Como Revisited

Halloween was Tuesday, but there’s not much going on here for Halloween. I took the #823 bus to Colognio Nord and then the green metro line down to the Romolo stop in Milan to meet Tatsuo at a bar near the language school. When we reconvened with some of the others from our class last week at a “school function” they told us there would be a costume party here. I bought a pair of ugly looking teeth last minute just to have something. But this proved to be a bad choice because I was unable to speak intelligibly with this appendage, and didn’t end up wearing them much. We did the usual aperitivo routine for 5 euros and hung out with the other students.


At a certain point we were called in for the judging of the costumes. Somebody did some sort of a dance to thriller, and then they awarded 1 week of Italian lessons to the best-dressed student. I was starting to think about leaving, but met an American from Michigan and her boyfriend from Milan –an interesting duo!

I’m becoming more eager to befriend English-speaking people because we can get to know each other quicker and I’m a little weary of communication-restricted relations that are more typical of my Italian companions. I still have more to learn before I can really express myself in Italian, though I realize there is a contradiction within this approach in that I will never reach high level communication without practicing more with italain-speaking people, meanwhile it’s harder to get to know people without using some English. The ideal cases are my bilingual friends: Umberto, Verena, Paddy, and Maddy. However, there’s also some guys from the office that I see often enough that I think I’m getting to know fairly well.

So I was getting ready to leave head for the station to catch the last train to Monza at 12:30, but some of the guys from the school convinced me to stay. I actually wanted to stay later, but was a little concerned what to do if they didn’t have the endurance to stay out until the first trains of the morning around 5. However, they assured me that they wouldn’t wimp out, so I decided to stay.

I spent some more time talking to Megan and Stefano before we went to join the others from the school at another bar in the Navigli. Stefano was encouraging me to talk to other girls in the bar, so me and another guy picked out someone to try to meet. I think I understood about 6% of the conversation before giving up and gong back to people watching while the other guy continued to hit on this girl. Eventually they sat down together and I went back to Megan and Stefano. Then it was time to head to another place called Plastic. Megan and Stefano made the right choice in bailing out because there was a mob of people waiting to get in, and we waited outside for quite a while before deciding to go looking for something to eat. I exchanged some stories with 2 Brazilians that were with us, and before I knew it, it was time to get the 6:10 train back to Monza.

Nov 1 is a public holiday in Italy. I woke at noon -somewhat rested after the escapades of the night before. I had planned a lunch/dinner with the neighbors today. We had homemade gnocchi with tomato sauce and fresh ground Parmesan cheese. The secondo piatto era un carne alla California. This was a meat with an interesting lemon-onion glaze. Dessert was an apple cake, and coffee (of course). We talked about a number of things; the most interesting of which were Dante’s recollection of the Americans liberating Napoli in WWII. They also showed me a family artifact: a dictionary printed in 1877!

I had debated going to work Thursday and Friday because a number of people were taking off the first or second half of the week. Had I know sooner, I might have planned a trip to England, Spain, or Rome. When I awoke Thursday and saw it was arguably the most beautiful day I’ve seen in Italy I decided it would be a shame to spend it sitting in our gloomy office. I was telling Christine the other day that the lights bother some of the people sitting around me. Common guys…! Anyway, I decided to go to Como.

I wasted no time (except for a half hour waiting on a late train) to go to the outlooks over the lake in Brunate where the view was as spectacular as I had hoped. This turned out to be another day where I’d shoot 100+ photos hoping to get a couple of good ones. The challenge today was balancing blue sky with terrestrial resolution. It seems my camera will wash out the sky if the lighting is set for the land, or darken the land if the sky is in focus. I would like to know if this is a phenomenon unique to my camera, or if a better camera might be able to capture both bright and darker components of a scene. After a pannini for lunch, I had to decide if I would take a boat up the lake, or go somewhere else. Since it was pretty cold on the water I opted to head for the castle of San Vigilio above Bergamo to see what else I might see there on a really clear day. I was less impressed with this view, though I liked some piles of fallen leaves that had accumulated under the trees on top of the hill.

Fall is definitely here, and winter does not seem far off. I saw a forecast for snow in the Alps on Sunday, and many of our trees have already lost most of their leaves.