Thanksgiving 2011 -- Slovenia

Teaching at an American school, we get the traditional 4 day Thanksgiving holiday break.  4 days?  Where to go.  I was poking around the Internet back in early October and was checking out the Serie A schedule and saw that Udinese (my team, as you all know) was playing at home, in Udine, on Friday the 25th of November.  Usually, Serie A games are on Sunday so this was a special game......and then I find out that Udinese is playing Roma and it's official, I'm headed to Udinese for the game.  If you look at a map, you'll see Udine is right on the border with Slovenia and that becomes the destination for this Thanksgiving day break.  First stop, Lake Bled.

Hawaii?  No, Slovenia.  This is "Slap Savica" or "Savica Waterfall" at the far western end of Lake Bohinj, a more remote and less commercial lake in Northwestern Slovenia.

Thanksgiving day itself was overcast and cloudy, but the lake was calm and we see the reflection of a mountain in Lake Bohinj.

Lake Bled is about 3.5 miles around in circumference, but it has cliff faces jutting directly up from the surface of the lake and has a castle looming over it.

Here, on the foggy first day, is a view of Lake Bled from the castle.  Right there in the lake is a small island, with a church which brings the charm factor "over the top" according the Rick Steves' guide.  I have to agree.

The next day, in the morning, the sun was trying to peek through and we went along the path near the island. The stairs of the island come right down to the shoreline.  This island is known for being the wedding capital of Slovenia and it is tradition for the groom to carry the bride up the steps.

No motorized boats are allowed on Lake Bled, so getting to the island is only by these "pletna" boats, which are rowed by families who pass down the boats (and the plans for the boats) from generation to generation.

No motorized boats, you say?  Well, turns out that Lake Bled is the rowing capital of Slovenia.  Lake Bled, because it is sheltered by the mountains to the west has little wind and is ideal for rowing.  The world championships of rowing have been held on the lake four times, most recently in 2011!

 

 

The area has produced numerous world and Olympic medalists in rowing!

Turns out the place I found to stay was right above the training center.

I used, for the first time, the website AirBnB, to find this one bedroom apartment.  It was PERFECT, quaint, and cost 40 dollars a night.  If all AirBnB locations are of this quality, I'm sold!

For those who remember him, Josip Broz, aka Tito, was the legendary figure who held together the six distinct and separate republics in one unified Yugoslavia up until the country started to break up in 1990.  The first country to gain its independence was Slovenia, the northern most of the six republics.  Here is Tito's villa on Lake Bled.

Taking a stroll along the ground of the villa.

In a ballroom on the second floor of the villa there is a huge mural extolling Tito and the Yugoslavia.  Up in the left corner, the attack by the Nazi's on Belgrade and in the center Tito rallying the people of this region (Yugoslavia) to bind together as a country.

Defeating the enemy...the Nazi's

The ideal of Yugoslavia, the farmer and the worker in the shadow of an industrial factory being led by a woman with a child on her shoulders carrying the flag of Yugoslavia!

Ala Tito, sitting and enjoying the view from the terrace with the Island of Lake Bled in the background!

Translation Services

This is a story that I've been waiting to blog about for a few months, because I've been waiting for the final chapter to unfold, which it did last night.

SCENE 1 (Late August 2011) -- Courtyard of the Quad at AOSR. 
It was late afternoon, and I was finishing up some things at school and headed to the bus to go home.  I'm about to exit campus when I see a young Chinese girl being huffy with her father.  I comment, in Chinese, because I assume they are Chinese, that I used to be just like her with my father.  The father turns around and starts talking to me in RAPID fire Chinese and stuffs some papers in my face and I figure out it has to do something with enrolling his children into the school.

I walk the family over to the main office building and find the admissions officer, who has already tried talking to the father that payment of tuition doesn't mean entrance into the school, that there is an actual application process involved.  However, the previous conversation between the English speaking admissions officer and the Chinese speaking father had gotten little of this point across.

Now here we were again, but this time I'm playing interpreter.  Chinese to English and vice versa.  Turns out, as I learned, is that the family has a son (L) who has been at AOSR for six years and is entering 6th grade.  The son was with us.  The daughter (G) was enrolled at AOSR back in Kindergarten and has been back in China for the past four years and speaks NO English.  Dad was trying to enroll G into the school by communicating through L.  L, being a 5th grader last year didn't understand what he was doing (and rightly so) and was doing everything though his teacher.  As you might expect, lots was lost in communication and transit and the admissions office didn't speak with Dad about G.

