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.

sunday evening in palermo

these are photos i took a few weeks ago on a sunday evening in the centro storico of palermo. on sundays everybody's out to take their sunday stroll and now they've closed off the main streets downtown to traffic on sundays, so everybody's out and about.

the politeama theater:

the statue that's referred to simply as "the statue":

casa di paola

i'm just full of party favors for all y'all today. here are some more photos that i've had sitting around for a while... all from paola's awesome house.

p.s. she's planning on putting it on the market soon, so if any of you are interested in buying an awesome villa with great views of palermo that costs probably upwards of 1 million euros, mi raccomando.

views! from the terrace.


teddy on the terrace:

little inner courtyard that the house wraps around (i love this style of house):





this is a taste of the wacky/awesome interior of paola's house. like, there's an angel hanging from the ceiling. and books all over the place. and all the rugs on the floor, they're from afghanistan. they're little rugs of the kind afghani muslims use to pray on. and there are tons of them all over the house. and you probably can't see here but they're crazy... a lot of them have machine guns and AK-47s and tanks all over them, because they're mostly from the time of the first gulf war and so apparently war themes came out a lot in their tapestry. anyway, it's all just craziness. crazy loveliness.




bellissimo, no?

ups and downs and all arounds

Dude. A huge bouquet of roses just arrived for my roommate Alessia from her boyfriend Marco, no occasion. Her Marco is such a sweetheart. He essentially lives here, and comes and goes at all hours, but it's okay because he's super nice and considerate. He's the good one, he's the one that we like. My other roommate Grazia's boyfriend is also named Marco, and we don't like him. He sucks, in fact. He never comes over here, and when he feels like seeing Grazia he'll pull up outside and make her come down. He never seems to get in touch with her at all except to call her up when he's feeling jealous and yell at her for something idiotic like having a new facebook friend who's some guy Marco doesn't know. So anyway, those are the Marcos.

*****

Thursday, Galilei day.

It's always a roller coaster over there. Like, i can never just have a neutral day at Galilei. One minute I'll feel really good, confident, energized. The kids'll be really into it, into me, and I feel like what I'm doing is actually important and useful and interesting for them. And then the next class there'll be moments where I just want to die, or burst into tears and run out of there. Either of the two.

And then it's just exhausting. I'm done with work by 12:30, but by then I'm so worn out that I never manage to do much of anything in the afternoon. Each of the classes is a full hour long, and there's no passing period-type break in between, so it's like me on my feet talking for an hour (and trying with all my little might to project my voice as loudly as I can which is not easy and drains me after a while). And then rushing to the next classroom, and having to figure out all over again where the hell it is, since the classrooms are bizarrely numbered over there and I still feel like a rat in a maze every time I'm there, and I usually have to end up asking someone where such-and-such classroom is, and if there's no bidello (janitor) around I ask the nearest group of students, and then they insist on leading me there themselves. Which always kind of amuses me. But anyway, it's brutally exhausting.

Plus every time I walk into a classroom it's a surprise what's going to happen next. The teacher will spring on me some idea for something she wants me to do right then. Or the teacher won't be there. Or the teacher will be there for a minute and then leave and do something else for the rest of the hour. Or there'll only be 5 kids in the classroom. Or for some reason or another I'll find that I can't do the lesson I planned, or in the way that I planned. Always always an adventure.

This one teacher I work with there, in two different classes, is downright abusive. Both to me and to the students. I've mentioned her before, I think. So for instance, today I come into the classroom and she jumps up and starts yelling -- okay, admittedly Sicilians/southern Italians in general tend to talk in a way where it seems like they're yelling; well, they really are yelling, but they aren't necessarily angry or maybe don't mean to come across as harshly as they do to an American ear. So sometimes it's hard to tell. But this teacher is pretty much always yelling. And she always sounds pretty damn pissed off to me.

Anyway, she starts yelling at me about how we absolutely can't go on like this, doing these dumb little American culture lessons that I've been doing. We need to make a syllabus, we need to do something serious. Like literature. Except these are third years and they're not really at a literature level, but in any case, we have to talk to my tutor Francesca and figure out something serious because this isn't working for her and we just can't possibly going on in this way. We need a book. For example, this book.

