Italy, Week 1

We arrived in Italy last Tuesday completely unscathed. We’d had some warnings about trying to enter Europe on one-way plane tickets. The airline’s check-in system did require us to talk to an employee in person, but she didn’t care that we didn’t have return tickets already booked. We flew from Austin to JFK with a relatively short layover, then from JFK to Milan Malpensa. The service on the transatlantic flight was super slow; about two hours after takeoff, I finally asked for Cora’s meal to be delivered so she could eat it and go to sleep. It was, she ate, and she slept. Maya even slept.

We arrived in Malpensa almost exactly on time. With just one phone working (one of the lessons from this week is how messed up and backwards cellphone service is in the US), we were able to connect to our friend here in Trento to let her know when we’d be arriving and we headed through immigration to get our bags and our car. Both of these were pretty easy. Our car (a Citroen Berlingo) is what I’ll call a “microvan.” It has five very spacious seats and then an enormous trunk.  Our luggage fit more easily in the Berlingo than it did in Tim’s Forester on the US side.

The car is really nice. But it’s larger than we really need. It’s also too large to fit in the garage at our apartment. This might end up being ok; the condominiums have some dedicated “free” surface parking spots, too. We haven’t tried them yet because we didn’t really learn much about them until this weekend, when we haven’t needed to pay for street parking. But from what we can gather, one needs to drive over a not insignificant curb (our car can handle this), and then, if the easy spots are unluckily taken, one has to maneuver around a pedestrian walkway and some concrete planters. I’m not sure about this. It’s a manual transmission, and I’m proud to say that neither of us has killed it yet. (This is a small lie; I did kill it last night just as I pulled in to the parking spot at the apartment. However, I didn’t have to turn it back on, so this doesn’t count, right?)

Anyway, after collecting our car, we drove from Milan to Trento (about three hours, with stops) without much trouble. Both of the girls slept, and Tim and I both managed not to. We arrived at our apartment, where our friend Amy met us. She had already collected the keys for us and chatted with the owner, so she knew all of the details about the place, trash, etc. The apartment is nothing short of fantastic. We have two balconies, one at either end of the apartment. The living room/kitchen balcony opens up onto a shared rooftop deck. The girls share a very spacious room, and even with slightly different bedtimes this hasn’t been anything of a problem yet. In fact, I think they kind of like it. Amy and her family also loaned us a significant amount of toys, games, and books, so it was easy to quickly settle in. If you’ve been paying attention to international weather, it’s REALLY hot here. Like 39 degrees Celsius. It probably goes without saying that our apartment does not have air conditioning. Also, fans seem to be sold out everywhere in the vicinity, including on Amazon. With the two balconies, the apartment does get a cross breeze sometimes. The heat seems to have broken a bit over the weekend.

For the rest of this week, we’ve been trying to take care of some of the things that are necessary for us to be able to stay. For instance, we’ve now got Italian cell phones. (8 euros each per month for the talking, texting, and data we’ll need… which is 4GB of data and plenty of texting and talking.) We’ve put the utilities for our apartment in our name. I’ve opened a bank account. We’ve started the process to get Internet in our apartment. And so on. All of this was made so much easier by our friend Amy holding our hands and walking us through it. She’s not only done most of these things herself, she also speaks WAY better Italian than we do. We’ve had one hiccup so far. We went to register Maya for school (Amy was told to come to the secretary of the school during the summer hours, and to bring Maya’s parents after we arrived). However, they didn’t want to register her for school. It has nothing to do with Maya in particular, but they’ve had “many requests” so they aren’t assigning any of the spots to any of the students until the end of August. Maya will get a spot in some school. We hope that Maya will get a spot in the school we’re interested in (it’s really close, her friend Milena already goes to school there, and they already have some English instruction in the classes). We just won’t know more for another month. We did buy some basic school supplies today, and Maya was excited to pick them out. Hopefully little things like this will get her excited for school.

You might think that the above paragraph is missing any mention of the copious amounts of Italian bureaucracy that we’re almost certainly going to need to wade through. We did get codice fiscale (something like a social security number) for everyone this week. The university got one for me to process my contract; Tim apparently had already had one automatically assigned the last time we were here; the girls got new ones (they need them for school registration). Tomorrow (Monday) morning, we start with everything else. The university has an office that will help us, but the woman that speaks English was away last week.

We have managed to get in some fun. As in the girls have had gelato at least twice (maybe more; I’ve been at work some, and I don’t know what happens when I’m there). Tim has been vegetable shopping (yes, this falls under the category of “fun”). Yesterday we spent the day at the lake in Levico with our friends Amy, Milena (age 6.9), and Viviana (age 2.5).  It was a little disappointing that it wasn’t as hot yesterday, but it was still a very relaxing and refreshing day.

Up for the coming week: that Italian bureaucracy I was speaking about above, plus summer camp for Maya (“Asilo nel bosco” … “bosco” means forest), and work for me.