Waiting for the summer to come...a reflection on the Skype exchange

photo by marirs

I would never think I would enjoy this experience so much. At the beginning I must confess that I was really nervous: my American peer and I didn’t know each other, so it was not always easy to keep the conversation going and avoid embarrassing silences! However, when I started skyping in larger groups, the conversation was livelier and more stimulating and there was a very friendly atmosphere that made me feel comfortable and at my ease. I felt free to talk about anything with my American peers. To be honest, both of us were more interested in talking about our hobbies and everyday life than about the death penalty and the problem of immigration, but even when we did so most of the times they seemed eager to cooperate and to say their opinion. One thing that surprised me was the easiness with which they expressed their political preference: in Italy this is often a “taboo” we prefer to avoid while talking with someone we don’t know, while for them it was not a problem to say that they agreed or disagreed with one candidate or the other. I also noticed that all of them knew Berlusconi, but they had no idea of who Romano Prodi is! It sounded weird to me, given that in Italy mass media usually transmit a lot of information about American politics. Evidently, in the US there is a different system of information and a different degree of knowledge about what is going on in the rest of the world.

As I already thought, I had the confirmation that life in a university campus is completely different from the kind of experiences we associate to university in Italy. First of all, for the American students it was absolutely normal to spend months far away from home to study and in this way they learn faster what being autonomous and independent means. Secondly, American universities seem to be very stimulating places to live in: they are attended by people not only from all over the United States, but from all over the world as well! In this way, I think it’s easier to broaden your horizons and to grow up without prejudices.

The exchange was also very useful from a linguistic point of view: we chose quite a difficult topic to develop, the death penalty, which compelled us to enlarge our vocabulary and to learn expressions and constructions we didn’t know before, such as to deter, death row inmate, to sentence and so on. Of course I had the chance to improve my listening and speaking skills as well and to learn to maintain my concentration focused on what was said since I was supposed to give a constant feedback to my interlocutor.
To summarize I hope to keep in touch with the American students and maybe to meet some of them when they come to Bologna next September!

Debated issues...

photo by luisa brehm

Another Skype exchange, another American partner! This week I’ve talked with Artem, with whom I’ll be working on the final project during the next month. After the usual problems with the headphones and the starting of a conference (Alessandra and Sara were supposed to talk with us as well), we decided that the topic of our research will be death penalty: it won’t be an easy issue to deal with, but I think it’s a very interesting and challenging choice. This project will hopefully help us to understand the reason why in some American States this kind of sentence is still used although the international community strongly ask for its abolition. We could also compare the American reality with the Italian judicial system. In our country death penalty was substituted long ago with the “ergastolo”, that is life imprisonment; however, the period of confinement has been recently reduced to some twenty years, a kind of punishment that a larger and larger part of Italian public opinion doesn’t consider sufficient for people guilty of heinous crimes. So, what’s the best solution? Is it something in between? We’ll see.
My group and I spent the rest of the time discussing another much debated topic: immigration. Artem comes from Ukraine, so we asked him if he feels that his everyday life is affected by his different origins. He explained to us that he doesn’t consider himself an immigrant because he’ll be staying in the USA just for four years to complete his studies and then he’ll come back home; beside, American universities are sort of “melting pots”, taking in people from all over the world, therefore in such an intercultural environment he certainly doesn’t run the risk of feeling a stranger.

However, he said that the American society tends to treat immigrants in different ways according to their nationality and – above all – to their financial conditions: as I wrote in the forum, Artem acknowledged that people coming from Europe are usually far better accepted than immigrants from Latin America and other poor countries. This happens for two main reasons. The first one is that while Europeans generally move to the USA with a legal permission to work and study in the country, Mexicans, Porto Ricans, Jamaicans, Filipinos flee from the conditions of extreme poverty they experience in their homelands, ignoring American immigration policy and crossing the frontier illegally. Secondly, Artem reminded us that people who struggle everyday to eat and survive are ready to work even for very low salaries, thus becoming way more competitive than their American colleagues. Therefore, they are accused of stealing American people’s job and for this they are excluded from social life and compelled to live in very closed congregations relegated in certain areas of the cities. We shouldn’t forget that Italian immigrants in the USA experienced this kind of “ghettoization” as well: “Little Italy” was the Italian neighbourhood in New York. By the way, Artem said that the situation has changed over the last decades and now Italians are no longer associated just with “pizza” and “mafia”, but with commitment and high quality as well thanks to their hard work. I hope that the other ethnic groups will go through the same kind of social transformation as well in the near future.

