Unspecified – Kait's Adventures

March 12, 2020March 13, 2020

Corona Virus in Rome

People are reaching out to me multiple times a day concerned about me here in Italy. So I just need to say, I’m fine. It’s not anything like the media has been describing. Though it might become that way soon; that’s actually changing while I’m writing this, so I’ll tack that on the end.

Italy is doing a pretty damn good job, IMO. There is honestly no other country I would rather be living in during this.

Tuesday all of Italy entered a “Lockdown” — as multiple English language headlines called it. A misleading term to say the least. It implies we’re all quarantined, and in fact Colbert and others started calling it a nation-wide quarantine shortly after. This is not the case, though as I mentioned, a new law today might change that.

As of yesterday, we’re just supposed to stay in our “community” and be able to justify travel between regions. Work is a justification, for example. Additionally, some “common sense” rules. School closures have been extended. Clubs are closed. Businesses are to minimize crowds.

For a while here the virus has been a major topic of conversation. Not panicked, just everyone was very aware. Though we were also still saying goodbye with a kiss on each cheek at the end of those conversations.

Now everyone is actually making adjustments to their lives. But I have to say– it’s not that bad! These “inconveniences” are things I would put up with if they even saved one life. At this point all we can do is slow the spread; doing so will save lives.

Businesses minimizing crowds

This means people wait outside the grocery store so it’s not crowded inside. Quite the visual, but then you don’t wait at the cashier, so it’s not that bad. And appointment businesses are to stagger appointments to avoid crowds in waiting rooms.

Yesterday (Wednesday) I was at the dentist. I was the only one there (plus the dentist and hygienist). Normally there are a few people in the large waiting room. Tomorrow I had a chiropractor appointment at 9. He moved me to 10:30 for the new staggered schedule. Frankly, he is always running very behind so this is a positive for me, haha. I also have a consultation Friday; that one looks like it will move to Skype. I had my nails done Tuesday. Most people’s arms are not long enough to keep the recommended 2 meters apart. So they gave everyone a mask at the door and no one inside ever lowered or removed their mask.

Still imagining me locked in my apartment? We also went on a picnic Monday. We are not under quarantine. But I’ve still never been within 2 meters of any human outside my family without them wearing a mask (I can hardly wear a mask myself at the dentist).

School closures

The change that affects me most (by a mile) is the schools being closed. I now have two small children to entertain all day. And I have to feed them all their meals! Che palle! I miss the hours I could expect them to be under their teachers care and plan non-mom tasks. And I miss knowing they were eating healthy 4-course lunches that I didn’t have to cook. I miss how much easier they were to entertain at home when they hadn’t already been home all day (for days in a row).

Still, as my kids are 1 and 4, this just puts me on level with every American mom who is stuck with their little angels until they can go to kindergarten at age 5.

Corona virus in Italy

My husband, an ICU nurse, has been following every minute update for months. He’s normally not one to be particularly glued to his phone, but he is these days. As such, I’m about as informed as any non-virologist out there. He’ll tell me about new studies published the day before over breakfast. Then I see the same thing on Twitter that night. I. Am. Informed. If information is more that 24hrs old, don’t bother sending it to me, I’ve seen it.

A summary of the outbreak in Italy

In January, we had 3 cases. A couple from China on a bus tour and one of the passengers on the government flight evacuating Italian Nationals from China. Later an additional single case on a second evacuation flight. The evacuees are not interesting because they got it in China and were quarantined the second they set foot back in Italy.

The bus tour couple was cared for here in Rome. The rest of the bus was quarantined in an out-of-use hospital that was converted for them; no others got sick; they’re all home now. The couple are still recovering here but doing well.

Yes, it takes that long. If you think it would be better to get it now before the peak, you’re wrong. Get it now and you will still be sick at the peak.

Back to the history summary. We went a month with just that one couple. During that time anyone who even sneezed and had any connection to them (e.g. was in the same hotel, even a different floor) was tested. Anyone with cold symptoms and an Asian face was tested. Anyone with cold symptoms that could claim any connection to Asia was tested.

Then everything changed the weekend of February 22. In a day we went from 4 to 11 cases. By Monday, 124.

These were all in small towns in the north. One town at the center of the outbreak is Vo’ Euganeo, a small town of 3k people in Veneto near Venice. The other is Codogno in Lombardia near Milan. These new cases didn’t have any connection to China. In Vo’ Euganeo none of the 3k residents had any connection to China. It was obvious the virus had been circulating and was estimated to be the 3rd or so generation.

The government reacted quickly. Venice carnevale (a big deal, possibly the most famous carnevale celebration after Rio) was cancelled. Fat Tuesday was February 25, so we’re talking very short notice. Schools all over the north closed — including for my poor pregnant sister in-law with her not-one-to-sit-still-at-home toddler.

Experts continue to try to track infection for the sake of understanding this new virus. For example, in that little town of 3k people they tested every soul to understand it better (89 were positive, that number has stayed stable). But now the focus has shifted from following the chain to slowing the spread.

Since that carnevale weekend, things have basically been growing at the expected exponential rate. Anyone who is calls Italy a “failure” is not particularly informed. Here you can see a table of cases in Italy compared to Germany, offset by 8 days. The missing numbers for Germany since that table was made are: March 9: 1224, March 10: 1565, March 11: 1966. They are exactly following our numbers.

Source: https://twitter.com/henrikenderlein/status/1236748772455170049?s=19

Someone also made it a chart and included more countries. You can see every western country is basically doing the same.

Source article: https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
Source image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ES31or1UYAEY3Ih.jpg

Note, the growth is exponential while the lines are straight because the y-axis of that chart is on a logarithmic scale. That means it is increasing by a multiple (in this case 10) rather than a number. The bottom of the chart is 100, halfway is 1,000, the top is 10,000. If your rusty on logarithmic and exponential growth and how they graph, this video is a nice refresher. And even if you’re not rusty, it’s a lovely visualization that makes a satisfying watch.

https://kottke.org/20/03/exponential-growth-and-epidemics

Back to the summary of what has been happening in Italy.

For a while the outbreak kept itself largely to the north. And the situation sounds much more dire there. We had a few cases here in Rome. On March 4th the city announced that all schools would be closed starting March 5th until at least the 15th.

Then Tuesday (March 10th), the so-called “Lockdown” went into effect nation wide. It was partially leaked and there was some panicking Monday night from people who thought it was going to be an actual quarantine.

There have also been prison riots. I confess I have not been following those stories. I believe the first ones were protesting limits to visits. I assume now it’s the opposite, that the prisoners are afraid they are primed for an outbreak and won’t get access to care.

