Working the forest, alone against the tide

Near the airport of Malpensa, just underneath you as your plane approaches landing in Milan, there is an ecomuseum. It’s in the middle of a small forest, close to where planespotters take position and  from there, one can see the underbellies of planes flying in every two minutes right above the tree tops overhead.

Words: Is this English? Italian? Both?

If you look up the world smartworking in any search engine, you will come up with results in Italian only. Fret not: google is not broken; this word, even if it sounds English, was actually created in Italy for Italians. I couldn’t find the actual origin and occasion in which it was used for the first time, but sources online (again, in Italian only) widely attest to this by arguing with its Italian users that they are so wrong. The word originally meant flexible work – as in “work smart, not hard” – but was later appropriated into a meaning of simply remote working. During the pandemic, this meaning became so dominant that was naturally taken as an English word, with disdain. A friend of mine, who works at an international bank in Italy, told me that their workplace uses the correct term – remote work – but she thought that was actually bad English, since she was hearing smartworking all around her.

This is actually a legitimate linguistic phenomenon.

The slow culture reports: kitchen flow

If I asked you to give me a definition for cooking mastery, I am quite sure I’d get descriptions of sets of skills like finding the right ingredients for the best possible recipe for the most sophisticated dish.

But really, the best cook is someone who is the most skilled in one particular area: making the best use of what is already available in the most efficient and tasty way. Actually, the highest level of mastery is using the least – and the simplest – ingredients to achieve the best result.

Quarantined in Milan

Since I have been living in Milan for the past year, I’ve been getting a lot of worried inquiries from friends about my wellbeing. Even thought the coronavirus pandemic has been having a lot of hot spots, it is interesting that Italy was the most salient one in the world’s imagination. Perhaps because it was so unexpected. We usually don’t attach health crises to Europe and especially not to Italy, the foundation of healthy lifestyle. How did it feel to be in the middle of all this?

You have probably seen the numerous news stories reporting how all Italians all came to their individual balconies and windows to sing together, even while being physically separated by this new necessity. While the tune was mostly botched because there was a disagreement on the exact song, the mood was unmistakably in spirit of solidarity and mutual encouragement to look at the brighter hope for tomorrow.

Plane Spotting in Italy

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Every airport has its own culture and Malpensa (MPX), Milan’s airport, is no exception. What is unique about it, though, is the super loyal and huge plane watchers crowd that is always present day in, day out around its perimeter, most of them taking pictures, with super lenses, of every airplane touching ground. I haven’t seen a crowd passionate like that anywhere else. (Nor would it be tolerated, I guess, anywhere in the US.) We always see them whenever we go out biking since we are close to the airport and the access road to the Villoresi canals, our favorite biking trails, goes right around it. And the crowds are the biggest in mornings because this is when the biggest planes, the transatlantic liners, usually land.

The flow of life and objects

When I was first leaving Bulgaria, I could take only two suitcases with me and that forced me to make sure that I filled them with only the best clothes I could have, so that space would not be wasted. I bought and made new clothes with fabric I had saved and even had a friend sew a skirt for me. The next two years were, in a way, such a luxurious experience that when I taught a two-month course at the Centro Cultural in Costa Rica, I was able to wear different clothes for every single class session (twice a week). My students never saw the same outfit twice. Sixteen different ones that I was proud of.

The village culture reports: hoarding

A friend of mine was asked to bring an iPad to a friend in Italy. He obliged: he packed the device in his carry-on, with all the documentation but sans the bulky box. His friend’s reaction? Thank you, but could you also send me the box when you can, please?

My friend laughed away this quirkiness when he told me the story. His friend was raised in a village culture, he said, and so he felt the urge to keep everything he is entitled to own. 

The naming powers of housing builders

I am collecting interesting names of subdivisions, apartment complexes and gated communities in my area of Texas. It seems that land development and construction around here has gotten so busy that builders are running out of names for their creations. After a series of Mira Lagos, Sleepy Hollow and Blueberry Hills, what’s next in terms of names for blueberry-less, lake-less, and hollow-less neighborhoods? Some of them have a hidden meaning that I wonder if it has been really considered by those who picked them or who chose to live there. Here is a shortlist:

Luxury food

I often ask my students, when teaching on the topic of culture, if, in their opinion, paella was a dish of the poor or the rich. Having seen paella as one of the most expensive options on the menus of expensive restaurants, they usually say that it must have been an invention for the table of the wealthy. After all, shrimp and clams, mandatory for paella, are deluxe ingredients.