What do we know about immigration?

photo by celikins

Last year I took the exam of “Geografia della popolazione”: if you’re interested in the issue of immigration I strongly recommend it to you because it offers a complete picture of the situation in Italy and abroad. As we all know, we could talk about it for hours, listing the different points of view, but here I’ll try to be concise and to sketch just some few points of the problem.
For many years, Italy was a country of emigrants: up to the end of the second world war millions of Italians fled from the desperate economic situation of their motherland, looking for better conditions of life in Germany, France and even overseas, in the United States. Then, in 1947 the Marshall Plan was introduced in the European countries belonging to the Western sphere of influence in order to restore their struggling economies and this provided the trigger of a new virtuous circle. In the following years, Italy entered the era of the so called “economic boom”, characterized by a large expansion of job and consumptions. As a consequence, by the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, our country (that before was merely a land of passage on the way to richer European countries) became - and still is - one of the targets of a new flow of immigration. However, this more recent phenomenon is completely different from the migratory waves of the first half of the twentieth century for at least two main reasons.
1 - The new immigrants don’t come from either our European neighbours or from the poorer regions of Italy, but from North Africa, East Europe, Asia, Latin America. This people bring with them ways of living that are completely different from ours and this often leads to a “clash of cultures” that can even become very violent when fear, prejudice and intolerance merge together.
2 - While in the past there was a predominance of “pull factors”, now the “push factors” prevail. This means that when our grandparents migrated to the United States in the interwar period they managed to find a job quite easily because countries like that had already reached the full employment and need foreign workers to fill the vacancies. In this way, little by little, those people got integrated in the new society by showing the natives that they had come to work hard and nothing more. Nowadays, Italy is very far from reaching full employment and immigrants either are employed in those sectors of the market of job that Italians reject (such as cleaning, working in factory, taking care of old people…), or they fall in the net of criminality, thus contributing to increase the hate towards foreigners in our society. Most of the times, people who get ready to leave their poor village in Senegal or in Romania know very well that life won’t be easy in Italy, but they come all the same because of the “push factors” that operate in their countries: famine, diseases, lack of job, dictatorial regimes and so on.
As you can see, the situation is not easy at all. In my dreams, a fairer judicial system punishes the foreigners who are guilty of a crime and allows those who work honestly and respect the laws of our country (who are the majority, although newspapers and Tv don’t talk about them everyday) to live in peace with the rest of the community, without being afraid that their children are beaten at school by some stupid bully. Multiculturalism IS POSSIBLE, but it must be promoted by the State and by the public institutions, otherwise another wave of racism will force us all to shut ourselves into our houses for fear of the "other".
Of course, the issue is by far more complex than what I wrote…

Elections again...

photo from ilmartino

This time my Skype exchange was briefer than usual, what a pity! Leah was absent, so Sarah asked Cristina and me to contact Marigny. I was eager to know another American student, but unfortunately when we started our conversation my two mates couldn’t hear me! I spent more than half an hour trying to solve the problem and I managed to join Cristina and Marigny when there were only fifteen minutes left.
Although brief, our chat was interesting all the same. The main issue was political elections again: we explained Marigny that in Italy there is a very large number of parties and each of them has its own candidate to premiership; however, only the Popolo delle libertà and the Partito Democratico seem to have a concrete chance to win right now because they form a coalition with other political groups and they have a nation-wide net of offices and groups of support that let people know their programmes. By the way, vote wasting is a constant issue in Italy: the main parties generally fail to receive a high percentage of votes because people have the possibility to choose among many (maybe too many…) other possibilities, therefore the winner cannot count on a solid majority in the Camera and the Senato. This, in turn, means that whatever faction is elected, it will find many difficulties in ruling the country and passing new bills because the Government’s decisions could be easily rejected by the two legislative organs.
As I wrote in the Wiki, we also talked about how people decide who to vote: in America, as well as in Italy, many electors don't even know the programmes of their candidates because they are too difficult to understand; they choose on the basis of either the political preference of their family, or the charisma of this or that politician, or the possibility to identify themselves with his/her life, personality and aims. For example, as Leah had already told me, it seems that Obama is more charismatic than Hillary and his successful career let black people hope that they too can defeat racism and discrimination and get the position they deserve in the society. In the same way, in our country people who have started an activity on their own feel to be better represented by Berlusconi, who followed a path which was similar to theirs; however, the other side of the electorate thinks that he’s too ironic and self-confident and prefer to choose someone more reliable and down-to-earth.
I also told the girls that a couple of days ago I watched the ad of the Partito Socialista, which alludes to the fact that Jesus was a socialist as well. I’m not judging the political contents of this party, but I think that mixing politics and religions is quite anachronistic nowadays…

