When you live as remotely as I do, many things about your past life feel like fragments from a dream. The systems are vastly different, as are the social norms, not to mention the languages. I wonder if I’ll ever not experience moments of culture shock. For example, when you drop by someone’s home, it is not a given that you will be offered anything to drink or eat. Only at our South Asian friends’ homes is there always chai on offer, and sometimes freshly made pakodas. It isn’t a lack of hospitality on the part of the locals here, it’s just not necessarily a coded form of etiquette, unless you have specifically been invited. Cafes are really the meeting grounds for daily catching up, gossip exchanges or a game of cards. It’s the ‘third place’ for many, and since, in Italy, the price of a coffee is regulated, you never pay through your nose. It’s possibly cheaper here than many cafes in Delhi or Mumbai.

There are no such things as school uniforms. Also, until kids are in primary school, they aren’t even taught to write. Kindergarten is basically a playschool. The ‘Kita’—daycare for toddlers under three—looks amazing. There’s a wait list because they are particular about one caretaker managing no more than five kids. There’s a concept here of ‘Jahrgang’ (pronounced ‘yaargang’). It refers to all the children born in a specific year who will be classmates until they are done with school. The 2022 Jahrgang, which is our child’s group, has 24 kids in total. I think this shocked me most, because it wasn’t until my final year in college that I ever sat in a classroom with fewer than 20 people. There was one year in school when there were 81 students in just my class. I went to Holy Cross High School in Kurla, where each standard had up to six classes. Imagine each class having an average of 60 to 70 students and the teachers somehow remembering all our names.