I have an interview for a decent sounding language school tomorrow so if I get the job I could picture staying for a good few months. I can be useful for the family keeping my aunt company especially in her overcrowded (come 5 minutes late and it's standing room only) as in bengali man-filled italian language classes, and tutoring the kids and learn plenty myself at the same time. The class is quite fun - they all seem to love the teacher who really tries to explain things in a thousand ways so everyone understands. The guys all have random words and phrases they picked up at a restaurant or on the bus which make her laugh/ wonder what the heck they're talking about and try to teach us all these oddities (I'm not much of a note taker so I can't check for an example sorry) I'm picking up plenty of vocab and my aunt is pretty good- the grammar is familiar fromspainsh so it's easy to catch on and keep up. In fact it goes pretty slowly and it took only one session for me to replace my notebook with knitting.


My one venture into an Italian shop so far has given me a taste of the xenophobia that seems to be the attitude prevailing in this city. I don't think it's an excuse to say that the Italians' experience of dark immigrants is bad, so naturally they'll tail a you with a security guard as soon as you step in. The difference between thinking all Bengalis or coloured hijabi people are likely to be thieves, and racism is too fine a distinction for me. I'll smile at the guard and be polite when he takes the eyeliner i'm looking at from me and checks if it's a tester or I'm taking a new pencil, but really I'm angry and not sure if I should show it. I think I should on principle but the wiser course for a stranger is to prove them wrong by being an exemplary customer. Always a degrading experience though - one I don't think I've had in the UK so you forget what it feels like.

Actually just spoke to my aunt and she says this is more a train station attitude because people are constantly flowing through from everywhere and the staff there are more distrustful than the norm. So perhaps I should reserve my judgement of Italian folk generally (although this kind of thing totally happened to me in Verona a few years ago, plus my aunt's apartment hunting woes: constant rejection and refusal to even look at their perfect decade long rental record because they are a Bengali family. My aunt seems to think this is natural but seems shocking to me.

(edited to add: please note that was just an initial reaction which sounds harsh in retrospect- probably the culture-shock of such an incident coming from manchester. I'm always meeting lovely Italian folk whenever I go out and I'll give the haughtier ones the benefit of the doubt and assume their more averse to the shabbiness of my coat than anything else)