he insisted on filming us in a series of short shots and editing them into a sequence. Quite why Lord Capulens and Lord Montage couldn’t just take a decent picture I don’t understand.

 

After that was a short bus ride to Lake Garda, which was equally marvellous. We stayed three nights there in a lovely hostel in Peschiera del Garda on the south-eastern shore of the lake, which we felt was a perfect amount of time to spend there. We cunningly planned our days to ensure that we got as sunburnt as possible (as with the abovementioned vertigo, some of our group proved more prone to it than others, but I won’t namy name amy any namys names) and used the rain and clouds for more adventurous pursuits. Our intended walk to the next town along, Sirmione, ended up being a trip to Lidl and back on account of Sirmione’s being several kilometres further away than we’d anticipated. Fortunately the day was saved by a lovely pedalo trip in which we cruised up and down the same thirty or so metres of the shore eating crisps and trying to work out which of the buoys demarcated the shipping lanes. Our intended circular bike ride was likewise derailed when it turned out that it would cost €42 to take our bikes on the ferry across the lake from Sirmione to Bardolino. Fortunately that day was saved by quick calculations that revealed you could buy, like, a ton of gelato for that money, or that we could ride the miniature train to the patrician’s villa fourteen times each. Needless to say, a trio of half-loss’d tourists did not take their bikes.

Our proudest day, however, was when we climbed the hilariously-named Mount Baldo. As children we were often dragged reluctantly off on many a walk, over the course of which we tended to prove that just the one house is more than enough for any number of ancient grudges and new mutinies to develop and fester. Yet as you can see from this picture:

… wait no sorry, this picture:

… we were all still happy and good friends by the end of it.

As usual with Italy, I have to give the food a quick mention for being on point. My favourite food moment was definitely when Sarah bought what was basically a bowl of pure melted mozzarella and then choked on it in the middle of a crowded restaurant (I had to include this story because I know the certain relative of mine to whom this blog is dedicated will appreciate it). But pizza, pasta and gelato were eaten in great quantities, and overall it was more than satisfactory (although I must admit none of them quite topped the home-made Lidl-sourced cheese-and-salami sandwiches we ate victoriously atop Mount Baldo). At one restaurant a very charming gentleman painted my picture, which he then let me keep for a mere €5.

I think it looks the spit of me. Having spent almost three years struggling with Italian I also enjoyed listening to Sarah and Amy struggle to pronounce the names of pizzas to the restaurant. But then, what’s in a name? That which we call a capricciosa by any other name would taste as delicious.

All things considered, it was a very successful holiday amidst the essays and exams. I was sorry to say goodbye to my siblings afterwards, although admittedly it had been nice to see them. I wish there was some kind of Shakespeare quote pertinent to the situation, but nothing springs to mind.

Anyway, it’s time for me to close my tab on ‘famous Romeo and Juliet quotes’, nervously peek through the blind to see if my cousin is still standing outside holding a machete, and offer my customary warm regardas to all those who stopped by ferraread – whether they were forced to, or did so of veronaccord.

Ciao!

I’m not sure what to call this blog, usually I come up with a specific pun title but honestly this one’s kind of nonspecific with regard to subject matter because I didn’t really plan it beforehand, and it got kind of long and rambling and eventually it just turns into me talking about milk while I wait for the internet to come back so I can post it and get it over with

Last semester I tried to give every blog a theme – but last semester I only did about 5 blogs, and now that I’m planning on doing one a week I realise I’m not creative enough to do that. Which leads me to the alternative – updating you all on what I’ve done during this past week. But then I realised I’m not interesting enough to do that either. Don’t get me wrong, I did stuff this week, but it wasn’t interesting cultural stuff. It was stuff like reading, and going to the shops, and watching Mad Max: Fury Road. Not my usual blog-worthy trips to floating cities and Incan citadels.

