Small steps

Yesterday's extended whine apparently had a salutary effect, since I've managed to check at least a few things off my to-do list since writing it.

My first achievement was figuring out how to make a payment through our bank's web site to our condo association. We have to pay the monthly maintenance and, separately, a special payment for the new roof. Parting with money is always a little painful, but this is a bit more so because the maintenance fee is at least twice what our realtor led us to believe, and Danny and I also think he told us that the roof had just been replaced. This may well reflect language confusion rather than sharp practice, and we liked the apartment so much that we would have bought it even if we'd known the truth, but still, it grates a bit.

I do love this apartment. This was the view from our balcony during a festa last weekend. How great, right?

In Italy people don't seem to use checks very often. Instead they do a bank transfer, which requirens navigating a site that is (of course) entirely in Italia, and where none of the procedures or the names of things are anything like the ones I'm used in the U.S. In addition to the challenges of full language immersion, you have to input a 27-digit tracking number as well as a passel of other data, including your personal tax code, which is a string of 16 letters and numbers, and the SWIFT code, another string of letters and numbers identifying the recipient's bank. The possibilities for errors are thus legion, which is one reason it took me a full 90 minutes to make these two payments.

I had to retype this IBAN so many times I've practically got it memorized.

About 20 minutes of that time was spent being flummoxed and then enraged when I entered the amount to pay, hit "confirm" to move to the next screen, and saw the amount disappear from the little box while a notice popped up saying, "Amount not entered." Not knowing what else to do, I kept repeating the same procedure, getting (as the definition of insanity aptly reminds us) the same infuriating result. And of course half the time I hit the wrong button, which sent me back to the previous screen, where I had to again fill in all those strings of numbers.

After an embarrassingly long time I realized that I'd been filling in the amount with a period to mark the decimal point, as per American usage, instead of using a European comma.

Once I'd successfully completed that task, I also managed to pay a traffic ticket that we got last summer in Otranto, and that only now found its way to us in California and thence (thanks to a very obliging neighbor who was willing to photograph it and send it on to me via email) to us back in Italy. I had to ask Romano to translate it; apparently we were photographed driving in a "limited traffic zone," whatever that means. (Grazie a Colleen for that enlightening link.) Paying off the city of Otranto took only about 45 minutes, which felt like real progress.

By the way, I keep hearing how advanced Europe is compared to the U.S. when it comes to protecting citizens' internet privacy. What this means in practice is that every time you open a new web page you have to agree to accept cookies (the electronic kind) if you want to continue. To buy a train ticket online or maintain an online bank account, you have to not only provide vast amounts of personal data (birth date, birthplace, etc., etc.) but check numerous boxes accepting miles of fine print about the site's privacy policies.

In other words, it's not that they aren't collecting tons of personal data; they're just making us agree to let them, and agree over and over again. And like everyone else, I'm glad to surrender my data for the sake of convenience.

Last night I also checked off another item on my list of things to do: for dinner we had hot polenta with cicciolata di Parma melted on top. This was something I pledged to do a few posts ago, and it totally lived up to expectations. For fans of fat and gristle, this stuff is hard to top, and combining it with cornmeal, olive oil, and a little parmesan just makes it that much better.

Now I was on a roll. So this morning I went to the Servizio Tributi office to try to solve the mystery of our property tax.

Far from being a dusty cave, it was a maze of sunny rooms full of very helpful, very fashionable women who were eager to help me figure out what my tax status is. They found it a bit of a puzzle, since I'm a citizen and also a non-resident, but not yet registered as an Italian living abroad. (That's something I need to do once I'm back in California.)

Another wrinkle is that the taxable value of the apartment is not determined by the sales price, the way it is where I come from, but by "the authorities" (some other office, apparently), based on size, location, and who knows what else. The nice ladies in the Tributi office explained that said authorities think our place is worth a whole lot more than we paid for it. and evidently there is nothing we can do about that but accept it--another case where the Zen attitude that Pam keeps urging on us really does seem like the only possible path.

Eventually the ladies figured it all out, and with great patience managed to explain it to me in a way I could understand. The upshot is that I now know how much we owe and how to pay it (via a bank transfer, of course). Tomorrow perhaps I'll be able to check this off my list, too.

When I complain, in my moron Italian, that I'm having trouble learning the language, my Italian compatriots often respond, soothingly, "Pian' piano." That is, take it slowly; you'll get their eventually. Which I guess is also a kind of Zen attitude that I would be smart to adopt.