She calls up one of the students to bring over this book they all have, called 'Think English.' With an accompanying workbook called 'Think Culture.' And she flips through it for me, and it's filled with the exact same sort of cultural topics and activities and exercises that I've been doing with them. Except that instead of just being American, it's also British, Australian, whatever culture. But honestly, the exact same sort of thing.

And she's like, now here's a legitimate book, you need to get this book and from now on in this class we'll follow the book.

And while in reality I'm thinking, wtf? This is absurd, my ETA self is a little angel and says, sure Prof, of course, whatever you want to do, I'm happy to go along. Where can i get this book?

And she hesitates, and then she looks at the girl who brought over the book, and she says, you, you're going to give the professoressa your book, ok? (Again, wtf? Whatever, I don't ask questions anymore.)

By the way, if you can imagine this, this is an extremely loud exchange (this prof doesn't do anything but extremely loud) between the two of us, standing in front of the class, with all the students quiet and listening.

And then she's like, Okay, well for today what have you planned?

"Uh, i was going to do a lesson on US geography." (You know, a dumb little American culture topic. Because US geography clearly doesn't have any real value in a classroom, as opposed to say, Beowulf.)

Okay, okay, do your geography then, and from next time we follow the book, okay?

But by now, of course, you've totally undermined me in front of the class, as usual, and basically announced to them that my lessons are frivolous and silly and useless. Why on earth should they pay attention or cooperate with me or taking anything I do seriously?

Luckily, they're pretty good kids, and they mostly cooperate with me anyway (despite the fact that the teacher then proceeds to spend the entire hour taking some of the rowdier kids out in the hall one by one and screaming at them violently right outside the classroom door). I get through only about two-thirds of the geography lesson I've done with my other classes, but that's fine, I'll gladly take two-thirds. Given the insanity of this teacher and her relentlessness in trying to undermine me, and to destroy any semblance of authority I might dare try to have with these kids.

Luckily I don't take any of this too seriously, luckily I'm easygoing. Luckily I'm the kind of person who's used to taking a lot of shit and not getting my hackles all raised up about it. Luckily, it takes a lot to piss me off. Because if I were any different, this one teacher might just make me go mad.

So there's always her. And there are always other moments when I feel a wave of discouragement slam into me and almost knock me over. Or I feel so disheartened that I just wanna go and curl up in the corner and hide. Or I feel like, okay, this thing might just test my limits, after all.

But then there are moments that make it all seem worthwhile. There's one teacher, Ambra, who's incredibly sweet with me and lavishes me with praise, no matter what I do. And mostly there are those kids, so many of them, who are so cute and earnest and sincere that I wanna hug them, all the time.

Even the ones who make a ruckus and act like they're too cool for school, even the most obnoxious of them, inspire no ill will in me. They're just 4 or 5 years younger than me in many cases, but they seem so little and fragile and beautiful. Who knew I'd feel this way about them. When I was a teenager, I hated teenagers, myself included. I couldn't wait not to be one anymore. I thought my classmates were all little devil incarnates. And now, only a handful of years later, I find them sweet and adorable even when they're trying their hardest not to be.

And those are the bad ones. The good ones, they're the ones you to go school for. They're the ones who make me want to squeal every time they speak in class because they're just so freaking cute. It's like a constant battle against the urge to hug them. There are several of them in each of even the worst classes; and in the best classes, they're all that way. They're so genuinely interested even in the mundane things I have to say about the U.S. They put so much effort into every little sentence they say to me in English, so careful not to make mistakes, so eager to impress me. Of course they do make mistakes, all over the place, and sometimes mangle the English language beyond recognition, but then their mistakes make them even more charming. They're so amazed by and excited about little things, like lockers and prom. They proudly tell me the things they know about Las Vegas, and the others gush as if it were heaven on earth. And I want to laugh and say, guys, Las Vegas is gross, but I couldn't because the images they have in their minds are so lovely that I wouldn't want to ruin them.

