a re-introduction

i knew it had been awhile since i last posted here, but until i entered the site just now i didn't realize it had been a full three and a half months. wow. sorry to those of you who've checked in for updates during that time and been crushed with disappointment to find the same old photo of my marriage-proposal-via-slip-of-binder-paper. thank you to my devoted admirers who continue to check in to the site despite my lapses in updating!

so why haven't i kept up with the blog this spring? partly it's for the reasons you'd expect: i've been busy with school, weekend jaunts to various parts of sicily, the time-consuming chores of everyday life (side note: i spend more time cleaning than a stepford wife. perhaps it hasn't made me neater, exactly, but living with italian girls has turned me into an honest-to-god, larry david-grade germaphobe. well, the italians, and maybe also the fact that i've caught every cold/flu/virus imaginable during my time here). and as you'd expect, updating the blog is a perennial item on my to-do list, but it always seems to slip to the bottom, nudged out by preparing lesson plans, cleaning (naturally), going to the gym, going on some sort of outing, sleeping.

but i want to tell you about these last few months of school! and springtime in palermo! and roommates and friends and excursions! so i'll be back very soon, with much more to say.

stay tuned!

domestic life

This basically summarizes what it's like to work at CEI. 5B, every Wednesday and Friday.

At the "Ask the Ambassador" event, with the new US ambassador to Italy, David Thorne, and students from Galilei. These are some of my faves. Cuties, aren't they?

And again.

So I know I've been terribly cruel to leave you all in the lurch these past several weeks. Two months actually, wow. I've been busy, to say the least. And I haven't felt too much like writing during those few spare moments I have had, for assorted reasons and non-reasons. And then when I've gone awhile without posting it begins to seem like there's too much I'd need to say to update you fully on everything that's happened in the interval, and it feels like too overwhelming a task. It still feels that way, but no matter, I know it's only going to get worse the longer I let it drag on. Plus, I think writing probablydoes me some good.

Anyway, most of you who read this have communicated with me, probably, in some way or another since I lasted posted here. So you'll know that I ended up going with the 7-person apartment closer to the city center. And that it's been wonderful. So instead of trying to summarize the whole move situation now, I'm going to excerpt from an e-mail I sent to my fellow ETAs that I think expresses the excitement I felt at the time in a way I wouldn't be able to muster up by now.

So, from February 1st, which was my third official day in my new apartment:

"as for the personal update: i'm feeling a little scombussolata at the moment as i've spent all weekend moving, but i'm really happy in my new apartment! for those of you who didn't know, i wasn't completely satisfied with my last apartment so i decided to bite the bullet and move, but it was all really sudden. i think last wednesday i saw this place, along with a bunch of others, friday i'd decided to commit to it, and by saturday morning i'd moved all my stuff out. i didn't intend for it to be so rushed, but it just sort of happened that way.

"anyway, now i'm living with six other people, 5 girls and one guy, one british girl, a calabrian and the rest sicilians. ps, i agree with you elise and acacia that calabresi are the best people in the world. this girl is so so freaking nice and has been so welcoming, i can't believe it. there are still two of them who have yet to return from their weekends da mamma, so i haven't met them yet. but the other ones i have met are super sweet too. on my first night here i went out with them for an aperitivo, and i realized it was my first aperitivo of this entire stint in italy. which is slightly pathetic.

"the apartment is way nicer, plus it's cheaper. it's close to the center, it's practically next door to one of my schools, there's heating (!!) and a washing machine (!!!!!). seriously, if i ever have to go through another stint of washing all my clothes by hand, i will strangle someone. i don't know how anyone lives like that. also, i have huge windows and a balcony and views... basically, it's a better situation in every way. i just wish i'd found it from the beginning! but i'm glad i decided to make the move when i did.

"so, even though this is like my second day in my new apartment, i'm feeling really optimistic, and better than i ever have about being in palermo. things are good."

****

And yeah, things were pretty good. In the few weeks after I moved, notwithstanding the chaos of having everything up-ended and having to put it all in order again and buy a whole lot of new things and get oriented in a new neighborhood all over again... I felt kind of at home in Palermo for the first time.

Add to that the gorgeous weather that suddenly came upon us -- 70-degree, gloriously sunny, bona fide spring days in mid-February -- and things were definitely looking up.

And the reason I didn't update my blog during that lovely time is that I was spending every spare moment either hanging out with my roomates (lunch, afternoon tea, superlong dinners, church, the whole shebang); or cleaning (because operation: being a supergood roommate means a lot a lot of cleaning... and just when you think things are clean enough, cleaning some more); or during my fleeting weekend hours, taking some little excursions in Sicily (Ragusa, and Catania, and Segesta) and doing some exploring within Palermo. You've probably seen the photos I've put up on Facebook, and if you haven't, they're there, so hop to it.

Continuing on with my very synthetic recap: i should probably say a few words of introduction about my new roommates. There are seven of us overall, but in reality it ends up that there are never really more than four people here at any given time.

So, first there's Francesca, who's 34 and works both as a teacher of business economics and as an accountant. Well, in truth there's some sort of difference between a regular accountant and the thing that she is, a commercialista, but I haven't quite understood it. Anyway, right now she's preparing for the licensing exam (even though she already works at an accounting firm, so I'm not quite sure exactly how it works), and she seems like she's constantly on the verge of a total nervous breakdown. She reminds a bit of an Italian Greyhound, because clearly I think in dog metaphors. She's petite, very slight, very nice, and not a little high-strung. In the nicest of ways, however. She's from a small town outside of Palermo, one of those real old-fashioned small towns where her boyfriend of forever essentially lives here with us, but she's petrified of the idea that her parents (or anyone in the town and thus shortly afterwards, her parents) might find out. At age 34.

So then the boyfriend, Ivan, doesn't technically live here but he really does, and he even has chores like the rest of us and pays an equal share of all the bills. That's Francesca for you. Very thorough. Anyway Ivan is a police officer who occupies himself specifically with escorting politicians and the like. He too is very sweet and friendly and the sort of boyfriend that anybody would die for (at least in theory), in the sense that he basically lives to serve Francesca. He's also hopelessly square. But in a good way! Like, I don't think anyone even uses the word square anymore but there are some people for whom the only adequate word is square, you know? And Ivan is one of those people. But I adore him, he's the sweetest and most sincerely helpful friend's-boyfriend-figure I think I've ever met.