But, actually, not when the dish was first created. Fish and seafood in general was cheap food, since it didn’t need land to be farmed. It grew free and plentiful, with just labor necessary to be harvested – and that was cheap. In fact, paella is based on the concept of “small pieces of different meats and veggies, combined with rice”, which in practice means “any kind of meat, mixed together in rice”:  the perfect way to use leftovers. In most cases, paella was the Spanish casserole in which leftovers from yesterday or from the master’s table were put together to make a hearty meal.

Ghosts, queens and the flow of everyday life

Image by construction worker in the renovation of the Cairate monastery

The local Varese edition of Il Giorno, the newspaper of Milan, has reported about a ghost spotted in the old monastery of Cairate, a small town northwest of the City of Fashion. The monastery is currently under reconstruction and slated to open as one of the UNESCO-protected sites in the region, which was a historic Longobard outpost.

The ghost sighting has been captured by the cellphone of a construction worker and was of such importance that it was then written up in several local news outlets. It has also merited the official intervention of the mayor of Cairate and several local authorities, who speculated whose ghost it actually was. Most of them concluded it must be the ghost of Queen Manigonda, the Longobard foundress who built the monastery back in 737. There are also various guesses of why she still inhabits the place as a ghost, and most of them have to do with Frederick Barbarossa who spent the night there before his fateful battle of Legnano (also nearby).

This could happen only in Italy.

The village culture reports: death

Every year in mid-autumn, local galleries here invite submission of art related to the Day of the Dead. At least in Texas, where Mexican culture has become so mainstream that its symbolism is part of everyday life, this celebration is really ubiquitous.

However, there is something to be noted: said galleries feel the need to warn artists not to submit any Halloweeny content, like zombies and other gore. The Day of the Dead is nothing like Halloween, they insist to explain; it’s not about fear or disguise but about respect and connection with death.

And there is something very telling in our confusion and replacement of a day of commemoration of the dead with an (optionally scary) dress up party that Halloween has become. I agree, dress up is good and it used to have its own time for that (Carnival), but today I’d like to argue that we need more of what the Day of the Dead is: an opportunity to connect with death and our own departed to help us better make sense of their departure and our life. And I believe that village culture does that very well.

The perfect gift for Christmas (and other holidays)

When I was growing up, gifts were few and far between. This probably contributed to their high appreciation index rating. We loved looking at them for a while before actually taking them out of the box and trying them out. We built stories and even myths about their future role in our lives. In sum, we absolutely cherished them.

But with the material deluge we as society have experienced in recent decades, the value of gifts has somehow depreciated. How can they ever be special if we can afford to buy the very same things during the whole year, by whim or necessity? We have more things, we obtain them according to no specific season, we get them ourselves. So in this context, how do you make a gift special at all?

Here are the choices for gift-givers to make their gift stands out as special, cherished and one that affirms the relationship between giver and recipient. And is also easy on the environment.

Good causes, good will, good work. And volunteering

Volunteering may be the new black – ever since President Obama started the “Renew America Together” volunteering promotion program in 2009. But somehow the issue has faded away. I just learned that volunteer turnover is many, many times higher than regular paid worker turnover. You’d think that people who do something for free, just because they believe in it, would be more motivated to stick around than if they are paid to do it. But in reality the burnout is much more severe and the reason for that is conceptual.  In brief, many organizations misunderstand the role of their volunteers and treat them the wrong way.

Since I’ve been involved in many projects made possible only through the help of people who have generously donated their time and skill, in many capacities and different sides, here’s what I think most organizations misunderstand – and lose volunteers’ good will.

Planning in a culture clash

I am convinced that one of the most frustrating culture-clash experiences are cross-cultural planning experiences. I bet most people have had the chance to plan something together with someone from another culture and have ascertained how the differing concepts of time and negotiation strategies make it impossible to take joint steps together. The divergent worldviews result in mismatched philosophies of prediction of future, deliberately arranged events. A nightmare.

Planning is a quintessential human behavior. True, animals also take purposeful actions and so maybe plan for things to happen. But planning is mental enmeshing – you expect certain things to happen based on your own actions as well as other people’s presumed cooperation. And that’s where it gets tricky.

Codex Calixtinus, or the tourist guide for pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela

Codex Calixtinus, the precious 12th century guide for pilgrims heading towards Santiago de Compostela,  was stolen yesterday from the Cathedral of that Spanish town. Since Santiago (Saint James) had a very influential cult in the Middle Ages, his alleged tomb in Compostela became an extremely popular pilgrimage site for people from all over Europe – in fact, the third most important one after Jerusalem and Rome. Streams of devout people came walking (there were no cars or bikes back then!) the Way of Saint James  all the way from France, Italy, Poland,  Hungary to ask the Saint for a favor or as a penance. Quite a feat.