La Sicilia and Me: 2009

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.