Well, just a handful of hours and we will know the results…

Final paper.... :-S

Oh my goodness, the time has come to start thinking about another paper and it seems yesterday that I submitted the first one!!! This time our paper won't be a reflection on what we've done so far, but a comparison between American and Italian way of living. What aspect of this two cultures am I more interested in? Although it may seem quite banal, I would say education: last semester's exchange with American students from Albany and the chat with Chiara Olivi confirmed me that the whole American educational system is very different from the Italian one and it might be interesting to descover the way in which a different school path influences the preparation and the cultural awareness of the students in the two countries. Are American and Italian students equally competitive in the world of work or are the ones more prepared and successful than the others? Are there some elements that Italy could "copy" from the American system and viceversa? I'll start thinking about it...

Chatting, laughing, discussing

Last week I missed the Skype exchange because I had to take an exam, so this time I was eager to talk with Leah again! My friend Marta joined us as well: she is in the group that has been doing an exchange with Polish students from Poznan, but since many of my classmates were absent last Wednesday she offered to help us.
At the beginning we had some problems with the programme: Marta seemed not to be able to join the conversation and when she finally did I couldn’t hear her and Leah any longer! What a mess!!! Thanks to Sarah’s help, at last we managed to start our chat, which was even more pleasant than the first one: Marta and Leah introduced themselves to each other and then we talked about our Easter holidays and Leah’s spring break. We found out that Marta travelled to America a couple of weeks ago and visited New York and Philadelphia. This was a useful springboard to begin a discussion on national stereotypes that basically confirmed what had already emerged from the Cultura questionnaire: we said that when we think about the United States images of endless, wide roads, huge skyscrapers and beautiful top models immediately come to our minds; Leah, on the other hand, usually associates our country with breathtaking landscapes, Milan fashion shows and food! We ended up by comparing our alimentary habits: what we eat for breakfast; if we usually eat out or at home; whether in the USA people who are allergic to gluten can count on the State paying for the gluten-free products they need (like in Italy); if the general assumption that Americans only eat junk food while Italians stuff them with tons of pizza and spaghetti everyday is well-founded or not…
We would have gone on for hours if Leah hadn’t remembered us that the topic of our conversation was supposed to be politics! She completely wrongfooted us with a very simple question: “Girls, could you please explain me the political situation of your country?” Oh, my gosh!!! Mart and I look at each other, speechless: where could we start from? First of all, we tried to explain that Romano Prodi’s government collapsed because it failed to obtain the trust by both the Camera and the Senato and this opened the way to a new electoral campaign. Leah asked us what we knew about Berlusconi (Sarah was right, he is famous all over the world!) and we gave a very neutral answer in order not to influence her opinion: we said that he is a clever self-made man, who managed to become a very successful executive and then to enter politics; many people appreciate this qualities of his, but others think that he hasn’t always been completely honest and that he must have many skeletons in his cupboard. We also added, however, that this time making up our minds and decide who to vote for will be very hard: left wing and right wing governments continue to succeed each other, but none of them seems to be able to effect important changes in the situation of our country and therefore people is very disillusioned by politics.
Leah is going to vote as well (and for the first time in her life!). She was very critical about the usefulness of the media struggle between Hillary and Obhama: she explained us that while at the beginning the two leaders’ supporters respected each other recognizing that they were all on the same side, now each faction overtly hates the other and it is entirely possible that in November the supporters of the loser will prefer to vote for Mc Cain rather than giving their vote to the winner. America has its own problems as well, therefore!
As I said, the chat was really amusing and involving: in three it was easier to keep the conversation going and to confront our different points of view, so I hope to have another Italian “Skype-mate” the next time as well!

photos from flickr

Happy Easter to all of you!

