Kirbys in Catania

It's still cold and rainy here in Florence.  We're eagerly waiting for spring! As usual, we've been very busy these past two weeks.  Two weekends ago we had our American Cooking School here at the Bible school.  We helped Debbie prepare the food on Thursday and Friday.  Friday, March 8, was international women's day.  I don't ever remember hearing about it in the states, but here they celebrate it. The women usually go out to eat and men give women a mimosa (yellow flower that smells like honeysuckle).  So on women's day, we were in the kitchen from 9am till about 11pm with just a 2-3hr break in the middle.  It was a lot of hard work, but it was fun.  We had 30 people come, and we have two new people interested in taking lessons here now.  When we have the cooking school, everyone pays a small amount, eats the food we made, while Debbie show how to make it.  It's a lot like a tv cooking show.  After she finishes making one thing, ...

We have settled into a a "routine" here finally. I still have three students, a grammar class, and now a new beginner English class at the church building before service.  Alan has four students each week.  We are in our third month of Italian.  We took our final last Thursday! We really are trying to spend any free time we have, studying Italian.  The title of this post is a phrase that several of my students have been telling me all week.  They say that now they have, "no pope, no government, and no money."  I'm sure most of you heard that the pope retired.  Well, they also had elections last week, and nobody won a majority so basically no political party can govern at all.  Two Fridays ago we went to a Medici villa here in Florence.  Bepe, the cutest old Italian man, takes us on a lot of our cultural days (we have cultural day instead of class now on Fridays).  The villa was empty, and we pretty much got a private tour by a worker...