So today during lunch at the Architecture Cafe, Jenni and I sat with some Italians to have coffee and a panini (oh-by the way the food at our school cafe is AWESOME!) its 0.85 Euro for a cappechino and 2.00 Euro for a big panini! And these aren't just any cappechinos and paninis - these are like when you hear everyone say "Italy has amazing food"... well, yea... thats our school cafeteria... in the castle... in the park.
But anyways, the conversation was pretty funny because we started talking about the working habits when we are in Troy. Basically telling the Italians how we eat lunch, usually dont have dinner, and coffee at midnight. (its amazing that we have cooked dinner every night here) They were horrified that we didn't eat dinner and stay up until 5am back in Troy...even though to us its so normal - one of them was like "I wanted to study in America.. but now... no". Then, this same Italian (who, by the way, made a lord of the rings movie for our first presentation and has a crush on Jenni..) then went on to explain how in Italy their work mindset is: get "something" done, find a cool picture on the internet to show, think about how to make your "something" sound alot better than it is, eat, party, and then sleep.
They really dont understand our working habits, how we can stay working until early in the morning to get a project done.
It has been getting frustrating working with the Italians because they have such a tried-and-true mindset. They dont really understand the conceptual architecture we learn in America and only see design as something that is actually going to be realized. They also like a bunch of colors and labels, but they dont understand layering in diagrams to generate a new condition. But at the same time, its interesting seeing what they know versus what we have learned and being able to show them new things. As far as we go for being frustrating - I think the fact that none of us know Italian is pretty embarassing. Right now we are in Italian and cant even hear the teacher because there are Italians talking in the back of the classroom and only the first four rows can hear a teacher.
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Yeah, the Indians don't quite get our work habits either. Here it's also "get something done", but most of the time that something doesn't get done until the night before the review. Also, they don't know anything about presentation, in fact, they think what we consider "good" presentation just detracts from the quality of the work!!! It's so weird.
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