With everything, it's like the US of their imaginations is so beautiful and magical and full of promise that I find myself wanting to preserve that image for them. Because how neat would it be to have that, this fantasy idea of a place with big clean cities and money and beautiful people and wide open landscapes and wilderness and social mobility and work and possibility? I feel the US is to them sort of what Princess Peach's castle in Super Mario Land was to me as a kid. In my mind, Princess Peach had it made.

And plus, their enthusiasm for the US is weirdly contagious. It's not just them, I think it's also the way the state of things in our country has changed over the past few years. Obama, but also before Obama. Or maybe it's just me growing up and appreciating things more. But, for instance, I'm friends with a couple of my students on Facebook. And just today, one of them posted a big photo of the American flag on his profile. With a caption that said something like, America, I want you so bad! (Roughly translated... that sounds totally weird in English but also the way he phrased it in Italian also has sort of a sexual connotation, so it's the same idea.)

And a couple of my other students had clicked on the "so-and-so likes this" button, and left comments expressing their enthusiastic agreement.

And this is a picture of the American flag, basta. Three or four years ago, I would have thought, you kids are crazy! Don't you realize we're imperialist pigs? Or maybe, don't you realize you've been stuffed with Hollywood/Obama propaganda and that your vision of the US is a total fantasy? And I'd have felt uncomfortable with my role as sort of an additional disseminator of pro-US propaganda. And okay, maybe I still do have those thoughts at some level. But my initial response is more like, right on kids, yay America! And okay, in part maybe I'm feeling on some level as though their loving America is equivalent to their approving of me. But also, honestly, it makes me happy that they love America. I love America too. I wanna tell them, get the hell out of here kids, go there, and explore, and sure, be disillusioned when it doesn't meet your expectations and it's not always the way it looks on TV, but even so you won't regret it. Even if you come back you'll be so much better off for having gone. Exactly what I'm doing now, I guess, only reversed.

This is getting really scattered. But I hope I'm not being totally incoherent. I find it hard to explain these things, both my newfound affection for teenagers and my relatively newfound patriotism, because they're still sort of inexplicable to me.

Anyway, as always, lots more I wanted to say but so much other stuff to do. So i'll be in touch.

Un abbraccio..

C

delle belle foto foto foto

I know I haven't posted photos in a while (they take so freaking long to loadddd..), but here are a few. They're not particularly good or interesting, but just to give you a sense of what Palermo looks like, or at least the neighborhood where I live and work. I've started carrying my camera around at all times now, so I took some photos today and yesterday between my house and Galilei, one of my schools. So...




Near Galilei. Even though this area isn't particularly attractive, there are all these lovely mountains draped around in every direction..

Near my house. Sometimes it feels like all of Palermo is a fatty parking lot. Kind of like the LA of Italy. Except without LA's coolness factor.

Piazza Unita' d'Italia

Note the 1950s/60s-style high-rises. Yeah, that's all there is. In this part of the city especially, as it's a residential area, but also all of Palermo. Basically Palermo got bombed to bits during World War II and they rebuilt the whole place after the war. It's a pretty unfortunate style. Like Brown's Grad Center dorms, city-fied. Anyway, this is Via Valdemone, the street Italo's parents live on. And note the little tip of Monte Pellegrino in the background...

Yay intersections! Galilei is just beyond this one.

More soon!

a question to which i really want your feedback

also kids, here's my current dilemma.

so next week, thursday the 19th through saturday the 21st, there's this TESOL (teaching english to speakers of other languages) conference in rome and fulbright's paying for us to go and stay in a hotel for those two nights. the conference lasts through saturday afternoon, and then i have the option of either taking a flight back to palermo saturday evening or staying the night with one of the rome etas, ashley, and hanging out with her on sunday and coming back later in the day.

i'm really excited to get away from palermo for a few days, hang out in rome (it's pathetic how little time i've spent in rome given how much time total i've spent in italy), and of course above all to see the other girls and commiserate about teaching and speak americano and do fun stuff together.