But Alex! I hear you cry. I instinctively grab the shotgun I keep under my bed and tell you to get out of my room and also to stop crying. You oblige. But Alex! you cry again, this time from the corridor. The sound is muffled because I’ve closed the bedroom door in the hope you’d maybe go, and now I can barely hear you. I grudgingly open it a crack, and ask you to repeat what you said. My voice is cordial but you sense I’m only talking to you out of courtesy. But Alex! you cry again – more softly this time – your life is already a thousandfold more interesting than ours are, by virtue of its currently taking place in a foreign country! We would love to hear about what you’re reading, and what supermarkets are like over there, and whether you understood what they were saying in Mad Max: Fury Road! Please tell us!

I’m flattered by your silver-tongues – and also rendered slightly uncomfortable by the fact you’re all speaking in unison. It’s quite discordant and you need work. To prevent you speaking again, I resolve to tell you everything about my past week. Everything except for the fact I watched Mad Max: Fury Road in English. Of that I am ashamed.

I did, however, go and see Logan at the cinema, and it was in Italian. I won’t pretend I understood every word, but I understood enough to glean that it was a very good film. Interestingly I understood more of it than I did of Suicide Squad, which I watched in Spanish around three weeks into my stay in Peru. Whether this means I’ve taken more quickly to Italian, or whether over the course of the last six months I’ve just improved in the blanket skill of understanding other languages in general, I don’t know. The complex relationship Juan and Giuseppe share remains a mystery to me. Could it be that they’re working together? Is it possible that they will one day settle their differences and live together in harmony? Is their constant bickering just to cover up the romantic feelings they have for one another, #giuan, #juaseppe? I don’t know, I’m just a pair of trousers. Nonetheless it’s a positive, and given that cinema tickets are just €3 on Wednesdays I may be spending a lot of time there. Pipe down Sistine Chapel, you can wait in line with Juliet’s balcony and Lake Como while I watch Lego Batman.

As for supermarkets in Italy – well, let me tell you that yeah they’re exactly the same as supermarkets anywhere else in the world. The one I go to is called Eurospin, which despite sounding like a casino is at the opposite end of the scale of financial viability. It’s like the Italian version of Lidl, except it’s not because Italy also has Lidl. In fact Eurospin is probably worse than Lidl. Eurospin is to Lidl is what Lidl is to Tesco. I never thought I’d miss Lidl, but I often find myself wishing I still shopped there – and I wish a lot more these days what with all these wishbones you get in Eurospin’s ‘salmon’. (That was a joke, it’s not that bad. Eurospin I mean; the joke was terrible.) I might go to Lidl next week. I’m sure you guys would love a reprisal of this fascinating theme of supermarket comparisons. Assuming you’re still reading. I did say I was struggling for blogworthy material.

To be honest it’s not really that bad. Here are a couple of pictures which for me really stood out from the Italian shopping experience.

Like this one. This one confuses me. On the left you have goat’s milk – thus the picture of the goat. On the right you have cow’s milk – thus the picture of the cow. This raises serious questions about the nature of the milk in the middle. I know the Italians are big on seafood – you can buy an entire frozen octopus from Eurospin. But given the widespread availability of cows and goats, not to mention our shared terrestrial proclivity, it seems a bit unnecessary – almost ungrateful – to go trying to milk a seal. If I was a milkmaid and in lieu of a bucket and stool my employer handed me a wetsuit and a snorkel, I’d probably resign. Besides, Wikipedia has nothing about seals producing chocolate milk. If a seal is producing chocolate milk there’s clearly something wrong with it. And I know better than to buy a product if the seal is broken.

This picture is far less confusing. It clearly demonstrates that the Italian toilet paper industry caters to people with ultra big foxy asses. As someone with an ultra big foxy ass, all I can say is it’s about time too.

The other interesting thing that’s happened to me is my classes, which, in retrospect would probably have made for a better blog. I’m considering squeezing a bit of info on them in here at the end, but I can probably get enough material out of it for an entire blog if I flog it hard enough. I also might have a bit more of an explore of Ferrara and its culture, so all in all I’m hopeful next week’s blog might actually be quite easy to write. Unlike this one. This one’s been like getting milk from the proverbial seal.

