Carnevale, Chocolate, and Church Activities

February 13, 2013

Two weekends ago we had a lock-in at the church building. This was the first lock-in at Florence. We had 7-9 kids attend, ages 5-12. We colored, had a photo both, made individual pizzas for dinner, did some crafts, and watched Toy Story in Italian. The kids and adults had a fun time.

On Monday, we started our second course in Italian. We have two new teachers: Carlo and Paolo. They speak to us only in Italian all of the time. It's pretty overwhelming. Prayers that we continue to learn the language and to not get discouraged in this process, would be much appreciated.

We continue with our Bible classes, and are starting to get to know our students better.

Each Thursday we try to spend some time with a student or an acquaintance we've made. This past Thursday, we did something a little different. We went with Peter to the Nursing home that is just around the corner from where we live. They were having their Carnevale and we participated. As soon as we walked into the door, some of the workers grabbed us and dragged us to a room with costumes and wigs. We all dressed up and danced with the workers and some of the residents for a good two hours. The rest of the residents sat back and enjoyed our entertaining moves. :)

Carnevale is the festival here in February. It was intially a pagan holiday that was taken over by religious peoples back in the day. The idea was to have a party before Lent. So, you have Fat Tuesday, in which every parties and eats meat, before Ash Wednesday, when the 40 days of lent starts. There are other countries that celebrate this festival as well. The U.S. is one of them. Mardi Gras in Louisiana is French for "fat Tuesday," and was originally a carnevale festival. Here, everyone is about the confetti. There has been confetti on the streets all month. The nuns at the nursing home threw confetti at us as if their life depended on it. They even shoved some down one of the girl's shirts. I'm putting pictures at the end of the blog.

On Saturday, Alan and I went to a small town called Fiesole. It is actually older than Florence and has some old Roman ruins, such as: an amphitheater, some temples, and some baths. It's very small. You can take the bus to it from Florence and get there in about 20 minutes. It has gorgeous views of the city. Unfortunately, Alan and I got there around 2pm, which is when everything is shut down in Italy (from 2-5pm), especially in small towns. So we didn't stay long.

There's a chocolate festival going on in Florence right now. The few pieces of chocolate and the cup of hot chocolate I had were amazing!

So far our classes are going well this week. We've started a second textbook in Italian! Eek! Can't believe we've learned a whole textbook's worth of material in 5 weeks. My Tuesday night grammar class is going much better now that I know what level they are at with their English. Also, I have finally gotten used to slowing my speech down for that class, but it is unbelievably hard!

We now go to the local library once a month to teach an English class for kids. I helped this week with that. There were 10 kids there all around 8-10 years old. It was a lot of fun, I learned a lot of Italian, and I learned that their cursive is totally different from ours (great!). David learned that he'd better not count in Italian or else one little girl in particular is going to say to him (with a lot of hand gestures and loads of emotion), "Why are we here if you are going to count in Italian?!" hahah That was the highlight of the night!

We have been watching kid movies in Italian whenever we have some free time (rare). Also, Alan has been playing soccer each week and some of our students are now getting involved with those games.

Ciao!