Another fun photo blog, this time from Venice!

This is northern Italy.


I live here. As you can see, Milan isn't located near any large body of water. Sometimes when it's not foggy or smoggy you can see the Alps. That doesn't happen very often during the winter though.

This weekend though, I left Milan and headed to....


Venice!


Of course, it is very picturesque.


I was very happy to be there.


Though, it was frustrating at times having to be the tour guide. I've been to Venice four times now and still I've never been inside Saint Mark's Cathedral. Oh well, at least I always have an excuse to come back.



This is our hostel. It seemed very nice from the outside. It was originally a palace but was later sold to the Armenian church and was converted into a monastery.


The outside was nice, but inside it was kind of creepy. In the end the faculty of architecture here paid for everything, so I of course will not complain about a free trip to Venice. That being said, I never quite understood this mural in the dining area. Are they sacrificing babies to Mary? Take this as an indication of everything else that was on the inside. There was also an old, dark altar room and a room with a creepy old piano. I am convinced that the place is haunted and I made sure I drank a few more glasses of wine with dinner so I would fall right asleep and avoid any paranormal experiences...


The people I traveled with were swell.


Anyway, the purpose of our trip was to see the Biennale. The Biennale is a type of architectural exhibition that happens every two years in Venice. This year, the theme was architecture Out There. It was a little too abstract for me at times, but there were some very interesting planning exhibitions. This showed the new plan for Rome. They call it the "Pizza Plan". You can see why.



The point of the entire exhibition was to think beyond the spatial impacts of architecture. This part of the exhibit talked about the people that actually use new, "innovative" spaces that would be designed. I was a little surprised to find this description. The model says:

GLOBAL OPPORTUNIST
WORKS on being a student as long as possible.

LIVES wherever his studies take him.

CELEBRATES freedom

BELIEVES one day he will settle down. Maybe.

Hmmmm.....


This was an exhibition from the Danish Pavilion. It talked about the importance of sustainability in architecture and planning. The globe was an interesting presentation concept. The photos in the background are of many different geographic settings around the world. What made me laugh was how the Danes slammed Vancouver. Apparently, although Vancouver is supposedly an "eco-friendly" city, we would need four earths to sustain our living standards if everyone in the world lived the way people live in Vancouver.

Ouch.


For me, what was most interesting was the location of the exhibition. This is called the Arsenale. It was essentially the heart of Venice's naval empire. This is where most of the Venetian fleet was built and moored.




Everywhere you can see vestiges of the power this city once had.


This is the Saint Mark's Lion, the symbol of Venice. You see it literally everywhere. Propoganda is a lot older than we like to think.


Today, it is an interesting exhibition space. This was once a fuel room where the smell of kerosine still lingers in the air. It housed an exhibition on housing in Beijing.


We did have some free time as well...


and had an excellent dinner later in the evening. We kind of blew off the dinner planned for all the students in our group. I initially felt bad, especially when we had a run in with some of the professors who organized the trip right as we were escaping the scary dining room with the murals of sacrifices to some old Armenian godess. It was all worth it in the end, but I had a five minute ethics crisis especially after we were guilted by one of the professors..."well we did organize this to ALL be TOGETHER... but you are here one night so do what you want". Sorry, but boxed wine and blue plastic table cloths don't cut it when you have one night in Venice!


We also had enough time to walk around the island of "Gheto" where Venice's Jewish community was relocated during the Renaissance. Of course, the word "ghetto" derives from this neighborhood of the city. The island was fascinating and much more dense than the rest of the city.


The best part was when we found a small Jewish bakery.


My friend Karin and I, both Jewish-enthusiasts, spent a lot of money on freshly made matzoh and dreamed of American Jewish food during the holidays. I was horribly surprised when I mistook a gefelteh fish pastry for something made of figs.


Anyway, all and all it was an excellent weekend. I leave you with some scenic photos of the Serenissma...








and a quote from the Belgian pavilion to ponder.

More Linguistic Complexity

This is a brief update related to my last post.

A Twix is neither a chocolate nor a candy in Italian. Instead, it's a "merenda" or snack.

Clearly there is no logic to this system.

Whatever.

Linguistic Complexity

This is just a brief example to show the amount of information that is ultimately lost in translation from one language to another.

It was pouring in Milan the other day, not the kind of weather you hope for on your hour lunch break sandwiched in between two three-hour long courses.

Anyway, just for fun, we started talking about Halloween. Halloween, as many of you already know, doesn't have so much clout this side of the Atlantic. That being said, we hit the topic of candy, which, fortunately for me at least, opened a larger and much more interesting discussion that went a little something like this:

"Wait so, chocolate isn't candy?"

"No, chocolate is chocolate."

"But isn't it also sugary?"

"Well yes, but in Italian, chocolate is chocolate. Candies are small and sugary, but not chocolate."

"You're kidding me right? You're telling me that a Pocket Coffee (Italian chocolate with liquid coffee on the inside) isn't a candy. In English, that is for sure a candy."

"No, it's a chocolate."

"So, let me get this straight then. Dolcetto is the umbrella term from sweets. From this, it divides into cioccolata (chocolate), caramelle (candies) and baked goods which obviously aren't candy?"

"Yes. On top of that, stuff like cotton candy is an completely different category."