Interestingly during the course of my research into this blog, I discovered that pigeons produce milk. Which, being pigeons, they secrete in a sac in their throats and then throw up into the mouths of their young. This information has further solidified my belief that pigeons are disgusting. I’m only writing this paragraph because the internet here is terrible and won’t let me upload the blog yet, but it’s back now.

No, wait, it’s not back now. I still can’t upload photos. Feel free to stop reading though, I don’t really have anything else to say. I’m basically just writing information from the one tab I actually have open right now. Did you know that a wallaby can feed two different joeys of different ages different types of milk from different nipples? And there’s a farm in the Netherlands that sells cheese made of pigs milk for $1,200 per pound. Also scientists only know the milk compositions of 5% of mammals living today. What the hell scientists. Get it together.

Apparently the reason the pig milk cheese is so expensive is because pigs are really difficult to milk. Which sounds to me like they aren’t trying hard enough. Particularly when you consider here in Italy they milk seals. I was going to end this blog with that ‘getting milk from a seal’ line. I thought that was pretty good. Now it’s just going to peter out. Like this. Yeah.

Thanks for stopping by ferraread. Ciao!

 

Breaking the Habit

Some of the more psychologically-minded of you (as in “those of you who are interested in psychology” – I am aware that minds are by definition psychological) may have heard of a book called “Thinking Fast and Slow”. Its author, Daniel Kahnemann, expounds the theory that the brain operates on two different levels: a faster level, based on instinct and habit, which he terms “System 1”; and a slower, more logical level, which he terms “System 2”. The idea is that as we go through life making decisions, each decision we make uses one of these two levels. If you find yourself making a choice impulsively without taking the time to think beforehand, your System 1 is responsible. Whereas if you address the problem in a rational manner, basing your decision on logic, it’s due to System 2’s input that you arrive at your answer.

For example, if you are in a foreign country and you are aware that in order to be understood you will need to speak a foreign language, your System 1 will identify the foreign language you are most accustomed to using and at which you are most proficient, and very helpfully send it straight to your tongue. So sharp and ready is your System 1 at doing this, that you may have completed an entire sentence in Spanish before your System 2 cranks into gear and alerts you to the fact that, while there was nothing wrong with the Spanish you spoke, you are, infelicitously, in Italy.

That’s right, after my many months free of confusion between the two languages I speak – months in which my Spanish improved leaps and bounds – I have now returned to that situation, and to a country where my knowledge of Spanish isn’t just useless, but actively detrimental to my language-learning ability. We’ve been for dinner in our Italian neighbours’ flats a couple of times and they’re very nice about it, but it’s nonetheless not exactly a great way to make friends when you bring the conversation to a grinding halt whenever you open your mouth.

 

In order to better illustrate the problem I’m facing, I’ve come up with the following analogy:

There are two men, Juan and Giuseppe, and they live together. In many ways they are quite similar. Their ancestors spoke Latin, they’re both overly keen on using the subjunctive, and they like to go to sleep in the middle of the day. In other ways, however, they are very different. For example Juan can’t fathom Giuseppe’s proclivity for putting unnecessary z’s and e’s in otherwise perfectly functional words, while in turn Juan’s propensity to talk about completed actions that happened in the distant past in something called “the preterite” drives Giuseppe up the wall. However there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be able to get along just fine, so long as they spend some time outside away from each other, and give one another a bit of space. But here they run into a crucial problem. The law of the world which Giuseppe and Juan inhabit dictates that it is forbidden to leave the house without trousers. And Giuseppe and Juan only own one pair of trousers.

Worse, changing in and out of the trousers is an incredible hassle. It takes over a month. So in order to save time, Juan and Giuseppe decide to wear the trousers together. If Giuseppe wants to go to a pizzeria, Juan is dragged along behind him; and Juan can’t go to the bullfight without Giuseppe in tow. Consequently, when Juan’s amigos want to talk to him about tapas or flamenco dancing, sometimes Giuseppe will mutter something in reply; and when Giuseppe’s amici want to argue about pizza toppings (or sometimes just make incomprehensible hand gestures at one another), Juan will chip in unbidden with his thoughts.

