Single What? Female...

Even in Italy...

So we just got back last week from two positively fab and rejuvenating weeks in Italy. The man's got family there and his mother lives in Naples (thank you Elsie for the frequent flyer miles allowing us to visit you). We were in Rome and Naples visiting cousins and seeing the sights.

Now I had met two of the cousins and their wives as they came out for our wedding, but the others were new to me; and I to them...and none of them, on first site, believed I was American. Nothing is like getting that look and then hearing in Italian what I could roughly translate into "She's not American, is she?" Generally, they all believed I was Mediterranean, possibly Italian and one asked if I was Tunisian. It was later agreed that I was probably Italian somewhere and no one needed to know about that Danish/Caribbean thing.

I do love that one cousin said, after I told her about the Danish/Caribbean roots, she asked "Then why would you want to live in America?" Copenhagen...Grenada...New York...yeah, it's a tough decision :p

Though I have to say that one reason, perhaps the MAIN reson for me to stay in New York, and the states period, is *DING DING DING!* the diversity. Europe has a growing diversity, but it remains pretty segregated and small. In Rome and Naples, I noticed that the majority of brown people were Africans who were primarily illegal. Sadly, in Naples, which definitely has a prostitution issue, save for maybe 2, all the girls standing by the side of the road were African. The majority of them stand around small oil drum fires waiting for a john...and cars pull up, guys get out, and the police do nothing. (I'm not kidding. We drove by a mall area where the police were dealing with some guy while just behind them, a john pulled up to a girl, she got in the car and they drove to a secluded area to...take care of the transaction. If the police noticed, they did nothin' about it.) In Paris, the plight of Algerians in the poorer parts of Paris makes the news frequently, particularly with violent riots breaking out two years ago which were large enough to make international news. And even in Copenhagen, after 9/11 in particular, the small Muslim population - primarily Turks - started getting a lot of flack. Racial and cultural issues may still be problematic here in the states, but we have had an immigrant culture pretty much from the get-go here, while our older counterparts have only had a few decades more or less to experience and digest such diversity.
At least I know here in NYC, when I get on the subway, the Great Equalizer, I will see all kinds of faces, hear many different languages and if anyone has an issue with what I look like, it's more likely to be an ignorant tourist (from either another country OR my own), than one of my fellow citizens. The diversity-and the acceptance of it-here is wonderful; hence I don't mind living here.

KEEP PAYING ATTENTION!

Peace --Alex

posted by funkweee @ 7:24 AM