Wednesday (between me starting this and uploading it) a new law went into effect which is much closer to a nation-wide quarantine. We’re really supposed to stay home now — except for work, medical reasons, or to buy necessities. Businesses are closed except those selling said necessities: supermarkets, pharmacies, Tabacchi, and some others. And only one person from the household is supposed to do that shopping. There are various restrictions on cars designed to limit travel.

I just got my nails done in the nick of time! My chiropractor appointment was cancelled. We’re not supposed to go outside for non necessities. It’s not clear if airing out children qualifies. We’re going to keep bringing them outside once a day at least to the building courtyard or roof or linger for a bit on the way to their Nonni. Places where there isn’t another soul anywhere near.

For our family, I believe our biggest risk factor is the same as it was before: getting it from Daniele. At the start, about 10% of infected in Italy were healthcare workers. Now it’s 13%. Maybe that number is inflated because it’s more clear when they’ve been exposed and they are tested. But either way.

As for us infecting other people… The vast majority of people that the girls and I interact with are from school. For them, their classmates. For us, their teachers or the other parents for a coffee after drop off. So that’s stopped. I stoped going to my co-working space a little while back. I normally would see my chiropractor twice a month, my manicurist once a month, and most weeks some other appointment (dentist, electrician, etc) — that’s all on pause and (stiff neck aside) I won’t miss those. Daniele normally does the shopping and I mostly keep in touch with friends on Slack, WhatsApp, Skype, and Hangouts for years now. I don’t interact with a lot of people in my normal life, and these small changes have effectively made it 0 outside Daniele, the girls, and Daniele’s parents. The x-factor here is my in-laws who could more-or-less be considered part of our nuclear family. I believe they are being more careful now for the sake of the girls, but I don’t know everything they do.

These changes from yesterday are pretty “drastic”. But it’s still not that big a deal. It’s not that different from when we keep the kids home for a cold normally. Frankly, its easier than being snowed in after a blizzard (we have power, we can go to the store). And it’s much easier than the extended power outages and fuel shortages in NJ after Sandy (what I time for me to go home for a visit!).

The Italian health care system

Switching gears back to Italy. Italy has a very good health care system. I’ve been living here 10 years — through surgeries and baby deliveries and plenty of preventative care. I get better care here than I did back in California with my fancy Adobe health insurance that even paid for massages in full (if done at my chiropractor’s office).

When people say Italy has one of the best health care systems in the world, it’s actually true. The best jobs in Italy are government jobs. And the best position for a doctor (or nurse) is a contract with the public healthcare system. So by having the best doctors, the public system keeps from being a system for the poor. There is a parallel private system. We sometimes use it because it’s not that expensive and the experience is what I imagine celebrities get in the US. Some public hospital doctors keep a private office one day a week (my gynecologist does this). But if the richest man in Italy needed bypass surgery, he’s having it done at a hospital (every hospital is public even the Catholic ones).

The situation in Italy

I’m pretty aware of the situation in Rome because of Daniele. For what’s happening in the North, I only have the same news and doctor Facebook posts that everyone else does.

Rome is nothing like what the doctors are describing up North. Just like NJ is not like Seattle (yet). Every US news story that describes the situation “in Italy” based on the doctors up north are misrepresenting us, IMO.

How is it possible to be fine here and a “war” up there?

Supplies are owned by the regions. I’m in Lazio (central Italy), Tuscany is directly north of here (where Florence is). Lombardi (Milan) and Veneto (Venice) are way up North. So while we’re sharing… Rome’s not about to give them everything just like the rest of the US isn’t offering everything to Seattle.

Couldn’t we at least move them to our empty hospitals? Nope. The pneumonia you get from corona is serious enough that patients can not be moved 5hrs away.

The response in Rome

Here in Rome the plan is to dedicate entire hospitals as either corona hospitals or clean hospitals. The first corona dedicated hospital has already been completely evacuated and has about 100 corona virus patients. This is almost all of Lazio’s infected; a few can not be transported. The second corona hospital is currently in the process of completely evacuating the normal patients.

Daniele works in the ICU of Ospedale San Giovanni, which for now is dedicated clean. There is a plan for converting more clean hospitals as needed.

If you come to the San Giovanni ER as a potential corona patient, you are sent to a temporary structure that’s tented and all the staff are in full gear. There you will be screened (temperature, chest x-ray, etc) and probably tested. If you’re in critical condition, you’ll be treated in an isolated area.

For non critical patients, the tests can take a day to come back. If you are not in critical condition and you live alone, you’ll optionally be sent home on quarantine. They add your info to an app where you check in every day. You can stay home using the app while “healthy” even after testing positive. If that’s not practical for you, you get a bed in that temporary structure. If positive, you’ll go to a dedicated corona hospital.

If you come to San Giovanni with something like a broken leg, you are sent to the regular old ER. The staff here are still in full protective gear. You’re screened just the same. Assuming no fever or anything, you proceed through the process as normal (just getting you temperature taken more). If you need surgery, there will be more screening than normal, specifically a CT scan.

Staff outside the ER like Daniele, who works in a sub-department of the ICU for post-surgery patients, wear more protective hear than they used to (masks and goggles) but not the whole suit that the ER wears.

That’s where we are now.

However, exponential growth means things aren’t just changing quickly, the rate of change itself is increasing. Before February 22, our only cases were still just that one Chinese couple. Our schools closed March 5th. The first official nation-wide restrictions were put into law March 10. Then March 12 every non-essential business was closed.

There is nothing unique about Italy. There has been no particular failure of the government here. Granted, that’s cheeky of me to say when people have died. But I think there would have been riots if they had tried to close everything down sooner (or it would have just been ignored).

So to reiterate, we have actually had to make some drastic changes in the past few days. But other than getting less kid-free time, my life has not actually changed much.

July 2, 2015

Stella’s Second Year

We’re celebrating two years with our kitty Stella today. We adopted her back on July 2, 2013, shortly after we got married. I wrote about our first year together on this date last year. The vets she saw as a baby place her birth between mid March and late April, but we’ll never know her actual birthday.

Stella spends her days at my side working hard on Android development. She puts in the hours… though most of those hours she’s sleeping.

While she and I spend the majority of our time together, she is clearly very much in love with Daniele. The two of them spend many a nap together. She always knows when he’s coming up to the front door. Even when 10 other people have gone past in the past 10 minutes she knows when it’s Daniele approaching.

Speaking of napping, Stella sleeps easily 20 hours a day. She’s a very deep sleeper. It’s almost impossible to wake her. She wakes about an hour before each meal, has a burst of energy, then passes back out.