Those papers Dad was sticking in my face was were faxes confirming the school had accepted two 8,000 Euro wire transfers, which the Dad thought was payment for the first semester for both his students.  The school took the money thinking is was the entire years payment for L.  This is where the big miscommunication happened.  Once we got that sorted out, it was back to square one and Dad still wants G enrolled in 4th grade.

BUT, the 4th grade for the fall is oversubscribed and there aren't any spaces available.  The admissions officer says this but couches the excuse with "there is an application process" and "you just can't buy your way into the school" and "G doesn't have language ability in English".  So, the compromise is, enroll G in an English immersion program for the fall, and see if a space opens up in the Spring.  As the paperwork is being filled out, G's birthday turns out to be 2001, which is actually a 5th grade birthday.  We unravel that one of the miscommunications is that L, the brother, kept saying that G was trying to get INTO 4th grade, but meant to say, she had FINISHED 4th grade.

Well, lo and behold, the 5th grade, expands from two to three sections and there was space for G.  And just like that, all the arguments about why the school couldn't take her are out the window, and the money is accepted as G's first semester tuition payment and welcome to our newest 5th grader.  (Sketchy, I know).

The Dad is incredibly grateful to me and the next day brings me a huge beautiful plate (and gifts for EVERYBODY) and invites me to dinner. 


THOROUGHOUT THE FALL
The school has a HUGE proportion of students that are Italian-Chinese.  The parents, usually merchants, don't speak English or Italian and so simply pay the tuition and send their kids, but the school is NOT serving these parents.  Communication is done in only English and Italian, so these parents simply don't know or are isolated.

But now, the teachers know that I speak Chinese and throughout the fall, I'm called on to help translate with parents.  I've made phone calls from the nurses office to tell parents to get their kids glasses and even had to try and tell a Chinese mother that he should have his kid tested for diabetes.

SCENE 2 (November 18th, 2011 at school)
G's fifth grade teacher calls a parent conference with the Dad and asks me to translate.  The briefing from the teacher is that G, is incredibly smart, but seems to be neglected at home.  There is little love and affection for this girl and that anytime it is shown to her, G soaks it up.  I've noticed it too, that when I see her on campus, she runs to me, hugs me and won't let go.  The reason for the tardiness of this meeting is that Dad has been out of the country since the first week of September and G and L were theoretically living with her mother, although that has been called into question.  After the meeting, Dad asks me to come to dinner.  I'm free, so I say yes.  He tells me to meet him at 730 at a place in Rome's "Chinatown."

SCENE 3  (November 18th, 2011 at an Italian Restaurant)
I show up about 15 minutes late to the address given to me and I'm whisked away in a huge Mercedes.  I'm thinking I'm going to dinner with the family at a Chinese place.  Nope, we park and enter a very fancy Italian restaurant.  And we're NOT with his family, but I'm one of seven people at the table.  On my side is myself and two other Chinese men in their late 40's, early 50's.  On the other side, three 20 something Chinese girls.  At the head of the table Dad.  I know I'm in for an evening.

The food starts rolling and it's very high end.  LOTS of seafood, in fact EVERYTHING was seafood.  I slowly but surely start unraveling the stories of the table.  First and foremost, I learn what Dad does.  He, like most Chinese in Italy are from Wenzhou in China.  Dad came to Italy about a decade ago and started and import/export business.  He established his family here but a few years back, he started doing all his business on the China end and so lives the majority of his time in China, while his family is here.  One of the other men at the table (both work and have stores and businesses here in Rome) revealed at at the peak of the economic boom a few years back, Dad was selling about 10 containers of merchandise A DAY for a few years in a row.  Dad is LOADED, and it was revealed he more than a few homes in Italy.  That is nothing to say about what he owns in China.

Then there was the drinking.  Being a guest I couldn't say no to the wine (by the way even I know he had bottles of very expensive wine....Brunello from Montalcino, and the table finished 5 bottles) and was toasted constantly.  I strategically always kept wine in my glass but he would make me finish it and then refill.  By the second course, I had to claim that I would throw up if he kept making me drink.  It actually kind of worked.

