Scenes from an Italian life*

Technology:

Student delegate: IT person, the internet is not working in our computer lab.

Italian IT person: Yes. The internet is not working.

Blank stares.

Silence.

Blank stares.

Comprehension:

Student 1: What is the professor drawing on the board?  Is that a graph?

Student 2:  It's lines and squiggles.

Student 1:  Oh.

*I have a fun life, all things considered.

I have returned to Italy for the fifth time.  This year finds me away from the sea, and instead on top of a hill which has 217 steps leading you up or down from the tram line into the city - preferably down, but wondrous things start to happen to your legs once you've gone up enough times.  I come home for lunch these days and make crazy huge salads with corn and ceci (chick peas), provolone chunks and pepperoni (red pepper) and shredded spanish coldcuts, and then I head off to work and class again.  

My job is teaching a sweet two year old boy how to speak and think in English.  I think he knows a lot more than he lets onto.  He surprises me every once and awhile by randomly starting to count in English or repeating oddball words like "kitchen" or "sticky."  I take what I can get, and then repeat them into infinity . . . in fun ways, of course.  We play with noisy cars and colored play-doh together - but they call it "pongo" here.  Or rather "PAAAWHN-go," as the Italians have a love affair with dragging out vowel sounds.

I'm supposed to be taking something like eight classes, working three times a week for one (possibly two) jobs, and writing a thesis in the next few months.  The amount of posts you find upon here will be a measure of how much thesis writing I'm actually getting gone.  But hey, blogs are communication, aren't they?  It's part of my studies . . ..

For some reason I cannot upload photos from my computer, so until that is fixed it will be a much more visually boring blog.  

It's good to be back in Rome.  B3 is back again.