I am spending two weeks in Milan, working with a vendor on a project for our company. The guys at this company are engineers, like me and my colleague, and it is enjoyable working with them. Engineer humor appeals mostly to other engineers, so I won’t try to describe it here.
I am staying in a monastery dormitory that has been converted into a hotel. The refurbishment is new enough that it feels like a new hotel. It is in the town of Vaprio d’Adda, a town where Leonardo de Vinci spent around 30 years. It is on the Adda river and Leonardo spent a lot of time studying the river and water dynamics. There is a museum for him in the town, but I haven’t been there yet.
Driving here is interesting. Turn signals are taken as a sign of weakness. Lane markers are seen as mere suggestions of where one should drive. Pedestrians are invited to say on the curb and don’t cross the street. The other day, I saw a woman with a baby carriage who was afraid of entering a marked cross walk. Kirkland cops may sometimes act like they want to be in a Mussolini parade, but they will set traps to monitor crosswalks.
Much of the area around Milan is industrialized. I have read that one of the cultural divisions in Italy is that the people living in the north think that the people living int he south are lazy. I haven’t talked to my work partners in Milano about it. If you asked me about Alabama and Mississippi, I would probably point out that while I don’t know if they are lazy, they have poor schools and the schools reflect the mores of the community. The work output per person in the southern states is lower than those of the northern states. All of the southerns states get more in services than they pay in taxes (which is the opposite of most northern states). Faced with poor results in just about any metric available, people from the southern states still have the unmitigated gall to act like their culture is superior to that of the northern states. Go figure. Perhaps it is that way here in Italy also.
From what I can see of Italy, there isn’t a strong visual guide to identifying Italians. Perhaps this is true just in the northern cities. When I lived in Germany, I could tell Russians from Germans and Germans from Dutch. I have been flummoxed in my attempts to identify facial characteristics that I could say are indicative of being Italian. In America, I can often make an educated guess about the ethnic heritage of people, but I’m lost here.