Clearly the situation can’t continue. Juan and Giuseppe are at loggerheads, constantly hindered by the other’s presence. Until one day, Juan snaps, and locks Giuseppe in his bedroom. For six months he keeps Giuseppe trapped there, feeding him on a diet of Peruvian (and latterly Colombian) cuisine, which is Giuseppe’s kryptonite. Even the South American coffee is like poison to Giuseppe, for he only drinks espressos. Giuseppe feels himself wasting away, turning stale like an unwanted pizza crust while outside, Juan is enjoying himself.

For Juan, these six months are the greatest of his life. He improves greatly as a human being. He drinks the finest pisco, travels to Machu Picchu, and some Mexican girls try to teach him to salsa.  He can now speak to his friends with ease, and sometimes when he’s at a restaurant he even understands what the waiter’s saying to him. One day, he finds himself sitting in a tapas bar in Madrid, eating fried prawns and dogfish, and the rest of the things my google search for “typical tapas foods” came up with. He’s wearing a poncho, and a smile plays at his lips as he reminisces about the past six months. It’s early February, and as the door of the tapas bar opens a chill breeze, still lingering from the winter, sends a shiver down the back of his neck. He turns around just in time to see a scrawny, malnourished man with slicked-back hair, wearing only a blue football shirt and a pair of Gucci underwear leap at him with a cry of “Mamma mia!”*

It’s Giuseppe! He’s escaped!

“Giuseppe!” Juan cries.

“Your time outside is over!” Giuseppe yells, forcing his way into the waistband of the trousers. “It’s time to pasta trousers on to me!”

“It’s not time tapas the trousers on to you!” Juan retorts. “They’re mine now!”

“You’ve had your six months! Now I want a pizza the action!”

“They’re nacho trousers and they never will be!”

“It’s time for you to find out how it feels to be forgotten! Honestly it’s cannellonli.”

“I hoped it might have tortillu a lesson!”

That’s as far as the story’s got so far, I’m afraid. The fight is still going on. Giuseppe seems to be winning though, slowly but surely. They’ve since rolled away from the tapas bars and into several pizzerias, and Juan’s inputs are becoming more and more infrequent. Hopefully soon Giuseppe will be able to force Juan out of the trousers and lock him in his bedroom for five months. I’ll keep you posted.

Incidentally for anyone who is confused, in this story I am the trousers.

I’m pretty sure I must complain about the issue of learning Spanish and Italian to everyone I meet, and probably in most of the blogs I write. But it has long been the bane of my life, and given that it’s recently surfaced again, like a horror movie sequel, I thought I’d address it. And throwback to the beginning of this blog when I was talking about psychology and some of you thought it was going to be intellectual. Not today, you fools. In fact I’ve only read 14% of that book, according to my kindle. Also do I have to reference it? The student in me feels like I should reference it.

Anyway, all is well in Italia, and I will struggle on. Thanks for stopping by ferraread. Ciao!

*they do actually say this

Me wearing a disguise to avoid doing any work

Kahnemann, D. (2011) Thinking Fast and Slow, London, Allen Lane

 

Ferrarival

Yep, after my many months away I have returned to the freezing climes of the northern hemisphere. It was quite the journey. Together with my trusty companions – my PUCP rucksack, my backpack and my enormous suitcase – I’ve crossed oceans, traversed cities and leapt turnstiles on my way from Bogota to Lima to Miami to Madrid to Bologna and finally, to Ferrara. My suitcase is definitely feeling the strain from being dragged down so many cobbled streets and airport travelators, and started to make a strange and somewhat melancholy whining noise as I moved it – but I guess when you leave a country after that long, it’s normal to have some emotional baggage.

