Frequently Asked Hockey Questions

In honor of hockey week we're doing another frequently asked questions post solely related to all the hockey questions we get.

First up: is there really hockey in Italy?!
Yes.

Do you live in the same apartment every year?
No. The team provides us with an apartment every year, and so far they have always been different (this is our apartment this year and this was the one we had last year). Someone from the team's management finds the apartment for us before we arrive in September and we don't have to do anything. If we don't like the apartment we're given, for some reason or other, we can switch, although this has never happened to us.

Do you own a car there?
The team also provides us with a car that we use for the time we're in Italy. This year we have a snappy little Saab.

How many teams are in the league?
Twelve. 

Are there teams all over Italy?
All the teams are in Northern Italy, but they are spread out from east to west. The farthest teams are Val Pellice which is about 8 hours away from Cortina, and Milan which is about 5. Most of the teams are between 2 and 3 hours away. The team never spends the night after away games, they always come home (although usually it's at about 3 am).

Do you go to all of Ryan's games?!
I go to all of his home games - usually there is at least one per week. If I go to an away game, it's one that's close to Cortina - my limit is two hours away. Usually I only go to away games if we have a visitor in town who wants to go.

What's an import?
An import is a player who is not from Italy and does not have an Italian passport. Every year, the league decides how many imports each team in the league is allowed to have. This year it's 4, last year it was 5 and the first year we were here, it was about 8. Players who have Italian passports (because they were born in Italy or have family members who were born in Italy) don't count as imports. Aside from the 4 imports, the rest of the team is made up of local Italian players. The majority of them are from Cortina, but some are from nearby towns.

Is the team coached in English?
Yes. For the past three years, the coach has been from North America. The first year we were here, the coach was a German-speaking Italian, and the team was still coached in English.

What's the rink like?
As I mentioned on Monday, all home games are played at the Stadio Olimpico del Ghiaccio. The rink was built in the early 1950s and holds a few thousand spectators. All teams in the Italian league play on Olympic-sized rinks which are bigger than typical NHL rinks.

Can we watch the games online?
Unfortunately no, but you can follow along on a live ticker via Pointstreak. The Italian league plays games every Thursday and Saturday nights and some Tuesdays.

How's the team doing?!
Obviously this answer changes week to week, but right now they are in 8th place.

Can you send me the schedule?
Again, unfortunately no. The Italian league LOVES to change the schedule every year and add in all kinds of different rounds. We only know the schedule up to December 13 this year and then the league will split into two halves (top and bottom) and those halves will play each other for a few weeks and determine rankings for playoffs. It's very confusing and no one TRULY understands it, not even the people who thought it up. Plus, each year is different. So, no, there is no schedule. This is Italy, after all.

I'm happy to answer any other questions that anyone has and next up, on Friday, Ryan will be answering a few of his own!

PS - More frequently asked questions: on driving, how we like living in Italy, if we speak Italian fluently and what we do all day.

Frequently Asked Questions: Part 4

The last question in our Frequently Asked Questions series is “so…what do you do all day?”

I think that when people hear that we live in Italy for most of the year, their thoughts go one of two ways. One, they get visions of piles of fresh pasta waiting to plunge into a pot of boiling water, an olive tree in the back yard that we pluck olives from to make olive oil whenever we need it, and little Northern Italian grandmothers who teach us how to make creamy risottos. Most people tend to think of the Italy they see in the movies, and therefore conjure up images of us sitting around all morning drinking cappuccinos in tiny cafes, chatting (and wildly gesticulating) away with our Italian friends or else they picture us snuggled up under a cashmere blanket in a wine bar all evening, sharing glasses of Prosecco and kissing.

Or, they think that no one does anything in Italy (so not true unless you go south of Rome), so what could we possibly be doing all day?!

Well I hate to be the bearer of bad news but even though we live in Italy, I still have to do normal things like grocery shopping! Sorting the recycling! Taxes! The only time I drink a cappuccino in the morning is if I have to go downtown for an Italian lesson and then I’m honestly not really focused on enjoying the cappuccino because I’m desperately trying to remember the passato prossimo form of the verb “andare.”

We also don’t sit around drinking wine and eating delicious fruit tarts all afternoon, unfortunately. Usually I write in the afternoons (my first two columns in the local Steamboat newspaper are here and here, and if you are in the UK, I write a monthly column for Italia Magazine, which can also be bought at Barnes and Noble in the US, if you feel like spending 11 dollars on a magazine). 

We don’t eat homemade pasta every night for dinner because it takes me about two hours to make one batch and I HAVE been known to spill things on almost every batch I’ve ever made, causing me to have to start.all.over.

After living in Italy for the better part of four years, this is our real life, not a vacation or a wonderful fairy tale where no one has to do laundry. Which, for the most part, is really nice. Especially when we can partake in all those really Italian things that people think we do, like sitting in the sun for a whole Sunday afternoon, or wine tasting in Bolzano or skiing on a Wednesday morning in January.

Frequently Asked Questions: Part 3

Question three in our Frequently Asked Questions series is “do you speak Italian?”

Well…..it really depends on who you ask. For example, if you asked any of our Italian friends, they would say no, definitely not. If you ask Ryan, he would say that he knows all the “locker room talk” – which is not at all appropriate for every day conversation unless you want to get run out of town. If you ask me, I would say "sto imparando" which means I’m learning (and since I just wrote that in Italian, I would also say YES).

