Reality Bites

In a new place it always takes me a little bit of time to get out of vacation mode and enter into reality... umm... mode...
...'Vacation mode', similar to 'honeymoon period', is the time when your new emotions blind you from all that is bad in the new place, or person you are holding hands with... Reality Mode is when you realize for the first time that girls actually do... ahem... 'ausfahrt'...
... and Italy... like everywhere else in the world... is... unbelievably I know... still in reality... and still 'ausfahrts' every once in a while...
... I found out two things about reality here... just today actually...
... The first... that I heard... a man in Italy wrote a tell-all book about the mafia here in Italy... and now he has a bounty on his head... a bounty!? And everybody knows this... the whole of Italy is aware of the bounty and knows that the mafia wants this man dead by December... The President himself even spoke about this and said that no one should touch the man because the mafia is a bad influence on society and should not be aided... not enough for said man, however, as he is believed to be leaving the country for good shortly...
... The second... I heard... that the same President is planning on slashing 85,000 teaching jobs in Italy... 85k!?... We have 2 teachers on our team at present, and this means they're on strike for what will probably be quite some time... I remember I was watching CNN talk about how the US lost 79,000 jobs this year and how tragic it was... and here we have 85,000 jobs in maybe a month if this does go down... What I can't figure is how the country could absorb such a job loss... 85,000 jobs in a country of some 50 odd million... has got to take it's toll...