My Sunday Morning - Race Day



Domenica, 27 Novembre, 2011

It was a beautifully crisp, clear morning today for the Firenze Marathon.

The starting line was only 2 blocks from the apartment, and since Italians are NOT morning people, there were 7 or 8 thousand runners but few spectators. The dog below seemed a bit bored by it all.



The Race Route

The route through the city was very scenic - naturally.



On the left - the Bapistry; on the right - The Duomo



Via Calzaiuoli, Firenze

I only had to go to my window to see everyone running by.



view from my apartment window

The finish line was at Piazza Santa Croce, and sure enough, two-plus hours later, the first runners were approaching the finish line – I saw them scoot by in front of the Duomo.

Piazza Santa Croce - the finish line: what's a Florentine event
without some period costumes and a marching band!

I couldn’t help but think of my work colleagues Janice and Kelley and our 5K Your Way event, which allows people to do the Toronto Marathons and fundraise for the PMH Foundation. Interestingly, all the charities associated with the Firenze Marathon were from the UK. Hummm…..Kelly – maybe there’s an opportunity here!

Mio Compleanno

Tonight, my class celebrate my birthday (yesterday), and that of my classmate Tatiana (from Moscow) whose birthday is tomorrow (Friday). We went to a fairly expensive restaurant (Golden View) which overlooks the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio - a resto I've been wanting to visit, but needed an occasion to do so.  Our birthdays seemed the right occasion. There were 9 of us for dinner, and it was just delightful.

The Group - that's Maria on the right - she's also from Moscow
and studying art in Firenze for 2 weeks

Francesca - my teacher

William - from Brazil

Tatiana - the other birthday gril!

Jose and Nilza - also from Brazil, they joined the class this week

Fancesca and Mikhail (sp) from Israel - Mikhail's in another class.

Mikhail and Pablo who's from Mexico

A fun night was had by all. Sorry the pictures are a bit blurry, but I didn't want to use my flash. Oh, and there was a group of about 20 American's in the resto celebrating American Thanksgiving - parents and their kids who are attending Duke University (which obviously has a satelite program here). Try explaining the origins of the holiday, in Italian, to an Italian class - molto difficile!

Divine Inspiration



Dante Alighieri - 22 Novembre 2011

Each morning, I swing by Piazza Santa Croce – the square in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce (which is one block from school) and I have a few words with Dante Alighieri. The statue of Dante is probably 20 feet tall, and he’s very stern and earnest looking. Dante is one of the fathers of the early Renaissance so I think it’s only appropriate that I seek guidance from him. Learning a second language is very challenging for me, and each morning I ask Dante for some help – for some Divine Inspiration – to make my chosen second language feel a little easier and to make it come to me a little bit more naturally. Dante hasn’t delivered yet, but it’s only been 7 days. Best of all, I’m enjoying his company even if it’s only for a moment or two.


Santa Croce at Night, 22 Novembre 2011 - Dante's on the left.

Going to School - Again

So, I put my career and job on hold and hop on plane and fly 3,500 miles or however many miles it is from home to set up my life in Firenze in bella Italia for nine months and so far so good.

I run around the first week pinching myself  because I really can’t believe I’m on sabbatical and I’m here in Firenze and then I spend a great weekend in Roma with Anna doing all sorts of things and then I come back “home” and continue distressing and setting things up and going to the gym and going shopping what seems like every day because it took me awhile to figure out that my local grocery store has only five baskets so you can only buy what you can carry from the aisle to the checkout counter and that just seems to keep you going to the store more often but otherwise I’m having a mini vacation because I know school is going to start soon and learning the language is one of my goals for my sabbatical.

Yesterday I get up at 7:15am because I wasn’t not sure how long it’s going to take me to get ready and out the door and walk to school but I shower and I wear a nice sweater and I go to my local “bar” for a cappuccino on the way to school because that’s what almost every Italian has in the morning and I get to school knowing that the very first thing they’re going to do is give me a test to see how much Italian I know and the last time I took a formal test was to get my fundraising certification and before that it was a test at this very same language school when I was over here in 2001 so I knew what to expect.

There are easily a dozen people taking the entrance exam and we are given an hour to complete as much as of it we can and so we start and the first parts are pretty easy and I’m feeling pretty good about things and then it gets more difficult and like every student everywhere I start guessing at the answers and that just gets me into trouble and then there are things that I just didn’t know or couldn’t remember so they were just left blank and then the hour is up and I’m feeling like a stupid idiot that I didn’t spend all of the last week reviewing what I had studied before. 

