Miscowculated

After my Italian lesson today, I found out that it’s not because I’m dumb that I haven’t been able to learn anything in the two classes that I’ve been to, but that the teacher is an unfortunate teacher.  She never uses any other language, which would be okay if she had pictures of what things meant or something…but she only speaks in Italian, and if anyone asks what a word means, she explains using other Italian words.  If it weren’t for the Spanish that I took in high school, I would have no idea what’s going on.  I met a girl from Estonia after the class today, and she told me that she’s completely lost…so that made me feel better.  The Spanish students have been doing pretty well and have been talking with the teacher during class, but all the rest of us are very lost.

After class I had my first item of food that wasn’t amazing!  And it was quite alright, so it’s nice that I’m in a country that even when everything is done to make the food gross, it’s still edible.  There was a group of stands next to the ocean on my walk back from class, so I picked one and ordered something that looked like the stuffed pizza I had the other night (he told me what it was called, but I do not remember).  It would have been delicious if it weren’t so stale…  I suspect it had been sitting in that window for a few days, and that it has been heated up several times.  But when I got back, I went to kitchen to throw away the bits of crust that were too hard to eat, and the snack was out…there was fresh pineapple and oranges and the best tiramisu I’ve ever had.  So all in all, I had a nice lunch. 

My poor brain has just about quit working…  I’ve been using my iPod as a watch, but it’s set for the time back home, and I’ve just been doing the conversion in my head.  Thus far, this has worked fine, but today I made an appointment to meet with the teacher of my Foundation Engineering class, and I mis-converted the military time, as I was only thinking about the time zone conversion; I scheduled our meeting for during my Italian class.  So now I have set the clock on my iPod to be on the 24-hour clock, and told it to give me the time in Naples.  I will be meeting with Professor Russo tomorrow. (Yes, Russo!  Like Alex Russo!....this is for you, Leandra, if you’re reading.)  Now I only have the task of converting my English thinking to Italian words, and trying to remember if the word I’ve come up with is Italian or Spanish, and I don’t need to bother my brain with anymore time nonsense.

There are some little boys (between 6 and 10 years old) playing soccer in the churchyard outside of my room window, and it is ridiculous how good they are!!!!  20 of me could not beat the 9 of them.

One of the girls I live with just got back from Venezuela, and for the last hour has been telling me about it.  She was visiting her boyfriend, who is working for an oil company there for a couple of years. She’s an econ major, so she was going on about how weak their dollar is.  She told me about how poor the country is and how scary it is.  One of my roommates just got in and pulled out 4 large books.  It turns out that she is an aerospace engineer, and they’re 4 bound and beautiful copies of her thesis! Fancy.

Dinner tonight was amazing, as usual.  The first course was pasta in marinara (I can’t remember the name of the pasta, but it was a tube pasta, about an inch in length), and was excellent.  The next course was battered, pan-cooked steak (I am starting to have a hard time remembering American things…I know this is called something, I just can’t remember...but all the same, it was incredible), and cooked carrots, which were really sweet and buttery and perfect (I don’t usually like cooked carrots…I must just have a weak spot for the food in Italy).  For dessert we had 2 kinds of cakes!  I was a girl’s birthday.  My favorite cake was like a giant shortbread cookie, with some sort of gel stuff on it, then fresh, wild, little strawberries on top.

Okay, I’m sleepy and you all should have enough to read to keep you busy until tomorrow.

Buonanotte!