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Published: September 15th 2008
I am having trouble concentrating to write this entry because I think I am delirious from the extreme amounts of pesto I have been consuming in the last week. Over a matter of days I ate an entire, rather sizable jar of pesto. Basically, the pesto here is amazing. I bought myself an excessive jar, convinced that pesto is one of those indefatigable items (like peanut butter and honey) that you just sort of buy once and can keep sitting around for an undefined period of time. I was making myself a nice plate of pasta and pesto when I read the jar and realized that it said it must be used 3-4 days after opening. My roommates confirmed that this was true. While I thought that I could maybe get fancy and freeze it to use later, I didn’t want it to get weird and lose its naturally delicious qualities. So, instead, I just ate plate after plate…after plate…after plate of pasta with pesto. I did this for an entire week (I took the liberty of extending the time allotted for the pesto). It certainly made for many quick and easy meals and I officially polished off the rest of the jar over the weekend. Last night I barely even knew what to make myself to eat. I ended making a kind of gross, watery tomato sauce with tuna. It smelled good though.
Things at school are going really well. I’ve been working a lot on gathering study abroad information from many different colleges and this week I’m starting to work on another fundraising project with another girl, Tate, who is also here with the program. We realized immediately that we have a lot of things in common (the first few times we hung out, we just kept saying ‘No way, me too!’), and we secretly think that we are in fact the same person. I’ve been spending a lot of time with the students, taking them to concerts, events, and bars in the city (and we went dancing on Friday night!). This week every afternoon their schedule has two hours blank for ‘Activities,’ so another woman who works here, Lucia, and I have been organizing different things for every day. I have to study because this afternoon we are taking them on a tour of some of the public gardens in Siena. I did some research and today I’ll be giving a little talk about Siena’s botanical gardens. Hopefully I can keep their interest.
Lucia, who works for the school, is this wonderful and eccentric woman from Southern Italy. She has wild, curly hair down her back, a nose ring, and she rides a red motorino to school. We spend a lot of time together during the day at school and we’ve also gotten to be friends outside of school. We spent the day last Saturday eating pizza, having coffee, and shopping around Siena (it was great to have someone who has lived here for 20 years show me all of the cheap places to buy clothes!). She is always very supportive and has done a lot to help me transition into living here. And she’s going to invite me when she and her friends do different activities around Siena. If the weather is nice next weekend, she said they are planning a hiking trip somewhere in Tuscany (hiking through the Tuscan hills? Am I really here? When I wake up in the morning and walk outside the heavy wooden door of my apartment right onto a medieval, stone street, I still wonder this).
The past two weekends I have spent a lot of time getting reacquainted with Siena and enjoying some tourist activities. Last weekend, my friends Tate and Katie and I got up early and went to the church near their apartment to hear the Sunday mass. Although it was really difficult to understand anything that was being said with all of the echoes in the church (and this might have been for the best for me…), it was remarkably peaceful to listen to the sounds and just be with everyone there. Then we took a bus outside the city to take a tour of the old Jewish cemetery. The woman there was giving us a little tour and some history of the cemetery (only in Italian) and it was all going well until I noticed that she had this strange, yellow, bulbous thing kind of growing out of her right eye. I felt terrible and even though I tried not to let it bother me, I ended up feeling sick and having to sit down on the ground with my head down…. I just told her it was the heat. There is definitely no medical career in my future.
One evening we went last week to a choir concert at a church in the center of the city. It’s the same choir that I accompanied two years ago and after the concert I met with the director to ask if they might need an accompanist again this year. I was glad that he remembered me and I think that I am going to practice with them and play for their Christmas concert in Siena’s town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico. I’m thrilled and I can’t wait to start practicing.
I’ve been going a lot with the students to these free jazz concerts in a museum near the cathedral. That’s where I met Vincenzo. Vincenzo and I starting talking after one the concerts. He used to play the trumpet and we were discussing the concert, our own interests in music, and many other things. Vincenzo thinks I am beautiful and after the concerts he would ask if I wanted to get a drink or if he could walk me home. Vincenzo is charming and sweet…. and Vincenzo is also probably about eighty years old. He’s decidedly handsome for someone born in the early part of the 20th century, but I decided he might be a little old for me.
