La Scuola Lorenzo de Medici

Ciao a tutti! I’m laid up in bed right now with a terrible ‘mal di schiena’ (backache), so I guess I’ll try to update this again.
Classes started today! I am taking 6 credit hour super-intensive advanced Italian, and it certainly lives up to it’s name! There were only 8 of us in the class this morning, and after the first class there are now 6, out of whom I am the only American! Three of the students are from Switzerland, one is from Japan, and one is from Poland. So we don’t even all have English as a common fallback language, all we have is Italian. So when we’re trying to describe things or when someone doesn’t know what a certain word means, we have to give definitions in Italian, which is new for me. Fortunately, though I don’t talk nearly as quickly as all of them, I am much better with the grammar and have a larger vocabulary than most of them, so as far as grades, I don’t think I’ll have any problems. Our textbook is fairly large, larger than I would expect for a class of only 4 weeks, so I expect we will move extremely quickly through the material.
My teachers are both Italians, and both seem very nice. There is Mariangela, who does most of the conversation practice first, and then Irene, with whom we work on grammar and writing. Irene actually taught at UNC through some sort of exchange program a few years back, which I thought was interesting. Sometime I will have to ask her what she thought of it. Not a lot of homework yet, but I know its coming. Plus I will probably have to help my roommate and her friends along. They are taking beginning Italian, which I think is very exciting, and so hopefully I can help some! I think we are planning to have homework sessions together in one of the museums, since we have free passes to all of them and they are some of the few buildings that have decent air conditioning! My roommate, being from Hawaii, thinks that 70 degrees is cool. I can’t quite agree!
Last night we walked two blocks from our house, ate pizza and gelato, and sat on the steps of the Duomo until it got dark, chatting. It seems a lot of people do that. In the evenings, those who aren’t still sitting around the table at dinner chatting are out in the piazza or sitting around whatever is there, just socializing and relaxing. There was a woman singing opera in front of the Duomo, and a lot of people selling counterfeit artwork. They are always entertaining to watch, because as soon as the police drive by, they close up shop so quickly, its amazing! (They have obviously had plenty of practice.) Living in the center of the city is nice, because we see so much, but it is very noisy all the time.
By the way, feel free to comment after my blogs, or on Facebook. I have internet at my house, so I check things fairly often.