Hi Italians, Italy lovers and Exparts!

Looks like I'll be moving to Pordenone, Italy for a few months for work purposes.

Could you gimme lots of tips on Italy and Pordenone and what its like to live and work their?

Look forward to hearing from you!

Elux

What Jen says is true....the consumption of wine, for example, has dropped a lot over the last 30 years...and even when it was higher, Italians were seldom drunk...even the kids thought that getting falling down drunk was what foreigners did.

Speaking some Italian will enable you to deal with a lot of situations that English-only speakers won't be able to handle. During my year in Rome, it enabled me to rescue a student's camera from customs at the airport, to send students' luggage from Rome to London for a few dollars, to avoid paying penalties on very overdue parking tickets, and so on. However, other situations would have been just impossible if you didn't have a padrino, a local person who knows everybody and can navigate especially the Italian bureaucracy.

Jen, for example, has nightmare stories about getting her Permesso di Soggiorno, the visa to stay more than 90 days. On the other hand, because the university had a padrino, he knew somebody, and so a retired cop came over to the university one day, and he and I spent an hour fulling in all the forms - and we were done.

What you must not do is get on the wrong side of bureaucrats, because when an Italian doesn't want to do something, it won't get done...conversely, when an Italian does want to do something, miracles happen - this is why you learn enough Italian to have basic conversations, and you always tell stories to keep people interested...I have some examples on my Rome page tips...

Bill

"he and I spent an hour fulling in all the forms "

haha, I didn't make this clear...we did all the forms for ALL the students and faculty (probably 80 people) in an hour...had we not had this arrangement, I would have had to spend several days at the government offices getting something like 20-30 at a time (all you could get at one time for a group in those days), and each 20-30 would have taken me all day of waiting...and that's if everything went right!

Bill