Sesto Fiorentino

Unusual for ACLE, my current camp in Sesto Fiorentino is a 3-week camp. I will still live with a different family each week and have different children each week, but my location and colleagues will remain the same. My current host-family is really great and they live within walking distance from the school, so it’s kind of unfortunate to be leaving them… but who knows what the next family will be like (maybe they’ll even have internet!!).

The family seems to be fairly well-off and traditional. The father (Marco) is an architect, who designed the apartment complex in which they (we) live. The mother (Cecilia) is a radiologist for a gynecology facility. And the 6 year old boy (Andrea) is one of the funniest kids I’ve met. He is crazy about soccer; therefore, I have watched at least part of four or five World Cup games this week, played soccer with him once or twice, and was constantly forced to choose for which team to root. After dinner the other night, he taught me how to play the Italian version of “rock, paper, scissors” and thumb-wars. Then I would refuse to continue until I heard him blurt out the score in English numbers.

The host father reminds me of my own father in a lot of ways, constantly going out of his way to make sure everybody is happy and having a good time. Unfortunately, when it came to meal time, he took it a bit over the top. He would always insist that I take more of each dish and that I must “try some of this, and some of this…” There were a few nights this week when I actually wanted to throw up because I had eaten so much. The day I met the family, they took me to lunch at a beautiful restaurant that sits on the side of a mountain. The menu, in typical Italian form, has 3 main sections: Antipasta (appetizers), primi piatti (usually pasta), and secondi piatti (main entrees). After ordering a bottle of wine and two different appetizers, Marco asks what I want. I choose some kind of pasta with mushrooms. He insists that I order a second (entrée) dish as well and recommends the steak tenderloin… so I nod, reluctantly. Well, then I discover that the rest of the family has only ordered one dish, and here I am with more food than I’ve ever had to eat before. To ease his disappointment when I say that I don’t want dessert, he orders me some sort of really strong liquer, ‘limoncello?’. Combine that with an espresso and three glasses of wine, all of which he poured me , and I was feelin’ a little too happy… at 1:30pm.

As for the camp, it’s going really well. We’re in a five-classroom school, so things are a bit tight and crowded, but we’re managing. My class consists of 9 nine-year olds who are all pretty good kids. Our final show was Scooby-Doo (which I accidentally spelled with only one “o” all week). I was kind of hard on them during rehearsals, but I think it was worth it… they seemed really proud of their performance. And I was proud (for the first time) of my drawing abilities! I pulled-up a picture of Scooby and Scrappy on the computer, determined to draw their faces for masks... and they tuned out pretty darn good (and I have the pictures to prove it, haha)!! I also made ‘The Mystery Machine’ out of cardboard for them.

Anyway, it has been a tiring week, so I was thrilled when the family invited me to “go to the sea” with them this weekend. I’m not sure I got caught up on my rest, but I had a great time. The family has a small apartment flat within walking distance of the shore, so we just relaxed on the beach and swam in the sea for two days. I also learned that applying SPF 55 sunscreen four times a day doesn’t guarantee anything!!
On Wednesday, our Camp Director took all the tutors out for dinner in Florence. It was a really nice place with great food, right in the middle of the piazza. There was a huge sold-out concert going on in the piazza and the only way to get in was if you had a ticket or a reservation at one of the restaurants. Lucky for us, we were able to sneak into the concert following the dinner. Aside from the beautiful music, the atmosphere was simply indescribable. There were thousands of people sitting in the temporary seats and side-bleachers in the piazza, and every window of every apartment was open and crowded with family and friends relaxing to the music, drinking wine… just enjoying life. La vita e bella!! It was one of those nights during which you hope you will never forget the way you felt.

I really was in a euphoric state the whole time. I kept thinking about a conversation that Marco and I had had during the aforementioned lunch on the mountain. In his broken English, I think he was trying to investigate my personal philosophy on life and politics, etc. And I remember him saying, “I think man is a mistake of nature. There is nothing else in this world that destroys.” And during that lunch, I was inclined to side with him. After all, his comment is completely justified. There really isn’t anything else that destroys like we do, and creates things that we can’t even control (ie: Gulf oil spill). But then, sitting in that concert, I had the sudden realization that there is also nothing else in this world that creates such beauty either. Nothing else is capable of being emotionally moved by art or music. Nothing else is truly appreciative or altruistic beyond natural inclinations. No other living things are creative; they just exist. (I know, I know… I’m starting to sound like a romantic Florentine!) I just wish I had gone to the concert before that lunch so that perhaps I could have brought this realization to someone who thought otherwise.

Topsy-Turvy Italian Tid-Bits
1.) Italian kids go crazy over stickers. I guess stickers aren’t very common here. When I put them on a page in their workbooks, their eyes get all big and their mouths curl up in delight… then I have to pause class for 5 minutes so that they can compare their sticker to every other one of their classmates’. Then they kind of just zone out and stare at the sticker for another 5 minutes, as if they are absolutely perplexed beyond words that such an amazing thing exists.

2.) There are a few laws of ACLE tutoring that one comes to experience time and time again, for better or for worse. One of them is that whichever kid in class is the worst at speaking English always wants to be the lead character in the show… ALWAYS. I don’t know how it works, but I swear it’s true. It’s so difficult to write a good Scooby-Doo script when you know that Scooby has to have the fewest words. Or it’s the day of the show and all your kids have their lines memorized for Noah’s Ark except for the one kid playing Noah. It never fails.

3.) I forgot what it feels like to wear pants. The weather is so hot and humid that all the tutors wear shorts to school. I put on a pair of pants for dinner the other night (for the first time in 3 weeks), and it was like I was putting pants on for the first time. It was weird not feeling a breeze on my thighs, or sensing that my leg hairs weren’t as free as usual.

4.) I’ve learned that saying “I really hate being wet!” only makes people want to get you wet even more. Water-games is the pinnacle of each camp for most tutors… but never for me. I always rationalize that telling other adults that I really don’t like being wet and that it makes me miserable would encourage them to avoid getting me wet. So it really irritates me when the next thing I know, all the other tutors have poured a huge bucket of water over my head. Then they wonder why I’m so quiet and grumpy the rest of the day… ugh, I just want to scream: “HELLOOO, I just told you that being wet makes me miserable. You got me wet; therefore, you have made me miserable; therefore, I would really rather not talk to you right now. Why is this surprising to you?!? It’s a perfectly logical deduction that should have occurred to you the moment I gave the warning!!!”

5.) I had forgotten until this week that little kids don’t wipe their own butts… that’s so gross. The boy in my host family would call for his mom every time he went to the bathroom. I mean, I realize that I must have done the same thing… but it just seems so primitive. It’s 2010, someone should’ve invented a devise by now that liberates people from the task of wiping someone else’s butt. What if this kid had needed to take a dump at camp? Then what? I sure as hell wouldn’t do it!—This is a great job, but I am not getting paid enough for that!