I’ve been in Ferrara for a couple of weeks now, and it’s a lovely city – very different from Lima. I think this is very aptly summarised by transport. Ferrara is known as “La citta delle biciclette”, or “the city of bikes”, and having been lent a free bike by my landlord I’ve found it a convenient and enjoyable way of moving around within the city. You can cycle from one of the city walls to the opposite wall in about fifteen minutes, and so for me getting from home to the uni or the city centre tends to take a fairly leisurely seven minutes or so.

Compare this to Lima, where a bus from my house to Miraflores could take anywhere between forty-five minutes and two hours – it’s just that little bit more convenient. And – well, I was going to say I wouldn’t have been seen dead on a bicycle in Lima, but to be honest that’s probably the only way I’d’ve been seen on a bicycle in Lima. I fondly remember Lima’s roads, but only from the safety of a bus, any blow to be cushioned by the several dozen Peruvians wedged in there with me. To be honest I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to live in such a place of such tranquility and accessibility, and it’s very refreshing to be back in Europe.

As I said, Ferrara is a lovely city, but it differs from many other such lovely Italian cities by being off the beaten track a bit. It’s tucked away in the northeast of Italy beneath the lip of the boot (don’t know if lip is the technical term, I am not a cobbler), surrounded by better known destinations such as Venice, Verona and Bologna. But the relative lack of tourists means it feels more quintessentially Italian. The enormous moated castle is currently the standout feature (I say currently, the cathedral might offer some competition were it not for the fact that it’s going to be covered in scaffolding for the foreseeable future), but there’s a very relaxed feeling about the place, with its narrow, cobbled streets, its cafes and pizzerias, and of course the bicycles. The main square is usually filled with people, and offers plenty of places to stop off for a cappuccino and a prosciutto-filled croissant, but if you wander off down one of the many alleyways it’s also easy to leave the crowds behind and find some peace and quiet.

As ever the university has been a bit difficult to organise – due in part to the fact that they chose to hold their welcome week two weeks before the semester started, and so I missed what appear to have been quite an important two days of it. There’s been a lot of queuing, and I must have printed enough study plans, learning agreements, certificates of arrival and certificates of attendance to wipe out a small copse, but it all seems to be working out. I’m currently enrolled in modules in philosophical logic, moral philosophy, and aesthetics, so it’s a bit more cohesive than the psychology-law-metaphysics shambles of bygone semesters.

Of course, I’m hesitant to lay the blame entirely at the feet of the uni because usually my administrative woes are at least in part my fault. I probably should have used my one-and-a-half months in Colombia to prepare for this semester, but I had such a good time out there enjoying the culture, basking in the warm sunshine of Santa Marta and Medellin, that Italy just felt, well, nine thousand four hundred and three kilometres away. And of course, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it back at all, what with the crime in Colombia, and Rodrigo and his ladrones lurking out there waiting to harvest my organs and steal my laptop. However fortunately there was no sign of him. It was only in Medellin, Colombia’s second city and former home of former drug lord Pablo Escobar, while I was trying to get my hands on some more of that sweet, sweet coca that I so desperately crave, that I found out he’d been arrested there by four Americans and their dog. He would’ve got away with it too, if it weren’t for those Medellin kids.

I’ve still made some time for travelling in Italy too. Last weekend a group of us went down to Venice carnival, which was incredible. I’ve never been to Venice and of course it was absolutely heaving, but I think the number of people who went is testament to the brilliance of the event. Everywhere I looked there was something bizarre or beautiful to look at as the floating city was invaded by gallimaufry of masks and costumes, ranging from those attired in traditional masks and 18^th-century clothing, to Pinocchio and Batman, and even the characters from Inside Out (who were NOT AS GOOD AS WE WERE). We embraced the Italian spirit with pasta, coffee, gelato, mulled wine and pizza, and even found time to (very spontaneously) go to a Vivaldi concert – in Vivaldi’s church. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you to go to Venice, but if ever you do get the chance, go to Venice.

Me with my idols, not doing any work

I think I’ve made enough abysmal puns for one day, so I’m gondolierve it there. I’ve promised myself I’ll be a better blogger 4 u guyz this semester, so the plan is you’ll only have a week or a fortnight of eagerly awaiting the next dollop of my witless ramblings. It feels a bit strange not to be able to thank you for perusing. I guess I’ll have to find another way of thanking you for stopping by for a read.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by ferraread.