Then there's Irene, who's my age -- well, 22, and I guess I'm 23 now but close enough. And Irene is a living example of the simple truth that Italians age at a slower rate than Americans do, because to interact with the two of us at once you'd think I were a decade older. Well maybe not a decade, but I think it's fair to say Irene acts like a 16 year-old. But she's wonderfully sweet and bubbly and talkative and silly. In dog world, she'd be a Boston terrier. Yes, completely. One of those who when they first meet you jump straight into your arms, and slobber all over you in their excitement, and whose bodies are always wriggling and threatening to burst with their sheer uncontrollable joy at being alive. Even physically there's sort of a resemblance... she's got black black hair and pale skin and sort of wide-set large eyes. And always that crazy grin. Anyway, she's a real personality, but unfortunately she's not around too often. She's studying to become a P.E. teacher, and in theory she should be in Palermo during the week to attend her classes and go home to Mazara del Vallo on the weekends, but in reality she's been showing up here for an average of about two days every other week. (Attendance isn't mandatory in Italian university courses -- as long as you manage to pick up the material somehow.) Anyway, she's a lot of fun, and I wish she were around more often.

Then there's Alessandra, who's calabrese, Calabrian, and the object of a new major friend crush on my part. She's 25 and is in Palermo attending some sort of special post-grad law program (but not law school, which doesn't exist in Italy, since you dive right into law coursework at university). All these sorts of things work differently here, so it's hard to figure it all out. Her ultimate dream is to be a judge, but when she mentions this it's always with an undertone of bitterness, since apparently becoming a judge is practically impossible unless your family is extremely well-connected. So it goes with politics, and many other types of jobs, in Italy. Anyway, she's the sweetest of all of them, and from the beginning she sort of took me under her wing. She keeps me at the dinner table for hours asking questions about America... everything from what American Indian reservations are like (honestly I don't know that much, I've only been to one once), to what sorts of wild animals we have (that one I do know all about), and what sort of playground games little kids play (I can't even remember).

If Alessandra were a dog she would be a Vizsla, all lean and sleek and elegant, energetic but in a controlled way, affectionate and warm but not sloppy about it. (So some of those adjectives apply better to dogs than to people, but I think you get the idea. If you're at a total loss because you have no idea what a Vizsla is, you're surely not alone, and don't worry, the dog comparisons end here.) Anyway, Alessandra is lovely, a classic Italian beauty: so slender and all legs, with olive skin and superlong, silky dark hair. She's one of those people about whom everything seems effortless, and even though you know it can't be, really, you can't help but be slightly awed. With her sweetness and energy and total self-confidence, she seems to draw people to her like moths to a flame, but she claims total indifference to social interaction. Her cell phone rings off the hook, but she rarely lets anyone -- boyfriend included -- keep her on the phone for longer than 30 seconds. She jokes about wanting to pick up and move to Papua New Guinea, open up a T-shirt stand. Honestly, you can tell I''m smitten.

And tragically she's leaving -- yesterday was the last day of this course of hers, and now she'll pack up all her things and go back to Calabria. She misses her family, her grandparents are kind of sickly, her sister's getting married in May, she hates feeling like a burden on her parents. If she plans to practice law in Calabria, she'll have to take her licensing exam there. She's from a small town in the countryside, close to the sea, in the most traditional (Italians would say backwards, but obviously that's not very nice) of Italian regions.

Seriously old-school: her family's house is outside of town, and all that's nearby are her grandparents' house, on the top of a hill, and the houses of all her uncles and aunts, surrounding the base of the hill. You know, old school: every time one of your kids gets married, you build another house near your own, until eventually a new little town has sprung up composed entirely of your extended family. I remember watching a documentary about it in an anthropology class once.

Now her sister, after the wedding, will move with her new husband into the ground-floor portion of her parents' house, which they're converting into an independent unit. It really kills me. The other day she was talking about how someone had stolen a pig and a dozen or so of her uncle's sheep. Just like a hundred years ago. I'm dying to go see this place. She says I can come -- or rather, that I absolutely have to come and visit her, but in the summer, so that we can go to the beach. I normally feel weird about going to visit people and staying at their houses when I've never met their families, or even when I have, but in this case I feel like I have to go or I'll seriously regret it.

As a side story -- it's kind of amusing really -- the only sort of hiccup in this moving-in process was a little white lie that became a tangle of white lies. Paola, during this whole apartment search, when she made calls about prospective places, would say that she was my mother's cousin. Just to simplify things, to save the hassle of explaining the whole story of how we really know each other. Not that it's strange or anything, just that it would require a little bit of an explanation that would start to get a bit tiresome after a dozen calls to various landlords. And since my last name is pretty much as Anglo-Saxon as they come, it couldn't be my father's side, but it seemed perfectly harmless to say that my mother had some Italian heritage. And Paola gave me the heads-up that she'd been saying this, but I never really gave it a second thought. And then when Italo came along to help with the move-in, he naturally became another cousin on my mother's side. Someone even commented at some point that they resembled each other. Anyway, a perfectly innocent little falsehood.

Only that my roommates unexpectedly decided to ask me ten million questions about this Italian heritage of mine, and I was totally unprepared for them. I completely botched the whole thing from the get-go. Now in general I'm a pretty bad liar, and which means I generally try not to lie, if only to avoid making a total fool out of myself. Anyway, this time I took my usual bad lying to a whole new level of disaster. The first time someone asked me what exactly my relationship to Paola was, I think I said she was my mother's first cousin and that my maternal grandparents were from Italy. Then this seemed like too dangerously near a relation, and I could see a barrage of questions forming in their minds about Italian relations I would have to have met, and therefore know something about, so when someone else asked me I awkwardly changed it to my great-grandparents who were Italians, and Paola my mother's second cousin.

In retrospect I should have admitted right away that Paola had just made up the whole cousin thing to facilitate the apartment search, that really I have no Italian background whatsoever, that I happen to have met Paola and Italo in a roundabout way through the American consular agency of Palermo. But of course I didn't say it at the beginning, and then right away it seemed too late; these girls would think I was strange to have lied to them; they might think I was a habitual liar; they might never trust me. And I had no idea that they would ask me 25 million questions about it. Like what was my mother's maiden name? Well I couldn't think of an Italian last name on the spot, and in my panic at being put on the spot I just gave the true one -- Fillman -- which I then had to admit was German, so my story had to change again, my Italian heritage always receding further into the background. Now it was just my maternal grandmother who had Italian origins, and her parents who were from Sicily. But where specifically were they from? I had to say Palermo, not being familiar with any of the other little towns around here. And what was the relationship between Italo and Paola? I don't even remember what I said. And did my mother speak any Italian? (No.) And had my parents ever been to Sicily? (No again.) And had I met Paola and Italo before coming here? (Italo yes, since he'd already said he'd spent some time in the U.S.; Paola no.) Then my mother and Paola, despite being cousins, had never met? (Well no, I guess not.) And the religious question: I'd mistakenly let it slip that my father was of Irish origin and was raised Catholic, but I'd already said, rather unwisely, that I considered myself more on the Protestant side of things (I don't know how this came up, but clearly there was no thinking-through involved); so with my Italian Catholic mother and my Irish Catholic father, how on earth did I wind up Protestant? (um.)

