#10: Water Fountains and Wet Hair
Ciao Nonni!
With the children (finally!) settling into a regular school routine, and the beginnings of some new friendships starting to form, life in Lucca is starting to feel more real. Instead of just an extended, extended holiday. The school environment has been great for meeting other parents around Lucca, and I've already found a few people to go for coffee / yoga / lunch / aperitivo with. It's no surprise, but of course most of these new friends are also foreigners. It's been wonderful to learn about the journeys that other people have taken to end up here in Italy. Many have Italian spouses, but there are others who, like us, have taken the plunge purely in the name of adventure.
I have even met an American girl who is also here to claim citizenship through her great-grandparents! She has a three year old boy in Raffy's class. When I exclaimed that we were in the almost identical situation, she laughed and said that she was surprised but glad to hear that someone else was doing the same thing so maybe it wasn't so crazy after all.
To which I replied that I probably wasn't the best yardstick for assessing considered and rational decision-making. We're now sharing notes on application processes and comune staff.
Our approach since we moved here has been to embrace as much of the Italian way of doing things as possible, even if it didn't seem to make sense to our very Australian minds. While it feels positively medieval to share that one of our daily tasks is to walk down the street to the water fountain and fill up our water jugs with the next day's drinking water, it is one of my favourite rituals. And one of the things that makes me feel very connected to local life here.
While the tap water is fine for drinking, it is very high in mineral content and many Italians prefer to drink and cook with the water that is delivered into the town direct from the mountains via the old Roman aqueducts. It is exceptionally pure, and it really does taste phenomenal. Some local folklore even claims that the water has healing properties. I'm not sure about this, but the fountains often have long lines of people in the evenings - all chatting away and socialising as they wait patiently for their turn. In fact, it might be the only instance I can think of so far where queueing actually happens!
One Italianism that we just can't seem to get our heads around (literally) though, is the strong aversion to wet hair. It is exceptionally strange to leave the house here in Italy with wet hair. And ok, I can cope with that. So if my hair isn't completely dry, I will at least try to hide the fact by wearing it in a bun.
Our wonderful babysitter Ilenia nearly had a conniption the other day when I admitted that we don't actually own a hairdryer. She wasn't so much outraged / judgemental as just completely unable to comprehend the fact that Raffy and Leo would go to bed with only towel-dried hair. We may need to change come the cooler months, but for now it is one Australian habit I'm afraid we're not giving up!
All my love,
Kate
