Thursday, September 6, 2007

WHOA. I'm in Italy.


Hoooo lyyyyyy shit. So I just met my host mother Elisa today, and I'm at my house now, and, I mean, SERIOUSLY? Seriously. How did this happen. How am I in Florence right now at the most gorgeous house with my OWN ROOM? That looks out over Fiesole? With an outdoor terrace off my hallway… that looks out over all of Florence?? Was I a saint in a past life or something? WTF.

Ok so rewind… mia mamma is an older woman who has two grown sons (like, REALLY grown, they're like mid-to-late 30s) so she now lives alone in a gorgeous, GIANT apartment in a BEAUTIFUL residential area on the northeast quasi-periphery of Florence (aka a 15-minute walk to class, which is also not-so-central, and probably a 20-minute bus ride to the center of town, like the Duomo area). But the exchange for being kind of far away is that my roommate and I (who also goes to USC… how random!) each get our own rooms… which is TOTALLY unheard of. And ALSO, she has internet in the house which she's letting us use for free (although I haven’t figured out how to configure it quite yet…), which is also totally unheard of. And one room is way better than the other, so neither of us could bear the idea of rock-paper-scissoring for it for the whole four months, so we are gonna switch rooms halfway through.. but I get the good one first (which is great, since it's bigger and has bigger windows but gets less light, so in the colder months it will probably be colder anyway…. but there's always the chance she will get so settled in her room that she may just not want to go through the trouble of switching… so I wouldn’t even need to make up sour-grapes excuses anyway…heh heh…)

But yeah. So mamma is downstairs cooking for us.. it smells like heaven in this house, she's making a freaking pie! And homemade soup in like, a special soup-maker machine. I snuck a look in the fridge while she was out and there were squash blossoms in there. Just like, chillin'. ONLY Italians would keep squash blossoms, like, on hand. Just in case. Jesus.

I can't believe all of this. This weekend is “immersion weekend”, so we have some registration-type stuff to do at school tomorrow, but after that, it's dinner at home, then Saturday we get breakfast and dinner at home with mamma (Saturdays and Sundays are usually only breakfast), and Sunday is a full mamma-immersion day, I think we're gonna go to a beach town called Viareggio, possibly with Elisa’s sons. Wow. Unbelievable. And, um, I'm WAY better at Italian than I thought. My roommate has had three semesters and I've only had two and whenever we go upstairs she's still like “wait what was she saying?” And I actually know what she was saying. What? Amazing. I am so excited.

LATER:

Ok, so dinner was fresh-made zupetta (soup) of lentils, zucchini and rice, then an insalata greca with pomodori and feta. Una cena semplice e buonissima, just how I like it. Simple stuff is so great here because all the ingredients are so amazing on their own - just the tomatoes I have eaten here in the past couple of days have blown any that I've ever had back in the States TOTALLY out of the water. I thought I was going to miss California produce while I was here, but Jesus, instead I'm gonna be in constant mourning for the loss of Italian produce once I get back. Ok but back to dinner - she ALSO made this crazy-delicious torta di mela, which basically looked like apple upside-down cake if there were such a thing. Moist and delicious. Get ready to reunite with a 400lb Alex come January.

Ok, but for reals I'm exhausted because I went out last night and then woke up at 5:30 am this morning and couldn’t go back to sleep cause I was so nervous/excited/couldn't believe this shit was actually happening to me. Ho-ly jesus. A domani….

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