Aperitivo, ICIP, tutors

Ciao ragazzi,

Last night, Christiana (our 5:15 teacher at CLIDA) took us to this amazing pasticceria, called Pasticceria Giorgio, for some treats and conversation. The place was adorable and had some awesome pastries! It was also in a part of Florence that we had never seen before, so we were pretty excited about that. I had a pastry that looked like a chocolate covered cream puff. I forget the Italian name though. Either way, it was awesome!

After the pasticceria, we met up with a former Holy Cross teacher (she was there for everyone's freshman year- before I got there) for aperitivo. It was pretty funny because we ended up going to the place right next to the place that Elia took us a few weeks ago. The food was great and we had a nice time. I was exhausted though, so I had to leave early. I wasn't fun to be around anyway.

This morning, Dobby took me to the site of my Independent Cultural Immersion Project (ICIP). It's across the river at a little Catholic school, run by nuns. The director, Madre Carol was soooo nice and spoke perfect English. I'm pretty sure she's American, but she also spoke beautifully in Italian. Her plan is to make me a teacher's assistant to Eleonora. The class is a 5th grade level and I will be helping 6 kids learn English. I talked to them today and they are already amazing at it anyway. The scary part is that Dobby for some reason told Madre Carol that I was qualified in English literature and grammar!?!?! Sure, I know some things, but the US has a terrible way of not teaching English grammar to kids. Therefore, I know how to use my grammar, but not to explain it very well. I can do a little bit of sentence structure, but I have no idea what the terms are! This should be interesting... I'm also a little disappointed because the kids are so old. I had told Elisa that I wanted to work with kids ages 3-5, because that's the focus of my studies at Holy Cross. I'm also upset that I am not able to speak Italian to the kids. I was hoping to do a little bit of both English and Italian. I'm going to go to the first session and see how I like it. If I don't feel that it's right, I'm going to try to convince Elisa to set me up with something else. She's tough to deal with when it comes to changing things, though.

After that little session, we met Elisa at a museum called La Specola for our tutoring session. I had a really nice time walking through the museum. In the beginning, I thought she would be explaining all the pieces, but instead, she wanted us to look at the overall organization of a museum, placement, etc. It was pretty cool though. After the walk-through, we sat down and got some readings, etc. It's going to be pretty intense, I think. There are lots of Italian works that we are going to have to read which will take me 3x longer to get through than English readings. She is very thorough though and has a great reputation for her tutoring. A girl from HC actually got a perfect score on her Museology exam last year because Elisa was her tutor. Hopefully, she's just trying to scare us with all this work because it seems like they did less than expected last year.

After tutoring, we all met for lunch at our usual spot, Antica Noe. From the beginning, Carla had had an interest in the boy (Andrea) that works there. Everything changed last night when he called her and took her out on his Vespa!!! So now they have a little thing going on. So exciting and fun to hear about!

We're going out tonight and hopefully meeting up with Andrea. He said he's going to take us to some Italian places. I'm excited! I think I'm skipping out on the homework tonight. It's not due for a while.

A dopo!