The mornings are when she’s the most normal. She spends them looking out the window at birds and what not. The video above is her calling to the family of birds that recently moved in. You can only hear her with the volume on high.

Stella, where’s your head!?

Here she is playing with Daniele:

Her big glowing eyes are probably her most distinct feature. Here is a video of them in action:

I often find myself thinking, “what’s the worse she’s gunna do?” when tempted to leave her at whatever activity she is currently doing that I know Daniele doesn’t like.

For example, she likes to jump up above the top cabinets. Which seems innocent enough. Cats like high places. But then she starts to play with the hands on the clock. It’s easier to take the clock down than to get her down, so that’s what I did one day. Something spooked her and she jostled the glass jar (like the one in the photo above) full of rice. If rocked a few times before falling over the edge, smashing into the sink where it chipped off a good sized piece, then shattered, spilling rice and glass everywhere.

If I leave her unsupervised without putting everything in my desk away, then I should expect to find my papers shredded.

Caught in the act! Most of the day I drink out of a water bottle. I use glasses only for meals and put them away right after… or else she helps herself.

We love her even though she really is such a bad cat. Maybe it’s just the terrible 2’s.

She came with us again to New Jersey for Christmas.

She had lots of fun showing off her fancy red Christmas coat. Not to mention running up and down the stairs and playing with the Christmas tree.

My dad got two dogs last year. Our NJ cats had been hiding from them for months. Stella wasn’t a big fan at first, but she didn’t know enough to be afraid. She gradually started hanging out — she doesn’t like to miss out on any action. Soon enough she was playing with their tails.

Her aggressive need for food peaked. She stopped eating her dry food (the brand changed names and slightly changed the recipe on her crunchies). She was always going nuts for anything to eat. It was quite impossible to deal with, actually. We switched her to a higher quality dry food. But then we had the opposite problem, rather than snack on the dry food throughout the day, she would immediately finish whatever we put down. So the solution we came up with was to give her two smaller portions of the dry food a day: once in the morning and once at night. She’s always gotten her wet food at lunch time. And that’s how she ended up getting fed three meals a day.

She’s a pretty slim cat and the begging has gotten much better. So I think we’re in a good place. Though for the past week or so she’s not been finishing her food immediately. We’ve even thrown out some wet food. I’m hoping she’s not sick, it’s hard to tell since she sleeps so much normally. We’ll see how it goes.

Yeah, you just keep enjoying that nap, Stella…

Starting to feed her in the morning was definitely a mistake. Daniele feeds her early when he has early shifts. So by 6 am she feels entitled to be fed (even these past days when there was still last night’s in her bowl). Her strategy is to meow and knock things over until Daniele gets up. This works really well, so I don’t see her stopping.

Stella is excited to help paint the second bedroom.

That’s my little princess.

For a whole year’s worth of Stella photos, there’s an album:
https://goo.gl/photos/EVbPwZDnRnHHDfYt9

For more kitten photos, last year’s album:
https://goo.gl/photos/iVX8fSeNLWXiVhky7

September 8, 2014

Italian Food and Food Culture – Types of Food

Growing up Italian-American, I though I knew Italian food pretty well, but each year that I live in Italy, I consider myself more and more “American”.

The first thing to note about Italian food is how diverse it is. Some people will ask, “don’t you get tired of eating Italian every day?” They don’t understand that inside Italy, the Italian food is much less homogeneous than it is outside Italy. Similar to how Americans think it’s strange to group pizza and hamburgers, but in other countries it makes sense because it is all “American Food”. Or how a Chinese person might think it is terrible to but all the different types of foods that we pile on our plates at a Chinese Buffet on the same dish, but to us it’s normal because it’s all Chinese Food.

The first way Italian Cuisine is divided is by region. Nearly every restaurant associates itself with the regional origin of the proprietor. This may be obvious with a full-on theme, matching name, and scenes on the walls all evoking the region associated with the food. Or it might be very subtle and easy to miss if you are not Italian. Italians will immediately recognize characteristic foods on the menu and file the place away in the “Umbria, “Sardinia”, or whatever part of their brain.

Each region having a strong identity plays a roll in Italian culture in general. For example, they know what region any given celebrity or politician is originally from. By contract, I could tell you a couple famous people from my own home state, but have no idea where nearly any given celebrity comes from, even super-famous A-Listers.

The regional origins of foods play a big roll, bigger than one would expect given that it’s 2014 and Italy is just not that big. An American from the Northeast for example, will have an easier time finding a Canoli back home than in mainland Italy – they are from Sicily. The unsalted bread of Umbria is very different from the focaccia of Puglia, which in turn is surprisingly similar to Genova (Puglia mixes the toppings into the bread dough, Genova leaves them on top), but none of which resemble the cracker-like bread of Sardinia. Oh, and don’t expect any butter or oil, the bread is eaten dry or along with the meat course. Also being brought some when you sit down is definitely not a given and certainly not for free.

The next way food, particularly in restaurants, is divided is by specialty. Similar to the US, there are places that specialize in fish, beef, hand made pastas, local foods, a particular experience, on and on. Certainly there are more places specializing in fish in Sicily (an island) than there are in Umbria (land locked), but you find similarly run sea food restaurants up and down all coasts. Independent fishmongers are still very common all over Italy, and some have opened their own adjoined restaurant, cooking themselves their catches for customers. This same style restaurant can be found from Genova.

I know three specialty vegetarian restaurants here in Rome, and they all have menus very different from the “Bisteccherie” (Steak Houses) near our home. While a few of these places might also serve pizza, they don’t have the offerings of an actual “Pizzeria”. A pizzeria is normally a more casual place that serves a variety of pizzas, maybe a calzone, and some fried appetizers. There is also the “creperia”, which (you guessed it) serves crapes. You can get pastries at a “Pasticceria”, gelato/ice cream at a “Gelateria”, and fried foods at a “Friggitoria. As the “aperitivo” or “Happy Hour” has spread south from Torino (aka Turin) and Milan, there are also places that specialize in that. And more and more types of specialties beyond what I can even think of.

That is just the “Italian Food”. Italy may not have as many Mexican restaurants as the US (we have less Mexican immigrants) and our Asian choices are well illustrated here by The Oatmeal. But there are still lots of non-Italian options: Ethiopian, Indian, Turkish (there is a kebab and falafel place on almost every corner), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, sushi, German, Brazilian, and yes, Mexican. They are normally a bit Italianized, which is weird because I’m used to my food being Americanized, but that’s what one can expect. These are still not as big a presence as all the Italian options, though. When Italians ask me about American food I like to explain to them that when an American asks another “what do you feel like for dinner?” the standard way to reply is to name a county. I think that sizes up “American” food pretty succinctly.

