Labyrinths, 20 Years, and Code-Switching – aka “The Life of Boh” Part One

“Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.” ((I’ve had Sound of Music bits stuck in my head for the last few days, and it seemed a fitting quote.)) Last week began in a rather overwhelming fashion, as I think I’ve mentioned before. Orientation began with meeting in front of one university building on Savonarola, being hustled to a copisteria (copy machines, printers, and stationary supplies), hustled back to the university center, quickly marching through the halls, being told oh, here’s your classroom for your class that starts tomorrow (“wait, what?!”), and then walking briskly over to the Faculty of Sciences, (or at least some of them) maybe 15-20 minutes away and being led through yet another confusing building, sat down, and talked at in the most concentrated Italian I’d heard since May, and then let loose and told to find our way back there in the afternoon for more information. There were definitely a number of moments where I was silently going AAAH. What am I doing in Italy? I don’t know Italian! Too much information! Nonsensical university layout and system! AAAH. I think my wide eyes betrayed me.

It didn’t really help my comfort zone that at one point, Rosa Cuda, the director of the Middlebury Italy School (but actually based in Florence), who was doing all this touring and talking, kind of muttered a “Welcome to the Labyrinth!” At the time, we were being led through the buildings on via Savonarola, whose corridors almost squiggle, turning back on themselves over and over again in order to fit as many rooms with windows into a small piece of old city block. The other building is probably actually worse, although with a very different layout. Between the buildings, through which I thankfully found my way later on with the help of others in the group, and the very different, decentralized but very administrated university structure, the rules and advice and legal/financial obligations and etiquette rules and expectations of classes and activities and so-much-information, and all in Italian that I was honestly rather intimidated (note: the information-ing took most of the week). The buildings just felt like a fitting metaphor for the whole system and the cultural differences with which we would have to deal in the very immediate future. Labyrinths, indeed. I couldn’t help but think of the 80’s movie of the same name, and tried to focus on the more go-with-the-flow, don’t-just-take-things-for-granted points of the movie – which actually helped somewhat.

One of the things that helped the most turned out to be … going on more long walks! I think this is going to be a regular habit, and probably a healthy one at that. That Monday, I probably walked for at least 4 hours, just processing not only what we had been orientated about that morning, but also the start of school again (felt like being a freshman, but weirder because I'm in Italy!) – and the fact that it was my 20th birthday. The lattermost fact of which I actually had mostly forgotten about until my parents started singing me happy birthday on the webcam the night before. ^__^ Also, I managed to do a webcam call with the lovely folks at Xenia for the first Sunday Night Dinner of the year, and they also sang to me and semi-tossed the camera around to different people to say hi for a while – which was certainly very happy to get to do. Later on, I somehow got an enormous amount of messages from people, and saw the next day that a number of friends, organized by the lovely Hannah R., made a 15 minute video for me as a gift from far away, which was absolutely fantastic to watch, and succeeded in making me quite happy for several days after. (Thanks again, everyone).

Leah and I had an excellent dinner together the following day, but the actual day of my birthday turned out to be pretty quiet, besides the overload of orientation – walk alone, good dinner alone, evening alone. It was actually somewhat pleasant to do so. I spent most of the walk going around the Wall in the park. The Wall itself is very old, built in sections from I believe the 1300s to the 1700s, or something like that. It has fallen apart in many ways by now, with the outer surfaces crumbling and undulating irregularly along the length. The park outside is a little piece of the endless brown-green flats of this part of the country, slipped between the old city and the more modernized malls, industry and highways of the outskirts. Tall, slender, cylindrical trees grow in neat occasional rows, spiking up out of the flat land. This place feels empty in some ways, marked only by variations in the old ruins, by the tall trees, or by the intermittent proximity of the highways. But at the same time, the calm feeling of this simple space, punctuated with repetition (arches in the wall, the trees, the birds), was excellent for thinking - particularly so for thoughts of how most things must and do change, but some fundamental aspects of life can remain. I like the Wall for this reason, among others.

