I am always the last one finished with dinner. My mother always taught me not to scarf down my food, to eat slowly and enjoy. With the incredibly flavorful Italian food, I have so much to enjoy but for everyone else at the table…it’s scarfing time! By the time I’ve chewed and swallowed my first bite, my host mother has already finished half her plate. They’ve told me that it’s fine, I don’t need to eat quickly, but now they’ve started giving me less food so that I finish about the same time. So now I am eating more quickly.
During dinner, I find that I am picking up on more of my host family’s quirks. Mio babbo, Andrea, really enjoys the fattening foods with butter and sugar. Mia mamma, Daniella, notices this so she disguises the healthy food. It’s quite amusing. Tonight we had fettucini con burro e formaggio as a first course, then lentils (which reminded me of home…oh, nostalgia) with some sort of spinach and cheese dumpling (almost like an empanada). Then Daniella came in with a tray and proudly stated, “Salad Fruit!” Kari and I looked at one another… “fruit salad,” Kari smiled and Daniella scowls, “sempre, sempre,” because she was so proud at getting it right. Well, the Macedonia was delicious, which overcomes any language.
Tomorrow, another quiz and Thursday brings with it our Italian final exam. In class today, we gave speeches about the first time we met someone important in our lives. Here was mine:
Durante il primo anno di universitá, ho incontrato Joseph. Noi abbiamo fatto una classe insieme e lui ha sempre dormito durante classe.
All’inizio del second anno di universitá, ho incontrato mio ragazzo. Mentra ballavo a una festa, ho histo che lui fissava me. La settimana dopo un’allarme ha suonato nel mio edificio. Mentre ciascuno usciva l’edificio, io ho visto lui di nuovo. Lui abitava nel mio edificio! Mentre noi aspettavamo fuori, lui ha invitato me a stare insieme con lui. Io ho accettato.
Pretty good for my fourth week of Italian, eh?
Oh, and all of my other classes start next week…oh boy. They will be:
-The Medici as Patrons of the Arts: an art history class taught by the director of the program. I think this will be my most difficult class, mostly because it has already given so much dense reading (which is not my strongest suite). But the subject is quite exciting to me, I’ll admit.
-Dante’s Divine Comedy and the City of Florence: a class that will combine literature, history and art with an incredible professor from Cornell College. I am stoked for this class.
-Classical Figure Drawing: the orientation for this class isn’t until Thursday so I don’t have too much information on it other than that we will be learning a classical technique for figure drawing. We will be drawing from live models and taught by a renowned professor, Charles Cecil.
And we will also be continuing our Italian classes until mid-November. Well, I should probably get back to this reading for the Medici course (this is my third night trying to read it and I’m a little more than halfway through it. Please pray for me!). A dopo!
**addition: I got another 100% on my quiz this morning!
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