Suffice it to say, when we are thinking of going out to eat here in Rome, we are not headed to your typical “Italian Restaurant” as seen in about every city in the world, which offers a margarita pizza, veal parmigiana, chicken parmigiana, penne alla vodka, fettuccine alfredo, minestrone soup, bruschetta, tiramisu, and maybe a hand full of other “typical” Italian dishes that are not nearly so typical here in Italy. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I even saw someone eat one of those dishes, probably back in the States.

One last way that food serving establishments are divided by their level of service. There is obviously a big difference from the white-table-clothed, fancy location, high end service type of restaurant that you may find on the ground floor of a five-star hotel, from the grab-and-go place where you pick up your food at the counter. In English we might just say that a place is more or less fancy, Italian has specific words for each type. At the top is the “Ristorante” with table service, table cloths, and general high-end feeling. Then there is the “Trattoria” which feels a bit less stuffy, perhaps less ornate a location, but still good service. After that is the “Osteria” which definitely does not feel formal, but still has table service. Followed by the “Tavola Calda” where one picks up their ready-made food at the counter.

The prices and service go down from Ristorante to Tavola Calda. However, the quality does not! When one reminisces about how great the food is in Italy, they really mean how easily accessible and affordable great food is in Italy, because you can get great Italian food in any city if you are willing to make reservations and pay for it. I can hardly drag my husband to any place to eat in the US which has table-cloths because he insists you are paying for the table-cloths and the food is actually lower quality. While not true in the US (you normally have to pay more for the higher quality ingredients needed to prepare high quality food), this is surprisingly accurate in Italy. Though your best bet for avoiding high prices and bad food in Italy is to simply stay away from the big tourist crowds.

There is something to the idea that the quality of food is better in Italy. Artiginal (“artigianale”) is what’s expected as the norm and taken seriously. Even in the home, the food served will often be “from my own/my friend’s garden” or a specialty from a particular region gifted from a friend. My father-in-law gives us special sweet lemons from a friends of his who was born in Almalfi. He also gives us fresh dry-it-yourself oregano from Calabria that has changed the way I think about oregano. Heck, it’s changed my life! Nearly all Italians learn to cook and take pride in their cooking. As well as learn about nutrition and food anthropology in school. I think this keeps the standards on prepared foods high, because if it’s not better than they can make at home or if it’s too expensive, they will just make it themselves.

I could go on about etiquette for ordering at the counter, variety in pizza through out Italy, the rules of the courses, pasta, espresso, taboos! Since this is already a long post, I’m going to break it down into a series. So more to come on Italian food and food culture in the posts to come!

August 25, 2014August 29, 2014

Kait’s Adventures has moved from Blogger to WordPress

Google’s Blogger has been the home of my travel blog since the beginning in 2010. Blogger has been good to me. I even made $56 from people accidentally clicking the ads I had on the side bar, but I’ve moved the site to WordPress, now.

As a blogging platform, WordPress allows me to control the look of the site much more than Blogger does. Blogger only has a handful of themes, compared to the limitless WordPress themes out there, which are also more easily customized.

With self-hosted WordPress, I now keep all my content with my own web-hosting provider, which I’m not sure if is a good thing or not. I trust Google not to lose my data more than anyone. Still, nice to “own” it a little more. I appreciate how easy they make it to export all my past posts out, so can bring the past 5 years with me to my new blog.

Some people think that Blogger will go the way of other Google products that have been discontinued to make way for Google Plus. Google themselves uses Blogger for announcements, so I don’t know. But it does feel a bit like abandon-ware over at Blogger. Another good reason to leave.

Blogger gave a way for readers to subscribe and receive new posts via email. However I have no idea who was using this feature and have no way of getting their names out of there. My new site here has a sign up form to get emails from me. If you like that, please sign up using the form here to get emails from me when I put up new posts. Here, I’ll put the form right here for you.

Isn’t that neat?! I’ve no idea how to do something like that in Blogger. There is also RSS if that’s more your thing.

WordPress makes it so easy to add little widgets, like the search and translate bars on your right. OK, Google does search and translate and widgets, too. But I like these better.

WordPress also organizes posts in two ways: Categories and Tags. Categories have a hierarchical structure, which makes them perfect for location info here in my travel blog, in my opinion. And tags work just like tags normally do. So if I write a post about things to do in Rome, I can give that post the Italy, Lazio, and Rome categories and some tags like travel, restaurants, or whatever I’m talking about.

I think this organization combined with being able to place widgets prominently makes this site much easier to navigate than the old one. Before, if I wanted to find an old post, I would Google “Kait” with the name of the post in order to find it. Now, I have my own little search bar, or I can probably quickly find what I’m looking for from the Places widget.

Also my front page is so much prettier now, with pictures and little excerpts from my most recent posts. Before it was my most recent (or specific, if arriving via a deep link) post with previous posts concatenated after, forming a seemingly endless page. This also meant there was no way to read the “next” post if it existed.

The old site will live on at its blogspot URL, kaitsadventures.blogspot.com, frozen in time for as long as Google keeps hosting it.

So that’s all. I just wanted to announce my new shinny website for my blog. Happy travels!

July 2, 2014August 18, 2014

Stella the Cat

Last year on June 15, 2013, Daniele and I got back from our honeymoon and I was officially living in Rome with no return ticket out of Europe. This new stability meant we were ready to make a life decision that I’ve wanted to make countless times in the past, but had to resist because I didn’t know where I was headed. We adopted a cat.

We had talked about it for a while and had planned on looking into getting one after the wedding. Now that we were back, we started by visiting some shelters here in Rome to meet some contenders. Rome has a few really cool cat sanctuaries. A famous one is in Largo Torre Argentina. This is an Ancient Roman ruin, that is fenced off. The volunteers and inside cats are in an office carved from the side walls surrounding the ruins. The healthy cats can roam about the fenced-in ruins outside. They are a very organized and large shelter.

Around this time there was also a cute orange tabby kitten hanging around the parking area of our apartment building. We thought about adopting him, but we couldn’t be sure that he didn’t belong to one of the families in our building. Before we made up our minds, we stopped seeing him. He was very cute, so I hope he found (or already had) a good home.

The next animal shelter we visited was also located in a Roman ruin, similar to the one at Torre Argentina, this one is in Rome’s Egyptian-style Pyramid, “Piramide”. They are not quite as organized, and give the cats away for free, but still needing to visit a vet. Daniele liked that they were free, but we paid the same having her spayed ourselves.