the only thing is, my fourth-years at CEI have their confirmation on saturday morning (catholic school, remember?). and they've invited me multiple times, and they're so excited about it, and they're so sincere in begging me to come that i can tell it actually means a lot to them. forgive me for being extremely ignorant about catholicism, but i gather that confirmation is kind of a big deal.

anyway, i'd really love to go. i'd really love to feel close to these guys, to show them my support and my affection, to feel part of the intimate little CEI community that i like so much. it sucks that these two things coincide. because making it to their cresima would mean getting to rome thursday afternoon and leaving friday afternoon, essentially 24 hours later, cutting short my time with the girls and making a really rushed time of it there.

so let me know what you think i should do. like, stat, cuz i have to buy my flight...

btw, this is the input i got from ashley, the one i'd stay with if i stay on in rome...
"... that is really special that your students asked you to attend their confirmation, like really really special that you've developed a bond with them that carries outside the school walls. i don't think i'll ever get that close with any of my students/classes. i guess if you find a flight back to palermo on friday night then why not take advantage of this wonderful opportunity, especially since you know it will mean a lot to them and be a neat experience for you. but that's a quick trip up to rome, so hopefully we'll get the schedule soon and you can figure out what you'd be missing here vs. in palermo. but if you end up staying, of course plan on staying with me!!!!"

other takes?

and now we emerge from the chaos

okay, folks.

the reason for my absence is that i've been entirely discombobulated for the past week. the story: from the beginning of last week, we started getting angry visits from the law office downstairs, saying that every time we used the water in our apartment their office was becoming more and more flooded. at first we decided it was the bathroom sink, which tended to be a little leaky. so we stopped using that. but no, they were still angry, and still getting flooded. okay, we stopped using the kitchen sink too, but excuse us, signori, we said, you can't ask us not to take showers.

but no, it seemed they could indeed ask us not to take showers. more like hysterically demand that we not take showers. so then a plumber comes by to "take a look" at our pipes and decides that the only logical solution is to tear apart our entire apartment looking for a leak in the pipes.

so in comes a little army of like 5 construction workers, who stay with us over the course of the next five days. first they tear out our bathtub and put it in our living room. still can't find the problem. they stand around and smoke, ask for coffee, flirt with grazia. who flirts back and temporarily becomes the maker of magically good coffee. they leave their cigarette butts all over the floor of our apartment. not enough. they tear up the floor of our bathroom, they dismember the kitchen, they leave a thick red dust covering absolutely every surface of the apartment.

what was supposed to be a half a day's job and turned into a five-day expedition into the bowels of our apartment finally ended today. and thank god. i felt like i was living in baghdad. no cooking, no hot meals, no showers, no bathroom, no teeth-brushing, niente. noise and dust and big obnoxious men who only speak sicilian, from early early each morning to late in the evening. it's amazing how much a thing like that can really wear you out, especially when you're working every day and have got loads of stuff to do on top of it.

today when they finally left (by now they were so attached i didn't know if they'd bring themselves to actually part with us), we looked around and said, oh shit it's going to take us days to clean this place up. (so much red dust it looked like the surface of mars, honestly.) alessia had to work tonight so she told us not to start in on cleaning til she got back, so we could make sure we were all pitching in equally. but instead, grazia and i attacked this place with all of a week's worth of pent-up frustration and general grossed-outness, and we totally transformed it in like two hours. you know in those teen movies where the parents go away for the weekend and the kids throw a party and trash the place and then they go into a frenzy and magically clean it all up at the end just in the nick of time? yeah, it was just like that.

so anyway, that's been the past week. i've been going by italo's parents' house every day to take showers and just to hang out for a while with a little bit of peace and quiet. italo's mom also ended up feeding me, a lot. you think maybe stereotypes are false, including the one about italian mothers who shove food down everybody's throats, but that's one stereotype that's very very true. not that i mind it, in smallish doses.

i'm on the fast track to chubby at the moment, so i really need to try to stop buying nutella and join a gym.