Beyond television

image from notna

This week our American partners are enjoying their spring-break so there was no Skype exchange last Wednesday :( By the way, we can use the time at our disposal to discuss on the wiki and to find an interesting question about America and the way of living of its inhabitants. It seems a very easy task, but I'm pretty confused: there is so much I would like to know about a country that I started dreaming of when I was just a child and watched Superman’s unbelievable adventures on the TV. Yes, the TV. In spite of the coming of the Internet, a very powerful technology that has revolutionized the whole concept of “communication” by providing a way to know everything happening in the world, I think that television still remains the most influential of all the tools of knowledge. Why? Because it is something that everybody can use easily, whenever they want, without the need to read the directions; something that posses an infinite range of strategies to let a message pass and spread; most of all, something that has become part of our own culture and has accompanied us everyday since we were babies. For those of us who don’t have the chance to spend part of their time travelling around the world, television is also their eye on reality: using a remote control, you can dive in the depth of the ocean to discover beautiful submarine landscape and just a moment later you are walking in a fashion house in Los Angeles, wondering whether Brooke and Ridge will get married for the third time or not. TV series and films offer us portrays of American life, but is this reality? Are American men as lazy and slovenly as Homer Simpson? Are all Californian girls blonde, rich and spoilt? Is life in a university campus all about parties, brotherhoods and initiation rites? I don’t think so, yet I have to recognize that my idea of America is partially influenced by the stereotypes I learn from television. Reading my friends’ answers to the questionnaires on the Cultura website, I could observe that many of them share the same idea of what life is like in the USA and this is another proof of the way in which TV programmes are able to handle our opinions and expectations about the other. Therefore, I think it could be interesting to ask Dickinson students if they watch the same programmes and if TV really reflects their own life. As one of the members of my group pointed out, it would be interesting to know if shows and films influence the way in which Americans view Italians as well and, if so, what aspects of Italian culture are emphasized. I’m sure that both of us, our American colleagues and we Italian students, would discover to look at each other through glasses made of prejudices and commonplaces that this exchange can help us to remove. The meeting with Chiara Olivi is a clear example of what I’m talking about: in my opinion, she’s a very nice and outgoing girl, devoted to her studies and eager to know everything she can about the world, just like anyone of us. We have to abandon old preconceptions and be ready to recognize that reality has many more shades and facets than what TV let us perceive.

It was breathtaking but...I want to do it again!!!!

images by longdemon_vr

Here I am, the day after…Well, honestly, guys, I was afraid I would have not survived to tell it anybody, but I did and now I want to say that the first Skype exchange was absolutely AMAZING!!! My hands still shake if I think of it!
Let’s start from the beginning. Last week Sarah asked us if we preferred to participate to either an exchange with American students from Dickinson or a similar project with students living in Poland. In the first case, we were supposed to use Skype to communicate in real time with our partners for an hour or so; given that they have been studying Italian for a couple of years, we would have to speak both English and Italian during the conversation, as if it was a sort of tandem learning. In the second case, the two groups would communicate by writing their comments on a wiki and a forum, using English as Lingua Franca to compare Italian and Polish culture with the Anglo-Saxon culture. I was torn between the two opportunities: they were both very interesting, but the second one suited better my timetable…Most of all, I was afraid I was not up to the task of chatting with an American girl or boy for so long! I always get nervous when I have to speak English, I try to smooth my pronunciation and I forget what I wanted to say and vice versa. “I'll be so tense and worried”, I thought while I was trying to decide, “that I won’t be able to open my mouth and say a word!!!” Then I remember one of the complaints that I wrote in my mid-term paper: “I never have the chance to speak English and I feel that my oral skills are not improving”. I had no excuse: the opportunity that I was looking for was right there in front of me, I just needed to raise my hand to grab it and so…I did it!

Last Wednesday I talked with Leah Barreras and it was really thrilling! After introducing ourselves, we started talking about everything that came to our minds: Leah is nineteen, she moved from New Mexico to Pennsylvania to study History at the University of Dickinson and next year she’s going to come to Italy, in Bologna, to improve her knowledge of Italian. I tried to give her a description of our course, the subjects we study, my plans for the next future…So, without even realizing it, I was speaking English! It was unbelievable! And Leah seemed to understand what I was trying to say (even more unbelievable!) We also talked about the education system in our countries and our experiences at university: she was astonished when I told her that some of our courses are attended by hundreds of students and that in the same day we have to move around Padua to reach the place in which the lesson is held! Things seem to be more organized in America, according to Leah’s words: young people have to write an essay and an application form to get into university, classes are very small, students have free and easy access to the Internet and can often rely on the economic support of the State to finance their studies. The conversation was becoming fascinating and I felt sorry when we had to quit because the time was over!

I read that the topic of our next chat will be the comparison between Italian and American elections, very challenging! I hope I have the vocabulary necessary to say something sensible!

A baby-woman

photo by birthday24

I'm a little bit late but it doesn't matter, I just want to write few lines to say that I'm now 24! Yes, last Sunday I celebrated my birthday! The party was great, but I feel a little bit weird: if I think of me now, I've got the impression that I'm not so different from the young girl who attended high school five long years ago, with her pen-case full of colorful pencils to write her thoughts in her friends' diaries. I'm still eager to be thoughtless and spend a wonderful time with my friends, talking and laughing and screaming and playing...Then I try to look better and everything is clearer: although I often don't realize it, I've grown up and I'm no longer the same. I'm more mature and reflexive, I think about my future and I rely more and more on myself to overcome the little obstacles of my everyday life.