When we arrived there were two groups of kittens. Two tabbies that were already adopted and three solid-colored (two black and one gray). We wanted a kitten to give a cat a forever-home right from the start. Also, Daniele didn’t grow up with pets and a kitten is easier for that situation. There was a man there who was taking the gray and one of the black kittens, leaving just one female back kitten left. I held her and she fell asleep in my arms, leading everyone to insist she was destined to be mine. Daniele saw her sleeping and thought she was going to be calm and well behaved. He didn’t know that the kittens sleeping turn out to be the craziest once they wake. You need to see a cat awake, playing, moving to know its personality. But he didn’t tell me this was why he liked her, just that he did and he wanted to adopt her right away.

We hadn’t been planning on adopting that afternoon, so we had nothing. The shelter lent us a carrier to bring her home and gave us samples of the food she had been eating. Then on the way we quickly stopped (in underground parking) at the mall to get food dishes, a litter box, kitty litter, cat shampoo, and one toy (a bird on a string on a stick).

It probably took an hour to get her home, we then proceeded to traumatize her further. We shampooed her (she was kinda dirty). We clipped her nails. We tossed her in her giant (compared to her then) litter box, and she impressed us by using it right away. Then Daniele, who was working a night shift, had to go and left the two of us alone. She slept in the crook of my arm, and it’s been love ever since.

We named her Stella. A name that sounds American to Americans and Italian to Italians. Perfect for our family and perfect for my little star.

A day or two latter we went back to the shelter to return the borrowed carrier, and the man who took Stella’s two siblings had returned them!?!? His wife had told him to bring them back. The volunteers asked if we were interested in them, but one cat was already a big step for us. They were still cute little kittens, so I’m sure they found homes. Still, what a tool!

We adopted Stella on July 2, 2013. She was still very little when we had Daniele’s 30th birthday dinner at our apartment on July 8th and was the star of the night. It was our guests that night who first called her “Stellina”. In Italian, you add the suffixes -ino / -ina or -etto / -etta to say something is small; the suffix -one to say it is large. She’s been Stellina ever since.

Those first couple days were an adjustment. Especially for Daniele who had only ever had a kitten for a short period and that one lived on their balcony. She was a constant ball of energy. She relentlessly attacked our feet under the sheets (but never if on top of the sheets). This would wind up Daniele, which in turn would wind her up further. She still hadn’t learned to jump high with her giant rabbit feet, but had super-kitten upper body strength that allowed her to climb up things, like the backs of chairs and onto the table. But just like she quickly grew bigger, she quickly became calmer.

We moved over the course of August and September, and Stella was one of the last things to come to the new place. She saw all our stuff and took to it like home right away.

For Thanksgiving and Christmas, I planned on spending the whole month back in the States. Daniele was going to join me a few days after Thanksgiving and come back with me before New Years; though his departure ended up being pushed back to mid-December. Since that was too long to leave her, I brought her with me on the plane. It was pretty easy, I just called United and added her to my reservation. To the airline, she was something between extra luggage (how I paid for her) and an extra passenger (she had her own reservation number). She flew by my feet in her new soft carrier and handled the flight pretty well. It was actually more of a concern getting her home to Italy at the end of our trip than into the US. Europe controls pets more. But I’ll go into this in greater detail another time.

Back in New Jersey, she made friends with Moo and Flake (my cats at my parent’s house). Though it is debatable if they made friends with her back. She seemed to really enjoy it, from socializing with other cats, to running full-speed up and down the stairs, to walking through snow for the first time.

We sometimes let her into the couriyard of our building, but there is an old lady who yells (in Italian) “No cats in the courtyard!” whenever we do. So more often we put on her harness and leash and bring her out for a walk around the neighborhood or in a park. She likes the parks much better than the streets.

She’s met lots of people who come to our house, especially our AirBnb guests (blog.kait.us/2014/05/trying-out-airbnb.html), and she likes them all and they always love her. But when we take her outside, she is afraid of everything and everyone.

Daniele was slower to warm up to her than I was, not having grown up in the more american pets-are-part-of-the-family culture that I did. They bonded a bit when I left the two of them alone to go to a wedding in San Francisco last August. Then more and more over time. He worries about her food and litter box. And now he even asks me to leave her to sleep with him when he gets home from a night shift. A big change from not wanting her in our room at night, like when we first brought her home.

By Easter she looked fully grown. She had gotten pretty long and very muscular. She felt surprisingly heavy when you lifted her up and had really defined haunches. Or at least she did. Right after Easter she visibly lost some weight, and I think has lost some more since then, to get a bit smaller. We had taken her to the park a few times, so I thought it was the exercise. But thinking about the time-line better, I think we changed her wet food to a higher quality brand around that time. She used to actually like her dry food better, but the new stuff is definitely her favorite.

As mentioned earlier, we regularly trim the tip of her front claws. But she is very gentle with them anyway. If she starts playing with you, she’ll gently bat you with her soft paws…until you feel confident and unsuspecting, that’s when she bites! We’re also lucky that she likes to stretch her claws on cardboard, wood, and metal, but not fabric (so far, fingers crossed). Though she will shred papers if I leave them out.

Her most characteristic traits are her big ears, her big glowing eyes, and her constant meowing. She’s the most talkative cat I’ve ever known. And although, in theory, she could hide very well being all black, the profile of those ears or the light catching her eyes always gives her away.

During the days, I work from home and she keeps me company. Even though it’s still pretty lonely working alone at home, she makes all the difference.

Her hobbies include hiding in boxes, being made into the bed covers, and eating my papers. She spends most her day handing out by my computer or sleeping in an almost comatose state.

She’s a bit of a bad cat. She is terrible about going on the table and in the sink. She doesn’t seem to have much aversion to water. We just keep pushing her off and cleaning with a bleach solution

So that’s the story of our first year together with Stella.

The full album of all the pictures I’ve taken of her this year is here:
plus.google.com/photos/+KaitlynHanrahanIsidori/albums/6043706881572815249

May 14, 2014August 24, 2014

Trying out AirBnb

This past September (2013), Daniele and I moved from the condo he owns to one his father owns. Daniele’s is located in Monterotondo, which is still in the Providence of Rome, but just outside the City of Rome. We could have walked to the boarder from the condo, but we were definitely in the ‘burbs. The boundaries of Rome have spread out over the years as the city has grown to reach out and touch any already established city, such as Monterotondo.

Our new home is inside Rome, though just outside the walls of the ancient city. We are 7-minutes as-the-google-walks from two Metro stops on the A/Red Line, which I like better than the B/Blue Line. One of those stops is Re di Roma, a busy traffic-circle / piazza featuring many notable establishments. From here you can see, and easily walk to the ancient wall holding in Rome’s historical center, and enter at Basilica San Giovanni, which is the “duomo” of Rome (St. Peters is in the Vatican, which technically is not Rome). We are also sandwiched between the busy shopping streets of Appia Nuova, Taranto, and Tuscolana (Tuscolana Station is not a Metro stop, but it’s a great way to get straight to the airport). We have all this nearby, but magically live in a little microcosm of a quiet neighborhood composed of old people and a hand full of families where the only noise disturbance is church bells.

