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Jim Zarr
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Those are the basics. If you want to know more, keep on reading.
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When I first put up this page, I wrote: "I've lived
in Rome for over nine years now, so I'm starting to forget what it feels
like to live anywhere else." Well, now almost fourteen years have gone
by, hard as that may seem to believe. Before coming to Rome, I spent three
and a half years in Japan, and the year before that was passed in the south
of France. So that makes a total of more than eighteen years that I really
haven't lived in the part of the world where I spent the first part of my
life, the midwestern states of North Dakota and Minnesota.
Traveling has always been a part of my life. I've lived in Italy, France, Germany and Japan, and I have seen most of Western Europe at one time or another. Non-European travels have included Egypt, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Australia, with a return trip to Japan in the summer of 2000, after more than a ten-year absence. These pages will include some photos from those trips. When I arrived in Rome, I had to find some work to do. Given my training (literature) and my inclination (sedentary), I naturally gravitated toward teaching and translating. My early experiences teaching in Italy were linked to the horrendous rip-offs that call themselves language schools here in Italy. I spent about three years teaching group lessons at the school headquarters and making the rounds of offices to give private lessons for executives who really didn't want to learn English (with the rare gratifying exception) but who needed to go through the motions so that their superiors would be impressed. Naturally, part of the scam was that I could never actually give anything like an evaluation of their progress. That would have blown the whistle on the whole deal. As my Italian improved, I was fortunate enough to find a couple of translation agencies that gave me work. At least translating can be interesting - and even informative - sometimes! And I also had the good fortune to find an American study abroad program in Rome that needed a literature teacher now and then. That relationship eventually developed into my current employment, though I no longer work in the classroom. Instead, for more than seven years, now, I have been the program secretary. I enjoy the work, and it gives me a regular monthly check instead of the feast-or-famine finances of the language school days. Most of the translation work I used to do has been replaced by a connection that developed through my current job. Our study program is part of an association of US and Canadian programs in Italy, and my boss also happens to be the President of that association. Through her, I have become the recording secretary, so in the hours after my regular work I take care of secretarial duties for the association, including the maintenance of its web-site, which I also designed (www.aacupi.org). The site isn't gorgeous, but it is functional, I believe. As for my interests, you are seeing one of them in these web pages. I enjoyed doing them years ago, but time just didn't allow, until now, the updating that they needed. I hope that will change. And, naturally travel. I also enjoy reading mysteries. Years ago, while I was in Japan, I underwent a brief period of "artistic ferment" that produced some poems. I am including a few of them on these pages, though I haven't written anything for years. |
| So--that's a bit about me. Now I'd like to hear from
you. Click on the mailbox to send me some mail.
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