Monday, with new classmates again

My school has two-week long "courses" and last Friday ended a course. This morning, we spent the first two hours doing individual grammar work while the incoming students were tested, and now we have two new classmates: Lisa from France and Kun (?) from Holland. Anna from New York has left, so I'm once again the only american in the class, as well as the only one who has english as her mother tongue. I like it better that way. And I can feel myself getting better at speaking, although I'm not nearly as good as I would like to be. But there's still time....

Last night, I had dinner at I che c'e c'e, a restaurant that I've visited every time I've come to Florence. Marco had recommended it, and it's a great place...friendly people and good traditional Tuscan cuisine. I was the only one there speaking Italian with them...all the rest of the diners were American, as far as I could tell. I asked why, because my memory of this restaurant is that I couldn't even get in to the restaurant some nights, since it was so full of italians. The answer was that most italians spend the weekend at the coast, since it's so hot in town (as my hostess did). Also, many italians are on vacation in July or August, and they don't stay in town. Dinner was great: ravioli with sage and butter (one of my new favorites), grilled chicken, and vin santo with biscotti (another new favorite). When the bill came, I saw that she had rounded it DOWN...instead of charging 28, the bill read 25. It just amazes me how nice everyone is here.

Tonight there's a happy hour for all the new students, and then I'm heading to the ticket office: Monica (from Salzburg) and I are going to see La Traviata in the Boboli Gardens tomorrow night! I'm very excited, not just to go see an opera, but to go with a new friend and speak only Italian with her all evening.

I think that today (or yesterday) marks the halfway point of my trip. I've been here 19 days, and I have about 18 to go. Very sad...

To leave you, here are some pictures of things that I find very typically Italian:

Train and bus strike, but as you can see, from 6 am until 9:15 am and during lunchtime the bus was running to accomodate the working folks. Would never happen in america, would it?

Great works of art covering up other great works of art - hidden treasures! Luckily, I was in the right place at the right time to see this - I would never have known that there was a fresco behind this oil painting!

The bodies of dead saints on view. This saint (I've forgotten her name) died in the late 1200s. They fashion a plastic or ceramic mask, hands and feet for the saints, but under that nun's habit, her bones are there.

Places where very famous people have been. This placard marks a hotel where Mozart stayed on the first of his 3 trips to Italy. I'm always stunned to see something like this, just unobtrusively hanging on a wall!