And on and on and on, a never-ending string of questions, every evening for weeks, and the whole time me squirming in my chair and stumbling over my words and looking about as nervous as someone who's just robbed a bank. Maybe that was why they kept asking the questions. Maybe they've never really believed me -- I probably wouldn't have believed it, it was all so obscenely suspicious. Now it's settled down but I still get the occasional question about my Italian ancestry, and it always makes me nervous. And of course I'm stuck with my former boyfriend as my cousin, which has got to be suspicious as hell: for two distant cousins of the opposite sex with a fifteen-year age difference, we spend an awful lot of time together, and his interaction with me especially is rather un-cousin-ly. I think they're all rather perplexed by it, and probably pretty skeptical.

So, my final roommate -- and here's the only slight kink in this machine of domestic bliss-- is the English one. I feel weird about using her real name, so I'll call her Emily. Although I'll probably slip up at some point and use her real name -- the terrible liar in me again. Oh well, for now she's Emily. So I might have mentioned earlier that the idea of having an anglophone roommate was one of the things that appealed to me initially about this apartment. I had this image of us being great friends, commiserating about being foreigners in this crazy city. Well needless to say we aren't exactly great friends, mostly because she's pretty standoffish with everyone, though at the beginning I did really appreciate her presence here, for selfish reasons. All the little un-Italian traits that got me into trouble in my last apartment are even more pronounced in her, which makes me seem like the model foreigner in comparison. Her Italian's much worse than mine, she's much messier than I am, she eats stranger things, she's even more prone to reclusiveness. Plus by this time I've learned to make an effort to be more Italian in my habits, something she doesn't seem to have bothered with much. Anyway, especially at the beginning, they were always praising me for my language skills, for how well-adapted I seemed, for how well-mannered and friendly and responsible I was, always in comparison to Emily.

Still, they were always friendly to her, in a way that my former roommates had never been to me. They always invited her to come and hang out in the kitchen or have tea or eat dinner with them, even if she didn't always come. They'd sometimes make comments to me or to each other about her strange English ways ("She giggles so much.. are all English girls like that?"), but they were never anything less than friendly and gracious with her. I admired them for it.

And then all of a sudden it started to unravel. So first, background: Emily came to Palermo in the first place because she'd met a boy on holiday, and after some phone calls and some emailing he became her boyfriend, and she found a job teaching English to little kids in a private nursery school in Palermo, and decided to take a leave from university to come be here with him. Only that a few days after she got here in September, he took off for Romania to do an Erasmus semester there. Leaving Emily, blonde and alone, in Palermo. So naturally she started making friends with Sicilian men in a way that is quite easy for young foreign blonde girls to do. And she would go out with them, especially these kind of greasy guys who work at the pizzeria below our apartment, any and every night of the week, staying out til 4 or 5 or 6 in the morning. Just her and 4 or 5 or 6 of them. A little strange, admittedly, especially when one has a boyfriend, and especially a jealous Sicilian boyfriend, but she was fiercely proud of this idea that unlike Italian girls, she was independent and wouldn't allow herself to be "controlled."

It's a premise I completely identify with -- I couldn't be a Sicilian girlfriend either, if I tried. The behavior, though, I find a little silly, and naive and immature, but it's also understandable: you're young and it's your first experience away from home and your boyfriend's in Romania and you've probably never gotten much attention from boys before because you're not exactly runway-model-gorgeous, but you come to Sicily and because you're blonde and foreign and pretty you're suddenly bombarded with attention. Men stare at you wherever you go, they make comments, they try to start conversations with you. It's exciting, sure, it's fun. I went through a stage like that too, especially in Naples, and it's entertaining for a while, initially.

My roommates, though, being good Italian girls, and good Italian girlfriends, and never having had this experience, were rather appalled. They'd shake their heads in disapproval when they heard the door shut behind her at night. "Poor Francesco," they'd say, referring to her boyfriend, "he can't know what she's up to." They'd warn her to be careful, out alone with strange men so late at night, and she'd smile and nod and say sisisi, she was careful.

So this was the state of things when I got here. Then Francesco, the boyfriend, who'd started out as a good guy and had by now become practically a saint in my roommates' eyes, got back from Romania. He surprised her, showed up on Valentine's Day, weeks earlier than he was supposed to come home. Unsurprisingly, they broke up within the week. Or rather, she broke up with him. My roommates told Francesco he was better off. They failed to notice, though, that Emily was taking it hard. She was really sort of a wreck. Or maybe they noticed, but they didn't understand. If she broke up with him, why should she be sad? In the typical Italian style, they've probably all only had one serious relationship in their lives, the one they're still in. I don't think any of them have ever had to break up with a boy they cared about.

Anyway, Emily skipped some of her chores, she secluded herself in her room; my roommates were miffed, impatient, totally unsympathetic. And then the downward spiral began, sort of like the one I went through in my other place. They began to find fault with everything about her, and everything they could think to blame on her they did.

And then, I don’t know, it turned out there’d been this problem all along of food disappearing from the kitchen. From Alessandra’s cupboards, from Irene’s, occasionally even from Francesca’s. Often it was cookies, and since Italians have cookies in the morning, it’s kind of an irritation: waking up and finding there’s nothing for breakfast. In any case, they used to take it in stride, and joke amongst themselves about the mysterious mouse in the house. But now it became a serious issue. One morning Alessandra saw a strange boy sneaking out of Emily’s room, and decided that was an opportune moment to take her to task about the cookies. Alessandra would say that there wasn’t any connection between the two events, but somehow I highly doubt it. And this time, Emily got defensive, and it turned into a yelling match. And from then on, Emily basically hasn’t spoken to anyone. She eats meals at odd times so as to avoid running into anyone else in the kitchen; she even waits to go to the bathroom until there’s nobody else out and about. It’s a painful thing to witness, it really is. Lately I’ve made more of an effort to catch her tiptoeing about, to engage her in conversation. But even with me she always seems nervous, always tries to escape as soon as she can.

And this thing about the cookies, it’s ridiculous if you think about it. My roommates don’t understand it at all; first they thought she didn’t buy cookies for herself because she didn’t have the money; then it became clear that wasn’t the case, and so they’re mystified. Me, I think I understand it. I know what it's like to have a difficult relationship with food, and I've witnessed it in lots of my friends, too. This is a girl who clearly worries about her weight, like a lot of the girls I know in the States do (but not so much Italian girls, at least not openly, in my experience). She’s rather petite and quite thin, but that really doesn't mean anything. But you know, you’re at the grocery store, and you think, okay, I’m gonna be good and not buy cookies. But then you’re at home, and you’re hungry, and stressed or anxious, and all you have are unappetizing healthy things. And nobody’s around, and your roommates have all these great-looking treats, so you take a cookie or two. Obviously it’s dumb, because they notice; if not at first, certainly after a couple of times.

And not that I’ve ever stolen any cookies myself, but I think I can understand the mentality. I remember sophomore year of college, I went through a phase of being very, very regimented about what I ate. And I worked out religiously. And fairly routinely, they'd have university-sponsored social events with free food. Often cookies, or pie in the fall, or ice cream, or pizza. And I’d go with my all my roommates and eat an obscene amount of junk. Because on my own I felt so deprived. But when it was kindly professors offering the food, for free, and not me buying it for myself, I could feel somehow detached from the responsibility. In any case, yeah, I can imagine why Emily might act the way she does.