Then Lapo which is an Italian short-form for the name Jacob sits down and goes through each one of our tests in front of everybody and we have the verbal portion of our assessment and this is where I start to feel like a complete idiot because about 7 of the 12 people who took the test have Spanish as a first or second language and Italian and Spanish are pretty similar and they’re having these completely animated conversations in fluent Italian and I’m sitting there with poor Tatiana from Moscow thinking to myself how come these people want to study Italian they already know the freaking language but I put those thoughts aside and I have my verbal test with Lapo and then this part ends and we have a 20 minute break so I go out for another cappuccino and then I come back and I’m put into an existing class which Lapo thinks matches how much Italian I know already.

Well Tatiana from Moscow joins me in the class and there is already another Tatiana from Russia in this class so our teacher Francesca quickly numbers them Tatiana uno and Tatiana due and since we are joining a class that is already in progress and we know nobody there Tatiana and I introduce ourselves and the other students introduce themselves and then Francesca continues where she left off before the break.

Now, at the Instituto Italiano di Cultura where I have taken many of my Italian classes the pace is fairly relaxed and in any given 10 week semester you would cover two maybe three chapters of the textbook at the most which is a lot given you’re learning many different aspects of the language all at once. The farthest I’ve ever reached in my textbook was Unit 6 which at the Instituto was the end of “Intermediate 2” which was pretty advanced for someone casually studying Italian but never seeming to use it very often.

Well the class I was thrown into was a Beginner 2 type class which was studying the imperfetto or the imperfect present tense which is a verb tense I must had studied long ago but completely forgotten about but which is incredibly useful when you’re speaking Italian every day and so I go with the flow and it seems to be a pretty easy conjugation but somewhere along the line Francesca mentions that these students have already studied i verbi reflessivi and I think to myself have I ever studied reflexive verbs?

So this verb type comes up again today in class and I think to myself that I had better learn reflexive verbs so this afternoon after school and before the gym I do my homework and then I look for information on reflexive verbs in my old textbook and there they are in Unit 9 and there is the imperfetto in Unit 7 and I think to myself WOW I don’t think I’ve ever gotten this far before so I’m going to write my friend Elin and tell her about this and have another glass of vino and go to bed and tomorrow is another day and I have fifteen and a half more weeks to figure it all out.

Mia Casa

I thought, after nearly two weeks, it was time to open the door to my apartment.  It's about 1,000 sq feet according to Francesco, the owner, so it's quite big. It faces south and west (it's a corner unit!) so I get lots of sun in the morning and early afternoon. I feel very much at home here, and as you can see, I've managed to put something of mine on every surface and in every room. Home indeed!

The Main Room

The Main Room

The Bathroom

The 2nd Bedroom

Where I Sleep

The Kitchen

The Hallway

The Arno

Just because I could.....click on the picture for a larger view. Enjoy. Zak



The Arno, Looking West from Ponte Vecchio, Thursday November 10, 2011



Fiume Arno, guardando ad est, giovedi 10 novembre, 2011

The Daily Successes

Navigating daily life in a new city, country, and language often has its challenges and rewards. After one week, I can comfortably buy groceries, order a caffe e brioche at a bar, order food in a restaurant, and buy the necessities of life – like slippers, for example (which needed to be exchanged for a different size), socks (I ran out!), a scratch pad, and lots of little things for the apartment.  Today, I did laundry! Simple, right? I dried my clothes at a self-serve laundromat.  My apartment doesn’t have a dryer and well, for €3, it was worth having access to a dryer as it would probably take 5 days for my clothes to dry naturally! I also found the local dry cleaner, visited the two local palestre (gyms), and bought a 9-month membership at Ricciardi – a 5 minute walk from home.

My original plan was to start school today, but I was finding it time consuming getting settled in, understanding the daily rhythm of Italian life, changing my schedule (eating lunch at 13:30, dinner at 20:00, trying to stay up until midnight, getting up at 7:30!) and decompressing after 25 years of full-time work.  So, I registered for school last week but with a start date of lunedi 14 Novembre. It was a wise decision, so thank you Marie for your generous counsel. Tomorrow will be a trial run of a “new normal” day with 4 hours in the morning dedicated to self-study, a visit to my new gym, and who knows what else. It’s all very satisfying.

A Roman Weekend



Anna S and her motorino

It was four full days before I took my first trip – a weekend in Roma to visit my friend Anna S. We met in 1982 at U of T, and have remained good friends since despite the distance and a few years where we lost touch.  

Gloria's dinner party!