Ciao!

Adieu, Peru

This isn’t going to be a long blog, nor a particularly funny one (I mean I know none of them are funny, but this time I’m not trying to be). When I started it I was on a plane, on the fourth and final leg of my voyage back to Europe and to Italy, where I’ve now started meeting different people, using a different language, and having different experiences. And honestly if this semester goes even half as well as the last one did, I can only consider it a success.

Because frankly, last semester could’ve been terrible. It’s like what I’m doing now but a thousand times more intense. This sojourn to Italy – practically our neighbours – seems nothing compared to the days I spent back in August travelling 10,000 kilometres to a country where I knew nobody, to study subjects I’ve never studied before, in a language which when I tried to speak it could only at best be called español, and at worst espantoso. It was a recipe for disaster. There were endless ways if could have gone wrong.

And it didn’t.

And I have a lot of people to thank for that.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of things I’m going to miss about Peru. The obvious things. The warmth, for one. The beautifully dressed ladies with their llamas and alpacas on the streets of Cuzco and Arequipa. Standing on the path to the Sun Gate at Machu Picchu, having been there for five hours already, watching as the sunlight finally burned off the shroud of mist and transformed the ancient city from mysterious to downright stunning – that really stuck.

And other things, too, that are less obvious. The public transport, for example (what can I say, there’s just something about having your scapulae pressed up against the ceiling of a minibus). The university, which as well as being the source of most of my stress for the past six months was admittedly pretty great. Altitude sickness (ok that one’s a joke. Altitude sickness can jump off a cliff.) Lomo saltado, sopaseca, causa – and also Starbucks, Pizza Raul, Bembos, and KFC. Long-distance bus journeys. The word “chevere”.

But mostly the people.

People whom I would meet for lunch every Tuesday to discuss Joey Barton’s latest misdemeanours. People with whom I would dress up as Disney characters and sing Natasha Bedingfield, Natalie Imbruglia and Five Seconds of Summer on the streets, to the annoyance of most of Barranco. People with whom I would eat specifically helado (and who had never seen a snail before) and people with whom I would eat pretty much anything (but who can only eat so much turkey).

People to debate with about cheese, bananas, popcorn and the important things in life. People to debate with about what positions our sons will play for Arsenal. People to debate with about the finer points of Harry Potter, and people to debate with over whether it’s more important to go and get lunch, or to matriculate.

People who don their white (or black) knock-off Real Madrid kits (35 sol), yell “FA-VE-LA!” and go chase a football around for an hour. People who don their Peru shirts (be they Cueva, Guerrero, or just 18), tie “Si se puede!” bandanas to their heads, and yell “VAAAMOS PERUAAANOS!” all night, regardless of the score. People who don whatever clothes they fancy, head to the nearest pub, and yell… I dunno, they were mostly just incomprehensible exclamations of joy, with every Peru goal.

People who tell me I speak German like a robot as we trek to lost cities. People who hold rooftop parties in Miraflores. People who take dramatically-posed sandboarding photos. People who organise brilliant picnics, and don’t mind that I always bring tuna pasta. People who I’d always bump into in the most unexpected places. People who are worse at being Australian than I am, but a lot better at being French. People with whom to sit in a classroom and be bad at Spanish, and (a big shout out to the) people who helped us get better at it. All those people who gave me succour/victuals at 4,000 metres at Marcahuasi (you could have just left me to die, I would have understood). People with whom to climb to 4,600 metres on the way to Machu Picchu. A whole load of other people besides.

And, of course, people who keep eight dogs, two cats and two foreigners in their house.

(And their dogs.)

(And their cats.)

Exsplañatiolns (Español Explanations)

Haha remember that time when I was going to start writing a blog and posting it online at consistent weekly intervals, and you idiots believed me?

