August

The air is salty and the doors are rusty, so cancel your plans and get in the car because August will be sipped away in the blink of an eye...

This has been a week of me being confused by things that happened that I didn't expect. These moments are indicated with (?) in the following retelling of events.

Monday was great. I taught Machiavelli and one of my students saw my slides and said "Katie, your slides always eat, plus ten aura points" (?). Turns out, I don't understand the slang of this generation, so they all worked together to explain to me that "eating" means "is very well done" and "aura points" are a way to express whether something is cool or uncool. One does not keep track of one's aura points, though, so I'm not sure how you know where you stand on the coolness spectrum. I taught a rowdy Italian lesson on Sienese culture and the Palio, during which we accidentally ended up in a long discussion of the sounds animals make in Italian (?). This was not on topic, but the kids were excited about it, so I let it go. I had tagliatelle al pesto and a caprese salad from my favorite restaurant in Siena for dinner, and the guy there said "ha, you always have the pesto!" (?). I've only been there twice this year, and he wasn't working there last year, so I'm not sure how that became "always," but apparently I've already earned the status of regular customer.

Tuesday brought with it a guest lecturer who taught us about environmental economics. Professor Erspamer gave me a little notebook for me to keep track of which students were paired with which contrade that night, and said "I don't know, I just like the little chameleons on it" (?). There was also a rude tech support guy who yelled at me for trying to explain what was wrong with the classroom computer  (?) but then he couldn't figure out how to fix it, so that made me feel better. Vindication. We had dinner at the Nicchio contrada festival that night and then did the extraction ceremony to allocate our students to the ten contrade that are running the Palio this year. The highlight was the little Nicchio kids running around helping serve and yelling "DO YOU NEED SOME WATER" at all of our students.

After lecture on Wednesday, I went and did a load of laundry at Finlay's apartment and had lunch with him while my clothes were in the wash. I hung them up once I got back to the Refugio and, thanks to the 102 degree heat, they dried in less than 45 minutes (?). I had a ciaccino for dinner and ate it sitting on the steps in front of this beautiful little church tucked back inside the Aquila neighborhood.

Thursday's lecture on Galateo: The Rules of Polite Behavior was not attended by our most problematic student, which was really a shame since she could use some education on polite behavior. I later found out that this same student had screamed at the Refugio staff that morning at breakfast because they couldn't give her a cup of hot water since the cappuccino machine was in its cleaning cycle an hour after breakfast had ended. I would put a (?) here but none of us were surprised... I did go apologize on her behalf, though. Later that afternoon, we had a sensory concert with two saxophonists and two dramatic poetry readers. They gave us blindfolds so that we could lead each other around blindly and did a bunch of fruity little exercises with us, like putting the blindfolds on top of our heads and dancing around the garden (?). It was odd. They did some poetry readings later, which were equally odd since it was super contemporary poetry and therefore rather lacking meaning. I went to dinner with Louise, Giselle, and Rebecca and had a wonderful time with them!

Field trip Friday returned yesterday, and we spent the day in Lucca! Our first activity was going for a bike ride on the medieval walls of the city. I volunteered to take a surrey bike with one of our students since she doesn't know how to ride a bike, and somehow we ended up in the back seat of a surrey being driven by Vincent... (?) I saw my life flash before my eyes too many times, but I did manage to get a good picture of Professor E happily riding his bike! One of our kids got lost on the completely circular path (?) and then afterwards, I was putting ointment and band-aids on another student's hands since she had blisters from the bike handles and someone said "Katie is so mom coded" (?), bringing still more slang into my life... Apparently carrying bug spray, sunscreen, a first aid kit, pain killers, a portable cell phone charger, and extra pens makes me the mom of the program. I met up with Elisa, the lady who helps run the Italian language program at Harvard, for lunch with a few of her students who are in the program this summer, and then I dragged Finlay to get gelato. I wandered into a spot that had creative names for its flavors, like La Dolce Vita, Gattopardo, and Gusto del Maestro, but I opted for the Mille Miglia flavor (1000 Miles), named after the open road car race that takes place through Italy each year. We had a presentation from Lucca Comics and Games and then went back to Siena. I fell fast asleep on the bus and woke up to Prof yelling at the bus driver, who had ignored his fully-functional GPS and gotten us lost on the periphery of Siena (?).

Today has been wonderful - the high temp is 91 instead of 102, and I had breakfast in the garden before going for a long wander through the city, doing a little bit of shopping and a lot bit of zooming around slow-walking tourists. One guy in a shop was so excited that I spoke Italian that he sort of yelled in my face "DO YOU LIKE HARRY POTTER" and then handed me six packs of Harry Potter trading cards (?).  It's now thunderstorming, which brings me enormous joy, so I'm sitting inside and blogging, listening to the rain beat down on the scorched earth of Tuscany around me.