March 14, 2010

• Today is Mothering Sunday in the UK, so Happy Mother's Day Mum! (Don't worry, I have already sent greetings via other methods as well!). In Italy it's not mother's day until May, but last Tuesday it was "La Festa delle Donne", celebrating all women, so the Italian mamme got a lot of love that day as well. Women get given yellow mimosa flowers and lots of auguri (best wishes).

  Last night I had a lovely night out. A few of the people in the choir I sing in were going to a dinner with people from a Latin-American dancing course they are doing. One of them had invited me to come along, with the possibility of going to a discoteca to dance after. I'll admit that I was slightly apprehensive about the whole thing, particularly the discoteca aspect as I pretty much hate dancing. Big dinners like that can be tricky when you only know a couple of people, especially when everyone is talking very fast at each other and you've got different conversations going on all around you. It can be difficult as the only foreigner... but, all the fears were allayed and I had a lovely evening!

  We didn't meet at the restaurant until 9pm. Now, I'm getting more used to eating a bit later than my customary 6.30pm, but sitting down at 9pm was verrrrry late! Lovely dinner though - le crespelle to start, then risotto, then meat + potatoes (managed to avoid eating any of the meat), then cheesecake to finish. Yum yum. Nice dinner and also good conversation...a very animated discussion about marriage, men and housework!
  After the meal it turned out not everyone was going on to the club, which was rather a relief. I was able to go to a pub (and it actually was really very like a pub rather than a bar) with 7 other people, which I really enjoyed. It's much nicer to have a smaller number of people so that you can actually talk to them and only one person tends to be talking at a time etc! I'd had a few glasses of wine by this point and actually started talking French, then got some Italian muddled up in the French, and then resorted to English... exactly the reverse of what I normally do in England where a few glasses of wine makes me come out with French/Italian. Clearly wine just has this multilingual effect on me... anyway, it was all good fun and I was really really glad I went!

  Next week is going to be extra busy. I've taken on another private pupil who wants to do the Trinity exam that I'm preparing students for at school. The exam is in a month's time, so she's got a lot of ground to catch up, and has therefore booked 2.5 hours of lessons with me on Tuesday (but split up across lunch). At least I know the material well and have already prepared everything for the classes at school, but I need to work out how to get through everything with her in however many lessons we have (and I'm not yet sure how many she wants to have). It's all go! I have to say, I'll be quite relieved when the Trinity exam is done... I think I'm more nervous about it than the students are!

  • 7:54 am
  • 1 Comment