Homeless Part 1

Life is all about lessons. Whenever I’m faced with some hardship (but please, what do I really know of hardship, I have my health, my family, my friends, a little money, work, opportunities and choices) I try to focus on learning from the process. Our temporary state of homelessness has accentuated a number of personal characteristics, in both Gigi and I, and I’m sure that this is part of the lesson I’m supposed to learn.

As I get older I find that my nesting instincts are getting increasingly stronger. Both Martha Stewart and my mother assure me that it’s perfectly natural, especially in this world of terrorism, heightened security and civic unease.

The thing is that when we choose to travel and live out of a backpack, exploring and sleeping somewhere different every night I am quite prepared for this state of constant change and impermanence.

However, here in Naples, living a (somewhat) regular lifestyle, with routine and a level of (semi) permanence I have found it increasingly stressful and disconcerting to lack the certainty of knowing where I’ll be sleeping, which route to take to get to school and where to shop for dinner supplies. Naples is a city where people, generally, set up home and stay there for generations. If you can control your living environment, create a safe haven and a place of continuity and certainties then you are in a much better position to deal with the chaos that assaults you once you step out of your front door.

My anxiety levels have been up. My students are commenting on it. It’s showing in the way Gigi and I are relating to each other, and I feel like I’ve aged this month. Any nesting instincts have been suppressed this month, although I have experienced some leakage with my laundry obsession and cooking dinners for the friends that have kindly had us stay.

This period of being ‘in-between’ homes has also revealed some surprises from our friends. The biggest surprise though is to have discovered that I really do – finally – have some genuine friends in Naples. We spent two weeks invading Dana’s room, constantly concerned that we were creating havoc. Dana was away for the first week, but she lives in an apartment with three other women, two of them Italians. To Gigi’s delight he discovered two interesting women, Paola and Lina, quickly striking up new friendships. To our surprise they have both lamented that it’s a shame we couldn’t just move in with them.

As a testament to Dana’s generosity, we spent the second week sharing her room. Having spent her Christmas break in London, New York, Miami and Kuwait Dana returned to Naples and work, with some reluctance. Hopefully a week of sleeping with (I mean alongside) Gigi cheered her up. His cheekiness and my cooking helped take the edge of the problem of all our stuff clogging up her room and the inevitable lack of privacy, and someone’s snoring.

However, complaints from the girls’ landlady and a concern that we had already overstayed out welcome then saw us accept Seb’s offer to put us up for a few nights. Seb, is a quintessentially polite and occasionally shy young man, who is undeniably English and a teacher colleague of mine. He has recently moved into an apartment that he shares with Dimitri, a Greek guy studying architecture in Naples. We slept in their lounge room, sharing a bathroom with an ‘interesting’ toilet that refuses to accept anything other than body wastes as the plumbing system can’t handle toilet paper. I suspect Seb enjoyed our idiosyncrasies, and hopefully will remember the new recipes I showed him. After a week of us squatting in his lounge Seb is also more familiar with some Australian slang, which he found highly entertaining for some reason.

I have more blogging to write about the trials and tribulations of the last month. We are currently staying in a lovely B&B, thanks to another generous friend. And I think we might even have found a place to live. More soon.

Random 17 Jan 07

17 January 2007

Work: My head is spinning with verb tenses. I can’t help but wonder who came up with terms like ‘present progressive’ and ‘past perfect’. What were they thinking using so many ‘P’ words? It leaves me feeling slightly punch drunk just trying to get them all straight in my head.

I have spent a good part of today at the Inlingua school at the Vomero. I didn’t have any classes today, and it’s much closer to Dana’s place (where we have just about outstayed our welcome) than the school at Centro Direzionale where I work. My big Provincia group has about five lessons left of their course. They have to take two tests. In addition to the regular test reviewing the last five units in the text book, we also have to revise the WHOLE text book for their final exam.

It’s a bit of a scary process so I have to spend some time preparing. There is nothing worse than facing 2 ½ hours in front of 20 Italians and trying to fudge your way through it.

Weather: we are waiting for winter to arrive. With the end of January approaching it is hard to believe that the days are still relatively mild, normally about 16°C. I’ve stopped wearing jumpers during the day as it just gets too warm. One half of me is confident that I can make it through the rest of winter without buying a warmer coat. The other half of me remembers previous Februaries spent in Naples, with the wind and bitter cold penetrating despite the multiple layers. I’m guessing though that it will be miserably cold in Naples the week that we are in London. And if London is true to form it will be freezing cold over there as well. Buying a coat in London though will be a much easier process. The women in Naples are all generally shorter than me, and they are either small and slim, or they are small and round. I have resorted to buying men’s jumpers in order to avoid exposing my mid rift and the bit between my wrist and elbows where the ladies’ jumpers fail to provide cover.