"Whoa, hold on a second here. You are telling me that cotton candy isn't candy. Just because it looks big doesn't change the fact that it is fundamentally just a bunch of sugar teased out into smalls strands that happens to be wrapped around a stick and looks like something different. I feel like your categories are flawed. See, we just simplify everything. It's all just candy. Shouldn't it just be about the fact that it's sugar anyway?"

"Matt, shut up."

"But seriously though, consider this..."

Ad infinitum.

Anyway, you can see how in English we tend to simplify some things, which, realistically, would be better lost in the complexity of categorization. I certainly don't think it hinders the expressive creativity of our language as was insinuated by my professor who said that English was barbaric. It does however give some clues into why English can be at the same time so incredibly easy and so incredibly difficult to learn.

If everything had a category and a specific word though, would it actually be that much easier to learn or would we in the end just be lost in the same structures of candy classification?

Politics and Doughnuts

The past couple of days have been interesting and I have two different scenarios that
rightfully justify the confusion that comes with being an American abroad.

To start, as much as the political atmosphere in the United States has proved promising, in Italy unfortunately this hasn't been the case. The government under Berlusconi, has been moving to privatize the university system in Italy. The formula is simple, cut public funding for public universities proportional to the amount of money received from private investors. The question is, who are these private investors that are going to invest in Italian universities. On top of all of this, universities are now being required by the government to scale back the hiring of researchers; for every five posts vacated, only one new professor/ researcher can be hired.

Everyone, well, everyone meaning the students and professors at least, is alarmed.

This all being said, a professor in our course called Welfare States and Economic Sociology made a brief presentation about the current crisis in the Italian university system. He cited the fact that there needed to be some structural changes being that Italy has an alarmingly high drop out rate at almost 50 percent. That being said though, universities in Italy have made substantial efforts to decentralize campuses in order to increase accessibility to students outside major cities.

It's a difficult issue.

He continued by explaining statistics that the government is citing to justify privatization. According to the professor, world universities are ranked by two factors alone: student to teacher ratio and the amount of "hits" for the reading and citing of published material by faculty members. The student to teacher ratio is indeed unfair for Italian university professors as Italian universities provide decent educational opportunities but suffer in quality based on the sheer number of students enrolled. The issue of the number of "hits" on the readings of faculty members is a little more problematic. He made the case that because Italian researchers publish in Italian, they receive less hits than their French, Spanish and obviously English speaking counterparts. He only mentioned in Italian that he didn't seem to think he should "have to lose his own language".

He finished in saying, while Italian universities may not be ranked in the top 100 worldwide, they do preform very well at providing an average level of education for all. This, he deemed better than having a "few stellar universities" and a lot of "rather poor quality" institutions.

Ok. I guess my main problem, which when looking back on his argument now seems quite petty, was the implications of cultural imperialism implied by the publishing in English and the over appreciating of North American universities. Comparing the two systems and considering the professors comments, I agree that there are some structural inefficiencies here. That being said, I find it hard to believe the fact that North American universities are overappreciated simply because of the happy circumstance that they are anglophone.

I almost found myself defending the privatization of university education, something that you would be hard pressed to hear when I'm in the New World. It's interesting to see how opinions vary with context and how subjective our realities really are.

Anyway, I'm less annoyed by what was said now after reflecting on how it was said.

Moving on.

Today I was relieved to find out that Barack Obama would be the next president of the United States. Whether or not you agree with his politics, this was a momentous and much needed turn for America. Our great democracy has spoken and proven its merits. Obviously there remains a lot of work to be done, but it's high time that the stale air of eight years of misguided policy be blown out of Washington.

In any case, this is momentous and historical. Unfortunately, while I was obsessively checking the electoral map I also had to work on a group project. It was a presentation of an article for the same Welfare and Economic Sociology course I mentioned above. My roomate and I admittedly waited to the last minute and were unhappily surprised to find out that we both only did half the reading.

My friend Karin and I discussed getting doughnuts for the class if Obama won. Here, funny enough, there is an artisan bakery called American Doughnuts that makes doughnuts, lemon squares and other fatty American baked goods that cause me hours of only child eating guilt and angst. They even do American brunch and dinner. It's incredibly amusing and ridiculously overdone, but I love it.

Anyway, because of the group project, I almost backed out.

Today, however, was monumental; a once, maybe twice in a lifetime cultural change and thus needed to be celebrated appropriately. We ended up buying the doughnuts, priced at a light, 21.50 Euro a dozen. In class, we made a brief announcement in English and Italian about Obama's victory. Although bringing doughnuts or bagels is something that we do often at meetings and classes in the States (mainly to incite people to participate in group discussions through a perverse but wonderful system of incentives structured around food), Karin and I didn't really know how this would fly in the Old World... too folksy?

Sure enough, American doughnuts brought to you by real, live Americans was a success. Everyone, students around the world, applauded when we announced that Obama did win. It was really quite moving to have people congratulate us, especially friends from places like Iran that are often unjustly demonized by our media.

Here is the photographic evidence of the event:


The doughnuts were far too perfect...


...notice the red, white and blue shirt.

I hope that this is really only a microcosm of the good that is to come by a change n administrations. This is all admittedly a bit too optimistic and idealistic, but hey, we all have to believe in something. It was nice to bring a little piece of Election Day to the Old World and be mini-ambassadors of the United States' new found good will. We'll see what changes will really come in the coming months, but for now maybe everyone should step back, chill out and have a doughnut.