The only thing fast in Italy is a Ferrari. Everything else is really slow.
The post office can take up to an hour and that's with only three people in front of you. It's a place to pay your bills, do your banking and send registered mail (a frequent occurrence in Italy due to the lack of trust people have in one another). There's a popular Italian proverb that says, "Fidarsi e' bene ma non fidarsi e' meglio" which means, "Trusting is good, but not trusting is better." A sad truism worth looking into another day. Back to LA POSTA. I seem to be the only one in town that uses the post office to send letters and boxes. My transactions take about five minutes, but I have to plan for an hour.
You should never plan to go to the post office and the doctor on the same day. If you pay for a private doctor, you can make an appointment. If you happen to live in a town where the public doctor that you're required to use takes appointments (rare), you're lucky. If not, you go with the masses to the doctor's office and wait. I've found that what works best for me is going an hour before the office opens. Waiting outside in a heavy winter rain for an hour doesn't seem all that bad if you know you're first in line. But an hour in the horrible little waiting room (with plastic flowers and framed posters with fold marks) memorizing the order the patients arrived and hoping there are no disputes when it's my turn to enter isn't for me.
Public transportation? You have to be there 15 minutes early for some of the bus drivers that just might come early and wait an extra 15 minutes for most of the drivers that come late. Fortunately I don't have to take the bus to the post office or the doctor's office.
An 11:00a.m. wedding means blocking out the whole day. It starts with breakfast at the bride and groom's parents' houses. That means as soon as you get up you have to put on your fancy clothes for the 9:30a.m. buffet. Next comes the ceremony. They're always long because there's no such thing as a non-Catholic wedding in Italy, is there? After the ceremony there are pictures in the church just like in America. Then the bride and groom drive all over town to be photographed at famous monuments and sights and the guests go to the reception place for a snack while they're waiting. The snack is a heavy buffet. When the couple arrives the lunch begins (right after the heavy buffet). Italian lunches last at least three or four hours. As they're clearing away the long lunch they bring out another little buffet. After that, many relatives and older guests head home. The younger folks (like me) stay for the arrival of the B list. Those are the people (like work colleagues) that were only invited for an evening of dancing and.......yet another buffet! And this part of the evening winds down around 2:00a.m. when the pizza comes. That's 16.5 hours in your fancy clothes.
Live performances with classical orchestras, Italian gospel choirs or four guys playing accordions often have paid emcees. They're usually overly enthusiastic women in sequinned gowns. They make a lot of announcements in the beginning and then reappear between every piece to give you a little more of everything except the music you came for. A concert goes from 90 minutes to 150 in the blink of a few sequins.
Even the removal of Italian garbage takes a long time. Running on a little gravel road through some fields I saw a pile of black trash bags. Each one had a sticker that said, "This garbage has already been reported. It will be inspected and picked up as soon as possible." A week or so later I ran in the same place and saw the same bags with new stickers that said, "This garbage has been inspected to investigate unlawful administration." All I could think of was the old guy in the field with his tractor and trailer (considering the fact that I've never seen another runner or pedestrian in the fields leads me to believe it's just old guys on tractors). He sees the trash and doesn't haul it away, but instead calls City Hall. The City Hall guy goes out to the field (in some type of truck or utility vehicle capable of hauling away a few bags) confirms that yes indeed, there is some trash in the field, slaps stickers on the bags to say that he's seen the trash on a particular date and drives away without the trash. Several days later another City Hall guy heads out (not in
running shoes, but with a vehicle that could haul) to see what's in the bags, slaps on more stickers that say the bags have been checked and leaves without collecting them. I think it takes less Polish (insert the country of your choice) guys to screw in a lightbulb.
As far as what's quick in Italy, all I can really think of is a cup of coffee. Some people leave their cars running on the curb and dash in to down a little cup. They can be in and out before a barista at Starbucks would have enough time to say, "Tall non-fat cocoa extra hot no whip." (Or do they call it hot chocolate?) After 25,000 stores in 75 countries, rumor has it the first Starbucks will open in Italy in 2018. The rumor used to be 2017, but like everything else in Italy, it's slow to come.
I understand why Rome wasn't built in a day. It's Rome. But what I don't get is why everyday activities in Italy seem to have become as monumental as building the Colosseum.