Entertainment: the last time Gi and I had any fun was New Years Eve. So when Dana told me that a local cinema at the Vomero was recommencing its original language movie program on Tuesday night I was very excited. Gi and I haven’t seen a movie on the big screen since February 2006. We went to see ‘Black Dahlia’ starring Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johanssen. Unfortunately it wasn’t as good as it should have been, but it was an enjoyable experience nonetheless. The movie started at 10pm, at least according to the schedule. It was delayed about twenty minutes, probably due to the fact that the previous film was yet to finish! Then half way through the movie the lights came on and they flashed up ‘Intermission’ on the screen. It’s been decades since films in Australia paused for a break. But this is Italy, and while they do refrain from smoking in cinemas now, it isn’t reasonable to expect people to go for almost two hours without a nicotine hit. The final oddity was the fact that we couldn’t leave via the front doors, as they were closing up. Instead we went down a passageway and exited through the back doors. Luckily it was a more convenient exit for us.

Regardless it is nice to finally have a cinema showing movies in their original language. Everything gets dubbed into Italian normally, which is strange because at home we rarely dub, but keep the original language and have English language subtitles…which means that people who don’t like reading subtitles tend not to see foreign movies. I guess there are always people who are unsatisfied with the norm wherever you are.

Drip dry

I have to tell you that I am not writing about the harsh reality of life at the moment. It is enough to just be living through it one day at a time. Writing about it is something that I will get to once it moves into the past. Suffice to say Gi and I are still looking for somewhere to live. It's am impossible task. We are safe, dry and warm thanks only to the kindness of friends. We have stuff spread in three different locations and are both starting to sag under the stress and frustration of finding something reasonably decent (funny how your standards also start to sag), in the right area and within budget. Difficult is not the right word.

I know that this time too will pass, but it seems that we have really started 2007 with a bang of bad luck. Not just househunting...I will spare you the details though.

I also have to confess that I have recently come out. I have an addiction. Or perhaps it's better described as an obsession. My name is Jenny, and I have a laundry obsession. Washing clothes, hanging them out, folding them, ironing (not that I do that much in Italy) and eliminating dirty clothes just makes me feel better. There, I've told you.

I thought about buying a ticket home over the weekend. But my stupid pride keeps getting in the way.

I'll be in London this time next month...with or without a home base in Naples. It's about the only thing that is keeping me going.

Stephanie

Guess who came to town recently, on a four hour visit to Naples? My lovely cousin Stephanie. On a trip with her boyfriend's family to Italy and Egypt she was able to sneak away from their guided tour of Pompeii to come and have a wander around the historical centre and a pizza.

It's Stephanie's birthday in February. I remember holding her as a new born just before I left for my exchange year in Thailand. That was twenty years ago. Who would have imagined that we'd be sharing a pizza together in Naples in January 2007?

Deep Breaths

14th January 2007

It’s been a hell of a week. We moved out of our urban cave a week ago, and have been lucky enough to stay in friend Dana’s room as she is still away. Sunday and Monday were spent on the phone, taking appointments and going to look at potential apartments. Tuesday we both worked a long day, resuming the process of running around the city on public transport viewing and calling on Wednesday. Thursday I taught all day. Friday was a nightmare as we had an appointment in the morning, then we went to collect Gi’s mother’s car. Then we had another appointment. Then we had to go and move all the furniture and personal belongings we had temporarily stored at the centre, take it to Gi’s mothers place and return the car to her office – on the other side of the city – by 3pm so she could attend a funeral.

By 3pm Friday, after looking at dumps, climbing stairs in buildings built before the invention of the elevator and recognising that we are in an increasingly difficult spot of bother I was passed frustrated and tired. I was in tears.

The solution? Sleep. Naples is not a city where I can operate on overdrive for very long. Gi’s stress levels are through the roof, and while he’s doing his best to find us a new place that is comfortable, affordable and in a reasonable location it seems that we are looking at a hole in the market.

We need two rooms, a kitchen that has some living space, a bathroom and furnishings, close to good public transport links and in an area that is safe to walk around at night. Everything we look at is either just under our budget and inappropriately configured, or up six flights of stairs, or a dump. Or it is just out of our budget and still not really in the right area, badly arranged (many apartments are one long corridor so you have to walk through one bedroom to get to the kitchen to get to the other bedroom) or unfurnished (including the kitchen).

Saturday I was at an all day training session for teaching presentation techniques. And today, Sunday we have looked at two places this morning and are having a second look at something we saw a week ago. We are both resigned, again, just like we were in May, to the fact that on our budget, in the areas we want to live, we are going to make compromises on the size of the place we rent.

Don’t ask me where I am sleeping this coming week. Dana was due home on Saturday but is yet to be seen, or heard from. How can someone with a mobile phone for Italy, one for the UK and one for the USA not be answering any of them?

