You know you're old when

I was talking to my housemate this evening about the lunar eclipse. For all of us here in Siena, it happened very early in the morning and so he and some of his classmates decided to stay up to watch it. They’re all around the same age so they can handle those late to early night to morning things. So, I asked him how the eclipse was and he basically said that I really didn’t miss anything. Well, good I thought because I was engrossed with the passato remoto. In fact, he said that if you didn’t know what was going on, you wouldn’t even think anything spectacular or coincidental was happening. So, I was pretty stoked about hearing that because stellar events are definitely events where I can be found. I am a Star Trek fan after all (for all the sci-fi freaks like me out there reading this, yes, I am quite fond of Star Wars too). I told him that I had looked up the pictures on the internet. These pictures were slow captured (is that what it is called?) which created a much more dramatic effect and it was possible to actually see the moon being eclipsed.

Somehow our conversation delved into intelligent design, the bible, religion, and we attempted to tie all these topics back into our lives here in Italy. (I mentioned that I had taken a class with one of the more well-known and influential evolutionary biologists.) The poor kid must have been starved for some English. We did talk a little about our Italian language programs and I found out that his class has not even gone over formal and informal greetings yet. I was very surprised about this as I find it quite difficult to get around town without knowing this very subtle but extremely important distinction. I’m sure everyone can pick us out as foreigners but I’m sure that if you aren’t addressing people properly that they must be thinking about which books we are reading or who the heck is teaching us. This brought us into a discussion of some of the cultural differences.

There would be way too many things to write about if I were to mention every instance of cultural difference. I’ll try to mention some of them in future entries. One difference that we really thought interesting was the fact that you never get anything for free here (or at least seemingly for free as in America). You pay for everything; this includes the water and bread that you consume at restaurants. It’s not such a bad system, because someone somewhere has to pay for it. We listed a number of different examples of this when finally we found one example (here in town) where you do get something for free (seemingly). The Australian pub (makes sense that it isn’t an Italian one) gives away a free tee shirt if you drink four giant mugs of Fosters.

This brings me to the “feeling ancient” part of this entry. When my housemate told me about this tee shirt giveaway at the pub, the first thing that popped into my head was: Are your parents okay with that? Geez, when did I become such an old and uncool “practically parent”? My next thought was that this would be way too much liquid to consume and that my stomach could not handle that much liquid and alcohol. ANOTHER geezer thought. I’m sure that through the magic of the internet and those fantastic data mining tools that I have sold, that I’ll be getting those AARP applications in the mail back home. Those will surely be followed by solicitations for Atlantic Monthly and invitations to the local senior swing dancing socials. I made a fast mental note that I will make sure NOT to pull up my pants too high...