Kirbys in Catania

Being an American living in Southern Italy - Sicily to be exact, it's common to feel that I stick out like a sore thumb here. I mean, you don't even need to talk to me and Alan to figure out that we don't belong here, you just have to look at us walking down the street. Granted there are some fair-haired, fair-skinned, light-eyed Italians, but not many. Take into account that Alan and I are both pasty white, have blue eyes and he's 6'6'', and needless to say we attract a lot of attention here. :) But, I'm not just talking about looks. Italy is a beautiful country, and her people are beautiful people, and yes, on the surface their culture doesn't seem that different from American culture.  I suppose when you compare it to Middle Eastern or Asian culture it is much more similar, but it's vastly different at the same time. I'm not here to talk about the specific differences between our two cultures, but I will say that being from one culture

Classes have been in full swing now for over a month this semester. Alan and I have 18 regular students who come at least once a week (a few want to come more than once a week and we're cool with that). :) From week to week it varies because we have a lot of students who come "sometimes" meaning when they have time. So in total, I think we have about 30 contacts who have been students at one time or another. The ones who don't have time to come anymore, we still try to see and visit every once in a while. So, our student schedule/visiting people keeps us pretty busy.  We learned recently that we have to schedule one day off a week where we don't do any classes because we started to get really tired. It's gotten a lot better since we started doing that. We have four students who are doing a Bible study with Stephano after our English classes. We also have several students who have been asking some really tough/thought-provoking questions. Several of our lesso