After three long and painful years in Italy, here I went to Germany. With a car loaded with clothes, books and my three dogs, I left the sunny (and lethal) Florence for a nice quiet village on the German-French border. One night of travel, and we arrived to a nice house with an ugly yard, which I was expecting to cradle in another nightmare - I didn't know if much worse than the Italian one but definitely was not expecting it to be much better either.
The German landlady took 10 min of her time to explain me how to sort the garbage and showed me the calendar with the schedule of the garbage collectors. I felt a wave of amazement and a strange happiness warming up my heart. These people can actually plan something in two weeks from now on... while in Italy you can't basically look further than tomorrow and if, God forbids, something unexpected happens today you only have a horizon of uncertain dates and possibilities of when that thing can or actually will be solved.
Being used to hate as your only mean of defense, I started to hate Germany as I was hating Italy. "Those Germans" replaced "those Italians" in a well pre-made discourse. But hell, "those Germans" were giving little to no reason to comment upon or get angry with. The Internet connection broke down, and I had a sudden panic attack - if this happened in Italy, it would have taken anything, from 3 days to 3 months to get it fixed, and a lot of friendly conversations with nice Italians who couldn't solve it for various reasons: it has been solved (nope, try again), somebody is there working on it (where, do you use ghost workers, I see nobody), the technical infrastructure has an unknown problem (it's a damn wire popping out there, come glue it back), it's a holiday (you advertise as continuous and uninterrupted client service, why the hell are you on a break), it's a strike (to hell with your labour union), it's due to the storm (I didn't know my Internet subscripition was made to "God inc.") and whatever other reason that Mediterranean creativity could come up with. Well, in Germany it took like one hour of talking to the client service and voila, my net was back and working (and it took one hour because it was a very complicated problem, which I managed to solve only by being a non-German and lying shamelessly to the client service operator).
As days were passing by, my wall of hate was being reduced to nothingness. How can you hate a clock-wise mechanism in which your problems are getting solved without you having to sweat on them? How can you hate a small village in which you go walk your dogs in a huge nice field, where the lawn is mowed regularly to define the access path? How can you hate NOT hearing your neighbours (I still have the traumas of the Italian lady with an amazing pair of lungs and an unstoppable need to yell at everything that moved around her, from husband to kids and from pigeons to the pans and pots in her kitchen)? How can you hate the restaurants in which you pay exactly as much as you calculated and have no surprise taxes, fees or whatever else the waiter could think of when writing down your bill?
I still have hate reserves, but I save them for Italy - and yes, I still have reasons. My Italian card, purposedly required for as being "internationally valid" which doesn't work in Germany because they gave you some unknown V-Pay circuit instead of some boring Visa or MasterCard (and yes, it's your fault you haven't checked); trying to take the car out of Italian license plates which lasts "approximately a week" (I sometimes wonder whether they don't use some sort of computers with a very high random operating factor - today they are on strike, tomorrow they wake up late and so on); my Italian university, where my superviser barely remembers my name and, if asked for advice, he sends me a short letter of moral support but no academic idea whatsoever; and I could go on for a long while but hell... it's all behind now.
It's the first time in my life when I feel well in a place. So far, I was finding reasons not to, but here... oh well, I feel happy here. It's the first time in my life when I don't want to leave a place and, ironically, I'm supposed to be leaving in less than one month. Where? I have no idea yet... I might go home for a few months, although the simple thought of it starts to give me creeps... I might move to a different German city, and the idea is more and more present in my head... For a long while I've been disconnected from places - I could go anywhere and, oddly enough, this anywhere actually means nowhere. All places are equal, but none says anything to you. There are different degrees of comfort, but basically it is all the same - I ended up as a globalized mut without any home. When you feel the world is yours, and you can go any place, there is a complementary, but rarely mentioned, feeling of being a nomad, free but way too alone.
I've always been fascinated with nomads and always tried to become one. I've been afrain of ties, roots and responsibilities. I loved the feeling of being able to leave any place in any moment. And I do not know whether I am getting old and aiming to become just a pilgrim (always having a home to return to) or it's just a temporary feeling of belonging which would suffocate me in a few months or so.... but I don't want to leave this place. I walk on the fields every day and I watch ever step; I create memories of a place which will stay in my heart as the home of my soul, in which the feeling of home is not given by the past connections and ties, but by the present happiness and the dream of a possible future. A home by choice, this is what the little German village became for me. I do not know if I will ever return, but I know I'll be missing for a long while the corn crops, the football field and the jasmine from my neighbour's yard.
