Life seems to centre around Termini: it is the centre of Rome as far as transport is concerned: it's futuristic, modern facade concealing mille-feuille layers upon layers of shops and boutiques in it's murky depths. It's a love-hate relationship on an epic scale: I needed the location of Via Principe Amedeo so that I could travel anywhere at a moment's notice - albeit, feeling like I arrived with a thin layer of poverty covering my clothes. At the drop of a hat/alarm clock, I could tumble out of my pit, onto the tube or a bus and be at a lesson by 09:14. Which is usually when my students amble into the class-room, gripping plastic cups full of coffee, insistent on speaking Italian for at least the first ten minutes of the lesson.*
The plastic future
On the walls of the station, pasted up alongside the construction work barriers masking broken escalators, torn-down sections of building and blocked-up exits, are numerous propaganda posters with futuristic depictions of what Termini will look like once it's completed. (In the year "dot", as work on the mysterious Line C has been delayed by some time as excavations in Rome unearth yet more treasures.)
In the posters, 2-D people in bright Summery clothes go about their business in a metallic, space-age hyper-terminal, gliding past plastic facades with the greatest of ease, their progress towards their destination uninhibited. Their joy at efficient public transport, palpable. The truth? A bunfight of thousands running for the exits before 10+ elderly people start a conversation across the platform, blocking all pathways. A family, all armed with trolleys gets stuck on the one working escalator. The temperature akin to that of being 2cm from the centre of the earth, causes, seizures, fainting spells and an argument bubbling over between some tourists and the indifferent transport staff who seem their days standing in the way, watching people. And let's mention the gypsies...
So, myself, Date and Donna, having seen these amusing tributes to a perfect society one to many times, decided to create our own versions:
Frozen smiles of the future, anyone?
There's room for everyone on theescalators in "New Termini" TM
I actually got a tourist to take this photo.He was so nervous he hadn't taken a good shot,
he took another two just in case. Much lol.
P.S. This is One Big In-Joke. Apologies.
*On a massive aside, I was sad to say goodbye to one of my favourite classes the other day: Antonio, Massimo and Emmanuelle. Antonio was a an owl-like, quietly stated married man with a burning passion to learn English. Massimo, the cheekiest, most smiley guy I have every met and intent on winding up everyone in the class, and Emmanuelle, a soft, podgy guy in his twenties from the South of Italy, shy, full of pretended macho bravado but very, very genuine.
Anyway, it turned out in one of my lessons that we, or I should say I discovered that Emmanuelle might be gay. He declared during an especially dull exercise entitled "I like this, I dislike that" (imagine my attempts at trying to get the class engaged in talking about stamp-collecting at 09:30 on a Monday morning...) Emmanuelle proudly declared that he loved cooking, for his girlfriend - nothing unusual in that: men from the South take great pride in taking over their kitchens in Italy. Massimo, taking this opportunity for slightly misplaced humour, declared that Emmanuelle actually likes to cook for his boyfriend, at which Emmanuelle turned bright pink, attempted to laugh it off but couldn't make eye-contact with me for the rest of the lesson. We both knew what the truth was and all I could think to say at the time was "Cooking for whoever, it's just important to be proud of your creations."
I remember dying in class at school if anyone mentioned being gay in any context, which for hormonal teenagers in an all-boys school, was every day. My teachers had numerous opportunities to stop the kind of language that resulted from these 'discussions' or at least suggest that being gay didn't necessarily mean becoming a shunned, social pariah in adult life. And they didn't.
Teachers of the future: just remember that you're not only teaching children/teenagers/adults facts and figures, but you're showing them how to use their education, and more importantly their language, to have respect for each other.
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