dairy in Italy - part I

The following were my impressions on my arrival day in Italy.
More will follow once I edit out some personal stuff (it could be a while).


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Sunday, August 4th

Arrive in Venice
Everything is hard to find.
I found out that I don't really speak Italian at all. I've used mostly English for meaningful interactions, and French helped once.

So I had to figure out how to get to Trento. More than one source indicated that this was best done thru a 1:35pm train to Monaco. I go down and up the stairs with my 4 pieces of luggage (the computer being by far the most uncomfortable), and find "binario 4", which is my "gate". But one lady there told me that she was going to "Zurigo", which turns out to be Zurich, and that is really out of the way for Monaco.
So I go back, play with the machines a little more and finally figure out how to buy a ticket. One of the machines was broken and refused my cash and card, so I falsely generalized.

Now, in the train I sit with a middle-aged German couple, and they told me they were going to Monaco. I mentioned it was very odd that a rail line would go sharply north for a while, and then south and west. Guess what? "Monaco" is Munich. Damn Italians..... They call it "Monaco de Bavaria".

Italians: Will give you two or three answers and then they ignore you. While they use "scusi" a lot, they don't seem to expect "thanks".
You can tell them from their noses. The men wear dress shirts: in general, they are almost all dressed up.

Northern Europeans speak much better English than the Italians!