Sabato 19th Dicembre

Well it was a whole 5 day week this week! How unfair is that? First week was a 3 day week, then a 4 day week the week due to holidays - so a whole 5 day week this week.
Well I'll try and give the highlights, but it has been an amazing rollercoaster week again, with long hours and some really fun things going on.

I went to the karate school for the first time on Thursday. I really struggled with making myself understood, as I was just hanging around and none of them seemed to speak English at all. How very dare they? Got stuck in pretty quickly and it was a good class, I really enjoyed it. For the karateka out there, we did quite a few combos, a lot of backfist and elbows in kibadachi, and then some bunkai from Heian Nidan. Two things spring to mind - the first was that the temperature was nearly freezing outside and yet it was so hot in the dojo that we had to have all the windows wide open. Lots of sweaty Italians in a small room. Hmmm. This makes me absolutely terrified about how it's going to be in 40C heat in the summer! The second thing of note relates to my comprehension of language. I've had two Italian lessons so far and am doing ok, but not very well, sometimes I can understand stuff and make myself understood and other times it's just impossible. I wasn't in the zone at karate, but thankfully all the commands in karate and counting etc are done in Japanese so it was possible for me to understand the commands, albeit Japanese with an Italian accent. One thing kept making me laugh though and I nearly burst out laughing a couple of times. The standard opening move for any sequence is a lower block "gedan barai" which is done with the left or right foot forward. So in English you would say something like "stepping down, left gedan barai" and just about every move starts like this. So, the same thing happens in Italian, and the words for left and right are "sinistre" and "destre", respectively. (Etymologically, people who are left handed are thought to be freaks and unlucky and wierdos. Which of course they are. In fact, I remember at infants school we had a new kid join our school who was left handed. When he joined they wouldn't let him eat or write with his left hand and made him put his left hand behind his back and smacked him when he tried to use his left. And quite right too! He was quite a bratty child later through school - maybe that was the reason why. Full etymology of "sinister" courtesy of dictionary.com.

Word Origin & History

sinister

1411, "prompted by malice or ill-will," from O.Fr. sinistre "contrary, unfavorable, to the left," from L. sinister "left, on the left side" (opposite of dexter), perhaps from base *sen- and meaning prop. "the slower or weaker hand" [Tucker], but Buck suggests it's a euphemism (see left), connected with the root of Skt. saniyan "more useful, more advantageous." The L. word was used in augury in the sense of "unlucky, unfavorable" (omens, especially bird flights, seen on the left hand were regarded as portending misfortune), and thus sinister acquired a sense of "harmful, unfavorable, adverse." This was from Gk. influence, reflecting the early Gk. practice of facing north when observing omens; in genuine Roman auspices, the left was favorable. Bend (not "bar") sinister in heraldry indicates illegitimacy and preserves the lit. sense of "on the left side.")

So about 30 times in the class the command "sinistre gedan barai" came - and every time I imagined a sinister person, with a pointy moustache, similar to the child catcher from "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang", doing a lower block, and stroking his diabolic moustache and cackling evilly. And, needless to say, I was giggling internally every time the sensei said this!

On Friday I had to go to the Siena Municipality to be made official in Siena. Classic Italian bureaucracy - thousands and thousands of pieces of paper, absolute meaningless to me, that I had to sign again and again and again. I went down with one of the HR people and a Danish guy who started on the same day as me. The HR person had to pay the fees for me, him, his wife and daughter - it came to a mighty 1 Euro 56 cents. Bargain. So, I am now legal or something, I don't really understand, but I had to have a piece of paper documenting where I lived, that I had employment, and that I was earning enough money to allow me to stay in Italy, and all this pieces of paper had to be signed and stamped, and my passport browsed over. Then we had to have a shiny glossy stamp put on one of the pieces of paper. Bizarre. More paperwork stuff, I was looking into joining the work gym this week, which is directly below my office and Dawn forwarded me the link to the forms. FORMS. 6 forms. Allin Italian, and completely unintelligible to me. Aaaaaargh.

Friday was another one of those crazy days where a million things happen. Unfortunately the most senior member of my team resigned on Friday - hopefully, nothing to do with me, she had actually been offered a job at Novartis Pharma in Basel. Anyway, a real shame, but good luck to her!

It has been cold for several days, below freezing for most of the times. I was following the weather forecast in the UK excitedly, and gutted that Hitchin was deep under snow and everyone at Roche was at home. (Although it made me hanker for the days when being snowed in meant that no work could be done!) Apparently it never snows in Siena - it day snow a little, a light sprinkling 3 years ago, and then similar 10 years ago, but apart from that it never snows. I had seen a biblical hail storm a couple of weeks ago, but during my Italian lession in the afternoon the first flakes fell. A couple of hours later we had a couple of inches. Went out for a couple of beers in Siena central on Friday night and by the time we came out of the bars it was deep snow, and no taxis, so I strolled back, taking rubbish photos on my iPhone. Attached.
Saturday we woke up to proper snow. Sadly this meant that we stayed in and missed the evening's wine tasting since the roads are treacherous out in the sticks where we live. Also I was nursing a hangover, so probably for the best! Popped out briefly to take some photos during sunset and then dived back in to avoid the subfreezing conditions and watch The Italian Job - 1969 version, natch.