Similar to our old place, our apartment is made up of an open kitchen/living room, a bathroom, a master bedroom, and a small bedroom (though the last place had more outside space including a garden, two large balconies, and parking). Where as our last place was newer and designed with this layout, our home now was built in 1942 with a different design. Our place was the doorman’s apartment and we believe it is (by quite a bit) the smallest apartment in the building. Originally, you walked into the spacious living room with a door separating visitors from the rest of the home. The door leds to a little space with doors to each: the large bedroom, the bathroom, and the kitchen. The kitchen in turn leads to the balcony. When my father-in-law bought the place 10 years ago, he moved the kitchen to the living room and converted that space to a second (small) bedroom. This is a pretty common renovation now that society has accepted the kitchen as a gathering place, not something that should be hidden away. Fun fact, Italian Real Estate listings count “number of rooms”, but there is no uniform method of counting rooms. Some will only count rooms intended to be bedrooms, most will also count a living room, a few count every space including the kitchen and even bathroom.

Given our new, more central location and spare room we thought we would try out renting the extra space on AirBnb– just as an experiment to see how it does. If it went well, maybe we could do it for an entire apartment. The spare room was the last to get the renovation treatment, acting as our safe/clean room while the rest of house underwent the spackleing/sanding/more sanding/and even more sanding that the place needed to recover from the 10 years of being rented to students and the *72* years of general chipping and decay. I fought to maintain and restore all of the original wood and brass rather than replace everything with plastic and aluminum like my husband and in-laws would have done.

Daniele found several other airbnb-like sites. I didn’t want so much of our personal information spread out so wide, so I limited him to HouseTrip, which is very popular in Europe and particularly the UK, I believe. We did well with them, however, they just recently took down our listing and everyone else’s who was renting just a single room in order to concentrate on just listing full apartments/homes. We still have guests coming (and even right now are hosting two) who booked from HouseTrip. So, we still haven’t felt whatever effect losing their referrals will have.

We started last November and I had a few rules. First off, AirBnb is not like a hotel, where anyone can book a night, unless you want to set it up that way. Potential guests send a request for a stay that we have to pre-approve or deny. Only with a pre-approval can they then book. We do not sublet while away, many people use AirBnb this way, we do the exact opposite and will not take guests if we are not home. Similarly, Daniele works nights sometimes and I will not accept a booking where their first night here I will be home alone with them. It doesn’t take too long to get a feel for someone, and if we got someone sketchy, this would give me time to realize something was up and make Daniele call in sick. I also turn people down who seem sketchy online. A horror story I read a long time ago about a women who Airbnb’ed out her NYC apartment while away, and whose home was destroyed by the renters/robbers later noticed how the guest’s name was misspelled (something like Johgnson) and a few other indicators. I look for more complete profiles, with more methods of verification, and not accounts just opened today. Recently I’ve started asking people who request to stay and have new, blank accounts, if they could add some verifications and then ask again. After all, while we have a few reviews now, we were new once, too, and people gave us a chance.

It’s easy for me to deny requests because we are not trying to keep the room full 100% of the time. Who would want house guests all of the time? I’ve priced the room out according to this idea. We’re not the cheapest room you can book in the area. First off, do I want the people who look for the cheapest rooms staying with me and having my key? Not really. Second, there is enough demand that my pricing keeps the room full enough. It has to be worth what we’re getting (the money) to clean out the room, wash and change the bedding and towels, wait around to greet them when they arrive, and share my bathroom and kitchen with them while they are here (and in some cases, deal with their strange requests). That’s not nothing, if it was just a little bit of money I would be annoyed to do all that and never think it worth it when getting a request. But for the bit more that we charge, it feels like free money. It feels like getting $400 for just doing a load of laundry!

Everyone who has stayed with us has been really interesting and fun to meet. We had a brother and sister from San Paulo, a couple from Russia, a mother and son from Iowa, two gentlemen friends from India, three BU students studying abroad in Spain, two Italian girls here for a concert, two kids from Austria we housed in coordination with their Italian school, a father and son from Holland, an American couple living in Asia, and a bunch more. Each of these was the type of well-rounded, friendly, likes-to-travel person that you might meet in a hostel while traveling yourself. We got to live through their experiences and learn a bit about their worlds without even leaving the house. Not to say we become besties with everyone who stays. There is a wide spectrum of those who like to chat and those who prefer to keep to themselves. I have just been very presently surprised by how fun most guests can be.

There is also the consideration that Rome has lots to see and most of our guests spend morning to night out trying to seeing it all. Some have cooked meals at home, in general the older guests and the ones who stay longer have been more prone to do so. Many others we barely see, often just a quick exchange of greetings while they are coming or going.

We’ve been pretty successful, despite not exactly living across from the Coliseum or above the Spanish Steps. It seems there are plenty of people who would just as happily take the Metro a few stops or walk a bit further. We started off pretty slow in the end of fall and dead of winter. But then we got into spring-break season, and Easter, some big Rome/Vatican events like the Canonization, and now just the high tourist season of spring and summer. Right now we could easily book back to back if we wanted. Which, if you think about it is very impressive, that there are enough potential guests to match up with any weird opening, since we only have one room available. It happens enough now that we bought a second full set of sheets and towels, so we can turn over the room in the same day, while the linens hang dry.

I attribute a few things to our success. Besides entering tourist season, we have reviews now, which is going to make us more attractive to guests and send more requests our way. I also wrote a really, really clear description about our place (in my own mother-tongue English, which not all Italian listings can boast). I know I tend to avoid situations where I don’t know what to expect, particularly when traveling. Personally, I would even pay more for a place where I felt confident in what I was going to find, than a place that is perhaps nicer but I’m unsure about a few things– but maybe that is just nerdy me trying to avoid awkward situations. For example, if there are towels in the picture but it doesn’t say if they are included, or I’m not sure if the address given is where I’m staying or their office where I pick up my key, how many others will be staying here, which areas are common areas, things like that. Our aforementioned mother and son guests complemented our place on exceeding their expectations and said that at their last room, there had been a couch in the picture (mother and son did not want to share a bed) but on arrival were told the couch is now in a different and more expensive room. My description highlights how close we are to the metro, that it’s the metro line with most attractions, the grocery stores/restaurants/cafes nearby, that I work from home and will be able to let guests in just about any time (a known issue for Airbnb guests), and that Daniele has lived here 30 years and can help you figure out what to do during your stay. I also clearly state that it is a small room and what the shared bathroom and kitchen are all about, to manage expectations.

