la mia scuola nuova

Ciao!

School started a week ago and being the geek that I am I must say attending "Dante Alighieri" is the highlight of my days. I love my teacher-Marco, he's such a hoot. There is one catch: he teaches only in Italian. Therefore, I must being getting somewhere with this language because I actually understand most of it! Go figure.

My grammar and conversation classes are comprised of the same group of students, about ten all together. They are from Brazil, Venezuela, Switzerland, Canada, Sweden, Japan, Iran and Turkey. I am the minority; this is only my first "second language". My culture lectures are in the afternoon, Monday and Thursday's with a classroom lecture and Fridays are for fieldtrips.During the evenings, I either read or go and grab a bottle of vino with some friends before returning for dinner. Dinner at Dolores' is typically around 9 p.m.

Yesterday, I spent the day trekking in the rain, or should I say the tsunami. Something I really don't understand--the streets here are all very narrow. Yes, this sounds quaint and dear, but this smallness makes the sidewalks even thinner. Should there be any rain, which is frequent, tutti gli italiani bring out their umbrellas. Navigation gets to be an even wetter, messier escapade when passing on these narrow, cobblestone sidewalks with large umbrellas bumping and stabbing everything in sight. There must be some kind of trick that I am missing to handling this task gracefully and with class. ANYWAY, giving up trying to discover this trick, I finally I parked it at a lovely little trattoria and splurged for a 1/2 carafe of vino, rosso--naturalmente, and some "torta" (cake) and wrote in my trusty journal for about two hours. I really have taken a strong liking to this activity.

Stay tuned. There is sun today so I am on a mission to find some boots. There are sales "saldi" all over town! Yeah!

Kels