Erin Miller

Il Fumo Uccide: Smoking kills — it is what is written on the front of all
cigarette packages here. Much different than our American warning which seems
to say something along the lines of “someone, somewhere once found out that
smoking might be bad for you.” Along those lines, two days after my arrival in
Italy the Italian government banned smoking inside all public places. A study
came out finding that living in some major Italian cities, without smoking, was the equivalent of smoking ten cigarettes a day, and so the government
banned it. Pretty cool, I think. My clothes no longer smell after I leave a bar.. I have heard several Italian bar tenders complain about the measure. The
police have flocked to the cities, including Perugia, in order to enforce this
new law and have been fining bar owners. You know you live in a rough area
when the biggest crime in town is smoking in a public place.
An interesting thing about Italians is that they actually eat a lot of Italian
food. Pasta, Pizza, Pasta, pasta, panini, pasta, pasta. It’s weird but I
thought that Italian food was this weird American conception, but it seems to
be pretty true to form. Not a whole lot of vegetables, fruits or dairy in your
diet unless you work for it. There are fresh fruit markets around, but a lot of
people here seem to go days without vegetables. As I was eating all of the dried cranberries off our cheese and meat platter, I told an Italian that they were the first fruit or vegetable I had had all day. He looked at me and said “just one, just one day….oh you’re ok.”:)
A note about politics and the Iraq war.
One of my good friends here is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She
told me that she, and most Argentineans, did not really like Americans. Not
that they had anything against individual Americans, like me, but that in
general they really didn’t like them. She said that she could not believe that
Bush had won. I told her me neither. She explained that in Argentina, they see
shots of bleeding, dieing children and mothers screaming as their houses
burn to the ground at the hands of Americans on the news. She said that her
other American friends had told her that most of that stuff was censored in the states. I guess that those kinds of images would make it hard to like us. She also commented on the irony of our country’s generosity and willingness to help the victims of the Tsunami, when our country had killed half the number of people killed by the Tsunami in Iraq.
Anyway, just something to think about.