Bye Bye Baby

The blog is back, screeching like an eagle (God's favorite bird) for one last post from Milan. This week has been a crazy one, so buckle up...

Last Friday, instead of coming back with the group and continuing to be in charge of the program, Professor Erspamer ditched all of us and took a week off with family and friends in the mountains. This left me squarely in charge of 28 undergraduates, two teaching assistants, a guest lecturer, and all of the program activities. Things went off successfully, providing many things for me to handle so as to keep me busy and out of trouble!

The chaos began on Sunday, when the fire alarm in the Residence went off and forced an evacuation. This coincided with a 34-hour breakdown of the building's air conditioning system, so the alarm rudely interrupted me as I was halfway through eating an entire tub of ice cream in an attempt to cool down. Since we'd been baking inside, we actually found a bit of respite upon exiting the building to get away from the screaming alarms. This did not, however, save us from the hordes of mosquitoes that were patiently waiting for us in the garden. I am once again covered in bites, and my two saving graces are the tube of Cortisone I brought with me and a cool bath each evening. Side bar: I called my professor to ask how to handle the fire alarm and AC situation, and in the midst of trying to get the kids all out of the building, he casually asked, "so did Jack leave yesterday? I guess he dodged the bullet of today's chaos... I like him, you have my approval." As delighted as I am to have his go-ahead on the wedding, could he have saved it for when I wasn't trying to evacuate our students...?

Monday was class day, so I taught a lively philosophy discussion section in the morning and a very fun Italian language class in the afternoon. My Italian class is reading pieces of Calvino's Invisible Cities in the original language, and they're doing quite well with it! It's neat to see how excited they get when they realize they can understand what they're reading. I always wait for the "ohhhh!" of comprehension when the meanings of the short stories click. That evening, we had aperitivo again, and this time our socializing centered on a persistent yellow jacket who wanted to be friends with our group. One of the girls was particularly distressed by this uninvited guest, so the boys took turns trying to trap it under a glass. They finally managed to do so, trapping it with part of a sandwich - a bit more humane, I suppose. Our guest lecturer, Professor Sacco, arrived in Milan that evening, so I met him at the train station to hand over the keys to his apartment and prepare him for the following day of class.

Tuesday was lecture and prep for the dinner that I organized for the entire program for Wednesday night. Mercifully uneventful.

Wednesday included a return to cultural economics lectures, a cafeteria hamburger for lunch (in honor of the Fourth of July) and another language class, this one sweetened by my promise of a gelato outing during the last part of the class period. Upon arriving at the gelateria that I was targeting, I discovered that it seems to have been permanently closed. Distress! Panic! Wherever shall we turn for gelato now? The answer: around the corner. This is Italy, remember, there are gelaterie everywhere you look. Striking gold on our second attempt, the kids happily chomped on their gelati before dispersing for the rest of the afternoon. That night, we all met up again for dinner at Little Italy, a trattoria recommended to us last year by a plumber we had to call. We had the entire back room to ourselves, so our loud English could ricochet off the walls of the room without disrupting other diners. Dinner went well, and I very much enjoyed my fried zucchini flower appetizer, risotto with sausage and saffron, and cannolo with chocolate chips. I had organized the dinner with the restaurant owner, who was exceedingly kind and very patient with our rowdy group. My patience was less resilient, especially when I had to tell one of our Harvard undergraduate students to not stack the wine glasses on top of each other, because if they fell, she would have to pay for them. ?????

Today was more lecture, but since it was the last day of classes in Milan, our students had "last day" energy - very chatty, couldn't sit still, took a lot of bathroom breaks during class. I spent a chunk of the afternoon tracking them down to get their meal cards back from them so that I could return them to the university. One of them gave me a card with five euros left on it, so I used it to get myself a little sweet treat for putting up with everything for the past week. I tied up all of our loose ends with the university, took the metro back to Zara, cleaned up all of our check-out and departure details with the apartment complex reception desk, finished my laundry, washed my dishes, finished packing my things, and took my mosquito-bite-soothing bath before plopping down to write this. Woo! I'm ready for a change of pace, and I'm praying that Molveno and Trento place that squarely in my hands!