The German landlady took 10 min of her time to explain me how to sort the garbage and showed me the calendar with the schedule of the garbage collectors. I felt a wave of amazement and a strange happiness warming up my heart. These people can actually plan something in two weeks from now on... while in Italy you can't basically look further than tomorrow and if, God forbids, something unexpected happens today you only have a horizon of uncertain dates and possibilities of when that thing can or actually will be solved.
Being used to hate as your only mean of defense, I started to hate Germany as I was hating Italy. "Those Germans" replaced "those Italians" in a well pre-made discourse. But hell, "those Germans" were giving little to no reason to comment upon or get angry with. The Internet connection broke down, and I had a sudden panic attack - if this happened in Italy, it would have taken anything, from 3 days to 3 months to get it fixed, and a lot of friendly conversations with nice Italians who couldn't solve it for various reasons: it has been solved (nope, try again), somebody is there working on it (where, do you use ghost workers, I see nobody), the technical infrastructure has an unknown problem (it's a damn wire popping out there, come glue it back), it's a holiday (you advertise as continuous and uninterrupted client service, why the hell are you on a break), it's a strike (to hell with your labour union), it's due to the storm (I didn't know my Internet subscripition was made to "God inc.") and whatever other reason that Mediterranean creativity could come up with. Well, in Germany it took like one hour of talking to the client service and voila, my net was back and working (and it took one hour because it was a very complicated problem, which I managed to solve only by being a non-German and lying shamelessly to the client service operator).
As days were passing by, my wall of hate was being reduced to nothingness. How can you hate a clock-wise mechanism in which your problems are getting solved without you having to sweat on them? How can you hate a small village in which you go walk your dogs in a huge nice field, where the lawn is mowed regularly to define the access path? How can you hate NOT hearing your neighbours (I still have the traumas of the Italian lady with an amazing pair of lungs and an unstoppable need to yell at everything that moved around her, from husband to kids and from pigeons to the pans and pots in her kitchen)? How can you hate the restaurants in which you pay exactly as much as you calculated and have no surprise taxes, fees or whatever else the waiter could think of when writing down your bill?
I still have hate reserves, but I save them for Italy - and yes, I still have reasons. My Italian card, purposedly required for as being "internationally valid" which doesn't work in Germany because they gave you some unknown V-Pay circuit instead of some boring Visa or MasterCard (and yes, it's your fault you haven't checked); trying to take the car out of Italian license plates which lasts "approximately a week" (I sometimes wonder whether they don't use some sort of computers with a very high random operating factor - today they are on strike, tomorrow they wake up late and so on); my Italian university, where my superviser barely remembers my name and, if asked for advice, he sends me a short letter of moral support but no academic idea whatsoever; and I could go on for a long while but hell... it's all behind now.
It's the first time in my life when I feel well in a place. So far, I was finding reasons not to, but here... oh well, I feel happy here. It's the first time in my life when I don't want to leave a place and, ironically, I'm supposed to be leaving in less than one month. Where? I have no idea yet... I might go home for a few months, although the simple thought of it starts to give me creeps... I might move to a different German city, and the idea is more and more present in my head... For a long while I've been disconnected from places - I could go anywhere and, oddly enough, this anywhere actually means nowhere. All places are equal, but none says anything to you. There are different degrees of comfort, but basically it is all the same - I ended up as a globalized mut without any home. When you feel the world is yours, and you can go any place, there is a complementary, but rarely mentioned, feeling of being a nomad, free but way too alone.
I've always been fascinated with nomads and always tried to become one. I've been afrain of ties, roots and responsibilities. I loved the feeling of being able to leave any place in any moment. And I do not know whether I am getting old and aiming to become just a pilgrim (always having a home to return to) or it's just a temporary feeling of belonging which would suffocate me in a few months or so.... but I don't want to leave this place. I walk on the fields every day and I watch ever step; I create memories of a place which will stay in my heart as the home of my soul, in which the feeling of home is not given by the past connections and ties, but by the present happiness and the dream of a possible future. A home by choice, this is what the little German village became for me. I do not know if I will ever return, but I know I'll be missing for a long while the corn crops, the football field and the jasmine from my neighbour's yard.
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