Italian Bureaucracy/La burocrazia Italiana

I have often heard about the difficulties associated with foreigners living in Europe, particularly in the countries around the Mediterranean. I would sympathize when I learned about people's encounters with archaic bureaucratic procedures, but in the back of my mind, I thought having an Italian passport (and thus European citizenship) meant I could skip most of the hassle. How incredibly wrong I was.

It turns out that my Italian passport counts for nulla (nothing) without being an Italian resident. Residency is the key to all those things I sought after today: a healthcard, a low-fee bank account, and eventually, likely a job when I go to Florence. And residency wouldn't have been that difficult to declare had I not been leaving Milan in a few days. How it works is that you submit a form and within 20 days the police stop by your address unannounced to verify that you do indeed live there. Had this been public knowledge, maybe I would have registered for my courses a bit later or flown over earlier. But now that I think about it, I did minimal prep work for this trip, so I guess I got what I gave.

Being paralyzed abroad (metaphorically speaking) is a terrible feeling. I don't have any travel insurance since I was counting on being covered as a citizen. Plan B now is to file for residency in Florence which will prove problematic since my spoken Italian is crap. I know vocabulary and I can understand quite well, but not having any foundation of Italian grammar makes stringing words into sentences a feat in itself. Sometimes my knowledge of French, though not fluent, is helpful--but on the whole, they are disparate languages, sharing verb conjugation formats and Latin roots.

The only thing I was able to achieve was getting my train ticket to Florence. Meno male (thank Jebus).

Today's unfortunate word of the day then is:

burocrazia

Italian bureaucracy at its finest is one hundred times worse than Canadian bureaucracy at its best. Let this be a lesson to you all.