The thing is, Italian is really, really hard. One time I heard the word "proprio" used in a conversation that I overheard outside my window. In the spirit of learning Italian, I Google translated it to see what it meant.

The basic definition, I found, is "own". But that's just as a noun. As a pronoun, it means "its". As an adverb it means "just", “really”, “exactly”, “proper”, “quite”, “real”, “at all”, and “jolly”. And as an adjective, don't even get me started. There were 19 different definitions. And then I stopped Google translating things.

There are times when we feel like we know no Italian at all: at the butcher, for one, or when speaking to someone who speaks in a different dialect that what we’re used to. Then there are times when we feel practically fluent: when we go to Austria for example and have no idea how to speak German, and when we can swear at each other on the tennis court in Steamboat and no one else knows what we’re saying.

As with anything Italian, learning the language is a process that we are actively involved in through lessons, countless worksheets of verb drills, hosting Italian-only dinner parties and making daily trips to the grocery store….so I guess the answer is si e no. That’s an easy one.

PS – Here is the infuriating story of a man who learned to speak French in 17 days…showoff.

Frequently Asked Questions: Part 2

Question two in our "Frequently Asked Questions" series is "do you drive in Italy?"

"Yes," I say.
"Ryan drives?" they ask...
"Yes, he drives too," I say.
"YOU drive?!" they exclaim.

I get where these people are coming from. Italians don't have the best driving reputations. Neither do people from Massachusetts, for that matter. It's basically the same thing, just with smaller roads.

I first learned how to drive a stick shift (which all the cars in Italy are) during our second year here. Reluctantly. We NEVER drive in Cortina because we live so close to downtown, so I didn't really see the point of learning to drive when Ryan was right there to drive me around.

"But you'll feel so FREE!" one of my girlfriends told me. Ryan wholeheartedly agreed. So one November morning (I waited until November when the population of Cortina is about 500 - to lessen the chances of hitting anyone) we went to the parking lot of the rink, stalled the car 12 times and then drove to Austria.

Ever since then, this has been our little routine (although last year during my parking lot practice run I only stalled the car two or three times, I would say). Now that we're all settled in this year, I decided it was time to get back behind the wheel. So, Ryan drove me off to the rink parking lot where he shut the car off and we switched sides.

When I started the car perfectly (and got it going with zero stalls this year) Ryan commented that this tradition was a little silly.

"Driving a stick shift is like riding a bike!" he declared. Yeah, except you don't have to go to a parking lot to practice riding a bike every time you get back on one.

"I think you've gone beyond the parking lot tradition," he said. Yeah, except that Italians LOVE tradition, and I don't feel that it's right to break this one.

So off we sped to Austria, on tiny winding roads where the speed limit is faster than most highways in America. We went to the grocery store to buy peanut butter and sweet potatoes and to the gas station where the gas is 20 cents cheaper per liter. The trip went well - the car was unscathed when we returned home, for example. Ryan claimed that I seemed anxious the whole drive, but really I was just on the lookout for large deer (there were three) and for any cars that might be passing at inappropriate times (there were five).

On the way home I switched spots with Ryan while we were stopped at a construction site because there was no way that I was going to back into our driveway which is a) on a huge slant and b) gravel - the two worst things for stick shift driving. And so, as long as Ryan can get the car in and out of the driveway for me, I'm back on the road again.

Frequently Asked Questions - Part 1

Happy Monday! I'm completely settled back into Cortina life now AND Ryan and I are settled into a brand new apartment, but more on that later in the week. I thought it would be fun to do a little mini-series for the month of October - I've noticed that when people at home in the US find out that Ryan and I live in Italy, there are four questions they always ask during the conversation that follows. So this October, I'm going to answer one question a week...

...first up: how do you like living in Italy?

I LOVE living in Italy, are you kidding me?! Next question.

Kidding, kidding.

Really, what's not to love about Italy? As I've mentioned many, many times before: you can eat pasta for lunch, you can drink Prosecco at 11 am (I don't, but I'm just saying you CAN), there are the most delicious cappuccinos in the world...Beyond the food (if you can even get beyond the food), you have the mountains if you want them, the beach if you like that, busy cities or teeny towns. There are ancient ruins, the most elaborate churches and enough museums and villas to last you for years. If you go far enough North you can speak German, if you go far enough South you can do nothing! There is the nicest leather, the best gelato, and it turns out that it was actually the Italians who invented batteries. And the typewriter!

Aside from the country as a whole, Ryan and I are living in our own little piece of Italy which we love for the people we've met and the friends we've made; for the fact that we can walk down to the pasticceria in the morning for a warm brioche and to the cafe in the evening for a quiet aperitivo.We love that we're both doing something that we love. We love our little apartments, love Christmas in Cortina and love that satisfied feeling you get when you figure out how to use the washing machine or the heater.

As Americans, living in Italy allows us to embrace a slightly different (understatement) way of life and the new cultures and traditions that comes along with it. It teaches us something new every day and always keeps us on our toes. It lets us think about things in a different way and see the world in a new light.

Of course it's hard sometimes to be so far away from our families and friends. We hate missing birthdays, weddings, holidays...we crave real Mexican food and hate the panicked feeling you get when an Italian asks you a question WAY too fast. We wonder WHY the grocery store can't be open on Sunday when I've forgotten to buy milk and WHY everything takes so long to get done - and then we sit back, gaze at the beautiful views and think about how lucky we are to live in Italy.