Today is Labor Day.  It's a big national holiday as are all opportunities to not work.  Ironic.  There is a strong Communist Party in Italy and our crazy upstairs neighbors belong to the Cattocomunisti group who are both staunch Catholics and Communists.  They were up and out of the house at 7:30 this morning to go to a parade or rally or something calling for more workers rights.  This from a man who is paid full and good salary as a professor at an agricultural college behind our school and who works...wait for it...2 hours a day!  This of course is with full benefits of the state, as in health coverage, pension, disability, etc.  Mind you Italian Communists are fake Communists.  That "one for all and all for one" thing doesn't work here.  GP always says that the basis of Italian bureaucracy mutual distrust.   Nobody really trusts anybody outside their immediate family.  And that's a good thing seeing as most people are out to screw you or benefit from you in one sense or another.  All the bureaucracy is the government's way of having one prove that what they say is true because otherwise too many people would take advantage of the system.  Lying is expected.  In fact honesty is looked on with suspicion.   Example.  The accident I had last month happened so quickly and shook me up so much that I really can't remember what happened.  I don't know how it happened.  And much to everyone's chagrin, that's what I said to the police.  Silly me!  I was supposed to lie and point the finger at the other guy.  I was evidently also supposed to complain of pain and take a month paid off school and maybe sue somebody.  I'm hardly angelic but I couldn't do it.  GP and our Italian friends all shook their head at me and   talked   to   me   really   slowly  as though explaining something to a simple child.  That's the way you do it here.  Another example.  The cheating in school.  Everybody copies homework and cheats on exams which is why so much examination is done orally in front of the class.  When written exams are given they make up 2 or three variations so that no one is sitting beside someone with the same test.  Teachers never keep the same tests from semester to semester or even year to year because they know that someone out there has the old test ready to pass on or sell.  This goes for Secondary school right up through Doctorate degrees.  I have an Italian friend who got her Master's in Australia where her husband is from.  While preparing for their finals she discovered that one of her classmates had a brother who had taken the same class the year before and that the professor always used the same exam.  The guy had been studying day and night for this exam while he could have been memorizing his brother's test.  She was dumbfounded.  Why put all that time and effort into it when it wasn't necessary.  This why one always asks the price of the taxi lift before getting in, why you never buy an ice cream from a cart that doesn't have the prices listed, and why there is a law requiring shops to give receipts to the customers but also that customers demand a receipt from the shop and there are "fiscal police" checking that this happens.  Mutual mistrust. They said it would be sunny today and it's chilly and gray.  Liars!  xxoo me