The men started asking me about my wife.  I told them I was single and left it at that.  But they didn't leave it at that.  They kept hounding me, asking me if I wanted a Chinese girl or a white girl, and if I did, to contact them for a set up.  This lasted on and off for about 15 minutes until I came up with a brilliant plan.  I told them I had gotten divorced just before I moved to Italy in 2009.  They asked me about her, and I was vague, telling them we were together only for a short time and that's why we didn't have kids.  So, any girl out there want to play my fake ex-wife?

Another crazy thing was these three young women.  One is a business woman from Taiwan.  The men kept ragging on Taiwan and making this woman chug wine all night.  They clearly were trying to get her drunk.  This Taiwanese girl spoke English and translated for me when I needed it.  I needed translation because the accent and dialect these men speak was at times incomprehensible to me.  I would be able to understand some, but some words I had no idea. 

But, at one point, one of the other two girls finds out I speak Italian (or a bit) and it turns out SHE is 22, and was sent to live in Italy by her parents at 15 and speaks fluent Italian. We share stories, she's impressed by my Italian and how after only 2 years I know 50x more than these other Chinese men who have been living here for over 5 years.  We start dishing on the guys in Italian and there are times when she translates the dialect for me directly into Italian.  So here I am, getting some Chinese dialect translated for me into Italian.  There were times when I was going back and forth between Chinese and Italian for minutes at a time.  It was AWESOME.  I was on fire.  The amount of wine I had probably was a big help.

So Dad then starts BRAGGING about how much he can drink.  He says that back in China he drinks three times every night.  He has an early dinner, a late dinner and then when they go out "kariaerka".  I was like "what?" and then it dawns on me he says "karaoke" because he mentions that the "kariaerka" in Italy is old and not fun.  I'm fearing at this point that my evening is going to continue with karaoke and drinking, but the two non Taiwanese girls make an exit.  Then the party breaks up and I'm offered a ride home in the big black Mercedes.  I, however, decline, when Dad reveals to me as we're walking up the stairs that he's had a great deal to drink.  I know, I saw it.  I tell him it's easy for me to walk to the bus and catch it home.  And for those of you who know me, and drinking, yes, I DO nod off on the bus home.

However, Dad says in parting to me, that next time, dinner will be at his home and it will be Chinese food.  I think I have to say I'm looking forward to it.

Berlusconi E' Dimesso

Let's take the term "Arab Spring" and change it into "Mediterranean 2011".  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya all toppled dictatorial leaders....and now, 12 November 2011, Italy has managed to get Silvio Berlusconi (and you all know that I find him a great speaker) to peacefully resign.  And I was there.....kind of/almost.

My friend Lance and I were talking a tourist stroll through town.  Walking back from the Colosseum back to my apartment, takes one through Piazza Venezia and down Via Plebescito to Vittorio Emmanuele II.

And we come across this crowd of people

Since we're near Palazzo Chigi, where there are ALWAYS cameras outside of the front door, it HAD to do with Berlusconi.

And the police confirmed it for us.

I was THERE.

This entrance/exit to Palazzo Chigi (the residence of the Prime Minister of Italy) where the crowd, Lance and I watched for any activity.  Note there are NO plants by the doors, which become important later on.

This is looking east up towards the Quirnale, where earlier in the day the Italian parliament passed the financial austerity measures which was the lynchpin of Berlusconi's deal to resign.

Lots of black windowed BMW's entered, most of the time we in the crowd shouted "BUFFONI" or "A CASA"

Lot's of television cameras as well.  Lance and I were standing on some planters for 2 hours, between 1830 and 2030.

More police arriving....great anticipation.

Then, all of a sudden all the action moved over to another street and everyone moved.  Our "front row" seats became less important as it turns out there is a back entrance/exit to the Palazzo (of course) and the Carabinieri, police and crowd moved to a corner.

Lance and I stayed patient, hoping for action.

Every once in a while, a light would come on in the 1st floor windows or people would peek out....but at 2030, it was cold and we were hungry so we went to get some food promising ourselves we would return.

Alas, we didn't.  Got home, and saw THIS picture on the internet and were KICKING ourselves, because we were RIGHT there about 4 meters to the left of that black SUV.  But wait, what are those plants doing there?  There weren't plants next to the doors we were watching.  Phew, this was the back entrance, where no one was allowed to pass.  Lance and I didn't miss the big action.  But we didn't go back after dinner, so we missed out on the street celebration.  So, a little "lame" on our part.