And I feel terrible, because I should try to explain it to them. I should defend her, but I don’t. And I know what it’s like to be in that position; it’s the same position I was just in, in a house that became so full of tension that I too started to sneak around to avoid interaction with them when I could. I could hear them griping about me in the kitchen, just as I’m sure Emily can hear when my roommates gossip about her. The walls are thin in these old buildings. And the language barrier isn’t that insurmountable.

Last weekend, our apartment flooded, and it happened that at the time water started pouring down from the ceiling, first thing Saturday morning, Francesca and Emily were the only ones at home. It was coming down in my room and in Alessandra’s, and spreading rapidly over the floor throughout the rest of the house. And since I’m the only one who doesn’t lock the door to my bedroom, Francesca was able to go in and pull a lot of my stuff out to safety, and mop, and open the windows, and put the wet things out on the balcony to dry. The poor thing must have had a hell of a time, and I found out later that she slipped while trying to move my bed and the frame collapsed on top of her and hurt her shoulder. She went to the doctor’s for it. And anyway, the way Francesca told it, she and Emily woke up to this crazy flood, and Emily said something like, “Oh dear, it’s raining,” and took her things and left, totally nonchalant, leaving Francesca to deal with this enormous mess all by herself.

Thinking about it later, I realized that Emily gives lessons on Saturday mornings, and she must have had to leave to go to work. And she should have explained, clearly, because Francesca thought she left because she didn’t care and didn’t want to deal with it. She probably feels so nervous in the presence of those other girls by now, or so on edge, that she doesn’t think of explaining things like that. But the thing that’s really awful is that I realized this, that she must have been going to work, and I didn't say anything. I made a brief comment when she repeated the story to Irene, but let it drop without much resistance, and I didn’t say anything at all when Irene made some reference to it today.

Then this afternoon I was doing a load of laundry and I must have done something wrong because by the time I came out of my room to check on it, the entire kitchen was a lake, and water was pouring into the hallway and spreading into the bathroom and advancing rapidly towards the locked doors of Irene’s and Francesca’s bedrooms, where it threatened to seep underneath their doors and cause who-knows-what kind of damage. And I’m such an idiot that I didn’t even turn off the washing machine because the cycle was almost done and I thought I might as well let it finish, as it couldn’t possibly get much worse. Mistake. It definitely got worse. And this time, poor Emily came out and helped me try to scoop the water, an obscene amount of water, up into buckets and mop and shove towels under the doors to stop its progress. Giggling and trying to make light of it as she always does. And I felt so really terrible about it all, about not defending her. Anyway, next time I will. I swear.

So that, in a nutshell, is my new apartment! That turned into something unexpectedly personal and intimate and slightly intense, and writing this I realize that it may also sound slightly ridiculous... everyday conflicts and infighting among a group of girls sharing an apartment. It’s a stereotype, really. But thinking about it, I realize it’s also the sort of thing that most fascinates me. Domesticity. People, normal people, and the way they behave every day in their most private spaces and in their most private moments.

I hope you find it interesting, too.

apartments, round 2

confession: i haven't been to school yet this week. so i was sick, yes, but it was only a cold, and since you need a massive fever to be considered sick enough to miss school in italy (in fact they don't even say 'so-and-so is sick,' they say 'ha la febbre,' or so-and-so has a fever..), i exaggerated it a little bit.

i mean, it was a fairly bad cold, but still i felt guilty when antonella showed up at my door to pick up the exams i graded for her over the weekend, with an equally bad if not worse cold herself, but full of anxiousness and concern for me and my fever. oops. i fully expect to be struck down by a bolt of lightning any minute now.

the truth was, as they say constantly here in italy, che non ce la facevo ad andare a scuola questa settimana. non ce la faccio is a conveniently vague expression that can mean anything from i can't do it (there's some serious obstacle in my way) to i'm not up to it or i don't feel like it (for no other reason than my passing fancy). and, especially if you're like me and like to pretend to be immune to social awkwardness in a foreign language, you don't really need to follow it up with any specifying explanation.

anyway, as you could probably tell from my last post, i've been in kind of a funk lately, and i took my cold as an excuse to become essentially comatose for the past five days. i crawled out of bed all of two times, once to attend my first spanish class and see an apartment directly across the street from the high school, and the second time to see another apartment. both of the apartment viewings, i'm ashamed to say, were entirely coordinated by paola and italo, who've taken over the reins of my apartment search after i sort of ran out of steam.

also i discovered, unfortunately for my work ethic, that on kindle there are all these books available for free that can be downloaded within seconds to my ipod touch... so i've spent the last five days sleeping, subsisting on soup and tea and these dreadfully good little tea cookies i've been consuming in obscene quantities, and reading no less than four victorian novels. sending occasionally text messages to my co-teachers that while i was getting better and there was no need for concern, i wasn't quite well enough yet to go to school.

but it's done, don't worry. with the end of my last wilkie collins novel my coma is officially over. this morning i actually took a shower (which i haven't been doing much of, both out of laziness and fear of getting reprimanded by my roommates for excessive consumption of hot water) and blow-dried my hair and everything, and i'm waiting for paola to pick me up to go see another apartment, and tomorrow i'll go to school, and by next week i'll have the first of a series of black-history-month-themed lessons planned out to a T. i even get to interview an italian applicant for brown, which is absurdly exciting.

anyway, the apartment hunt is coming to an end, i think, only it's not clear yet what kind of an end it'll be. basically i should get out of here before i have to pay another month's rent, on the 1st, and since paola and italo are both going to be around this weekend, paola's plan is to take the place by storm saturday morning, and with all three of us, plus paola's suv, to have my stuff completely moved in a couple of hours. then paola plans on "handling" my landlady over the phone, which promises to be dramatic.

only that i don't yet know where i'm going. by now it's come down to two places, the last two i've seen, which are the only acceptable possibilities i've come across. but i don't know which i ought to choose -- they both have their pluses and minuses -- and any confidence i may have once had in my apartment-choosing abilities has been completely shattered by my experience with this place, which i was substantially excited about in september.

one of the two is right next door to the school where i work on tuesdays and thursdays, galilei, and as i mentioned, right across the street from the other high school where i'm taking my spanish class. it's also even further to the north than where i am now, which means further from the city center, and deeper into this largely residential area. there'd be two roommates there, of whom i met one, and she seemed very quiet, low-key, a little aloof maybe. the other one is apparently hardly ever there. they're both gone on weekends. the apartment is plenty big, fifth floor, lots of storage space.

