Babilonia in Taormina, Sicily
I can’t believe we are already starting another new week. Last week flew by faster than the first and Don will be here in just four days. Tomorrow I start the cooking part of the course, which will be in the evening for the next three days, including Don’s first night here. Haven’t decided yet exactly what he will do. Most likely he will have dinner with my Italian family without me. Aurelio, I’ve been told, speaks English and I think he will enjoy meeting Don and vice versa.
School
This Monday is not as chaotic as last Monday with much fewer new students. The teachers have changed again and we have the teacher from the first week’s language practice lessons for the grammar lessons this week. We’ll see if her lessons are as communicative for grammar as they were for language practice.
Today we just went over grammar homework from Friday and wrote a letter telling someone that we never wanted to see them again, an odd choice. We started to correct each other’s grammar mistakes, but we’ll see where this lesson leads to tomorrow.
In the afternoon practice lesson we went over a bunch of names of regions and capitals of Italy, which I personally found a waste of time as I’m never going to remember them all. I’ll learn them as I visit the places and need to remember them. We then started to discuss and exchange information about our own countries, a better use of time.
Home
Helena and Rachel (a Swiss student I rarely saw) have gone home and we have two new housemates this week, Isabel from Spain and Calvin from Australia. I still haven’t met Calvin. I hear him in the morning moaning loudly as he wakes up. The windows of the house open on to a central atrium such that you can hear everything that is going on in the other rooms. As I type this I can hear Angela and Isabel chatting in the kitchen. Ding, the toast just popped. Calvin is still making his morning noises. Isabel is quite nice and speak Italian well, but fast, a true Spaniard. Funny, although I can hear her Spanish accent it doesn’t bother me like the French accent that sends my mind whirling into another language. I understand her quite easily. In fact, for me she is easier to understand than Katrina who speaks just as fast but with a Swiss German accent. The mysteries of language learning.
For links to all the posts in this series see the Taormina, Sicily page.