Even though we didn’t have a lot of time at our disposal (because of some technical problems), last Wednesday’s chatting with my American peer was really interesting and fruitful. First of all, he asked me about my spring break but I had to admit that I stayed at home all the time in order to prepare for an exam (anthropology)! Anyway, he hadn’t done anything special either, so at least I was not the only one!
As both our countries are now facing the general political elections, we inevitably ended up talking about politics. He told me that in America the candidates of both wings put nowadays a lot of emphasis on environmental concerns (gas emission/the preserve of forests in California and so on)…apparently this is a good way to get votes nowadays. ;-)
Then, he told me that last Monday they watched “Il Caimano” by Nanni Moretti at Dickinson and that some of them had been pretty shocked by it. Some of them heard (for the first time) that our former president (I cannot tell the name, we are in “par condicio ;-)) had faced a trial but that he was then discharged of all accusations. To him, the fact that he was finally discharged and that he was allowed to continue in his political career sounded really weird …Well, it IS actually weird but unfortunately here in Italy it is the norm: the morality of both left and right political candidates is not always immaculate and I’m afraid we have to cope with it.
To cut a long story short, I think that our conversation helped me, once again, to have an idea of how the Italian system is perceived abroad : sometimes we are “accustomed” to its negative aspects but maybe we don’t even ask ourselves if things really have to be that way.
(photo taken from Flickr)
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