Yesterday Tate and I went to Montalcino, a city near Siena, for the honey festival, the same one I went to two years ago. It was just as tasty as I remember it. Basically you just walk into this huge area where there are tables set up everywhere upon which there is everything you can think of made with honey, as well as every kind of honey that one can dream of. And, for no charge, you just walk around and eat as much honey as you want. Everyone is trying to sell you their honey or their products, so everyone keeps trying to give you spoonful after spoonful. We ate orange honey, clover honey, strawberry, chocolate, mint, and hazelnut honey, and so many other kinds (a lot of which I didn’t know because I didn’t recognize the words. I kept asking people what they meant and I was answered with many confusing descriptions of various herbs and flowers). We also tasted honey beer and chocolate liquor, some traditional Tuscan pastries, cheese and meat, and this rich truffle sauce. By the end, we were so overwhelmed and after purchasing a few jars of our favorite honey, we were ready to head back to Siena.
Things with the roommates are going pretty well, although I thought that living with Italians my own age would give me more freedom to do things my own way (such as washing my hair as I wish). I was entirely mistaken. Olinda and Letizia are constantly either commenting on how I do things, showing me how to do things better, or basically just consistently observing me. Whenever I am cooking they want to know exactly what I’m making. Whenever I am leaving they ask where I am going. When I am coming in they ask where I’ve been. When I shower they ask why I wash my hair so much. Then they worry that I will get sick from having wet hair so often. After I eat lunch they tell me that I didn’t eat enough and I’ll get hungry later, then they try to get me to eat more. I am definitely enjoying their company, especially because they leave me no time at all to be homesick or sad, and I am learning so much Italian from constantly talking with them, but it also does get a little tiresome. Olinda and I always watch TV together at night before we go to sleep and I have discovered that I really like having a roommate. I have also discovered my capacity and skill for falling asleep no matter how much noise or light or anything is going on in our room. Many nights, Olinda and I will be watching TV and she’ll be talking on the phone with all of the bright lights on and when I get tired, I’ll just sort of close my eyes and easily fall asleep. She thinks it’s really weird and that I might have a problem.
Our apartment looks out across a street with another set of apartment buildings. At night, we can see pretty clearly into the windows of our neighbors and Olinda loves to pull her chair over to the window and watch everyone. It’s pretty hilarious. Her favorite is this old guy who always walks around in his underwear. He has a pretty consistent schedule, which Olinda knows really well, and she always rushes over to the window and calls me when it’s the poor old guy’s bedtime so that we can see what he’s watching on TV that evening and watch him walk around the bedroom. She always laughs and says that watching in people’s windows is better than watching ‘Sex and the City’, which she absolutely loves and we watch together in Italian.
I am also glad that I think I have finished doing all of the annoying and boring paperwork I had to do to stay here for so long. The other day, I had quite an experience at an Italian government office. My landlady came downstairs one day and started lecturing me about how I needed to get a ‘codice fiscale,’ a fiscal code. I didn’t really know what that meant, but I asked someone at school and they said I had to go to this office with my passport so that the Italian government could assign me a number. No one was really able to tell me why I needed this number or what it was for but, armed with my passport and the address of the building, I set out. I got to the office and this heavyset woman wearing a see-through silky purple shirt (she looked like that blobby thing from Candy-Land), was sitting at a desk using her cell phone to text message. She looked up and told me I had to go outside and fill out a form. Once I did this, I went back into her office and sat across the desk from her, telling her that I needed to get my codice fiscale. She completely ignored me and kept texting. It was awkward.
Five minutes later, she was still texting. She finally looked up, eyed me suspiciously, and grabbed my passport. She typed my info into the computer, then, acting annoyed by my name, asked me if she had spelled it correctly (mind you, she had my passport right in front of her). She had written my name: Ewlizabeth Swarz. I politely showed her that she had in fact spelled it entirely incorrectly. She was not happy with me. After correcting my horrible name, she just printed the paper, lackadaisically plopped a few stamps on it, then turned away and started eating crackers. I nervously took the paper from her desk and left the office. I still have no idea what the paper is for.
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Leslie
non-member comment
Plumpy!
I loooove how you compare that woman to Plumpy. haha!!