Erin Miller

Dear beloved friends and family,
I just wanted to share a few highlights of Italian life here in beautiful
Perugia.
1) Kisses on both cheeks. It is how people greet one another here. Mostly
boys to girls and vice versa, but also same gender couples. Anyway, I have
decided it is one of my favorite parts of Italy. A kiss on the cheeks makes you feel so loved, welcome, and important, like you’re part of the in-crowd. Plus, I
have had several very good looking guy’s lips on my cheeks. You guys should
all start the tradition in the States and see if you can get it to become a
normal thing there by the time I return.
2) the view. The view from my city is amazing, you can see all of the
smaller village towns from the street by my house. I’m not sure that it beats the
flatirons, but it is pretty cool. One of the things that you miss out on in
most American cities is that they were not built on a hills for
fortification. All of the towns around here were built on hills. If you ask a local how to get to the city center they say, “Salita salita salita, sempre sempre
sempre” (up, up, up, always, always, always).
3) the wine. It’s great, and it’s cheap (unfortunately not calorie free).
Each town specializes on a certain kind. And, it doesn’t give you headaches the
way it does in the US because the thing that is most responsible for the
headache is the preservative they put in it to transport it, which isn’t added here.
4) the Language. Italian is beautiful. Our teacher keeps telling us to make
it sound like a song, because when locals speak it, it does. I also love that
people around here expect me to be proficient in it, which will encourage me
to pick it up. Now, if only I understood all of it….I go through my day
constantly understanding about half of what is said to me and having about
half of what I say understood.
5) the lifestyle. The pace of life is slower. Everything closes for 3 hours
in the afternoon (for naps, of course) it’s called pusolino (the Italian
version of siesta). Everything is also closed on Sundays. No putting off your
grocery shopping till the day of rest, unless you enjoy shopping at the only store
open on Sundays, the Bangladesh grocers. It’s ok to be late to class because
you had to stop on the steps to talk to your friends in the sun. And if you
tell an Italian friend you can’t talk because you are running late for
class, they won’t understand because here nothing is more important than stopping to talk to someone you enjoy. And likewise, it is not nearly as much of a faux pas if your cell phone rings in class. The professor’s rings on occasion.
There is also an interesting Pagan church in town. It is
shaped like an octagon and full of pagan imagery, like something right out
of the DaVinci code. At some point some Christian came in and put a cross on
the top of it this octagon shrine to pagan gods. It’s pretty funny.
My big adventure this week was a Saturday trip to Sienna. Each of the
roommates picked a place to travel and created an itinerary. Then we picked a
destination out of a hat after this mandatory school breakfast Saturday morning, and went running to the train station, only to discover that the girl that planned
this particular trip, hadn’t checked the train times. So we ended up taking a 3
and a half hour route to a destination 2 hours away. We got to ride through some very small, industrial towns on “ghetto” trains, but it ended up being like
only 12 Euro round trip, which was cool. We saw the Campo and the Duomo in
Sienna. The Duomo was truly breathtaking. There was a Donatello statue of an
emaciated John, and a cross that the Siennese had looted after winning a war
that were neat to see. The tile frescoes on the floor and the stain glass
were my favorites. The frescoes had a mix of Roman and Christian ideologies,
including several depictions of Remus and Romulus suckling from a wolf. We
managed to get into the church just as the sun was hitting the highest
stained glass. Then we stopped by a wine shop where the owner let us sample several wines, mostly Chiantis, the specialty of the region. We had to run to the
train station to catch the last train back to Perugia. It took us 5 hours to
get back (piece of advise — always check train schedules) But it worked out
incredibly well because we had a two hour layover in Chiuso and ended up in
this local restaurant where for 12 Euro I had what was probably one of the
best meals in my life. Now it’s time for my evening stroll around the city.

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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.

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ciao,
So, I’m in Italy. It’s awesome. Yes, they will serve alcohol to anyone over 18
on international flights. I spent my first day in Rome. I met some English
kids at the hostel and we went into town and saw the coliseum, forum etc. We
spent the night drinking cheap beer and wine out of a box playing 21 on the
roof of our hostel in down town Rome.
I arrived in Perugia on Friday. Perugia is a city on a hill. The city center
is on the top, which is where we live and take some of our classes. There are
so many steep hills around town that on one side of town there are escalators,
to take you from level to level of the city. On the other side, the incline
was too steep for escalators, so there is an elevator with an up button and
down button. The city is full of history; there is a wall in the city that was
built by the Etruscans in 300BC. Everyone around here speaks this weird
foreign language, and they expect us to speak it as well. They become offended
if we cannot answer their questions in their language. I started taking my
Italian class today, I’m in level two and I lost our professor right after
Buon Giorno (good morning).
My apartment is terrific, there are 6 of us and five bedrooms, so only two
people have to share and there is a couple living with us. We actually have
control of our heating as well, our landlord is very nice and only asked that
we turn off the heat at night. Most of the other student apartments cannot
control their own heat and the apartments are kept at around 55 degrees.
One of our roommates lived here last semester and she is almost fluent in
Italian. She has been showing me all of the good bars and hangouts around town
and introducing me to her friends, some of them Italian. I met a guy named
Davide, his English was about as good as my Italian so our conversation was
fun but challenging. We finally realized that we both spoke Spanish the best
and did a lot of our communicating in it. Davide = Italian Stallion:)
Wine here is cheaper than water. A gallon of high quality wine goes for about
8 Euro. But a beer will cost you about 5.

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