One major difference between Italian university students and American university students is that they do not normally leave home to go to college. University is considered more like a job than a new social environment like in the US. Most students going to school in Rome grew up in Rome, still live with their parents, and their closest friends are still their friends from high school or earlier. Even students that have moved to Rome to go to school usually come and live with a friend from high school. So the way we do ministry here is get connected with a whole group of friends rather than trying to have some sort of weekly meeting that just wouldn’t happen.
Italian students also have their finals over a period of two or three months rather than in one week at the end of the semester like in the US. Whenever we tell students how our finals system works, they are horrified! But we get three months of summer and they get one sooo… good trade off in my mind.
Anyways, we met a few physics students who had exams on Friday and Monday, but we had a good time with them anyways playing cards. We taught them Egyptian Rat Screw (try explaining that name to an Italian) and kicked their butts twice. :] Then they taught us a game called Merde (which means shit in French) which was basically spoons but you slapped a pile of cards in the middle and yelled “Merde” instead of grabbing a spoon. One of the guys, Giuseppe, did some really awesome card tricks too. He was really good. We ended up running into them the next day and grabbed coffee with them. I got my first caffe (basically a shot of expresso) and our new friend Giovanni paid for it. Italians are so nice! That gave me a lot of energy but I had a KILLER headache later. Way worse than anything Rockstar ever did to me… although when I mentioned energy drinks to Giovanni, he immediately started to try to convince me to never touch them again because they’re unhealthy and coffee is more natural.
Getting coffee with them was definitely the highlight of Thursday though, because other than meeting people we had already talked to, we did not meet anyone who spoke English. We went up to at least eight different, semi-large groups of people and no one spoke a word. That was just a little uncanny, because no one has had any trouble finding English speakers before. It was really frustrating, so I’m glad we have the weekend to regroup before going back on campus. We’re trying to plan some fun things for the weekend to do with the Italians we met. Giovanni invited us to go biking around Rome with some sort of giant biking event called Critical Mass, but the weather isn’t the best right now and we’re not really sure what to do about getting bikes… but hopefully that will work out.
Friday we were supertourists and did the Coliseum and the Roman forum for a total of six hours. Yeah. It took us so long
because we made a photo shoot out of everything, so be on the look-out for pictures on facebook. Then at night we finished off the day of being the typical American tourists by going to Hard Rock Café. And oohhhh man, was it good to have American food again. Don’t get me wrong; Italian food is great. I know I might be going out on a limb here, but I don’t think you can get fresh mozzarella on your pizza at a take out place in America, and corn dogs in America aren’t made with freshly made cheese bread like I had for lunch today. But after a week of pizza and pasta and what really seems to be nothing but carbs and veggies and ham, having some real protein meat was incredible. I got ribs. They were wonderful. Also, Hard Rock has free refills, and that doesn’t happen here, even on water, so… score.To polish off the day, we went to Patos (a café/restaurant next to where we stay) to get on their wi-fi. The people who work there are starting to get to know us pretty well because we all go there en masse around 5 to get online to talk to people and such. We call them Patos parties (and usually yell "Patos Party!" while en route) and they’re always pretty interesting. They have the strangest mixes of music… I have heard classical, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Barbie Girl in one sitting, and they play a lot of Michael Jackson. And my roommate was trying to be friendly with one of the guys serving coffee, and accidentally got a phone number on a napkin. Anyways, unfortunately the wi-fi had already been turned off for the night, but we got introduced to two of the baristas (one of them was the napkin number guy). One of them tried to ask all three of us girls out at once for his friend, and then announced "But I'm gay!" Oh Italians... they're great, but I think we're going to need to bring more guys in with us before they get the wrong idea. haha!
Some things you could be praying for would be that we would be able to make plans this weekend with our Italian friends because we've been having some communication issues, and that if we do hang out with them we would be intentional in our conversations to bring up some of the spiritual things we have already talked about with them. You can also pray for continued unity within our team and a renewing weekend so that we'll be refreshed and ready to go when we're back on campus on Tuesday.
No comments:
Post a Comment