cucina

To celebrate my first day as 'casalinga' (housewife) I'm posting a few pictures of the kitchen here.  Gibbs has been doing 99.9% of the cooking the last month while I've been at school, and he's been doing it in style looking up recipes in our new Italian cookbooks and trying new things.

sei ragioni

Six reasons we are feeling lucky and glad we chose to live in a small town this year:

6. the post office worker asks us how our temporary residency applications are going when we go in to buy stamps

5. the gelateria (icecream stand) owner knows I'm lactose intolerant and gets the sorbetto ready when she sees me coming

4. we get our milk fresh from a farm stand

3. when movies come to town everyone goes- the kids all sit up front and the grown ups sit behind

2. the girl's volleyball coach made sure to come and inquire about Maddys plans, hoping they included his team

1. the local produce vendors always slip a special bonus in with your fruit and veggies- a lemon, or a pair of carrots and celery for the evening's soup, once I was required to share a banana and chat in order to complete our transaction

Pizzano

Maddy and Gus had their first day of school today, and thanks to a bus-driver strike we were both able to see them off. They both said they felt welcomed and had a good day. Maddy had volleyball practice this evening and Gus starts basketball tomorrow. I guess we're off and running. We had a prosecco toast to the official commencement of our goals for the family: learn Italian, make friends, and have fun! 

PS: Two signs that it was a good day at school- Maddy says she has 7 new friends and Gus is already correcting my Italian

pranzo di domenica

(excerpted from a note to my friend, Brionna, senza fotografi)

"I'm good- I'm making friends and learning Italian which is what we all came for. I had a great day. Our landlady and landlord had us over for the Italian equivalent of sunday dinner. We gave my landlady a cookbook last week from the region she grew up in (we accidentally bought two of them- they are a cool promotion of national pride through cooking that the newspaper is putting out- one a week on a different region of Italy for 3 months) and she picked a bunch of recipes she remembered from her childhood. The best thing was that she invited me over to help cook. We made a bunch of stuff together and the kids were watching so she put them to work, too- speaking only Italian to them, mind you. And they did it! Maddy read an entire recipe out loud in Italian and then baked a cake, and Gus followed her instructions and made some fancy little rolls filled with green olives and anchovies that he was very proud of."

Maddy and Gus start school tomorrow!

grammatica e conversazione

(here is the last in a series of three excerpts from an email to Katy)

"So I had to take an entrance test before school started and they put me in the second lowest level, which suits me just fine because I think it's where I need to be. I have classes mon-fri 9am to 12:30 ish. It's about 2 hours of what they call structure and grammar, but the practice we do is mostly conversational and interactive. Then after a short break there is about 1.5 hours of expression and conversation. We're 12 students in a tiny room without airconditioning and it's about 90 most days. Most of the other students have studied Italian for about 2 years- they are mostly better than me in grammar , but I think I can usually hold my own in conversation. The other students are from all over- England, Slovkia, Germany, Japan, Austria, Sweden, and one other student from the states. Two of them are 19 years old, the rest are almost all in their 20's, only one other 30-something, but I am the oldest and only one with kids (there's one obviously older woman in the photo below, but she changed classes). I feel like peers with my teachers, who are about my age and do what I used to do, but I don't have the language skills to chat socially with them :( Afternoons are free for me, but if I want to take advantage of the little extracurricular options they organize for us here, I can't go home. I have been finding a park 15 minutes walk from school (there are two) where I eat my lunch and do my homework, then just reading the newspaper (trying to keep on top of American politics and maybe learn something about Italian politics) or window shopping. One day last week, I suggested an outing to a restaurant for lunch and more than half the class came. It was fun and I think I'll do the same again. We can all be communication handicapped together...

In the evenings there are little social outings or a lecture, or a visit to a historic location. It makes for an incredibly long day because I get up at 6, leave by 7, classes start at 9, I'm in town sometimes til 8-ish (that's the last bus that goes all the way out to our house) and don't eat dinner til 9. Exhausting for me, hard on your Dad because it leaves him with all the work at home... Not every day is long, maybe two every week I can be home by 3 or 4. Tonight to make the long day more fun, yer dad, maddy and gus are coming into town to eat in the same resturant as my school."

