My mother in law, who understands Greek and Latin better than most Romans and Greeks probably did themselves and who knows Dante's Divine Comedy by memory calls me 'The Ignorant'. It may not sound very sweet, but I believe it is her way of showing affection (even though she would never admit that). To be fair to her, she has a point. There are many things, I have absolutely no clue about. There is one thing though... that I do know about and that is customer service. I travel quite a lot and the times where I experienced excellent customer service can be counted on one hand. Those who know me know that I never had much patience for poor customer service, but now that I am tired, my patience level has dropped to far below 0 and I risk to turn into an uncontrolled monster within less than a split second.
The best things in life usually happen when you least expect them and yesterday was such a moment. Hotel La Tana dell'Orso near Ponte di Legno, a very elegant hotel decided to support our fight against intensive farming and offered us a room. We arrived very late, but were just in time to have dinner in their restaurant; a very posh place, filled with equally posh guests (apart from us: -). During dinner, I observed one of the waiters, and from very small things I noticed there was something special about him. He got my interest, he was polite but not stiff, he was friendly but not intrusive, he noticed everything that was going on and gave impressive advice on both the origin of the ingredients as well as on the wine. I noticed that he adapted his style to each different guest and the more I observed, I understood that to me, he was the most fascinating person in that restaurant. I was convinced he was not an ordinary waiter and was eager to get to know this person. So on our way out I chatted with him and he explained that he is actually a butler by profession (which explained why I was impressed) and a storyteller by hobby, with a prdound interest for local languages. His name is Iuri and he explained that this area (Ponte di Legno), like many other areas in Italy, had their own local dialect and when a language gets lost, a culture disappears with it Iuri has a great knowledge of the local dialect that was spoken by shepherds. In that language, shepherds could speak to a lady, without her understanding what was said, and as such without risking to get into trouble.
For example the shepherds would say: " Te do' 'na scabrinada sul baitel dei stodui' which is dialect for: "I am going to give you a slap on the house of the flees'; meaning: 'I am going to give you a slap on the head'.
This is the last update about the actual skiing for the next few days because we have now arrived in Trentino and I do not wish to give any of my readers the idea to come here on a holiday!
This province has opted for a policy to reintroduce the brown bear because that brought in interesting funds. In 2017 this became inconvenient due to so-called 'aggression to a tourist'. Trentino politicians responded quickly and killed 2 female bears. Note that this so-called aggression was the result of a human being who proved unable (reason unknown) to use his brain. This perhaps, somewhat naive person (this is my best attempt at remaining polite, which I don't think is succeeding) met two bear cubs in the forest and decided to take a selfie with them. He didn't think that perhaps when there are baby bears... that maybe closeby...there might also be something else.... something slightly bigger... in the form of a mama bear.
Having traveled in Alaska where I have seen brown bears myself, I have learned enough about these fantastic animals to understand that it is A: quite rare that a bear attacks a human being without provocation, and B: when he really intends to do so, there is not that much chance of survival and it usually ends in a slow and cruel death. In this case, the person in question just ended up with a scratch from mama bear. Clearly, this bear never meant to harm this person, but more likely, she wanted to protect her cubs and send a sign saying, get lost!
Instead of educating people on how to behave when they encounter a bear, Trentino politicians decided this was not good for tourism and simply killed mama bear.
So apart from a meeting with the organisers of one of the worlds biggest cross-country ski events (The Marcialonga), that happens to be here, we are refusing any hospitality in this province and we won't be publishing anything that might promote tourism here as a protest for the politics on bears in this province. We are here because there is no way around it in order to ski home, but we are keeping our stop in Trentino to the minimum. We recommend everyone to avoid Trentino as a holiday place until the bear politics change in this area.
Only through education, we can put an end to abuse in intensive farming and together we will!!! We are raising 10 Euros for every kilometer we ski, which will be used to make a documentary about pigs. Please help us to realise this documentary and make the world a place without intensive farming!
#butler #intensivefarming #pigs #skiingforpigs #trentino #orsi #bears #varkensleed #nvwa
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten