Going to switch to English now really quickly. It's late and I have to sleep, but I'm a little wound up after a 7-ish course (molto buono) 4-hour dinner that I just returned home from.
Can't believe how long it's been since I last blogged or Facebooked. There is too much going on to spend the time and I feel everything must be written in Italian. Yes, I'm keeping some sort of journal, much of it is comprised of the pictures I've taken in various places...and I'm pretty well documenting every single gelato I've eaten since I've been here. So far, I've missed 2 gelato photo opportunities.
The highlight of last week was meeting up with Ciclismo Classico in Gubbio and riding with them to Spello. I have pics, will post later (hopefully!) Great time to visit with Frank & Marcello, the same two guides from my trip last summer. It's weird to look back on last summer...Frank reminded me of how little Italian I knew back then (I remember not knowing the definition of va bene, sort of the cornerstone of the Italian language) and now I can understand the full conversation when people speak good Italian (not slang).
We also got together in Bevagna for the opening ceremony of their medieval week. I ended up seeing 3 cousins while I was there that evening. It's cool to have historical ties to a place, but even cooler to have living, breathing relatives in a place who are close enough on the family tree to see the resemblance to the rest of the family!
Here's a pic with me and Prof Piatti. He is a friend of Ciclismo's (lives in Bevagna) and he (via Marcello) helped me to get in touch with my relatives here last summer. We ran into him, as well, Thursday evening after the show. He looks much younger than this in person.
This coming week is my one and only exam for the past 2 1/2 months of Italian classes. I have been great at sitting down for hours at a time studying when there isn't an exam coming up...just when I want to know Italian better. Today it was really hard to force myself to study (and it was raining so it's not like I had an option to do much else). While I was taking breaks from studying, I found myself on Monster.com checking out the work scene in the world. It's becoming time to start figuring out what comes next, though I have a sneaking suspicion it might take more than a month or two to get to where I'm going (which is not yet known).
Reading job descriptions just makes me shutter. Really, you want someone who has a passion for something that is absolutely impossible to be passionate about? And you want him/her to do this meaningless work for all of the good hours every single day? Good luck to the "lucky" candidate. I've received more than one email from friends encouraging me to not re-enter the working world as they are currently in the process of being overly stressed out with their jobs.
I'll leave it at that for tonight. I'm still too full to fall asleep, but I have an Italian newspaper that should make for good reading material prior to shutting off the lights. (Actually, reading in English puts me to sleep, in Italian it wakes me up since I have to look up words and be very actively thinking about each word as I'm reading.)
Buona notte a tutti and THANK YOU to the wonderful DADs in my family AND to the wonderful MOMs who bridge the communication gaps to the DADs!!!
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