I’m learning to accept changes and let things go much better than I could when younger, but am also appreciative of the pieces of my life that don’t have to fade away and be forgotten just because I’m growing up or because where I am and relationships and situations have changed or because I’m bad at keeping in touch with people from far away. Good things to be thinking about at the end of my first two decades of life, the end of this stressful summer, and the beginning of this totally new experience here in Italy.

(Boh.)

So, thinking about those things, having some good conversations and exchanges with friends and family, and very quickly recovering some of my Italian skills ending up making the week go pretty well in total. Being talked at or with in Italian for much of last week really helped me remember a lot, thank God, and sometimes I can hold decently-paced, communicative exchanges. But.

((WARNING: language commentary ahead, I apologize if you don’t understand to what I refer.)) I’m having much more trouble with switching languages than I have ever had before, which I honestly think has to do with the fact that I now have English (a germanic/semi-romance language), French and Italian (two romance languages), Japanese (an isolate) and Arabic (a semitic) all floating around in there, from strong-intermediate to advanced to fluent levels. It had been relatively pretty easy to switch between English and into either romance-language-mood or Japanese mood, and not too difficult to go between the latter two. Switching between French and Italian in the same piece of time was sometimes very hard, but luckily the need rarely arose. However, with a fifth and very different language now in my head, I’m having some unexpected challenges. By now, I have remembered enough Italian over my Arabic to have stopped saying “la” for “no” and to stop putting “an” between primary and subordinate/infinitive verbs (like: I want to go in English, while in Arabic it would be “I want “an” I go”), among many other very interesting mixes of Arabic and Italian grammar. Those issues I expected to have, since at the cross-over point in the middle of code-switching I have in the past put, say, French or Italian words into a Japanese grammatical skeleton. Usually, though, after a few minutes I can click the gears (how it often literally feels) into whatever other language I’m trying for.

Two problems, though. Arabic was just kind of loose in my head this summer, as I didn’t ever have to really pack it up, put it in a box, put it on the shelf and open up the different boxes of Jap/French/Italian. So, while at home, it was pretty hard to gather up the Arabic pieces and be able to use Italian again. Now that I’ve done that, I’m afraid of losing the Arabic I knew, since, after all, I learned an enormous amount in only 9 weeks, and then had to quickly ignore it in order to come to Italy. And that's not to even mention my worry about losing some Japanese, as I have definitely forgotten a LOT of kanji. That should hopefully be resolvable with enough studying (if I can find enough time to do so, that is). The harder, more immediately relevant, more abstract issue at this point, is actually with English-Italian. Whenever I talk in English for a bit, or hear it, etc. it becomes waaaay harder to switch back into a decent level of Italian than it really should be. It’s as though my brain can relax into English (clearly, as a native speaker), but then has a lot of difficulty figuring out which of the other 4 grammatical codes and lists of vocabulary it needs to click into. So I swing up and down through the day between feeling confident in my Italian abilities, and like I’m back in first-year language classes. And since it’s not like I’m going to cut off all comunication with non-Italian speakers through webcam, email, blog, etc. and I can’t get Andrea (who returned yesterday) to speak mainly in Italian to me (he loves practicing English), I can’t exactly live completely in Italian. At least Leah and I most always speak in Italian, and class and the rest of my interactions are all also in language. I’m getting significantly better at the language already, or at least in comparison with my ability upon arrival, or at least when I can kick it in. But it’s still somewhat bothersome that I can’t quite conquer the daily drops in my skill level.

This also makes me think I’m crazy for planning on adding German to the mix, although I know I have to for entrance to a good graduate program. o.0 ………. And this is all a very good example of when to use …… “BOH!”

You make your choices, deal with the consequences, and move on.

I had planned on writing about several other adventures here, but it will soon be time for us to go off to the Ferrara Balloons Festival! (Us being Andrea, Leah and I, and the balloons being colorful hot-air filled ones) And so, I will just have to continue my story later on this evening, hopefully after having seen some very pretty flying machines. A presto.