First day of second semester

Today was a long, but very productive day. I learned my fair share of Italian grammar at CLIDA from 9 to 1, had a delicious salad for lunch, and then read my new texts by Giovanni Verga until it was time for my first Italian Literature class at 5 pm. I had managed to read 15 pages of his first short story entitled, Nedda. So far so good, but it's slow-going with his bits of Sicilian dialect and copious vocab words that I don't yet have memorized.

Class seemed fine. In the beginning, we weren't sure what our professor was like because he just sat at the front of the classroom for about 15 minutes, reading some book. He didn't look up once and I sort of got the hint that maybe he would wait until we quieted down before starting. At that point, I thought "Well, that's impossible. These Italians could talk forever." Turns out he must be one of those professors that gives himself the Italian 15 minutes of rest before doing anything. At 5:15, he picked his head up and started into the microphone, giving a long-winded speech about judicial things and the texts that we would be reading. I was surprised at how well I had understood everything, especially in comparison to my first day in Museologia last semester. However, when he got to actually giving an introduction on the course material and naming classical Italian authors that I had never heard of, I lost him. He spoke very quickly, and with lots of vocab that I didn't understand. Kevin had some trouble too. At times when I felt brave enough to write notes, I would hear a sentence and repeat it to myself over and over as I wrote it. But, by the end, I would forget what I had meant to write because of the background conversation with which the professor had continued his lecture. Oh well.

We had a little trouble with the other students in the class, and this really revealed the professor's personality-type. We discovered that he has a good sense of humor and is much easier to listen to than my Museologia teacher. However, he gets very thrown off by side conversation and actually yelled at the kids in the back. He had been watching them chat the whole class. According to Claudio, our tutor who was also present, he gets aggravated very easily, but is pleasant if you are on his good side. Hm. I'll have to work on this. At the end of the class, Claudio introduced me and Kevin to our professor and he was incredibly brief. He probably had dinner to get to with his American wife. American wife= he knows English and understands cultural differences= good for us!

Claudio, Kevin and I talked for a little while after class, and I am so relieved with the way that he wants to run things. He's very efficient, but also understanding. He assigned us a regular and do-able amount of readings for next week and said that we could go on if we had the time. Soooo much more pleasant than Elisa's tirades and ridiculous 100-page assignments. The class is most certainly going to be tough, but I think I'm going to like it much more. He told us to relax and enjoy the stories! The only thing that will be hard for me is the schedule. 5-7 pm. Ick. I prefer morning classes, but I'll adapt.

A presto!