Friday night I attended my first dinner party (for this trip, anyway) at Gloria’s house – the mother of Desiree, a childhood friend of Anna’s.  I think Gloria’s bathroom says everything you need to know about her, except she likes beer and not wine,  speaks English like I speak Italian, is a very gracious and generous hostess, and an all-around wonderful woman.

il bagno di Gloria

Early Saturday afternoon, we hopped on Anna’s motorino (scooter) and headed to Il Festival Internazionale Del Film di Roma, where I got a ticket to see the best picture as selected both by the Jury and the audience.  The Festival had ended on Friday so there was minimal “action” but everything was still set up, including il tappeto rosso, which was fun to walk down.  In the evening, Anna, Sonia, Agnes, Neil, Janna, and myself saw this charming Argentinian/Italian production called Un Cuento chino (A Chinese Tale). The main language was Spanish, one of the main characters spoke only Mandarin (I think), the main subtitles were in English, secondary subtitles were in Italian, and none of the Mandarin was translated.  Anna, who speaks Spanish, said she couldn’t figure out which language to follow! I felt a bit the same, switching between the English and Italian subtitles. It was a fun night out.

Festival Internazionale Del Film di Roma

When I was in Roma last year, I made a special effort to visit the newly completed (but not yet open) Museo Nazionale delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, designed by famed Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid. The MAXXI, as it is known, was the first new museo built in Roma in quite some time, so there was lots of buzz about it, the architect, the building, and what it was going to mean for the contemporary art scene in Roma and Italy.  The MAXXI was not far from il festival cinema, so we went. 

Inside the MAXXI

From the outside, it’s nothing special (at least in my humble uneducated opinion), but once inside, you see Hadid’s genius.  The main exhibit was called “Indian Highway” which presented a very interesting panorama into modern-day India and how the country’s changing as it barrels head-long into the 21^st century. It was a fascinating and stimulating 2 hours.

Life-size exhibit piece, made from small polished metal disks, from Indian Highway, MAXXI, Novembre, 2011

I’ve stayed with Anna on many occasions so I know my way around her neighbourhood quite well.  Sunday morning was beautiful, so I took myself for a walk.  At 10:00 Via del Corso (a main shopping street) was already busy with tourists and locali, the Spanish Steps were starting to fill with tour groups, but Piazza del Popolo was not crowded at all – just people enjoying the warm sunshine.  One of the local hangouts where we like to have a drink is called Ciampini, in Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, where a few tourists venture, but it’s mostly filled with locals. The people watching is fabulous!

Piazza di San Lorenzo in Lucina, Roma, 6 Novembre 2011

The afternoon was spent eating a late lunch, venturing out to find the Apple store, and driving to the stazione in the pouring rain.  It felt weird to say to Anna that I had to go home, knowing that “home” was now Firenze.  But when I got back, the city and the apartment did feel remarkably like home.

Sono arrivato a Firenze!

At the Airport - Oct 30

Before you arrive, you must first depart.

And what a departure it was – pretty much non-stop working, visiting, cleaning, and packing.   

There were a few departures of note in the last week. My colleagues at work threw me a very stylish farewell party Friday afternoon, complete with a chocolate slab cake (my favourite), Brio, homemade biscotti, Italian music and videos, and my boss brought in a giant wood-mounted poster from il Palio di Siena for decoration. I was thoroughly impressed and very happy – just the kind of send-off I wanted. To keep them top of mind for the next year, my colleagues gave me two guide books for Florence and Tuscany, handy references and night time reading to be sure.  I left the office at 6:30pm exhausted, stressed, and a bit relieved to be finished the week.

Friday night was spent with David and Geoffrey eating pizza, drinking lots of vino, and watching Funny Girl – an iconic movie one of us had not seen before. It was a late night, but oh so much fun.

Michael M.  helped moved several boxes into my locker on Saturday afternoon, but there was still time for a coffee on Church St.  Saturday night was spent at Bannock, the new O&B restaurant in the Bay on Queen St, celebrating 3 early birthdays occurring in November: mine, Buzz D’s, and David K’s.  The food was great, the vino flowed freely, and we closed the place down around 11:30pm

Sunday (Day 0) seems a bit of a blur now, but with Geoffrey’s help in the last hour, I managed to finish everything and lock the apartment door only 10 minutes past the original departure time. Left to my own devices, I think I’d still be there cleaning and packing! But we made it to the airport, said arrivederci, and I was soon on a plane to Frankfurt, Germany, then onwards to Firenze.

Once in Firenze, I found my apartment, moved in, and started setting up my life here.  I’ve been scouting the neighbourhood at every opportunity, buying things I need from the local market and supermarket, cooking my meals, and exploring everything Firenze has to offer (which is a lot!). I’m taking advantage of the superb weather to walk the streets (no, not that kind of street walking!) and absorb the language and culture.  Everything just feels right, so I guess this is where I’m meant to be.

Where I'm living in Firenze