In the meantime, Gi has enamoured himself to Dana’s Italian flatmates, so hopefully they will be happy for us to bunk there…or I’ll be checking into the Holiday Inn.

Going Up?

Written 9 January 2007

The school started up again this week. Our temporary homelessness meant that I had to take a bus to get to work. Not knowing how long it would take to tackle the traffic and the freeway I crawled out of bed at 7am. The other impacting issue was that as guests in the apartment (and considering that our hostess herself is still overseas) we are trying to be as invisible as possible, which means not interrupting the regular routine of the household. This is particularly important in the mornings when people are preparing to go to work and using the one and only bathroom. After sneaking in for a quick shower, I scurried back to the bedroom along the cold tiled floor to find Gigi still in bed, snuggled up under the duvet, pretending that the alarm hadn’t gone off.

I caught the C30 bus at 8:10am from just nearby the apartment block and it did a twenty minute loop of the surrounding suburb picking up other commuters before easing through the traffic to hit the ring road that floats above the city on concrete pillars. Whenever we drive on the freeway or ring road I try not to think about the fact that we are way up above the mess of residences, businesses and schools. I have on a couple of occasions vocalised my surprise that we don’t hear more reports about cars and motorbikes driving straight off these sky high freeways into the buildings and houses below considering the risks some of the local drivers take. Of course Gigi, with his Neapolitan superstition, told me I had now jinxed them all. He calls me a blackbird, as it’s my habit to ask ‘Why doesn’t this happen more?’ or ‘Wouldn’t you think that such and such would happen?’

Naturally if you wait long enough disaster will strike. Earlier this week my husband proclaimed that it was my fault that a truck had driven off the freeway. The truck crashed through the concrete barricades into an apartment block below. Three different newspapers reported that the truck fell, one paper claiming10 metres, one 20 metres and one 30 metres.

I told him it was bound to happen, the way everyone drives in this city.

Anyway, as the bus drove over the city towards the central business district I tried to ignore the fact that the orange capsule of death I was in could just as easily slip off the ribbon of grey and end up in someone’s kitchen, interrupting their morning coffee making ritual.

I arrived at school just before 9am, with time to print out some lesson materials and prepare myself for my first class at 9:15am. It felt strange to be teaching again after a two week break. Similarly, I started my big class at 2:15pm with some trepidation, only to find that most of the students arrived some forty minutes late.

Forty minutes late? Yes, it seems extraordinary but of course, this is Naples and there is always a good reason. The building where the school operates is part of the Centro Direzionale zone built during the later part of the 1980’s. The school occupies most of the 13th floor. There are four elevators. Two of the elevators have been out of service since late November. Quite regularly we have large groups of students all starting at the same time. Imagine fifty people waiting in the foyer for the lifts to the 13th floor? Now, imagine the fact that the two lifts out of four that are operating only take two people at a time. Add to the fact that there are numerous other businesses in this building, who also rely on the lift to get a coffee, or have coffee delivered from the bar (not to mention the internationally recognised uses of a lift like getting to and from work, getting lunch, running errands, attending meetings etc).

Just think about a skyscraper in the central business district in a city of more than one million people, where two out of four lifts are left out of service, in disrepair and unlikely-to-be-otherwise-in-the-near-future for two months. Just think about it.

Don’t even ask the ‘why is it so?’ question. That’s easy…this is Naples.

Then think about a truck smashing through the concrete barrier on the freeway that sweeps beside your apartment on the 15th floor, falling ten metres at an angle before crudely lodging itself and its load precariously in your kitchen as you stand at the stove in your dressing gown preparing coffee.

Then think about which scenario you’d prefer.

Bang!

2007 started with a bang. Quite literally. Following a somewhat abysmal Christmas celebration we decided to escape for New Years and found ourselves at a friend of a friend's farmstay / B&B at Meta, on the Amalfi Coast. Unfortunately we miscalculated, and discovered that all of the restaurants and pizza joints were closed, so New Years Eve dinner was bread rolls with cheese and ham. However, in accordance with what has become something of a personal custom we found a quite, private spot to celebrate the start of the New Years...the terrace roof of one of the farms buildings, up on a hill with a fabulous view of Sorrento and part of the Amalfi coast line. From there we watched the locals celebrate with the traditional, generally illegal and somewhat dangerous, practice of releasing exorbitant amount of fireworks. The local church and a nearby villa put on a spectacular show, but we could also see the Sorrento-by-the-sea fireworks and those behind the hill. The view exploded with colour and sparkle, eventually dying down at about 1am.

Naples too celebrated with an excess of fireworks, evidenced by the thick layer of smoke that lay over the city all of the next day until the late afternoon. We drove into the haziness at noon having abandoned our plans to do some sightseeing following a rainy, grey start to the day. I'm sure it wasn't a sign of the year to come, it will be full of sunshine and blue skies. Happy 2007!