So, I'm almost a woman, but, as you can read in the photo I chose, I don't forget the naive and crazy part of me. It is still a fundamental part of my personality and, who knows, maybe I will be a joker even in my eighties!!!

Freerice: an ambitious goal

all pictures by Google images

Are you looking for an original way to assess the wideness of your vocabulary? And are you interested in helping poor people who have to fight against famine day after day? Strange but true, now you can combine this two interests of yours just with a click!!! Surfing the Net I ran into a very interesting website called FreeRice: it is a sort of quiz, in which you can choose among four options the correct definition of the word you read on the screen, but each time you give the right answer you donate a handful of grains of rice to the people living in the developing countries. I think it's a wonderful idea!!! I was afraid that it could be the umpteenth fraud, so I visited the website carefully and I discovered that this game is part of the United Nations World Food Program. FreeRice was launched just few months ago, in October 2007, but since then almost 20 billions of grains have already been donated to feed people from Bangladesh, Myanmar, Cambodia, Uganda and many other countries in which hunger is still a major problem. Please, take a moment to watch this video and understand the importance of this project!

Here are the answers to some of the questions you may have about FreeRice taken directly for the website:
"If FreeRice has the rice to give, why not give it all away right now?
FreeRice is not sitting on a pile of rice―you are earning it 20 grains at a time. Here is how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.
Does FreeRice make any money from this?
No, it does not. FreeRice runs the site at no profit.
Who distributes the donated rice?
The rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The World Food Program is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good. Wherever possible, the World Food Program buys food locally to support local farmers and the local economy.

Will the rice I donate make a difference?
The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it. According to the United Nations, about 25,000 people die each day from hunger or hunger-related causes, most of them children. To a mother or father watching a loved child die in their arms from hunger, the rice you donate is more precious than anything in the world."

And don't forget that learning new vocabulary can have inimaginable benefits for us who are supposed to use languages for our job as well!!! So what can I say? Have fun saving people, but watch out: words are not so easy as you may think...:-D

Exams scare me!

picture by Google images

I chose this picture because I found it quite realistic and perfectly suitable to this period of the year, don't you think so? I apologize for having abandoned my beloved blog for a while, but exams have started and the time to devote to this pleasant activity is not much... By the way, this morning I have taken the exam of "Letteratura inglese contemporanea": the program of the course was really interesting and dealt with the literature produced in English language by black people living in the former colonies of the British empire. The exam was oral, so it was a good opportunity to practice my oral skills once again - and it's never enough!!! I was SOOOOO NERVOUS, guys, you can't imagine! I was literally trembling when the teacher asked me the first question, but, luckily, I knew the answer: the more I talked, the more my self-confidence increased and at last I passed the exam! I'm very happy right now, but I know that there are still many other tests to come for all of us, so...broke our legs, guys!!!

It's ice skating time!

photo by Goolge images

Guess who has brand new ice skates???? Yes, it's me! The course has just started and I decided to attend it again to learn something more about this fascinating sport (and to show off when I go skating with my friends on the weekends!!! ;-] ). The teachers suggested that it was time for us to wear something more similar to real skates than the old "ski boot-like" skates that you can borrow at the ice rink, so now you can see me dancing on ice as I was fleet-footed! Of course, my style has immediately improved... If you want to have just an idea of what I can do now, have a look at this video...

video from youtube

Well, I hope you didn't believe a single word of what I said!!! The new ice skates hurt really bad! I know that I have to use them as much as I can so that the leather will soften a little bit and it will fit the form of my feet, but in the meanwhile the result is more or less this....

photo by protoflux

Ooooooooohhhh, the snow!

Video from YouTube

At last it is snowing!!! So let's sing with Frank Sinatra!!!

Let It Snow

Oh the weather outside is frightful,

But the fire is so delightful,

And since we've no place to go,

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.

It doesn't show signs of stopping,

And I've bought some corn for popping,

The lights are turned way down low,

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.

When we finally kiss goodnight,

How I'll hate going out in the storm.

But if you'll really hold me tight,

All the way home I'll be warm.

The fire is slowly dying,

And, my dear, we're still good-bying,

But as long as you love me so,

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.

All the best, folks!!

image from Virgilio Images