€0,24 for my thoughts

Ferrara takes its time, I have noticed. Practically all of Italy does. Maybe not all the Italians, but the city and the country do. What does this mean? It means that here, it takes a few days to get things done, like, for example, getting my student discount ticket for the trains reprinted (I lost the paper ticket that gives me discounts, which they gave me when I bought the cartaviaggio... the cartaviaggio card itself arrives in about a month. Again, taking its time) . It means that if you want milk Sunday afternoon, you can go out and buy it Monday when the supermarkets open again. But it also means that there is time to exchange a smile, a "ciao," or due chiacchiere. There's time to cook a pizza slowly so that it comes out just right. There's time to give help and (often unsolicited) advice to strangers.
Just a few minutes ago, I went to a copisteria to photocopy the chapters I need from one of the books for my theatre class. I don't think I'm a felon yet, since I copied only a few dozen pages out of a couple hundred, but it really wouldn't have mattered if I had wanted to copy the entire thing three times and sell it to my friends for a marked-up price, because the girls who work there would still smile and let me, as some one's little brother came in with his big, black dog. I had copied 31 pages, at a rate of €0,04 per page, based on what I gathered from to the card that was keeping track of my copies. When I went to pay, the girl took my card, fed it to the machine, and after she read the screen, said "€1,24, quindi, diciamo €1,20... anzi, €1,00." I took out a Euro and a 20 cent piece, but she would only take the Euro. "Uno sconto," she told me. I don't know of any business in the US would let 24 cents slip away so easily, but it happens all the time in Italy, enough that it probably karmaically rounds out in the end. Then when I went to the library to return the book that I had just copied, the woman there took the time to teach the new intern how to enter a book back into the system on the computer while I stood there. They assume that you have the time to spend. And so you give it to them. And then when all the business is done, you smile at each other, thank each other, and bid each other farewell. If you ever come to Italy, and I encourage you to do so, don't save anything for the last minute, because your sense of temporal proportion will be all off. In the US, you can run in anywhere, grab what you want, throw some money on the counter, and before you know if the person behind the counter was a person at all, you've got your change and you're out the door. Here in Ferrara, budget in some extra time for the... I don't know what to call this demeanor, so let's say... the Ferraresità.