I'm baaaack

If this semester has taught me anything, it’s that English isn’t an easy language to learn. Italian’s not easy, either, of course, but I already knew that. I’ve been helping my roommate write a speech, in English, for her application to get her doctorate at an English-speaking university. It’s actually quite fun. I get to feel like I’m really good at something, even if she does want me to talk in a British accent because she doesn’t think American English will be well-received. Her speech is tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed. I’m very invested in her being accepted to this program.

Other than that, I also get to give lots of little English lessons every time I go to Judo. One man told me that he and his husband…actually, he never told me what they did. Once he asked what husband meant, he got so embarrassed he just stopped talking and walked away. Earlier this week, I tried a certain move on the kid I was working with. Afterward, he stopped to consider it, assuming the traditional thinker’s pose:

*

“Come si chiama questo?” he asked. “What’s this called?” The move? No. His chin. And I also get to try to wax linguistic in Italian to explain the pronunciation differences between word and world or thing and think. (Tangential story: Tonight at Judo, I worked with someone I’d never met before. He introduced himself, and then said, “You study at Georgetown University?” I said yes, and that was it. He didn’t tell me how he knew, how he’d even heard of Georgetown here. My best guess was that he’d already met some Georgetown students, but it was weird that he didn’t think to mention it. When I finally asked how he knew where I went to school, he pointed out that I was wearing a Georgetown t-shirt. Oh. Right.)

Other than my new calling as an ESL teacher, the most exciting things to happen since I last wrote (quite some time ago now) have been the visits of Matt, my family, and my cousin Michaela. (That’s in chronological order there, not excitingness order.) I worried that the cold Italian spring weather, on the cold Italian floor of my unheated Italian apartment might actually kill Matt, considering that he’s used to…well, Africa. Luckily, he survived, with the loan of my pink-flowered pajama pants. (He wouldn’t let me take a picture, or I’d be sharing it with you now.)

We took a bike tour through the Tuscan hills outside of Florence, which was fun but somewhat “strenuous,” and stopped for lunch at a restaurant on top of a hill, where we got to know our (psychotic) tour-mates, who laughingly recounted the story of seeing a man being beaten to within an inch of his life. “The guy had it coming to him. He was making faces,” they said. “At least it was amusing for us.”

We went to Parma for cheese, ham, (exquisite) pumpkin ravioli, and a really nice hotel. (I snuck in as the fourth person in our three person room. It’s easier to do this in a really nice hotel than it is in a bare-bones hostel.) The next morning, Matt and I were intrigued by what our map showed as the ruins of a medieval fortress, so we went looking for it. It was a park; there was a moat of grass (which looked really cool), a playground, a jogging path, basketball courts, etc., all where a medieval fortress used to be, but they hadn’t left many of the ruins, apparently not anticipating the visits of people who love medieval ruins. Shouldn’t medieval Italian cities know better? We saw a gorgeous, brightly-painted, beautifully-decorated church in Parma.

We spent an afternoon in Bologna, saw a rather plain church, with a “vibrant” band playing in the square outside of it, and walked around for ages looking for dinner, before finally settling on a rather mediocre apperitivo. Back in Florence, we watched the Georgetown Final Four game, with its disappointing conclusion, at a bar. I don’t remember getting home.

My family was late getting in the next morning, which was overall a good thing, because I was still getting sick at two o’clock that afternoon. When they finally called, we got good and lost trying to find the hotel on a street none of the Florentines we asked had ever heard of, and then Matt got to meet my sisters without any clothes on. Okay, so they did have towels on, but it’s not nearly as interesting to phrase it that way. Matt was then lucky enough, over the course of the next 4 days, to spend several hours of his Spring Break hanging out in my parents’ hotel room. I’m sure he enjoyed it.

If I get around to it, I'll write about more visitors, sightseeing, etc. Or maybe I'll just skip right to the present day. You know, if something exciting happens. We'll see.

*Not an actual picture of Marco thinking.