Friday 16 March 2012

Dirty foreigner

You don't get a cough in Italy, you get bronchitis. My daughter and I didn't just share a delightful 24 hr tummy bug, oh no, we had gastroenteritis. This is a nation seemingly doomed to suffer horrific illnesses with complex-sounding Latin roots. You know when you get a slight cold but your other half gets pneumonia? Well, this is man-flu on a national scale. If an Italian wants to commit suicide, they don't jump off a cliff, they sit in a cold draft on a hot day - those dastardly cold drafts will get you every time.

The other enemy to Italian health is bad hygiene. In our past life (ie: that mysterious time before we had a child) our bidet, which was right next to the loo, was always stacked with magazines. Now, we use it for Isabel to wash her hands - obviously, she's only 85cm tall so she can't even see the basin. Too many Italians I know would faint from shock if I told them that we very, very rarely use it for its original purpose. Call me a stinking slime bag of a rotten-dirt-caked foreigner, but I have a shower everyday rather than just washing various select parts each morning. I'm a human, not a cat. I'm also not inspired by the leading brand of 'intimate soaps' (what? is it going to become my best friend? share secrets about its love-life over hot cocoa?) which happens to be called 'Chilly Gel'. No thank you very much. I've got this far in life with out ever needing special soap down there and I'm certainly not going to start applying one that markets itself as 'chilly'.

Of course, today I committed the most heinous of all bad hygiene crimes. Isabel dropped her biscuit on the ground in the park and, wait for it, I actually picked it up, dusted it off and gave it back to her. I was thinking '5 second rule', but I could hear the other mums in the park take a collective sharp intake of breath that practically sucked the very leaves from the trees and all simultaneously take a step away from me, covering their off-springs' eyes in shame and horror. In my defense, and I know I'm massively tempting fate here, Isabel learned to crawl in the park and spent the entire crawling-to-walking phase face down in the dirt, licking odd stones and teething on bits of twig. Despite this (and this is where I'm teasing Mr Fate) she's only ever had two very slight bouts of 'gastroenteritis' in her whole little life, a couple of cases of 'bronchitis' and the odd cold (sorry, 'influenza').

However, there are limits. I caught her trying to drink from a puddle on the way home yesterday - thank you Peppa Pig - and even I had to draw the line at that. No dog poop or cigarette butts either (forget the bidet issue, there's a couple of truly filthy habits) but anything else goes. She's also already in her light-weight Spring coat which will no doubt cause untold havoc to her delicate bronchial tract and this, coupled with her inexplicable insistence on not wearing a wooly hat when it's over 15 degrees, will probably lead to a fever (ie: slight temperature). We'll all be house-bound for weeks but it'll be much safer, as at least the house is a totally sterile environment. Well, it would be if the lady of the house was Italian.

8 comments:

Recipe Junkie said...

made me laugh! Have an (English) friend in Sutri, near Rome who's about to have her first bambino (actually think it's a bambina if that's an italian word) so I have forwarded her blog to you. She was telling me only the other day about how the Italians like to wrap their babies up against the 'cold'...

Jay at The Depp Effect said...

Hahahahaha! Well, during my travels in Italy I haven't actually had experiences which lead me to suppose that the Italians are so germ-conscious that everywhere is spotless (it most certainly wasn't!) but maybe they just reserve that for us dirty foreigners? LOL!

I do seem to remember a preoccupation with health, though you're right, of course. Over-protecting children from germs is the way to go about making them delicate, not the other way round.

Love the picture of her washing her hands in the bidet - what a great idea!

Mel said...

Hi Recipe Junkie, thanks! Tell your friend that Italians are generally GREAT with kids - they're just a little obsessed with wrapping them up against cold drafts!! They're also not so good on the practical side like providing changing tables and high chairs in restaurants either - apart from that they're fab.. :)

Mel said...

Jay, hi! You're totally right, if you judge by the average public toilet then Italians are fairly filthy themselves!!!They just go to the opposite extreme in the home and go utterly overboard with kids.. It's a weird paradox (one of the many in this country!!). Hope all's well, x

The Divorced Lady's Companion to Living in Italy said...

The Chilly ad drives me nuts! Once I went into a loo at a party and saw yoghurt flavoured sapone intimo on the bidet. I mean, yerk!

On another note I couldn't find a contact address on your site and wanted to ask you something. My address is stromboli27@yahoo.com. I am an Australian mother-of-four/writer marooned in Veneto, thanks Catherine

Expat Julia said...

The Chilly ad makes me shiver! I expect it sounds better in Italian than it does in rasping Dutch!

Mel said...

Hey Julia - can't believe they have the same ad in Holland too.. Love your blog by the way - you're way more technological than me which makes it all a lot cooler!! Hope all's going well over there :)

Anonymous said...

Dear, you can have a bidet without using any intimate soap. Besides that, does the fact of having a shower everyday imply you go to the toilet just once a day before that shower? Because if you don’t and surprisingly you go to the toilet few times per day, well, it would be nice wash that part of your body and be clean. That’s the point of using bidet, and it doesn’t have anything to do with having “a shower everyday rather than just washing various select parts each morning”.