and then the other one, in via costantino nigra, is practically next door to my other school, CEI, where i work monday/wednesday/friday. it's also across the street from the apartment of paola's sister, whom i met when we went to see it. it's a bit of a hike to my other school, but it's much closer to the city center, a more lively area, close to the port. there'd be 7 people (including me), of whom i only met two: the one who showed us the house, very energetic and thorough, and an english girl. the available room is pretty small, and one of the walls is essentially a piece of cardboard that divides it from the next room, the english girl's. basically the same situation i have now, where it's a former living room converted into two bedrooms, and you can hear absolutely everything that goes on in the next room. only now i don't have to worry about what i say on skype, etc., since i know alessia doesn't understand me. whereas in this other room the girl would understand me. not that i'm divulging state secrets in my skype conversations or anything. i don't know. it's by no means a big place; the kitchen is teeny, there's no living room.

but in both of these places there's both a washing machine and heating, which makes them infinitely better than my current place. so i don't know, it's a tough call. in both places i'm next door to one school and far from the other. one's next to a mountain (the galilei one); from the other you can practically see the water. i guess it comes down to whether i want to live with two people or six people. in bologna we were in six; same with the red house last year at brown. in both cases i loved coming home to a place where there was sure to be somebody at home, something going on, someone making tea, wanting to chat. but in both situations they were mostly, if not all, americans. and another consequence of this stint in my current place is that my confidence in my odds of making friends with sicilian girls has also been shattered. it'd be unfair to sicilian girls to imagine that my experience with these two is any reflection on the population as a whole, i know, but i can't help but feel a little pessimistic.

paola also told me, as a way of being comforting, that her mother came to palermo from veneto (the region venice is in, up north) at 19 or 20, the spitting image of grace kelly, and never her whole life managed to make any female sicilian friends. the implication being that they were all jealous of her, as an outsider, and a pretty one. now, clearly i'm no grace kelly, and paola was just flattering me. even if i accept the comparison, it's a reassuring excuse, but it's also pretty depressing. anyway, who knows.

so, feedback! i'd like some, as always. which apartment should i go for, if either? no, i'm pretty set on leaving this one, so it's between the two. give me your thoughts.

update

hi everyone,

i know it's been a while since i updated. most of you know, i think, that it's because i've been a little preoccupied lately with looking for a new apartment.

basically i came back from my christmas break at home all re-energized and ready to make sort of a fresh start here in palermo. and then within a week i found myself feeling strangely low, totally discouraged. and it took me a bit to realize that it was because of my housing situation.

i mentioned here earlier that before the holidays we'd had a couple of disagreements. but ever since i got back it's been pretty unpleasant. i've made such an effort to appease them... for example, i basically haven't used my space heater in the two and a half weeks i've been back, even if it means i'm forced to huddle up in my bed with three pairs of socks on anytime i'm in my apartment. (forget your sunny visions of southern italy, winter is SO cold here!)

i'm not used to having outright conflicts with people. in fact, this one's kind off caught me off guard, i don't even know how to respond to it. but anyway, i've decided that it's probably best that i move. it's just not worth it to have to deal with roommate tensions after all the stress of being at school all day, planning lessons, dealing with rowdy kids, the last thing i need is to come home to more stress. to an environment where i'm constantly walking on eggshells around my roommates.

and if this were my real life, so to speak, if i were here for the next three or four or five years, i'd probably look at it differently. but i've only got six months left before my official grant period is over (though i may in italy awhile longer), and i want them to be the best six months (or more) they can possibly be. this is a rare opportunity for me; as much as i'd like to, i don't know if i'll ever have the opportunity to live abroad for an extended period again. so i want to make the most of it. if i think i could be happier with a comfier home atmosphere and friendlier roommates, shouldn't i go for it?

last friday morning, alessia blew up at me for something silly that i don't even recall, and i started thinking, maybe i should look for other places. and by saturday, i told my friend italo and we found a bunch of listings, and by monday we'd seen like four places. it just sort of evolved on its own. only that none of them was quite right. well, one of them was great, but a polish girl had been by to see it just before me and they gave her first dibs, and she ended up taking it. as for the others... one was great except it had no internet, another had a slightly overbearing landlady, another had one too many girls (plus live-in boyfriends) sharing one bathroom. i feel a bit like goldilocks, except i'm still looking for the one that's just right. i figure if i'm going to go through all the trouble of moving, it should be for a place that's going to be a significant improvement. which means a washing machine, for sure. and preferably heating.

combing through apartment listings is a pain, and really time-consuming. for every 50 announcements i look at, there'll be maybe 2 or 3 that meet my requirements, and by the time i call, i find out that the room's already been taken, or that the landlord wants a yearlong commitment, or is weirded out by the fact that i'm foreign (just my supposition, not that they've ever actually told me that).

so that's been sucking up a lot of my time, time that i'd rather be spending working on lessons. though if i find something better than this place, i suppose it'll be worth it. by now i don't care what kind of toads i live with, so long as there's a washing machine. washing clothes by hand is officially my least favorite chore of all time...

okay, well this was meant to be a couple of sentences but clearly i'm incapable of writing brief blog posts! so much for not getting into it. anyway, i'll let you know how it all works out.

buonanotte!

i'm baaaack!

hello everyone,

happy 2010! after two weeks at home for christmas (about a week and a half of which I was miserably sick, but it was still nice), i got back to palermo on wednesday night. i had a hell of a time getting here with the excessive amount of stuff i decided to bring back with me from the states... it involved having to re-pack my suitcases twice in two different airports, pay overweight luggage fees in both instances anyway, leaving one of my bags at italo's in naples to be retrieved god-knows-when, and getting off the plane in palermo with a backpack bursting at the seams, a purse so full it wouldn't close, and a plastic bag with the overflow. but anyway, i, and most of my stuff, eventually made it back in one piece. i was so relieved to see paola waiting for me when i walked out of baggage claim... i didn't have a working cell phone so i couldn't find out in advance whether or not she was going to be there. but there she was, and she was right that it would have been a bitch to have to haggle with a taxi driver in the condition i was in after that epic journey.