I’m joking. Some of my facebook friends really are idiots, but no-one is stupid enough to believe that I, the older version of the kid who routinely got up at 8:20 on schooldays in order to catch a bus scheduled to leave at 8:22, will ever develop the necessary organisational skills to actually stick to my word. I favour caprice over consistency, and this blog is fated to spend weeks ignored only for me to suddenly remember it exists, plough in a couple of decent posts, and then forget all about it again because I’m distracted by some lovely Peruvian scenery. Or, you know, work.

Me not doing work

In fact, it’s highly probable that I will presently be ignoring this blog for quite a long time, because very soon the semester will draw to a close and I will be going off travelling to such places as Bolivia and Colombia, and staying in the sorts of establishments where having a great deal of electronic equipment lying around isn’t always the best idea. It’s a case of either I leave my laptop here in Lima, or else one day my internet presence will mysteriously disappear and your future blog updates will come from a man called Rodrigo who lives in Cartagena, be written entirely in Spanish, and all be adverts for a nice laptop he recently acquired and maybe some of my organs.

To be honest that’s probably preferable for some of you; the sizeable portion of Colombia that the UK government advises against visiting suggests that organised crime is, as its name suggests, very well-organised, and I’m sure Rodrigo and his ladrones would do a much better job of running this blog than I do.

Having just offered the services of my blog to a Colombian cartel so it can flog stolen goods, I realise it must be time to get to the point (after all, what would the Global Opportunities Centre say?). Seeing as my time here in un pais hispanohablante is drawing to a close, I thought I’d do a reflective piece on how my Spanish-speaking ability has improved during my time here. It’s the sort of thing the GOC would have loved, and hopefully useful for anyone interested in learning languages.

My aim before coming here was, very loosely, “to be better at Spanish”. If pressed, I might have elaborated to “better at speaking Spanish” “better at writing Spanish” and “better at understanding Spanish”. Of course this is a stupid aim, for two reasons. First of all, as anyone who has ever had a GCSE English class knows, the words “good” and “better” are to be avoided at all costs because they are incredibly vague. Second of all, as anyone who has ever taken a GCSE Spanish class knows, the Spanish language is incredibly complicated.

I may have wanted to improve the part of my brain labelled “Spanish”, but that section has a lot of very niche subcategories. Such as “Object Pronouns”, “The Subjunctive” and “Vocabulary Useful When Discussing Cheese” (yes, some are more niche than others, but no less important). And in order to boost the whole Spanish category, I had to keep on top of all these subcategories. In a real life situation, a flawless execution of the pluperfect conditional meant nothing if I then didn’t know the word for ‘grater’. Overall I have undoubtedly improved; in some ways I am probably not as much better as I’d hoped. In some ways I am definitely worse (conjugations of vosotros being the most obvious example, but I blame Latin America for not using it). But it’s compartmentalising and then working on the individual components of the language that really leads to improvement.

Of course the theory is only half of it. I had to learn how to apply Spanish to the real world as well. When I first arrived in Peru I would only speak if I was confident I knew every word in the sentence I was going to say, from start to finish. I think this is something most people new to a language do. While it stopped me looking like an idiot so much, it had a lot of negative implications. First of all, it was very difficult to enter into a fast-paced conversation if I had to spend an extra few seconds planning out what I was going to say before saying it – usually someone else had already started talking. Also, my conversational range was greatly restricted by my vocabulary. I seemed weirdly interested in knowing what pets people had, or how many brothers and sisters, or their age. And most of the stuff I actually wanted to say, I didn’t, because I didn’t have the necessary words to do so. Not talking, and being really boring when you do talk, are ineffective ways of making friends. If you’re going to try and learn a language, the safe way is not the best way to do it.

For me, the best way was a mixture of overconfidence and laziness. So every time I started a sentence I would just assume I knew the way through. Let’s say I wanted to say the sentence “I was walking the dog in the street.” With my nervous, insecure approach to speaking, the conversation I would hold in my head looked like this:

“Ok do I say it?”
“Hold on, I’m not sure what the word for street is.”
“Calle, right?”
“Uh… I’m going to check the dictionary.”
“Ah, too late, someone else is talking.”

