CHIAVARI,
Italy - Andrea and his girlfriend are going to move in together at some point in the future. He bought an
apartment about a year ago, but for reasons I don’t really understand the deal
isn’t going to close until sometime next month. In the meantime he has been
halfheartedly shopping for furniture.
A Nice Place to Live |
I
don’t know how much input his girlfriend has had in choosing the furnishings,
but I don’t think she’s had very much. He told me once that she wanted to
furnish the apartment with antiques but he was leaning more towards less
permanent furnishings, aka cheap stuff. Not too cheap, but not investment
furniture either. He also said he had asked his mother and his aunt to shop
around for him and come up with some decorating ideas, and from the way he said
it I understood that was the way it was going to be.
There
was one point, however, that the girlfriend was insisting on. She wants a
clothes dryer.
“I
don’t see the need for it,” he said to me. “My mother and my grandmother never
had a clothes dryer and they got along just fine. You wash your clothes, you
hang them up, the next day they are dry. And if you hang them out on the
balcony they may even dry the same day. Beside, where are we going to put it?
The apartment isn’t that big. There is space for a washing machine, but a
clothes dryer? I don’t think so.”
I
think the problem is cultural. Andrea’s girlfriend isn’t Italian. Where she
comes from people need clothes dryers because it rains a lot and the winters
are long and harsh. Another part of the problem is that Andrea does not think
of this apartment as his “forever” apartment. That is also the reason why he
does not want to invest in appliances like a clothes dryer. He knows it is only temporary,
but unfortunately I don’t think the girlfriend does.
Andrea’s
brother also bought an apartment recently, but he did buy a “forever”
apartment, which loosely translated means an apartment with two bedrooms, one
for him and his wife to be, and another for any and all future children they
may have. And there was no discussion about a dryer yes or a dryer no. The
bride-to-be is Italian, Sicilian actually, so it’s a moot point.
The
last time I saw Andrea I asked him if the dryer issue had been resolved and he
said yes. He had given in and it would be part of their new life together. So
that’s one for the girlfriend. But how she’s going to feel living in an
apartment decorated by Andrea’s mother and his aunt, well that’s another
question, and not one I’m going even going to try to get near.
The
idea that Italians don’t embrace clothes dryers in quite the same way as
Americans do has come up before. The most recent discussion took place when my
Best Friend was here. She just didn’t get the Italians resistance to such a
fundamental part of American life. And no amount of me spouting
eco-explanations or cultural differences could dissuade her from her pro-dryer
stand.
It
wasn’t as if I was asking her to abandon her dryer and drape her clothes on a
rack when she's at home, all I was saying was this is a different country and
we do things differently here. Last week I found out how that all translated
when, in a casual conversation, she told me that she had been asked to speak at
her local elementary school again this year as part of Grandparents Day. She
was a big hit last year with her talk on what it was like growing up with 10
brothers and sisters. This year she talked about her trip to Italy. Part of what
she told the eager 9 year olds was that everyone in Italy lives in a
condominium and that Italians don’t have dryers because they don’t have the
electricity for it. They don’t have 220.
Like
the question about how Andrea’s girlfriend is going to like living in an
apartment decorated by his mother and aunt, I’m not going to get near my BF’s
version of the dryer story either, especially since we spent half a day
shopping for a new hair curler for her because her hair curler, which runs on
110, would not work here without a converter as we only have 220.
I
confess, some days when I'm trying to understand things I'm as confused as I have ever been, or maybe even just a little bit
more. It's starting to feel like my new normal.
Fasinating! The idea of a temporary apartment vs a forever apartment! As to drying clothes, I think Italians are basically a very thrifty people and a very "back to basics" people. If electricity is outrageously expensive, why pay to dry clothes when you can air dry them? Many buildings are extremely old and the infrastructure does not allow for the massive amounts of electricity appliances consume. Friends and bloggers talk about blowing fuses if they turn on or plug in too many appliances. Now about dishwashers.....:-)
ReplyDeleteMy ex-husband would not let me put up a clothes line. We had a big private yard, but he insisted that not do that. He said it would look like a tenement house. His mother had one, my mother had one, why couldn't I have one. Well, I lost at that one, but he's gone now and I hang my clothes in and out doors or anywhere else I want. lol
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