(apparently taxi drivers in palermo always try to rip you off, like most taxi drivers in naples, so taking a cab means being prepared to argue. this seems to me totally unnecessary: if they were just required to have meters, and use them, like in the rest of the civilized world, it would be a non-issue. but i guess it's just one of those nonsensical inconveniences that make italy so charming. anyway, i digress.)

i was supposed to go to school on thursday, the kids' first day back after the holidays, which conclude in italy with the epiphany on the 6th -- but i was utterly wrecked by the time i got home, around 5:30 pm, and i just wasn't going to be able to handle getting up at 5:30 am to go do my perky thing for four straight classes. so i e-mailed my advisor francesca and told her so, and naturally she didn't get the e-mail until after school the next day (wtf, why do italians not seem to check their e-mail every 30 seconds like americans do?!?!). anyway, she said it was fine, and i hope it actually was, but i think it probably was because in italian schools everybody's used to never knowing what to expect and just rolling with the punches. a little frustrating sometimes, but it comes in handy when i feel like taking a day off, which, you know, happens.

so friday was my first day back at school, with the weekend afterwards to soften the blow, thank god. no, actually, it passed without incident. the kids welcomed me back with their usual charmingly obnoxious enthusiasm. in 4B i gave an impromptu lecture on the american colonial period, only possible because half of the class was absent, and during which at any given moment only about 2 out of the 12 of them refrained from conversation long enough to catch a few words.

in 5B, they now insist on speaking to me only in italian, and do their best to get a response out of me in italian too, which sort of goes against the point of my being there, but the trade-off is that ever since they got me to admit i could speak italian, they've been ten times more tranquil and cooperative. i think they were majorly offended that, as they perceived it, we had been lying to them about this no-italian business -- though i saved myself by saying the school had made it a rule that i not use any italian, or admit to understanding any, in class. which is essentially true. so now they accept that in front of my co-teacher they must attempt to use english or not talk to me at all (it's usually the latter); though i always get to class a few minutes before she does, and during this time they're tripping over each other trying to chatter away to me in italian, and are delighted to hear any response from me in italian.

(italians in general are usually delighted to hear a foreigner speak italian, as it's a complete novelty to them; while in english we're used to hearing our language in all sorts of accents and all degrees of brokenness, to them italian isn't a language that foreigners bother to learn, and they only ever hear it spoken by natives.)

anyway, where was i? oh yes. jet-lag. everyone knows this already, but it's a real drag. i'm still completely exhausted, and regardless of when i go to bed, i'm up like a shot first thing in the morning. this morning, saturday, i woke up at 6 am, and despite my best efforts, i couldn't manage to sleep in any further. on the plus side, i'd forgotten how much i really do love mornings, though they're preferable without the side dish of exhaustion. especially saturdays. saturday mornings, i think, are the best time in palermo, but this might only be because i've hardly been conscious for any. still, palermo's quite lovely before all the traffic starts and the swarms of people take to the streets. sundays are too quiet, desolate, with all the stores closed and absolutely everybody inside for sunday lunch and then the soccer game. but saturdays are nice, because they start out quiet: things are open, and the shopkeepers stand in their doorways, and gradually people trickle out of their homes and you see the city come to life.

the trouble is how best to savor my rare saturday mornings of consciousness. there's a big open-air market near the city center that i've been meaning to go and photograph; but as it runs every morning but sunday, and i work every morning during the week, saturday's the only time i could go. this morning it was a bit cloudy, off and on, so i decided not to go, but hopefully i'll make it soon and bring back photos to share with you all.

instead i did this crazy little exercise routine my friend jen forwarded me, and i googled the historical accuracy of the pride and prejudice movie adaptations, which is something i've always wondered about (with not altogether satisfying results, however; you know how you can never believe stuff you read on the internet), and caught up on my friend gabby's blog, and then went out and took advantage of the saldi (sales) and did some shopping.

unfortunately for my dad's wallet (though fortunately for my well-being), i did a ton of shopping while i was home for christmas so more sales are sort of the last thing i need. but in italy sales take place only twice a year, by law: at the beginning of january, and at the beginning of july. and since for various reasons i was never able to hit up the saldi during my previous stay in italy, i feel sort of a duty to participate now.. you know, it may be my last chance.

shopping in italy is not my favorite thing to do, actually, since frankly as chic as italians manage to look, in their own way, theirs is mostly just not my style. italian fashion also seems to be a weird disparity of two extremes: real italian fashion, the kind we ooh and ahh over in the states, is super expensive; and then the clothing that real people can actually afford to buy tends to be overpriced and of poor quality. just not well-made. and tacky. think lots of sequins and rhinestones.

anyway, though, one does manage to find some things, if one looks hard enough. i always set out to buy practical things, like in this case gloves and boots and jeans, and seem to end up with dresses: this morning i bought three, and nothing else. what can i say, i just love dresses. maybe all style-conscious people of either sex have that one thing they tend to gravitate towards. i know for a lot of girls, it's shoes or bags, and for guys i'm not sure, but there must be things. for me, it's dresses. you can never have too many, and there's such a range, from casual to slightly dressy to cocktail to formal; there are all sorts of different occasions that call for just a particular kind; and it's the one item of clothing, it seems to me, of which there are styles to flatter every body type.

okay, this is all probably mind-numbing detail, so forgive me. i never end up writing what i set out to write. what i wanted to mention, like five paragraphs ago, was this:

one. i realized on my first real day back (the 7th), that this was the exact date two years ago that i arrived in bologna and set eyes on italy for the first time. (i do tend to remember significant dates, like everybody i've ever known's birthday, and the like.) i remember how exciting it was, after having studied the language and learned the history and devoured the movies for so long, to finally be there. and how novel it all was, in the beginning, every little detail of it, from the little cars to the little elevators to the little old men that clump together in piazzas and cafes for their vigorous discussions. there's little about italy that's still novel to me anymore. which in some ways is nice: coming back to palermo i actually felt like i was coming home, to a place i knew and felt comfortable in, whereas bologna in the beginning felt like a different planet. but i also kind of miss that feeling of novelty, of those everyday exciting little discoveries.

i think i appreciate it all less now. after all, of these past two years since i arrived in bologna, i've spent just about twelve months of them in italy, so as much time in this country as out of it. maybe when i've been away for a while it'll all seem precious again. when i was in the airport in san francisco waiting to board, there was an italian family sitting next to me, naturally being louder than everybody else. and hearing italian again after not hearing it for two weeks, i was startled by how beautiful it sounded to me, and i realized that when i was here in palermo it had stopped sounding beautiful -- the way it always sounded before in the movies and from my teachers and even through my time in bologna and naples -- and had started sounding just normal, even abrasive sometimes. maybe it's a good thing, maybe it means i'm fluent enough now that when i hear it, i hear the words instead of the sounds. but it's also kind of sad, isn't it? maybe it means i need a new language to learn.

two. while i was home, a few people who'd been following my blog and/or occasional (okay, excessive) facebook-status updates said things to me to the effect of, "well, would you say you're having a good time over there?" with that note of optimistic concern in their voices and the sympathetically cocked heads. as if they were saying, "i really want to be reassured that you're having the time of your life over there but i'm not at all convinced." and i, surprised, quickly answered, "oh definitely, of course i am..." and i am, but apparently my blog postings and facebook updates don't give that impression, so i'm afraid i've been whining and complaining entirely too much.

so, to those of you who start to feel optimistically concerned sometimes, be assured: this is my version of having a wonderful time. i've been known to complain a bit sometimes (usually in private), and i think maybe everyone has a tendency to share more or to reach out to people when feeling discouraged, or overwhelmed, or frustrated. those contented moments don't tend to get recorded as much. but really -- and being at home reinforced this for me -- i do get homesick, and i miss things about the U.S., but i have no desire to live at home right now. or anywhere else in the states for that matter, just now. no, there's really no place i'd rather be, not even any other place in italy, at the moment. i was sorry to leave home, and my friends and family and dogs, after this too-short holiday break, but once i was back in palermo i was perfectly happy to be here.

