Vocabulary, Part 1

The best way to describe a trip is through the words and phrases you learn.

Auguri!

The full toast is "Auguri e figli maschi!" - congratulations and may your child be a son! - although my friends who were marrying in Firenze were not having any children, so it was merely "auguri!"

Apparently Italian weddings are a thing. I mean, a wedding where Italians are getting married, not some American destination wedding. I went from the plane to food and wine, more food and wine, barely any sleep, and then more food and wine.

The main party was held at a formal trattoria, with all the imagined deliciousness that a Tuscan trattoria has to offer: pear and cheese pastries, roasted suckling pig, several stuffed pasta dishes, panna cotta, wines of various tastes, all followed by a café normale, i.e., an espresso. My friends chose to celebrate their wedding on the 80th anniversary of the fall of Mussolini's government, so the cake was decorated with poppies and a wreath was present on a nearby square to celebrate the day of national liberation.

Compasso d'Oro

This literally translates as "golden compass", but this is an annual design award infdfdf Italy given to the designer that is the most impactful and innovative. Currently, the ADI museum in Milan has a show honoring the 70 years of the award, with a nook displaying designs from every winner of this prestigious prize.

On Sunday, I met an Italian friend who I meet with monthly to chat about AI and current developments to attend the show at the museum. The bed on the far left was a modular children's bed from the late 1970s that is designed to improve children's autonomy, as in the Montessori model, so that kids could have the freedom to move things around and do as they wished in their space. While it has a definite institutional feel, I get the well-meaning idea behind it, although for a child's room, something a bit warmer and softer was probably more in order.

While there was a lot of beautiful Olivetti industrial design from the early 1960s I didn't picture any of that here, I was floored to find Bruno Rinaldi's first iteration of his lovely stacking bookshelves, as seen in the central image. I own multiples of the later version of this shelf, as it allows me to house my enormous collection of books in a small space.

The last image is of the Bosco Verticale (vertical forest), a prestigious architectural project in Milan renowned for its integration of greenery on the vertical of a high rise modern residential building. Seeing these actual innovations, it reminds me that while Silicon Valley claims to be a fount of innovation, I'm not sure that it really is, certainly in the last fifteen years. The designs I saw in Milan were focused on the quality of living life - green spaces in cities, improving the spaces of urban dwellers, giving children control over their personal space. Digital design is a poor substitute for these thoughtful works of beauty that can make such a difference for a humane existence in a city. The hubris of Silicon Valley is such that what they create only adds chaos to lives on this planet while believing like cultists in the importance of the creations of their computational dystopia.

Sechseläuten

Sechseläuten is best described as Zürich's version of Groundhog Day. After an enormous parade from the city's historic guilds and districts, a giant pile of wood is constructed with a fake snowman on top filled with fireworks. This is then lit on fire and the length of the fire from the lighting to when the snowman's head explodes is correlated to the quality of summer weather. A short fire means a fine summer, while a long fire means a cold and rainy one. This year's fire was 28 minutes, so that means (I think) an average summer (the fastest fire ever was 12 minutes, and the longest almost an hour, so this seems pretty average territory).

Since I was staying with friends with young children (not quite 2 and not quite 5), we didn't go so close to the fire as it's loud and a bit overwhelming. It was quite warm that day in Zürich (maybe 22 Celsius in late April is really warm in Zürich), so it was a quite overwhelming to be honest with the crowds and noise. Still, Zürich might be one of the lovliest cities on Earth, and is probably the cleanest I've ever seen in my life. It's hard not to just enjoy life on a weird holiday spent with friends.

Palpitazioni cardiache/Sanglier

No images for this particular part of the trip. I decided due to the cost of hotel rooms (200 in Geneva vs. 80 in Montpellier) just to push for a long trip to Montpellier the day after Sechseläuten. I spent the morning watching student presentations on bio-rehabiltation at ZHdK (playing grown-up and offering a critique of each) and then sent off the cursed set of trains that delivered me to Montpellier.

The Zürich-Basel stretch was of couse uneventful and punctual to a fault, as SBB trips always are. The commuter train from Basel to Mulhouse was also quiet. Then I boarded the TGV in Mulhouse... and so began a very wild journey through most of France.

An hour or so south of Mulhouse, a passenger had a heart attack. We had to pull into the nearest town for emergency services to get him. Fortunately, he seemed ok, but needed help straightaway, but he was awake and talking when he got off. The day was still hot, and as we were headed south, it kept getting warmer on this TGV with a broken climate system. And so, the one unfortunate guy was not the only one with heart issues.

I was sitting in the sweatbox of the upper deck when a call went out in German and French - "if anyone speaks any Italian, please come to the area between cars 11 and 12." My Italian is crap, honestly, but it isn't the worst, so I went in case I could at least help. I suspect this guy spoke more than just Italian, but he was in a state of panic, so he was defaulting to his native language. After a chat, I did manage to determine "palpitazioni" (self-explanatory) and then "cardiache". Translating that into German was not a problem ("Herzklopfen"), but the train conductor who supposed spoke German really did not. He could take food orders and ask for tickets, which is really all he needed to know on a typical day. My French was not up to the task of explaining this and mercifully a French-Italian bilingual showed up to take over this task that my Italian and the conductor's German was really not up to.

So this SNCF train from hell (most seem to be honestly - the French rail system is terrible, but they're at least always nice if you aren't near Paris) was delayed by hours at this point, meaning our connection in Lyon was not going to happen. Through bureaucratic magic or something, the TGV line to the south was somehow going to pick us up in Valence rather than Lyon, an unscheduled and atypical stop for both TGV lines.

Once I was on the final train, I was thinking "hurrah! I'll be in Montpellier soon." Oh, sweet child, I had no idea. About half an hour south of Valence, the train jolted suddenly and then halted. And then twenty minutes later an announcement: "le train a heurté un sanglier."

My French is good enough to get that we had hit something, but sanglier was not a word I knew. I asked the woman in the food concession. She didn't speak English, but held up her phone with Google translate (also, my French also means I don't know how to spell novel words easily, so I couldn't think how to spell what I heard).

Sanglier. Boar. The train had hit a BOAR.

Since we were now at peak ridiculous, I ordered an overpriced rosé (I rarely drink and even more rarely do in public). There was simply something haywire with the universe.

Eventually, the track was cleared and we reached Montpellier in the middle of the night.

For the rest of this story, the joys of food, sunshine, and old friends in Occitanie, see the upcoming Vocabulary Part 2, all French words for food and words from troubadour songs.