More jet-lag, more Canadian

Back from the holidays, with a damn headache that has been hammering my neurons since I left for Italy. Oh, the joy of jet-lag, that made my holidays really miserable!

My slept was totally messed up for the first 10 days at least, which made me sleep an average of 3-4 hours a night.

I became very soon an intractable, nervous and overstressed person who probably made my family regret to have me back home.

In other words I discovered the perfect formula for bad holidays: how to get back to work from your vacation even more tired and stressed than you were when you left.

While in Italy I didn’t really enjoy much social life, as I don’t even know where my friends hang out now (assuming that they still hang out). A talk with a couple of people I knew was enough to remember me how sad and depressing can be there, especially if you are looking for a proper job.

I am aware I’m getting more and more disconnected from my home country: I watched the news on TV distractedly, as if I was in a hotel room of a foreign country, passing there and feeling no connection at all with that temporary place.

The return flight was less traumatic then I could imagine: unlike the last time the immigration officers didn’t seize me for an interrogation, searching for evidence of something strange in the underwear  I had in my baggage. In fact when I showed my passport and work permit at the security control, the officer just said: “Welcome back”. A sign that I’m becoming more Canadian and less Italian? The only problem is that the jet-lag passed the control as well and followed me.

Challenges

Challenges: what fuels human ambition to do more, to crave for better, to climb another mountain (even though when I do it I feel vertigos and get scared I may have gone too high, instead of find something higher).

Challenges are what I’m dealing with now, that make my life less relaxed but maybe more interesting:

1) immigration (‘cos hey, I know I got a work permit, but it’s not over yet until I’ll put my hands on the pr card, thus soon it will come the time to research again the government website and find the best way to make it)

2) work (always busy, one million things to do in a start-up and my intentions to learn new things continuously postponed to when I’ll get some more time)

3) social life (improving, thanks to my colleagues, but I should stop thinking of a rainy Saturday night as an excuse to stay in)

4) ...

Challenges are also what keep me busy now, at the point I barely think in 2 weeks-time I’ll be back home on holidays. They will be my first holidays since last June (yep, that’s the side-effect of living in Canada) but somehow I don’t feel excited and impatient as I was last year.

I’m not saying I’m not happy to see my family, but I feel as if it was a part of routine process, a yearly task to deal with.

That makes me aware that my country is going farther and farther from my thoughts and that I have been loosening my links to Italy much more in this 2 years in Canada than in 5 years in Ireland.

After all, let’s be honest: if that famous 24^th April 2012 I had left Canada (it was my original deadline in case of failure to get a job) now I would be unemployed in Italy or not in my home country at all.

Definitely too early to say Canada is a choice for life but at the moment I have tasks to accomplish here.

Italians: mixing love and hate in a messy recipe

Glad at this time I won’t talk too much about my immigration issues: I got my work permit, and for a couple of years I should be ok.

I need a work permit for the obvious reason I’m not Canadian. It doesn’t happen often to me to think of myself as an Italian in Canada: I just live my life in Vancouver, mixed with thousands of other people who do the same and that probably come from somewhere else. That’s actually something it’s always fascinated me: the number of accents and languages you can spot when for example you go to a supermarket.

Yet, something that happened some weeks ago drove me to think what it means to be Italian.

Not to me, but to others.

I was with some colleague at an Ethiopian restaurant: chats, laughs, food of course, whatever you can expect from a lunch with colleagues.

I had paid my bill and I was about to get out when my attention was caught by a paper hanged on the wall,  close to restaurant entrance.

I didn’t read much, but the title was meaningful: “Graziani, the butcher of Ethiopia”.

Graziani was the commander in chief of the Italian army that invaded Ethiopia in 1936 and used toxic gasses against Ethiopian troops.

Italians therefore, at least to some, are not just the people with love for stylish clothes who always waive their hands when talking, messy, noisy and unreliable, but funny after all.

What has recently happened in my home country, with the 4^th Prime Minister in the last 3 years can just confirm Italians are messy and unreliable, at least when they have to stay together.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that from a badly managed country thousands of people are fleeing (in few hours the 2000 places available for the WHV in Canada got finished).

Being Italian abroad, especially nowadays, I think it means somehow to love and hate your own country at the same time, because when you look at it you probably look at yourself, what you actually are and what you don’t want to be.

It’s probably a mixture of pride towards a concept of quality and way of enjoying the life unknown to Canadians and rage for the absolute lack of cohesion and civic-mindedness that afflicts Italy.

It’s love and hate, good and evil all together, with a result that’s not always a masterpiece like a monument or a square in an Italian city, not always tasty and healthy like a real pizza (where you do NOT put ketchup on), not always a dolce vita, rather than a difficult situation that has brought many to leave the country.

I wouldn’t be in Canada otherwise, would I?

Canada: Year 2

Year number 2 in Canada for me today.

Not much to say honestly: I think I exposed quite clearly in my previous post how the last year was, what I managed to achieve and to improve. I can just repeat that I went beyond what I could expect, and that will keep that way.

And let’s be honest: the first anniversary is always the most exciting one, as along the time you risk to get stuck in some sort of routine, with year after year to put on a pile like the rocks on English Bay.

Ok, maybe the word routine doesn’t entirely apply to me: it will if and when I’ll get the permanent residence.

For now I’m impatient to get the new work permit and book some holiday to go home.

Canada is actually trying to teach me the virtue of patience, but I’m a slow-learner.

You are asking me time Canada, so I’m asking the same to you: be patient with me.

In case somebody noticed the new cover: it's a picture taken a couple of weeks ago in Lynn Canyon, North Vancouver.