almost everything about this experience has been challenging to some degree, but that's the way it ought to be. i'm young, and i want things to be slightly difficult. it builds character, right? or so i've heard. no, in all seriousness, even i've experienced enough to have learned that nothing meaningful is ever easy. so even though not every day is all sunshine and daisies, i'm having a wonderful experience.

and that's more or less what i wanted to say. so i'm out for now.

until soon,

C


P.S.: A couple of people have told me they've tried to leave comments and haven't been able to... well, i've just poked around in the settings and apparently the default was that only registered users, i.e. people with blogs on this site, could post comments. anyway, now i've changed it so that anyone should be able to; just select 'anonymous' under 'comment as' and leave your name as part of that comment. so let me know if that works and sorry about taking so long to figure that out.

erice photos!

two weeks later... finally, the photos i took in erice. it's a little town about an hour west of palermo, on the northwestern edge of the island. it's very medieval-y, and it feels more like umbria or other places in the north than it does sicily. a bit cold, a bit foggy, but a very cute place.

sunset on the road from palermo

view from the hotel room

the trinacria, symbol of sicily, which i'm kind of obsessed with. the three legs symbolize the three points of the island.

fog

a cat pile

views!

this little item of graffiti reads: "crazy group from palermo, 9/30/09"

in the distance you can kind of see the islands off sicily's coast.. which ones these are i'm not exactly sure. but cool ones, for sure.

another view from the hotel room, later in the day with less fog

on the way home: scopello

the sign says this little property was confiscated from the mafia and is now owned by the town of Castellammare del Golfo (the town on the coast between Palermo and Trapani where my roommate Grazia's family lives!)

Yay photos. And there's more to come... Give me a day or two to get caught up. :)

my first thanksgiving abroad..

sorry i've been negligent about updating here recently. honestly, the past two weeks have been the most exhausting imaginable. the weekend before last i spent in erice, a cute little medieval hill town about an hour away, on the western edge of the island. don't worry, i took lots of photos, and you'll see them soon. it was darling, and i realized it was the first little bit of traveling i've done (well, aside from the rome jaunts) since i've gotten here. and that feels strange... when i was in bologna, almost every weekend we were in someplace new, even just day trips of a couple of hours by train. and i know there's a ton to see in sicily, and time's a-wasting, but i'm so exhausted after the school week that i don't have the energy for excursions. in fact, even though erice was lovely and i'm glad i went, missing out on a weekend of rest and recharging left me totally destroyed, not to mention unprepared work-wise, for the following week.

and a busy week it turned out to be, too. i only worked monday through wednesday, and then thursday i was off to rome for this english teachers' conference. i was only there for about 24 hours... in retrospect, it may not have been the best idea to go. it was great to see the other girls for like the few hours we spent together, but i was so totally exhausted that i couldn't even really enjoy them, let alone pay attention during the seminars.

i'd booked a flight home for friday at 9 pm, but as all i could think about was being in my own bed, i decided to ditch the conference early. i arrived at the airport in rome at like 3:30 in the afternoon hoping to change to an earlier flight. and, long story short, after standing in four different lines and dragging my bags back and forth across the enormous airport lobby, the ticket agent guy brushed me off and told me there was nothing he could do. and the combination of my exhaustion and his total indifference (because i had a strong feeling that he could have actually figured something out, he was just too lazy to bother) left me wanting to cry. and it must have showed on my face, because as i checked my bags and went through security and walked through the terminals, everybody was staring at me. well, partially because in the domestic flights terminals you don't see a lot of young girls traveling alone, and dressed as i am i'm suspiciously un-italian, but mostly i think because i looked like i was about to cry. which i then went and did, in the airport bathroom, for a few minutes. and then i felt better, and then i went and waited for six-plus hours (because then my flight was delayed) at the boarding gate. all the time just wanting to die of exhaustion, and by now frustration too.

so then i finally get to palermo around 11 pm, and by the time i get in a taxi and get to my apartment it's almost midnight. i'm a wreck. and first thing in the morning i have to meet barbara and we take the bus together to the historic center, where my CEI fourth-years have their confirmation in the big huge legit cathedral in the middle of the city. in the end, i'm glad i went. it was a sight, let me tell you. almost 80 kids were being confirmed, plus their families, la creme de la creme of palermo society. plus all the CEI teachers, plus a huge flock of japanese tourists checking out the cathedral. in short, a ton of people.

and i realized that despite the fact that i've spent almost a year in italy altogether by now, if you add up my little sojourns, i've never attended an actual catholic ceremony in italy. well, not that i've attended any in the US either, aside from a christening once, but still. with all the churches i've been inside in my time in italy, i'd never sat through an actual mass. it was interesting. a little awkward to be the only person in a huge cathedral full of people not making the sign of the cross as the bishop walked down the aisle... well, aside from the japanese tourists i guess. thank god for them.

it lasted for more than two hours. and for most of it i sort of tuned out what was being said. because religious ceremonies are hard to pay attention at in the first place, let alone in a foreign language. but it was neat just to see all my students dressed up and beaming, and all of their families, whom i basically spent the whole time studying. i was thinking about how in the U.S. you can easily categorize people according to social class just by looking at them. maybe especially those of us who are familiar with fashion: i can look at anyone's clothes, especially women, and usually know exactly how much they paid for everything that they're wearing. but i don't even think you have to know fashion to be able to categorize people by class according to appearance. anyway, here it's all different and they dress differently and have different things, and i can't quite tell in the same way. i don't know if i would have been able to tell if i hadn't already known that these were palermo's elites, but anyway i did know and so it was sort of fun studying them. i took a few photos, but nothing that came out too well. it was too dark inside and there were too many people. i'm hoping, though, that i'll have some opportunity soon to take some actual photos of my students, because i'd love to show them to you. so many of them are so darling. but anyway, here's what i got:

this was my view from the very back of the cathedral, but this is before it actually started so a lot of people weren't seated yet. by the way, that's professore bologna directly in the middle. and to the right of him is antonella, the history teacher i work with for the fifth-years. although i know, i know, you can't really see either of them.

trying to get a view of the actual confirmation part... not really successful.

outside, afterwards. in the way background on the left, you can't really see, is one of my kids giuseppe taking photos with his relatives. and ps, this white building is the high school italo went to. right next to the cathedral, how cool is that?

here's a partial view of the cathedral from the outside, with all the families coming out after the ceremony. that little guy in the middle-right, in the jacket sans tie, is antonino, one of my students, coming over to greet me and barbara. and i was taking a picture of him as he was walking towards me, haha.


