American Life in Italy - Part Uno

Subject - Television

We do get limited American programming. We have an American Forces Network (AFN) satellite which shows mostly soap operas (General Hospital - yay; no As the World Turns - boo hiss), sports (even Redskins - yay!), radio stations (ok, AFN radio stations - boo hiss) and a variety of shows from a bunch of different networks (sometimes we get Food TV shows or PBS specials). Don't get too excited. We get about six channels even though our satellite tells us there are 200. Almost everything except the news and Oprah (go girl!) is a day late. That stinks when you haven't watched the finale of Dancing with the Stars, and the winner is posted on the front page of AOL the morning of the day it is going to air - grrr! On the other hand, if you want to know what's going on on Oprah today, I can tell you at 10am EST, and you can plan accordingly.

After a few weeks, I convinced Bret we needed the Sky (Italian/British programming) satellite - lots more channels, including movies, some American sports, lots of kids stuff, music channels, etc. At first the only one who watched it was Thomas! Lots of the kids' shows are in English, so he loves to watch Curious George and Handy Manny (Manny Tuttofare - translates as "Manny who does everything" in Italian...LOL). You may (or may not) find this hard to believe, but apparently the Italians love Law & Order. It's on at least two channels every hour of every day. We also get CSI, NCIS, According to Jim (seriously, do Americans even watch that?) et al. Now I tend to watch this programming more than AFN. I like to watch shows in English with Italian subtitles - a good way to communicate.


Now, to the good stuff. Bret doesn't watch much other than sports, Thomas cartoons, and me pretty much everything else. However, we have all found one show we LOVE and watch pretty much every day for at least 10 minutes. It's called Shaun the Sheep (Shaun, Vita di Pecora). "Life's a treat with Shaun the Sheep!" Enjoy him on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGh7gHjmDWw&feature=PlayList&p=58985094B0F775A7&playnext=1&index=3