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Published: March 5th 2010
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Big American
A pizza loaded with meaning I haven’t written in quite a long time. I’ll just jump right in. The semester is going very well. There is a group of 22 students and so far it has been busy, but going very smoothly. We’ve had the normal problems and ups and downs of the beginning of the semester, getting everyone settled into their houses, dealing with initial worries and problems with the home-stays, but nothing out of the ordinary. For example, many of them are initially very uncomfortable with the fact that their host mother will be doing their laundry for them (“But, I mean, I’m the only one who ever washes my clothes. It just creeps me out to have someone else wash my underwear”). In the end, most of them are amused but pleased when their obsessive compulsive host families wash their underwear, hang it outside, then proceed to iron and fold it into perfectly color-coded piles into their dressers for them. Another common complaint is that their host families serve them too much pasta (“But like, well, at my house in America, we just eat a lot more vegetables and like, more organic things. These are just like, way too many carbohydrates for my
system to handle). This is a hard one because many issues, like the laundry problems, can be solved with a quick call to the host family to discuss the feelings and discomforts of the student in order to come to an agreement of what can change. However, telling an Italian host family that they should serve less pasta just doesn’t make any sense to them and probably never will. Telling them that eating too much pasta is bad would be like telling them that the pope doesn’t exist or that having wet hair doesn’t actually cause neck pain: it’s clearly wrong. I usually just have to talk to the students about the fact that a few excess carbohydrates for a few months probably won’t kill them and they should indulge and enjoy it while they are here. These conversations usually happen while I myself indulge shamelessly in gelato or pizza or something. I like to set a good example for the students.
In December I moved into a new apartment. It’s a cute little apartment right near the main square in Siena, Piazza del Campo. It has a big kitchen, two large bathrooms tiled in aqua-colored tile, and has
Fall Orientation
Door to the farm where we stayed little ceramic signs on all of the doors labeling the rooms. The kitchen says cucina, the bathrooms say bagni, and our bedrooms say camera. This proved particularly helpful when I couldn’t remember the word for utility closet, and I just had to look up at the little sign that said ripostiglio. I still share a room with Emanuela, but I have two new roommates who share the other room in the apartment, Valentina and Alessia. They are also both from Sicily, so I am constantly surrounded by vibrant Sicilians who are the most wonderful cooks. We eat big dinners together almost every night and spend weekends cooking lasagna and risotto and all kinds of delicious things.
Right now I am sitting in my kitchen. It is one of the rare evenings when I have the whole apartment to myself, and I am enjoying having some quiet time to read and write and watch some TV. Two of my roommates are gone for the week and the other went to spend the night at a friend’s house. She was very anxious about leaving me alone for the night. She called me to tell me she wouldn’t be coming home and
kept telling me to call her if I needed anything, that she would come right home if I felt strange or uncomfortable being in the house alone. She kept going over what was in the fridge that I could make myself for dinner and made sure that I would eat a good dinner. Apparently before leaving, she had already gone to warn the girls in the neighboring apartment that I would be here alone so that they would keep an eye out for me. I think it’s sweet how overprotective they are and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that sometimes I am thrilled to have some time by myself. I came home and ate the dinner she told me to make and, like every night, could count on the fact that Walker Texas Ranger (pronounced, in Italian, something like walll-care teeek-sass ran-jeer) is on Channel 7 at 8:30. Chuck Norris somehow seems so much more majestic and powerful when speaking in perfect Italian.
I love my roommates, but they still have a lot of the strange ideas and habits that I have grown to love about many of my friends here. They are constantly telling me
that I am going to have chronic neck pain because of walking around with wet hair in the house. They always worry if I take a shower too soon after eating because it’s not good for digestion and could make me sick. They panicked the other day because I got a beautiful bouquet of flowers for Valentine’s Day and put it in my bedroom on my dresser. The next day, they were really worried and lectured me that it was a really bad idea to sleep in the same room as flowers. (Ely, cosí si puó morire, you could die like that!). I still haven’t quite figured that one out, but I humored them and moved the flowers to the kitchen. Because of all of the crazy and careless things they think I do, sometimes around them I feel really strong and vital, kind of like Chuck Norris.
We’ve done some fun activities with the students. Last week we all got dressed up and went to go see the ballet of Carmen. We went on a hike outside of Siena to an old monastery, and we took everyone to see Siena’s basketball team play Madrid. Siena has a really
good basketball team, comprised mostly of American players. At the break halfway through the game, about 80 percent of the people left the stadium and went outside. I got excited and thought that everyone was going to find some kind of delicious Italian snack bar, so I grabbed a few of the students and followed the crowd. I stepped out of the door and into a huge cloud of smoke. About 80 percent of the fans were crowded outside of the doors having a quick smoke before the game started again. I still haven’t gotten used to how many people here are chain smokers. Out of all of my Italian friends, I know less than a handful who don’t smoke.
Well, I am going to get back to watching a strange movie on television with Kathy Bates and a guy with a greasy mustache.
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