Kirbys in Catania

Pronunciation class! Okay, lots has happened since the last blog.  First, two fridays ago (April 19th) we had a pronunciation class here at the Bible School.  Elizabeth, who is a speech pathologist, gave the 3.5 hour seminar.  We had around 40 students come to the class.  Elizabeth lectured, and then each of us teachers would do practice exercises with a small group of students.  It was really neat, and they are still talking about it with me in our private classes.  It was very helpful to teach them pronunciation rules for things that are especially difficult for Italians in particular.  All of us Americans learned a lot about our language that we didn't know before either.  So thanks Elizabeth! It was great!  That is, except for the part when we broke into our groups and none of us Americans knew how to pronounce scythe correctly, and almost nobody knew what it was either.  :) Last Saturday, Melissa, Alan, and I tagged along with...

I've decided that in addition to blogging about our experience here trying to spread the Gospel here in Italy, that I am going to blog about some funny everyday stories, interesting tid-bits, and cultural differences here in Italy.  I was going to do it all in one post, but after I saw how much I wrote just about the food here, I decided to split it up into topics.  The Food I have to talk about the food here.  Italians take meal time very seriously.  They don't have lunch or dinner during meetings at work, and they don't do anything else really while they eat.  They just eat.  In a typical Italian family, the mom does all of the cooking.  Of course, pasta is a staple here.  There are tons of different types of pasta.  However, these two dishes that we eat in America are not actually Italian, and most Italians haven't even heard of them: chicken parmesan and fettucini alfredo.  Dinner is often had late in the evening - usually around...

Ciao from sunny (finally) Italy! The sun has arrived.  In fact, while I'm writing this, I'm sitting outside on our new swing that someone donated to us.  We just finished putting it together this morning. :) We have been taking advantage of this beautiful weather. Two Saturday's ago we had park day for the kids at church.  Several of the kids and some of their parents came.  I was sick again that weekend so I did not go, but everyone tells me that it was fun.  It sounded like the day involved a lot of soccer playing.   Last week was a pretty typical week for here.  Our classes went well.  On Thursday, we took the kids from church to Cascine park here in Florence.  It's a nice park alongside the Arno river.  They have a small fair that is there all the time.  Only two boys from church were able to come, Marco and Moreno, but we had a lot of fun.  Actually, I think us adults might have had just as much if not more fun than th...

Margherita Pizza from Pizzaiulo (our fav place) Two weekends ago we had a Women's Convegno for all the ladies from the churches in Italy.  It was held in Prato, which is only a half hour away from us.  The whole convegno was conducted in Italian.  The topic was spiritual gifts.  While it was fun and encouraging to meet so many women from so many different churches, it was exhausting.  You find that at certain points in the day, your brain just shuts off from all of the translating you're doing.  However, it's really exciting to realize how much we are understanding and how much better we are getting at communicating.  I met ladies from all over Italy: Milano, Sicily, Ancona, Roma, and several other places.  Through meeting several members from the church in Milano at this convegno, Alan and I are now invited to go up to Milano to visit their church.  So we will probably be doing that some weekend this month. The kids put on a skit L...