Daily update - parte cinque

It's amazing what a voice raised in anger can accomplish. After numerous unfulfilled promises (the details are unimportant), and our house standing patiently waiting for its facelift, I lost it. I called Paolo (the builder), and in my fractured Italian, berated him for his absence and empty words, even questioning why I made a special effort to get him his first (sizable) payment.

Since then, he has been on site every day before 8am, works into the deepening gloom (at times dark) of the evening, and has gone so far as to curtail pranzo to but a single hour, a positively counter-cultural, even anti-patriotic, behaviour. Still more astounding, they're working in the rain, just as their colleagues run for cover and indolence for fear of melting (I assume).

Progress has been dramatic. The lower floor has taken on a rather more livable look than its previous rather obvious agricultural flavour. We're both holding our breaths, hoping the trend continues, and showed our friendlier side by inviting Paolo and his two assistants from Kosovo (with whom we've struck up a friendship) for a slap-up lunch, ostensibly to cement (sorry!) the relationship.

On the language front, for the past 5 weeks or so we've been attending Italian classes put on (for free!) by the Commune of Tolentino. The class is an eclectic mix of Albanians, Ukrainians, Senegalese, Indians, Peruvians, and French. The teacher and head of the academy, Franca, is a fascinating woman who speaks 5 languages fluently and runs an international store with products from the developing world. Like the renovation of our house, our linguistic progress has been notable and noticeable, although perhaps not quite as dramatic as the house's.

It's interesting how learning another language reveals our lack of knowledge of our own language. I'm now being forced to re-learn (learn for the first time?) imperfect tenses, past participles, pluperfects, and the like. I'm left thinking - who cares what it's called? Our natural proclivities are far more able to intuit it from simple examples (e.g. eat, ate, was eating, have eaten, will have been going to eat, wanted-to-but-couldn't-get-away-to-go-and-eat, etc.).

Oh well. As the apparently oldest person in the class, I do seem to get shown a little respect, and a small allowance for my clearly waning learning aptitude.

Curiously, I'm the only English-speaking person in the class. This is interesting given the profusion of expats in the area. Outside of our own immediate circle (which includes four English-speaking families), we recently met an Australian couple who live across the valley, and an English couple who are just a few km beyond. Then there are the English owners of a house near Colmurano, and the several families in the village I've heard tell of but never met. In the coffee shop I frequent each morning there's invariably an English accent in the buzz, and in the Internet store I go to each day, English-speaking customers come in almost every day.

It's really quite astounding, and the sheer numbers simply have to change the profile of this place in some way. So far the flow of English arrivals has already pushed house prices up by 15-20% and more for each of the past few years. Who knows how else it will manifest itself - it will be interesting (and hopefully not unfortunate) to be a witness to it.

Talking of the internet, I was recently referred to a new outfit that is erecting towers in the area for hi-speed wireless access. There's not one planned for Colmurano (right now 5km is the standard reach of the tower, ruling out Tolentino), so I'm trying to drum up the 10-15 names they would need to consider it. In the meantime, they've given me daily access (at a very reasonable cost) to their training room, where I plug in my laptop for 3-4hours a day. It feels just like going to work, which, in my so far low-income existence, makes me feel a bit better. Now I just need to make it work for me.