Michelangelo's Moses

This past summer I read "The Agony and the Ecstasy" (I remember this book sitting on my Dad's shelf in the living room when I was a kid), which is the fictionalized autobiography of Michelangelo.  It's the kind of book my Dad would want me to read but only now, 41 and living in Italy, did I read it, and I couldn't put it down.

One of the major works (and disappointments of Michelangelo's life) was the pared down commission to create and carve the tomb of Pope Julius II.  I have a tangential connection to Pope Julius the II because he was born Giuliano Della Rovere and here in Rome, I live on Piazza Della Rovere. The story goes that just after Michelangelo shows the world his David in Florence, Pope Julius II brings Michelangelo to Rome and commissions him to carve his massive three story tomb, on which there would be some 40 statues and placed in St. Peter's.  The money stopped flowing, Pope Julius II died in 1513, and in 1545, the tomb was finished simply as a facade and placed in San Pietro in Vincoli church, where Della Rovere was once a cardinal.  The tomb contains Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses.

November 1st, is All Saints Day in Italy (maybe all over Catholic countries?) and a national holiday.  Being in Rome, I can just hop over on the bus and go see a Michelangelo in the city.  Part of life here....

The not so impressive facade of the church San Pietro in Vincoli

The name of the church comes from the legend that these were these chains housed here were the ones that bound Saint Peter when he was imprisoned in Jerusalem.

The tomb of Pope Julius II, commissioned in 1505, this here is the final product finished in 1545.

The brilliance of Michelangelo is his ability to bring out inner feelings of the piece.  We can "see" into the soul through the eyes.

Marmore Falls

Stolen from WIKIPEDIA

"In ancient times, it fed a wetland that was thought to bring illness (probably malaria). To remove that threat to the city of Rieti, in 271 BC, the Roman consul Manlius Curius Dentatus ordered the construction of a canal (the Curiano Trench) to divert the stagnant waters into the natural cliff at Marmore. From there, the water fell into the Nera river below. However, that solution created a different problem: when the Velino river was in flood stage, its water flowed through the Nera toward the city of Terni, threatening its population. The issue was so contentious between the two cities that the Roman Senate was forced to address it in 54 BC. Cicero represented Terni, and Aulus Pompeius represented Rieti. The Senate did nothing about the problem, and things remained the same for centuries."

The Marmore Falls were a stop on a weekend trip through Umbria.  The falls are turned on twice a day.  My friends and I watched the falls from OUTSIDE the pay area. Still pretty spectacular....and to think, they have been around for 2,200 years.  Another point in the"THE ROMANS WERE AWESOME" column.

 

Venice Biennale Part III

Day 2 of the Biennale took us to the second exhibition sight, the Arsenale, which is the old (I think still functioning) naval shipyard in Venice.

The country pavilions were contained in these "warehouses"

These colored pipes in the Turkish pavilion I thought were derivative of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

But, the cool thing about them is that it is a working desalinization system!

Saudi Arabia Pavilion

There was a pavilion dedicated to the connection between Latin America and Italy.  Each Latin American country (even if they had their own pavilion) exhibited at the group pavilion.  One of the most interesting films (mostly I found videos to be not interesting but this one from Colombia caught my attention) talked about the circle of war and had an Obama lookalike dancing around with the filmmaker.  You had to be there to see it.

An example of the need to read the text accompanying the exhibit.  These just look like piles of dirt, but upon closer inspection, they are revolutionary texts from Chile that were buried and more recently uncovered when a new house was being built.  Perhaps a statement on the way we lose history over time?

This artist, had gold filling put in his/her mouth in Latin America and then went to Berlin to have a doctor remove them.  It's an metaphor for the Europeans/colonial countries removing natural resources from countries.  WOW!

The Italian Pavilion, which used to be at the Giardini is now here at the Arsenale.  It was large, and I found it to be just so jumbled, it felt like being at an artistic department stores.  Just too much and too many different artists in the space...and the space was enormous.

There was one large exhibition on the mafia in Italy.  I thought this was an fascinating way to represent Italy.

The last pavilion we entered before heading home was the Chinese Pavilion, which was located in an old tanker storage warehouse.  The installation was the white tube which you walked through....

...and saw Western text (as apposed to Chinese characters) fall like snow.  I thought it was a cool effect, if not an unoriginal concept.