also, i've been relying on paola quite a bit and she's enormously generous and hospitable. plus i just love hanging out at her house. it's a combination of her and the dog and the house itself and the atmosphere she creates in it. it's fun, relaxed, quirky. she's been doing my laundry and also feeding me and giving me a ton of stuff, including a little space heater and her daughter's left-behind winter clothes. (once again, i find i have utterly failed to take into account my total intolerance for cold weather, despite my four years in new england.)

i'm grateful for all this mothering and attention, though like i said earlier accepting this sort of generosity doesn't come easily to me. and it's weird that this is the social network i find myself with. on one hand i feel like i've failed at making friends, reaching out to people my own age. my roommates are sweethearts but i haven't gotten super close with them. i'm friendly with the young teachers at cei but i haven't succeeded in actually socializing with them outside of school. but i'm not absolutely alone here... so basically instead of friends, i have mother figures. like i said, it's strange. but it's made a world of difference in these past few weeks.

comunque, more to come soon.

a post intended for a week ago..

whoa, sorry for being MIA for so long. i've been incredibly out of sorts lately. first, here's the post i wrote over a week ago that's been sitting on my desktop unfinished ever since. it's still unfinished, but i'm just putting it out there. and then i'll give a more current update.

ecco, allora:

it's getting a bit cold now, and by cold i mean like 60 degrees fahrenheit. certainly not brown cold, but still, it feels like a fall. all the palermitani of course are bundled up as if we were in alaska. and then it it's completely dark by 5:30 pm, which is always a drag.

so, last week was pretty exhausting. thankfully there's no school on monday, since on november 1 italians celebrate all saints' day, probably better known in the U.S. as dia de los muertos, aka day of the dead. i made this huge to-do list for the weekend and i've accomplished basically nothing on it, so let's hope tomorrow is super productive.

last week, then. this ESL consultant visited me on thursday to observe one of my classes, chat with me afterwards, and then conduct a workshop with the english teachers at galilei. i was unnecessarily nervous about it, but it went really well, in the end. she was very positive about my lesson, a basic geography lesson very much in the american style, where the kids had to get up and move around and work in groups on different things that they'll then present to the rest of the class. as she commented to me afterwards, it's amusing how when you first ask them to stand up and move around, there's this stunned silence, a few moments during which they think they've misheard you and they don't understand what you want from them. the concept of being asked by the teacher to get up out of their seats is so foreign to them. luckily this was a small class, sixteen kids, and a quiet one, though their level of english comprehension isn't terribly high. the whole getting-up-and-changing-seats-and-working-in-groups thing didn't work out nearly as well in the larger, rowdier classes.

then over lunch she gave me some constructive criticism, mostly about "classroom management" and pacing. and she had a lot of ideas and suggestions about classroom activities, a lot of which were really helpful. [i do have to admit though, it was kind of amusing that after the big spiel she gave me on "managing" a classroom, the english teachers at the workshop later proved to be entirely unmanageable themselves, thus proving that trying to get a bunch of italians to work in small groups in a remotely orderly fashion is about as easy as herding cats, no matter who you are].

the workshop, on teaching american literature, was really good, though i'm curious to hear about what the teachers thought of it. it presented a way different approach to teaching american literature than they had in mind. scarlet letter, yeah right. try a two-paragraph excerpt from the house on mango street. it makes way more sense, though i do remember hating it when in english class we used to have to read a brief excerpt from something and analyze it to death, break it up into so many small pieces that it no longer means anything. that’s what destroyed To Kill a Mockingbird for me. I remember every time we read a chapter we had to answer in writing like 80 questions about every little detail from that chapter – what was scout wearing, what did scout’s aunt serve for tea, etc. – and it was the most tedious thing imaginable.

but, to my surprise, i find myself tempted to gravitate towards some of the same methods and exercises that i found irritating as a student. they often make sense in theory. and then i’m usually reminded that no, relocating them to italy doesn’t make them any less irritating. i have to learn to trust my initial instincts.

as i was telling this american esl consultant, i don’t really have experience teaching esl. but i do have plenty of experience as a language student, having taken spanish, latin, french, and then italian in my school days. And that’s not a bad background to have, as long as i can learn to trust it.