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Italian Hallway
Here is one of the hallways in Paolo's school--pretty classy :) What can I say about today other than, "Holy Crap."
I woke up pretty early (around 5:45 Italy time) and couldn't go back to sleep--I was nervous because today was my first day of school. After I took a shower, Elena offered to make me some eggs. So I oblidged, but then she wanted me to teach her how to make scrambled eggs (I still don't know whether or not she ever knew how to make them in the first place). So I basically made my own eggs this morning before going to school. Elena told me she makes omelettes, but only for lunch. Huh. Gotta say, I don't know if Italians have their meals set straight.
Now I can't remember if I explained the schools in a previous post, but I'm going to talk about it again. In America, the students move from class to class during the passing periods. But in Italy, the students stay in one place as one class and the teachers, rather, move from place to place. Well when I (nervously, of course) entered the classroom, I met all of the kids that would be my "classmates" for the next 12 days.
It
Italian vending machines
You know that stereotype where Italians drink a lot of cappucinos and expressos? Well, it's true. Not only do they sell soft drinks in these vending machines, but also coffees! turns out that the teacher of the first two of Paolo's classes (storia e filosofia--history and philosophy) was gone, so what did we do...? Absolutely nothing. I thought that they didn't have substitute teachers in Italy until I found out that they ran out of substitutes. So, during that time, I did my little presentation in the lecture hall there (yes, you read correctly. They have a LECTURE HALL!) and then we went back to the classroom and played hangman for a long time (in both italiano e inglese for my sake 😊 ). The kids in the class are very friendly and were more than willing to help me learn some Italian words.
When the time came for their Latin class, it happened to be a day where they take an oral test--where the teacher asked them to translate text into Latin. Since all of this was WAAAAY over my head (two languages I don't know, Latin and Italian, being thrown around the room), I decided to figure out how to say something in the past tense in Italian (I already sort of know how to conjugate the present tense). Sitting next to me was a girl named
Italian Lecture Hall
Can you believe they have a lecture hall and Eaton HS doesn't?!?!?! Yeah, so can I. Martina, and she saw what I was doing and started to help me out, and when the bell rang, everyone in the class was huddled around me, watching me conjugate Italian verbs into past tense. No pressure.
After the break, the next class was Inglese--where there was also an oral test. I personally was blown away by the things they talked about in the test. It was stuff like "Compare the novels Robinson Crusoe and Gullivers Travels"--which are two of the novels they had to read (I don't know if they read all of it) in English. I was impressed by the English teacher's accent, however, she was a grump. I could think of three language teachers who are a heck of a lot more fun than her. Props to fun, entertaining, teachers.
During the English lesson, I continued to practice conjugation of the present tense (and another girl, Meb, would help me when I slaughtered an irregular verb). She also drew a cute picture and gave it to me (see photo).
The next class was French, which is a class Paolo doesn't take, so we left the classroom and went into an empty one. I decided to
Italia & USA
Here is that cute little drawing that Meb gave me. I think it really shows the friendliness here. just wander around the school and take photos. When I was wandering, I got my first real experience of speaking Italian to someone who doesn't speak English. They started talking to me all fast-like and I said something like "Mi dispiache, no capisco. No parlo italiano" (which means "I'm sorry, I don't understand. I don't speak Italian"). I just smiled and nodded the rest of my way through the "conversation" until they went away. Whew...
When I came back to the classroom, they were all practicing graphing on the "lavagna" (blackboard). They were arguing over how to graph ln(x+5) and asked me if I knew how. (Be warned, if you don't speak math, i'm sorry, but this was odd and I want to share it) I showed them that it's just the graph of ln(x) just shifted to the left 5 units. They looked at me like I was an idiot and proceeded to show me how they thought they should do it. They said "you have to change the axes", and redrew the y-axis to the right 5 units. It then hit me that in Italy, they move a graph WAAAAAY differently than we do, because when we
Nerding it up with Italians
Now this is my type of crowd, all standing around a "lavagna" graphing logarithms. Represent. move the GRAPH, they move the AXES--and you get the same solution. "molto interessante"
When Elena got to the school to pick us up (around 1), we came home and she made lunch--which consisted of spaghetti, salad, and a dessert of tiramisu (I thought, we eat this for dinner!)
Claudia started giving me a full-blown lesson in Italian (things like common verbs and their conjugations, colors, seasons, etc.) and before long it was 5:30 and time to go watch Paolo's band practice (Once again, when I got there, every song they played was in English). They ended practice around 8:15 and we came home to have dinner.
Now dinner was french fries, salad, bread, and beef. The beef was like steak; however, it was only a quarter of an inch thick. They told me this is because they did not have very good beef in Italy--I thought it was good, but I do wish it was bigger.
Well, gotta go now, they want me to watch TV with them 😊
Ciao!
P.S. If you are reading this blog and are only checking every now and then to see if I have posted, do not
forget that you can subscribe to the blog and an email will be sent to you every time I post something... Just a thought to make life easier on you!
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Enjoying blog
Stan, this is a great way to keep up with your adventure! I am thinking your will pretty fluent in Italian soon!