True to form after 3 days in a town the local bums and regular faces started saying hello to me, and me in my effort to be conspicuous placed myself in one of the main town squares and happily “buona sera”d passers by.

After a while a local gent came and sat on the wall near me, didnt say hello, but sat so close to me that it would have been rude of me not to make the initial effort…. “sssseeeera” i said… dying to be taken for a local. “Sei straniero?” was his reponse,.. hmm.. guess that pretend to be a local approach lasted an entire 0.0 seconds.. but he seemed to be ok with the idea of me not being frrom these parts and so i gave him my abbreviated life story.

He was interested in Australia but much to my surprise was more interested in New Zealand,.. i mean aren’t we all!!!?.. He knew a fair bit about Australia, and even knew the prime minister’s name… you know who i mean… the short guy you voted for. We spoke of the nature of the people, i told him how Australia has large numbers of European migrants but the system is fairly English and this includes the way the people interact with each other. I said its possible to live next door to a family for 20 years and not know their names.

He said in italy thats not possible, within 20 minutes everyone knows everything about you…. he then asked if they would help if you were in trouble.. I responded in the affirmative and told him that Australians were pretty much always interested in lending a hand… he interrupted me with.. “i would rather have my neighbours not know my name but help me if i needed it rather than have them say hello to me every day, buy me a christmas present, remember my daughter’s birthday but pretend not to be home if they see somebody breaking down my front door”.

My homework for the evening was to learn more vocab which would help me describe the “stolen generation” to the locals. I was unsuccesful in my attempts to fumble my way through it with my new buddy, i think i left him with the belief that in ancient times the government of australia would form a religious community and it would share children from different families with local priests and they would bring them up according to white ways… i guess that was close enough.