also, another thing i noted through this confirmation experience: saturday mornings in palermo are lovely, and i should really try to get up in time for them once in a while. i've been in the habit, when possible, of sleeping until sometime between noon and 3 pm on saturdays. in fact i can't remember having been conscious for a saturday morning ever, since i've been in palermo, other than this past week. although there must have been at least one. but that saturday morning, palermo's old center was simply glowing in all its crumbly decaying splendor. the centro storico, as they call it, is full of awesome stuff but it's also usually also very crowded and more than slightly sketchy so i tend to avoid spending much time there, especially by myself. but saturday morning there was hardly anyone on the streets, and the sun was shining, and all the shops were open and outdoor markets were going on. it was the most pleasant i've ever seen the center. plus i had the added bonus of barbara, the history teacher, who was happy to chat on and on about the history of all the old buildings and monuments, many of which i've seen before but never known the backgrounds of. so all in all, it was a slice of palermo i hadn't experienced before, and it inspired me to want to start making an effort to get out and see more and learn more about this city.

so this was last weekend, then. another weekend without sleeping in. also i spent my third sunday in a row having traditional sunday family lunch with italo's family, which is kinda cool. i've heard friends say that sundays are always the most depressing time to be in italy, because everything's quiet and stores are closed and you know that all the italians are at home with their families having their big meal and doing their thing, and you're all alone. anyway, i'm still not sure whether i'm a fan of spending my entire sunday having a meal (though it is good, don't get me wrong).. but it's one of the few italian rituals that i have been taking part in.

and then, another crazy week that i jumped into totally exhausted and absolutely unprepared. one of the teachers at galilei asked me if i could bring in a pumpkin pie for thanksgiving today, and obviously if i was going to do it for one class i had to do it for all my classes. i wanted to do it for my tuesday classes too, in the spirit of fairness -- having of grown up in a family with two kids where absolutely everything was divided absolutely equally, and no one got anything, no matter how small, that the other one didn't get, this only seems natural to me. however, i didn't get it together in time for tuesday so my tuesday kids went without. but now i feel like i ought to make them pumpkin pies for next week.

when i agreed to this i thought it was going to be a simple thing. making a pumpkin pie in the us is relatively simple. making enough pumpkin pie for 100 kids becomes a little more complicated, but still do-able. but no. never again will i try to do any american-style baking in italy. it was truly a herculean task. i think i've been to the supermarket -- all different ones -- like 8 times in the past four days. yep, twice a day has been my average. first of all, no canned pumpkin so i had to use fresh pumpkin. but the pumpkins are different here in general, and they're also not in season right now. and then no pre-made pie crusts, of course, as they don't have pie, so the crust also had to be made from scratch. and everything -- everything -- is different. they don't have brown sugar like we think of it. evaporated milk -- i don't even know. i ended up buying some sort of concentrated milk thing in a can that i finally found in a far-away supermarket, and i'm not sure how much resemblance it bears to american-style evaporated milk, but i used it. and did you know they don't use measuring cups or spoons here? technically you're supposed to weigh everything and measure things out in grams. in reality, no one ever measures anything.

so basically this was a two-day marathon of crazy pie-baking, and six things resembling pumpkin pie came out of it in the end. they all came out slightly different, and i only tried one so i have no idea how the others were, but the kids ate them all. and some are more expressive than others, of course, but i think they did appreciate the effort.

that one crazy obnoxious teacher i work with surprised me by going all out and bringing in a ton of food, including like three apple tortes she'd made and several jars of apple butter she apparently makes herself, with bread. and she'd asked all the kids to bring stuff in too, so they'd brought in a bunch of store-bought desserts and drinks. it was a crazy amount of food. this woman is seriously off the hook... she's like the human equivalent of a frenzied, foaming-at-the-mouth pitbull on a chain. honestly, i don't know a better way to describe it. at first she was yelling at the kids not to touch anything or cut the pies or do anything until it was all laid out perfectly on like half the desks in the classroom that were commandeered for this purpose. then she was forcing me to go first and eat before everyone else, despite my protests, but thankfully she got distracted and i sort of slipped in among the ravenous 17 year-old boys and managed not to have to eat anything aside from a little roll with her apple butter. she also roped in the janitor, who happened to be passing by, and after 5 minutes of his protesting she forced onto him a plate packed with food. also the principal stopped in and that was awkward because when i originally met him we spoke in italian but now i was in the classroom so i felt i couldn't speak italian in front of the kids because they're not supposed to know i speak it, so the guy was probably like, wtf is with this girl? she's been in italy for two months and she manages to actually lose her italian? at least that was the expression on his face. he didn't seem to get the whole no-italian-in-front-of-the-student thing. whatever.

anyway. some of the kids are such sweethearts that even though like 80% of the time i spend there is frustrating and difficult and draining, there are those few that make me feel like i have to give it my all, every day, just for them. this one fifth-year class, a tuesday class, still with the obnoxious teacher, is definitely the worst class that i have. it's overwhelmingly boys who are into being macho and sitting in the back of the classroom and tuning me out -- when they even show up to my lesson -- and generally doing their best to get as little as possible out of my lessons. but there are two boys in there who are eager and interested and sweet and speak good english and more importantly, make an effort to speak english and to speak as well as they can. this babyfaced one especially, named fabrizio, fabri, is darling... he has the face of a 10-year old boy on a totally incongruous really tall and broad-shouldered frame. he's the one who's come up to me before after class and apologized for the behavior of the teacher and of the rest of the class... he's sincerely embarrassed for them for the way they behave with me. especially the teacher. so fabri's in the tuesday class but snuck into this little thanksgiving party in the thursday class, and chatted with me the whole time. he was telling me about how he wants to go college in the UK if he can, but he's a little worried about leaving his family and going abroad and he wanted to know whether it'd been hard for me. and he told me that his dream is to go to harvard medical school. which on the one hand it's like, wow, good luck with that, kid. but on the other hand, meeting a kid here who has ambition like that is such a breath of fresh air, such an anomaly, such a dream.

and the hour that i spend with this class every week is the most demoralizing hour of my week. it's like the teaching equivalent of standing in front of a firing squad for an hour. according to jann, that consultant who came, i should ask to be transferred out of this woman's classes or simply stop going. at the very least, there's the temptation to shrug it off or to not give it my full energy. but how can i leave them, how can i not give it my best effort, when there's fabri? and there's pietro, the other one in that class who's one of the best english speakers i have and whom the teacher disparagingly calls "peter" for his america-love and gives a hard time to for trying to be a teacher's pet with me. they're two out of 25, but it's like i owe it to them, you know? they're the two i have to endure it all for.

well look at that, it's already almost 10 pm. see, this is the reason i haven't been updating often. because i'm incapable of writing a brief post. every time i sit down to update i feel like there are so many things i have to say and if i don't get them down right now i'll forget them... and i end up spending hours writing a post. granted, it would be easier if i updated more often because there wouldn't be so much to cover every time. but anyway...

happy thanksgiving, all. my favorite holiday! i wish i could be there with my family or at least in the states or at least with americans to celebrate it. but really, i can't complain. enjoy the holiday!

love.