Highly "recommended"....

This, my friends, is the first of what I fear will be many, many ramblings / rants / observations (I'm being as polite as I can be) on the "joys" of living in the "bel paese" (sarcasm starting to creep in already you notice). I fully accept that it was MY decision to move here, MY decision to stay, and I can damn well leave if I don't like it. I know all of that, and don't get me wrong - there are plenty of positive aspects to living in Italy (ummm....errrrrr....we'll come back to that later), and then there are the negatives. As you can probably sense, one of the negatives is on its way.
A new girl started at work today. Her first words were more or less these " Hi, my name's Giulia, my dad builds hotels." OK, they may not have been the exact words, but that was more or less the way she presented herself. This is something that you get a lot here and I have to say it drives me crazy... It's called "Raccomandazione" and basically involves daddy's golf buddies being Chief Executives / Managing Directors of multinational organisations, which completely coincidentally just happen to be looking for someone just like little Johnny / Jack / Giulia, to be cunningly inserted in some job which the rest of us have had to sweat blood and tears to get anywhere near.... It's just accepted in Italy that if you know the right people, pretty much regardless of your education or qualifications (although chances are, daddy had a hand in getting you into the best schools / colleges anyway...) you can expect a nice cosy job, straight out of university, bypassing all the slaves on stage contracts, to which you can drive your brand new car (bought for you by daddy), carry your Prada handbag (grazie papà) and totter around in your Gucci shoes and obligatory matching Gucci belt (guess whose money....). And at the end of the day it's not even like you need your salary to pay the extortionate rental prices here in Milan - after all you'll be going home to sleep under mamma and papà's roof....
No wonder you get treated like someone from a planet far far away when people discover that you live a thousand miles from your parents (shock horror), earn your own money from a job that you obtained out of your own merit (mamma mia!), and have been feeding yourself since you were eighteen years old (Dio Mio!!!). Rant over.