We have squeezed both a single bed and a full bed into that little room. This makes it a good layout for either couples or friends traveling together And while it would be cramped (and I always warn groups of three), three could fit in there and it’s a bit harder finding rooms for three in Europe. We recently added a small extra fee for the third person, after we started turning down most of the groups of three, once again restoring the “worth it” balance. Though really, the few we have hosted have not been much different that the groups of two. It’s just that 5 people sharing a bathroom has the potential to be too much.

We make an effort to keep the place immaculately clean. Which is the natural state of the apartment anyway, since Daniele and I have different pet-peeve things we like spotless (he likes clean floors, I could care less about floors but hate surfaces to have any dust or grime). Obviously this is good to do for reviews, but I have my own secret reason for it, too. People tend to clean up after themselves more when they are surrounded by cleanliness. All our guests have been pretty clean, one even commenting on not wanting to mess up our pristine apartment. So by doing the cleaning more often, we actually have to clean less by not having to clean up so much after them.

In summery, huge success. April was our best month to date, bringing in about $1500. All for a tiny room that we wouldn’t even be using otherwise. The space could have been an office for me, but we have space in our large bedroom for an office-area and that kind of money is like a salary in itself. Most likely winters will always be more bleak (though I think having reviews will help next year), but that’s fine because it is nice to not have guests, too. Someday we will have to shut down when it is time to expand our family and convert the room into a nursery. In the meantime, it is awesome money for just doing some extra laundry and a fun experience in itself.

January 20, 2013August 18, 2014

Our Home

I’ve been asked a few times to take pictures of our home in Monterotondo (Rome), Italy. It is a pretty new apartment building with a garage on the ground floor and four apartments on each of the three floors above.

We’re on the “first” floor, that’s a European first one floor up. We have a kitchen that opens to the living room, bathroom, a master bedroom, and a smaller second bedroom that functions as my office and a guest room. We also have a skinny balcony that goes along the whole North-West wall and wraps shortly along the North-East wall. The two bedrooms open onto that balcony. The kitchen opens to a larger balcony where we have a dinning table, clothes drying rack, and stairs to the garden below. All the windows in the apartment are doors to balconies except for the one in the bathroom. The window/doors are really interesting, they are made of double glass doors (window/air protection), a screen that slides to the side (bug protection), a plastic shade that rolls up into the wall above when not in use and could keep a vampire safe from sun when it is in use (for privacy), and an iron gate each with a unique lock (for security, everyone in Italy has these).

The aforementioned garden is the width of the apartment and right outside and below our kitchen. The building is surrounded by a ring of garden space minus the side where everyone enters the parking space under the building. The ring is sectioned into six pieces. We own one and seem to be the only ones who use ours, most the others are just overrun. It’s not a huge space but it’s very nice for a city. We have a patio covered with a kinda tent, a stone barbeque in the corner, some paving stones to navigate watering the plants, and another entrance in the fence from the garage. Normally it is very green with herbs, peppers, flowers, and Daniele’s tomatoes, but I just took these photos now in January so it’s pretty barren.

It’s only 11 photos, so I will just link to the album rather than re-placing them here. Most of them are rough cut panoramas because I couldn’t get much even on my wide angle lens in the space.

https://plus.google.com/photos/111221349198606775660/albums/5836701962471254273?authkey=CLHzp77w4_bBcw

I’ve started to make the place my own, but most of the décor was chosen by Daniele, his mother, or was just handed down when he first bought the place two years before we met. So don’t expect it to really scream “me”.

October 20, 2012August 24, 2014

Eggplant Preserving

I was recently having a conversation about preserving and prompted to write about how we preserve eggplant. There are two ways to do it, under oil and under vinegar.

I prefer the under oil version (Melanzane Sott’olio), as the vinegar version is a bit harsh for me. Daniele and I made this one together and it’s super simple.

Ingredients:

Eggplant
Oil
Vinegar
Garlic (cut fine)
Herb (Parsley or Mint, not both)
Peperoncino (red pepper)
Salt
Jar

Slice eggplant 1/4 inch slices
Grill until dried out, pretty grilled, some black stripes

Layer into the jar:

2 or 3 grilled eggplant
salt
garlic
peperoncino
herb
vineger (every other layer)
oil
Start a new layer until finish eggplant or reach top or jar

Oil has to cover the top layer, top off the jar the next day, as the eggplant may absorb some oil, shift, or expand up. It seals it and prevents mold. At least that is what Italians say, I’m not an expert on the matter.

Wait a day or two to try them, they need to absorb the oil and flavors. Then they just get stronger and better over time.

The oil when the eggplant is finished can be used over salad.

The second method, the under vinegar version (Melanzane Sottaceto) is very similar. The main difference is the eggplant is not grilled, rather it is boiled in half-vinegar half-water. I have never made this one myself (as I’m not enough of a fan to eat a whole jar, but Daniele actually prefers it).

It was explained to me that you boil the eggplant in the vinegar-water, dry them out, and layer them like the under oil version. This online recipe seems right on target:
http://flavorsofitaly.blogspot.com/2009/07/nonnas-pickled-eggplant-melanzane.html

We normally make a meal of “fresh things” for lunch about every day in the summer, and these jars of eggplant are awesome cause they are always there and delicious. It takes the pressure off having to cook veggies when it is really hot out. We also made several big jars in August that should get us through the winter no problem. And they just get better over time, they absorb more and more of the flavor.

October 15, 2012August 24, 2014

Changing Device Timezones

I spend months at a time in different timezones. However, I often won’t change my clocks. Sometimes someone will see my computer clock is wrong and point it out as if I don’t know how easy it is to change. The problem is it totally messes up my calendar.

I view my calendar on my Android phones, tablet, and laptop. My phones change their clock on their own. I also have cameras and a wrist watch with clocks– but those I always change since there is no calendar issue.

I use Google Calendar, here is how they handle timezones:
http://support.google.com/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2367918

The meat and potatoes of that link:
“Whenever you create an event, Calendar converts it from your time zone to UTC time, using currently known conversion rules. By using one universal time for all events, Calendar can keep all of your guests’ calendars consistent regardless of which time zones they’re in. When we display the event on your calendar, it is converted from UTC to appear in your own time zone.

If you have a recurring meeting that spans across different time zones, then its time always remains constant for the organizer, and will shift for guests whenever their time difference with the organizer changes. That’s why if you’re in London and attending a weekly meeting that was created by your New York colleagues at 10am NY time, it will always be at 10am for NY, almost always at 3pm for you, but at 2pm during that particular week in early November.” [“particular week”, reference to US and GB change their clocks for Daylight Savings Time on different dates]

Indeed, Google is trying to solve a complex problem here. That’s cool for the people who work at Google, who use Google Calendar a bit different from people like me. Personally, I don’t have many recurring international meetings. Actually, pretty much all my events are just for myself. But hey, that’s me.

Here is the type of use case I run into. I have a Nexus 7 tablet. This device currently is what plays my morning alarm, because unlike my phone which can get forgotten in a purse on the other side of the room, he lives by my bed so I can read him in the morning. I actually was getting a bit annoyed looking at the time three hours off (I just came from NJ to San Francisco) so I changed his clock from EST to PST. The next morning, I woke up before my alarm and was reading news in bed waiting for my alarm to go off before I got up to get breakfast. I wanted to dismiss it and not wake anyone else up. It never went off, but I had forgotten about changing the clock the day before so just wrote it off and moved on with my day. About three hours later I started hearing chimes. My tablet had changed the time of my alarm from 8:30 to 11:30 (or rather to 8:30 EST, 11:30 PST the same UTC time). Does this seem like it should be the default behavior? Do most people set alarms to notify themselves of some world-wide event (perhaps an space-shuttle launch), so they would need that time to adjust to their local time? Or are most people just looking to wake up around the same time every morning?

Those are alarms, it behaves the same for calendar events. So, if while in Italy, I make a doctors appointment for 3 PM on a Wednesday for when I’m going to be in NJ, I can put it in my calendar while still in Italy and my computer clock is set to Italian time. Then when I come to NJ and change my clock, that 3 PM appointment will jump to 9 AM on my calendar. Confusing, no?

I could have put the event in at 9PM when I was in Italy, as 9PM in Italy is 3PM in NJ, my target time for this event. The problem with this work around is I have to look at it on my calendar with that weird time up until I change the computer clock. That is really confusing for scheduling other events around it.

Fear of this behavior (and that I will not see something scrolled down on my smaller laptop screen) encourages me to put important events in my Calendar as all day events, with the time in the details. But unless this has been fixed since I last saw it, and this behavior I definitely consider a bug, an all day event I create in one time zone will actually change to a 3 AM to 3 AM (for example) event when I change timezones. If an event is July 8th all day, then it is July 8th all day in any timezone, IMHO.

I wish there was a way to opt-out of the time-zone syncing behavior, for my whole calendar, or for non-shared events, or for anything. As far as I can see, it’s not an option. Until then, I just keep everything on EST.

UPDATE 10/24/12
The very smart Marc D responded to this post with

Marc Dougherty ‏@muncus
@kait3210 not sure if it is any better, but “use home time zone” in calendar settings that will always show the same time zone. Maybe?

It took me several days to figure what on earth he was talking about because I manage my Calendar 90% from my laptop and use my devices (phone, tablet) to make sure I’m not forgetting anything. I’m not normally playing with Calendar settings on these Android devices. I use Android because it syncs so easily with my calendar and I don’t have to work to make it work– like setting up Exchange in my iPhone days.

But sure enough, In an ANDROID Calendar, you can go to the three-dot-menu-button, Settings, General settings. Once there, I found a little check box to “Use home time zone” as well as one right below it to set your “Home time zone”. As soon as I did this on my Nexus 7, all my appointments (remember, I changed this device to PST) jumped back to the correct time. Awesome solution.

This is an Android feature, the web version has no such check box. However, looking closer, I can set my Calendar timezone independently from my laptop time zone. It is in gear-shaped-button, Settings, General-tab, “Your current time zone” setting. Here I can set it to always be EST, or even add both EST and PST and both times display in two columns, but no non-US timezones. I can’t believe I missed this feature! I only had to dismiss Google asking me if I wanted it to change my Calendar timezone when I changed my laptop timezone just now– which I’ve never seen before, so maybe this is a newer feature.

It’s nice to have my laptop clock on the right time. Just in time for me to blow out of town in another week.

August 23, 2012August 24, 2014

Websites in Italian

I can’t really say how frustrating it is to use my browser when I’m in Italy sometimes. My browser, the application that runs the most on my computer. My computer, my dear friend. It’s a betrayal and an example of what you can versus what you should do in terms of applying technology.

The technology I’m talking about is determining a browser user’s location. In my two-years as an expat I feel like more and more website I go to open up in Italian on me. Often with no way of turning it off or switching back to English.

Just now I went to Macy’s website. Granted, I googled it first, though I could have guessed the URL. So I deserved to be sent to the .IT version of the site, with blown up “WE SHIP TO ITALY NOW” covering the whole site. I quickly changed the URL to the standard www.macys.com and saw the normal american-aimed site that I wanted. From there, found a link to the info I sought. Only to be hit again the moment I clicked it “WE SHIP TO ITALY NOW”. Give it up, Macys, I’m so not interested.

Even earlier today, I went to my AdWords account to see why the ads are gone from my blog (robbing my of those potential pennies in case anyone were to click them!). I log in and it’s in Italian. I’m logged in! Google knows me. Google probably knows me better than my mother. So I google (ha) how to change your language preference in AdWords Dashboard and navigate through the Italian to find the setting, but it is already English. It mush be a setting for the language of the Ads, but looking at the “Inglese” sure felt ironic. Yes, I get by in Italian, but these are setting panels, it brings me to the level of a 70-year old blind women.

Speaking of Google. I have tried everything to get my browser search bar to default to google.com, rather than google.it. If I put google.com in the navigation bar while in Italy, it forwards to google.it. The only way to get to google.com is to use iGoogle– somehow that knows I’m me, American, and not to give me all Italian language search results. Just the normal wikipedia first then everything else, that I expect. But iGoogle is being phased out by Google and will be turned off November 2013. So I guess I’ll have to get better at reading Italian and wean off wikipedia.

Now I’m not saying all websites should always be in English, I’m saying that if you are going to offer multiple language versions of your website, which is great, you should do that, let the user choose to change it after you maybe pick the default based on location. Don’t assume every person in any location prefers one language. Like half the people in Italy at any given time are tourists (I think I read that in a Rick Steves once, I can’t back up those numbers), so it’s not that safe a bet as you might think that a person here wants to speak Italian. Plus we already can’t get to Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, NBC.com, or even the pirate bay. Also the fastest internet you can get is DSL but most people use “internet keys” which is cell phone tethering. And no, there is no 4G, lots of places have Edge or even no data coverage. So, don’t kick dirt in the wound by making inaccessible websites. It’s just mean.