Florence, Italy: Grasping for Cloud 9

Have you ever noticed that, no matter how hard you try, sometimes you can never get to “Cloud 9?” I’ve been trying like crazy today, but there are always little details that slip me up.

I started out the day going to the Central Market. For those from Texas, the Florence Mercato Centrale blows the HEB version out of the water. This is two-story and is full of different meat, cheese, fruit, bakery and wine stands. This was only the second time I’ve been there; every other time I’ve thought of going I haven’t had enough confidence in my Italian skills to try ordering quantities of foods. This morning, it worked. The vendors understood me, gave me smiles and those always-appreciated head nods affirming “you’re getting closer.”

Then on the way to the apartment I met our landlady in the street and had a wonderful little conversation with her. She speaks incredibly little English and I speak almost as little Italian. She asked me questions on if our water was hot (we went five days after the leaking sink fix) and if my roommate had told me she’d showed him how to drain the shower (we’d also had a problem of the shower overflowing onto the floor if it lasted longer than 45 seconds — which wasn’t a problem with only cold water). I said yes and then told her that the window works great for the steam (there’s a window in our shower to let the steam out; another side-note: we learned the word for window yesterday in Italian class, so I already got a chance to use it). I left Adua (the landlady) and was pretty excited: I finally felt like the semester had a good future.

Later in the morning I went to the Accent Center and checked my e-mail. Eric, a friend who works at my parent’s business in Iowa, had helped me with deploying a computer programming project and it works. I felt like it couldn’t get better. I went to the bookstore that the Accent Center pointed me to and found a copy of “Rhetoric” in a version of Aristotle’s collected works that I need to read for my Classical Rhetoric course. Perfect! Things couldn’t go worse. After lunch I was going to talk with my parents via webcam.

The one downside to the day: technology. Actually, that’s the one downside to many of my days; go figure! For some reason, the video conferencing we’d installed on my Mom’s computer that worked with mine while I was in the states doesn’t want to work now. I’m still confused on it, but my guess is that a firewall is closed somewhere between Italy and America. I know, that’s pretty general and non-specific, but I’m at the point where that’s the only thing I can say in confidence about it. Even though we couldn’t get the webcams communicating, I did talk to both of my parents on instant messenger. I found out that the Drake University student newspaper used three of my pictures on a story they did of the soccer team. That was like a cherry added to a cake without frosting: good sometimes if you have the right wine (or I guess “whine”) with it. Hehehe.

The day has gone well since then. I was able to do audio chats on my Mac with two friends, one from the University of Chicago Div. School and another one who left this afternoon from TN to come over to Scotland to work on his PhD in Theology. Why does audio chat work with them and not my parents? Macs and PCs. Why can’t we all just get along?!? The working solution for this one is that my mom is going to borrow her mom’s iBook and use it to talk to me Friday night. That’ll be the first time we’ll have heard each other’s voices since I left on Aug. 31st. We could give in and just pay for the cell phone costs, but why should we do that when the technology’s supposed to solve all of the problems? (I know: a little sardonic,; but, I don’t care!)

I may be plummeting from cloud 8.95 soon since my first Italian test is tomorrow. Then again, if it goes well it might be the elusive icing on the cake. We’ll see! Pretty soon Erin, one of the TCU girls, is coming over to teach us how to make an Asiago cream sauce. She’s the epicurean master of our group.