The photos above are: our classes first lunch outing (there have been more) and our whole class from week one.  Photo 1: Denisa, Michele, Elena, and me  Photo 2: Katie, Jenny, and Sinead  Photo 3: Amanda, Me, our conversation teacher Marina, then in back: Michele, Linnea, Katy, Agnes, Jenny, Sinead, Harriet, Angela, and Denisa.  The class is full of great people and we laugh a lot together.  Four are leaving this weekend to go home or on to other Italian adventures and I will miss them!

piano, piano

(The following is another excerpt from an email to Katy, this time senza fotografi)

"School.  Before I came here I knew two things about myself: I love learning languages and I have a lot of language-learning self confidence, as in: I'm pretty sure that given certain amount of time, I can do this.  Well, I think it was Socrates who once said (wait, do you know the Steve Martin bit where he says, "In the immortal words of Socrates, 'I drank what?'" very funny, that.  I do miss laughing with you...) Anyway, Socrates once said something to the effect of the wise man knows that he doesn't know eveything.  Well I am currently intimiately aware of what I DON'T know and it's kicking my butt.  I can understand 99% of what my truly gifeted teachers say in class, but depending on the circumstances, I might only get a tiny bit of what real, everyday Italians are saying to me in other situations.  It's embarassing and frustrating.  I feel sorry for our nice landlady who gets to see my miserable, confused face regularly.  Dino, our landlord, Gabriella's husband, asked my how the first week of classes went and I tried to tell him in Italian that my head was spinning and that I didn't feel like I was making good progress.   His reply was "piano, piano" which means more or less in this case 'little by little' but I'm laughing now because this reminds me of Ms De Vries' (the kids' piano teacher) famous saying, 'life is easy, now PIANO, that's hard!'   And that's how I feel, it's so hard it's making me sick.  OK, it's either that or all the cheese I've been eating (or maybe a little of both).  But I have been a bundle of nerves and feeling tight-throaty all week.  A few hours of hard labor in the garden yesterday helped a lot.  I bet it will take a while to really see progress, but I suppose I can see some if I calm down a little- like the fact that I'm often thinking in Italian, that I've switched to writing in my journal in Italian (for now, anyway) and the fact that I can understand more of Harry Potter no 1 (the movie) in Italian than when we watched it a few weeks ago. I spend plenty of time thinking of what I should have said in whatever Italian conversation situation I just made a fool of myself, constructing cleaver responses.   I know I come off as pretty dim, and I just want to scream, 'I really am a reasonably intelligent, interesting and witty person, no really I am!' I hate feeling so incompetent, but I bet it will be rewarding to notice my progress, piano, piano..."

la bellezza di una moglie

(The next few posts are excerpts from a long email to Katy responding to her question- how is school going for me.)

School has been interesting so far- It took me a couple of days to get used to Bologna, but I'm starting to see her finer points. I say 'her' in part because città is feminine (like in French) but also because on my first day of class , the director of the school told us all that Bologna doesn't have the beauty of a movie star like Rome and Florence and Venice, but more like the beauty of an old wife. And it's true that Bologna doesn't have fancy monuments or many open plazas, and virtually no parks in the centro storico- this is mostly due to the fact that Bologna's layout hasn't changed much since medieval times when people just didn't have time for hanging out in parks.   When you come here you will notice that nearly all the sidewalks are covered by arcades (which I'm sure will be nice in the rain, and already offer much-appreciated shade from the still-scorching heat) and the fact that the entire town is BRICK RED! I'm pretty sure that there is a law in town that you have to paint your building some shade of brick red and that you MUST use brick red shutters, shades, or curtains in your windows. At first I thought this was a missed opportunity for something much more lovely, but now I'm noticing small differences between buildings and seeing interesting little decorative touches that betray the city's interesting past- it's kind of like going into a forest and saying at first 'bleah, look at all this green! How about a little neon here or there for a change' and then after a while of looking, seeing all the amazing but sometimes subtle diversity all around you- certainly prettier than you could have imagined. Size-wise for your reference, the city seems to be a little bigger than Tours, but nowhere near the size of Paris. The university is the huge here and it is the oldest in the western world (1088).

(all the pictures here are taken in Bologna within a block of my school, the last two in piazza Santo Stefano)