Podcasts and my world
I like listening to podcasts of foreign radio programs at different times during the day, typically when I’m walking or cycling to and from work and while I’m having lunch at the canteen. This is in my opinion incomparably more entertaining and constructive than talking business with colleagues or indulging in petty backbiting on common acquaintances. You could say I withdraw into a world of my own, but it’s a world I’m at ease and feel content with, because it gives me a wide bird’s eye view on issues that are not necessarily part of my national culture.
This reminds me of the time when I was desperate to be as aware as possible of things that make up the pop culture of the country whose language I was studying. The very attempt of identification was frustrating, being nothing but a lost battle against your personal history, armed only of your best intentions. Just think how much time and effort it takes to keep up-to-date with things going on in your own country, let alone having to follow more than one.
However, it is obviously essential to have common background (i.e. know certain facts and frames of mind), if you don’t want to be cut out of most conversations, although now I have gained enough self-confidence and independence of spirit to face up to the fact that there are conversations I’m cut out of and like to be left out of. One of these, for instance, is talk on tv commercials, to which I plainly reply – I hope not too contemptously, but inevitably with a dash of pride – that I simply don’t watch national tv.
I don’t think it ever made me feel like a fish out of water knowing I’m not in tune with the mainstream interests of people, like football and tv, just to name two, or the easiest thing would have been adjusting and conforming. However, now I’m smug to ensconce myself in the nest of my own "pop" culture, composed of a motley assortment of elements from world countries, of course grafted on an Italian root. Oddly enough for someone from this country, my world also encompasses different ways of cooking food and, hark!, making coffee.