Whereas with my overconfidence method, it looked like this:

“Ok do I say it?”
“HELL YEAH YOU DO ALEX, YOU GOT THIS! YOU’RE THE BEST AT SPANISH EVER! KNOCK ‘EM DEAD YOU HANDSOME DEVIL!”

And of course, sometimes it turned out I didn’t actually know the Spanish. Sometimes, I wasn’t really even confident I knew the Spanish. I would launch into a sentence, only to discover I didn’t know half the words. To illustrate this, say a sentence in English (or your native language). Then replace half those words with a very loose definition of them – and then half the words in those definitions with THEIR definitions.

“I was walking the dog in the street.”

Becomes:

“I was… going along on my feet… with the animal that has four feet and the long thing at the back that some animals have… and I was in… the place between the houses where the… things that people drive go in the middle, and the people go on their feet along the edges.”

Every sentence turns into the plot of Inception. What’s meant to be a quick, maybe witty observation becomes a painful, drawn-out game of spoken charades. It sounds stupid. It’s made me look stupid on several occasions. But the alternative is saying nothing at all, and if you say nothing you don’t learn. It’s not necessarily about being confident, it’s just telling yourself you are so that you’ll actually make the mistakes you ultimately need to make.

And in fairness the above scenario doesn’t happen very often. Usually, if I close my eyes and blurt out the word I think is right, it is – or at least, it’s close enough that the person I’m talking to understands me or corrects me. It’s tough when you do make mistakes, and sometimes it feels like you’re getting your comeuppance for so brazenly assuming you can speak Spanish. But really what’s happening is that the areas you need to work on are being revealed with pinpoint accuracy so you can work on them later – or right there and then, if the person you’re with is sympathetic.

For me, that’s the process. Imagine it like a board game. You hide away in the library and do all your vocab building, all your grammar, all the theory, readying your strategy. Your turn comes: you must go out to speak Spanish. Your strategy was terrible; your flaws are brutally exposed in front of everyone. You remember them, go back, repair them, consolidate what you’ve learned. You go out again. Things are going better, but you roll a double 6 and the conversation turns to politics. A whole new set of flaws is exposed. You crawl back to the library to find out the words for ‘fake tan’, ‘misogyny’ and ‘wall’. You go out again, confident in your ability to talk about the US Election. You draw a community chest card: oh no! The conversation is all hypothetical, and you can only talk in indicative tenses! All that precious vocabulary is useless. You waste two turns crying quietly in the library.

You learn the subjunctive. It doesn’t come in useful in a single situation for the next twenty-thousand turns. In the meantime you find yourself pressed to use the preterite tense to discuss your past experiences. Oh no! You discarded your ability to talk in the preterite in order to learn the subjunctive! Oh no! You mix up the first-person and third-person verb preterite verb forms, and accidentally tell your friend’s grandmother about the time you committed a war crime. Go directly to jail.

There you meet a man called Rodrigo from Cartagena who asks whether you’d consider blogging for his cartel. Finally, a chance to use the subjunctive! You say you would accept, if he were to offer. You stand there with a smug grin on your face. Rodrigo knocks you out, harvests your organs, and uses your laptop to sell them to your friends and family via your blog. You are dead.

So, uh, to recap… learning languages is great! You will die.

Anyway, I shall try and pick this blog up with a bit more success when I get to Italy. Maybe aim for one of two blogs a month, something like that. “Ah, well, you say that now Alex!” you cry – but I can’t hear you because I am 10,000 miles away in Peru, where your well-founded scepticism regarding my inability to structure my life is drowned out by the soothing sound of panpipes, that unexpected and somewhat unsettling squeal llamas make, and the man who cycles past my bedroom window every weekday morning shouting about fruit.

My god I’m going to miss this country.

Quick shout out to what may be my best title yet; if you don’t like it, fight me. And yeah, don’t hold your breath for the next blog (as stated above, you will die). Thanks for perusing!