How's about a little medieval city to start your day

Finally! Home sweet home! Finally, a Laundromat! Finally, hangers!!

Ummm, remember how everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, talked about how very small the town of Siena was? I’m not exactly which Siena they were talking about, but it definitely couldn’t have been my large, confusing, and winding city of Siena. Sunday afternoon my roommate and I decided we’d try walking home instead of taking the bus. And here’s a really bad idea, let’s do it without the map! On our second day in Siena. Excellent. Well, by now I am an expert at getting lost, so I’m pretty sure I know when I have NO IDEA where I am. And I didn’t. Have any idea. So, after about 45 minutes of desperate walking in the heat, we stumbled upon a hotel and asked the man behind the counter, “dove Cappuccini?” “No, no, no cappuccino. Mi dispiace.” Ummmm, no, we don’t want coffee, that’s where we live. “Ohhh! Si, si, cappuccini! That is VERY far away! Very far!” Ok, so much for small town. We were instructed to go back to the train station where we started, then wait for 45 more minutes for our bus to come and take us home. We are sticking to buses and maps from now on.

Thanks to the language barrier, I have been trying lots of new foods! My host mommy puts food on my plate, and I eat. Ask questions (in my extremely broken Italian) later. As a result, I have now had green beans, tuna, nectarines, tomatoes, strawberry jelly, and avocado. And plenty of new stuff to come, I’m sure. Although, I’m pretty tired of saying “prima volta” (first time) and getting that shocked reaction, not only from my Italian mommy, but also from my very American roommate. Yeah, it’s pretty sad when I have my very first fresh piece of raw (ummm, raw? I don’t know the tomato lingo) tomato in Italy.

Speaking of language barrier, I know about five words in Italian, and my host mommy knows about that many in English. It makes for some pretty interesting dinner conversation. Luckily, she has about eight English/Italian dictionaries, and after every other word she says, “aspetta, aspetta!” and riffles through the pages until she hits upon the right word, and the stilted conversation continues. Everything is “molto, molto, molto!” or “bene, bene, bene!” or some other Italian superlative repeated many times.

Here’s the view from my classroom at school. Be jealous.

And my quaint little room at home. I get my own room!

Also, they have some very serious street pride here in Siena. They have this horse race called the Palio that has been going on every summer since before the Etruscans (so my mommy tells me). Each racer represents a contrada (team) made up of seventeen different parts of the city. Your contrada is determined by the place that you are when you lay your head to sleep the first night you are in Siena. Hence, I am of the istrice contrada. Aka, porcospino. Aka, porcupine. Intimidating, huh? Well, at least I’m not a snail (an actual contrada). Anyway, they are very serious about this race. And each team also has a saint, and on that specific saint’s day the contrada parades the street with flag wavers and drummers all morning as they march into the church. Well, on our way back from church Sunday we happened to run into the She Wolf contrada doing just that.

Check out those men in tights. Anyway, I was getting pretty into it, with the clapping and celebrating. Then I remembered, hey, this is not MY contrada! What’s all this gaiety for?!? Suddenly I got very sullen and started thinking about all the ways a porcupine could stealthily sneak up on, attack, and destroy a she wolf. You’d be surprised at the odds against the she wolf.

I apologize for the lack of pictures from Siena. But I’ll be here for two months, so I’ve got plenty of time, ok?? Until next time, ciao ciao!