A Sustainable Train of Thought

It seems whenever I go out for a walk on the weekends in Ivrea, something’s always going on. Last week it was a foot race of some kind. Today it was some kind of concert. Since I tend to sleep in on Saturdays, I usually catch the end of whatever is going on. Today I was able to take a quick snapshot with my phone-cam:

Slept in this morning, woke up in time to get a couple of errands done. First was to get my cell phone set up. A cell phone in Italy can be called a “telefonino,” or in other words, a small phone. It was a bit of a challenge (think about how many cell phone plans there are in the US!), but I ended up with a Vodafone plan. I know that SMS is 15 cents, but phone calls are something like 50 cents a minute to the USA (!) – I’ll most likely just use it for SMS.

Then it was off to get a haircut. Let me say, trying to explain what you want done with your hair in a foreign language is a true test of your language ability. I failed miserably. They had to haul out the book of pictures, and I pointed to what style I wanted. I now know, however, that “corto” means short. Of course, you can only say “corto” so many times before you’re completely shorn. I think I provided a week’s worth of entertainment for the hairdressers. But in the end my hair was cut and I’m not bald.

I inquired about a used bike at the bike store, and from what I could tell, new bikes run from 350 Euro and up, but the cheapest bike he had in the store (it was small) was 850 Euro. And it seems that used bikes are sort of potluck in terms of when and what kind he can acquire. Mind you, this is what I think he said.

After all of this, I decided to find a dizionario. As an aside, a librerio is where you buy books, while a biblitoteca is where you borrow them (a library, to use the English word). Luckily, we had gone over the difference in Italian class, so I was spared the confusion. The dizionario was easy enough to buy, but the other book I wanted was a little more difficult to find.

Syd has a book called lo zingarelli, which is an Italian dictionary with a lot of pictures. I wanted one after seeing her copy, but I forgot important things, like the fact that there are two kinds: a big one and a little one. So I went into this bookstore and asked for a “dizionario con disegni”—a dictionary with drawings—because that was the best way I could think of describing the book. After the person behind the counter disappeared into the storage room, I turned around and there it was…lo zingarelli. But this one was huge and came with a CD-ROM, all for the low price of 80 Euro…

After much broken Italian and hand gestures and the like on my part, I was brought into the storage room to speed up the process. And lo-and-behold, they found lo zingarelli minore (the small one), which was just what I wanted. Just to explain, this book doesn’t have a picture for each word, but it does have diagrams of more difficult concepts (such as a volcano) with the various parts described. It’s all in Italian, so I’ll probably be using the regular dizionario (or the internet) in most cases, but this is a good book to have when describing more technical or involved material. I think it will come in handy over the next two years.

My next goal was to find another bike store I’d heard about, but I was unable to locate it. So instead I went to the supermarket and bought some things I had forgotten the other day when I was at the market.

Tonight there was a party in one of the rooms for the students and faculty. Not many professors showed up (I saw two), but then again I was a couple of hours late (a 15-minute nap turned into 3 hours) and they may have already headed home. Now I’m up way past my bedtime courtesy of the same nap.

Just did the dishes, so I think it’s time to turn in. Ciao!

(Apologies for the randomness of this post, but I think it’s a reflection of my thought processes at the moment.)

I hope the lack of posting during projects won’t become a trend, but this week was pretty intense. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we had to make a 30-second video describing what interaction design is for the 30-Second Visions project. We presented our finished product on Friday evening at 17:00.

My mind is still spinning from everything. After all the presentations were finished, I went back upstairs to studio and sat down at my desk, stared at my computer, and slowly realized that I didn’t have to do anything. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel exhausted and tired, as I’d expected to; rather, I felt like I should be doing something—I felt a lack of work. Strange feeling, this is, as I was always so eager to be done with work at my previous jobs. I’m taking this as a good sign for now, but I’ll have to get back to you in December to see if I still feel the same way.

To say that we had to deliver this video by Friday evening at 17:00 doesn’t begin to describe the rest of the scenario:

Italian class from 9:30 to 13:00 every day. Lunch from 13:00 to 14:30. Lecture from 14:30 to about 17:00. Group work and dinner from 17:00 to 21:00. Presentations from our guests from 21:00 to 23:00. So somewhere among all those other things we were supposed to conceive, film, and edit our video.

Let’s just say that we were up until 5:00 on Friday finishing something that we thought (at 20:30 Thursday evening) would take just an hour or so. “Numerous technical issues” just begins to scratch the surface. It’s been a long week, so after the presentations on Friday everyone hustled off to aperitivo. Sadly, the selection of food wasn’t quite up to par with the previous weeks, so I ended up cooking and eating dinner with a couple of people back in Talponia.

It’s a strange setup at Talponia. We each have our own apartment, and the way the building is arranged it’s very hard to get from room to room. But even so, we still manage to get together in groups and cook dinner together or just hang out. While we lose some of the community feel that a dorm provides, it’s also nice to invite people over to your apartment.

I was also pleasantly surprised with how our group dynamic worked in this project. We had four people in our group. Sometimes people can be great to know as friends, but horrible to work with. Since we had gotten to know everyone as friends (and to a very minor degree that’s how the groups formed), it was a bit of an adjustment to working together. And I think there was some stepping around toes at the beginning, but eventually we got comfortable enough to work effectively.

This morning I was woken up by the cleaning ladies when they rang my doorbell. I’m not the most lucid person when I first wake up, especially not when having gone to bed just five hours earlier. And the last time they’d rung my doorbell when I’d been home, I wasn’t fast enough to answer and they just walked right into my room. When I heard the doorbell this time, my brain immediately recognized the danger and as a reflex tried to communicate to the cleaning ladies that I was indeed home.

So I began yelling incoherently. Yelling might be too strong a word, perhaps: “speaking loudly” is probably a better choice, retaining the emphasis on “incoherent”. Eventually the “conversation” reached the point of them saying “Lunedi Lunedi” and me saying “Si Si Si,” after which I promptly fell right back to sleep. It had all the characteristics of a bad dream…

When I awoke, it was around noon and I ran off to the market to get some food for the upcoming week. My food supply had begun to dwindle earlier in the week, so when I’d gone over to other people’s rooms for dinner I had very little to offer. At the market, I made sure to get fruit and veggies, and tonight we enjoyed some amazing raspberries and kiwi fruit for dessert along with the pasta we’d had for dinner.

Tonight I learned that “cod” is “bacalhau” in Portuguese.

And with that I think I need to sign off. I’ll write more about my new computer, the challenges of typing on a foreign keyboard, and other exciting things in another post some other time. Right now, I need some sleep.