Sconfinamento - Trespassing!

We were up early yet again this morning (whyyyy won't they let us sleep in even once?!) because one of the Umbra professors, Zach, took us on what he declares to be an internationally renowned walking tour of the "Nooks and Crannies" of Perugia. Zach is seriously awesome though... he was sitting across from me and Rachel at the faculty dinner so we learned his life story - he's from upstate New York, went to Kenyon College in Ohio (they have an amazing writing program!) and studied Italian at Middlebury and has been living in Italy for the past 12 years, working at the Umbra Institute for most of them. He teaches in the Food Studies Program - as he told us in class, he's not actually that interested in food, but in how food and the act of eating is the meeting point for fields like history, political science, and sociology. He's just really cool and so the tour was worth getting up early for. Plus, while we were waiting we got to see the Fiat 500 Club drive past... well, kind of. It's basically a parade of old men with classic Cinquecentos that they adorn with flags and drive by on Sunday mornings, except they were apparently lost so a few minutes in, just as they were passing us, someone told them they were going the wrong way and the poor old men just stopped there. Their 500s were still idling when we headed out on the tour :(

We saw all the sights and learned a lot about the history of Perugia, ie why there's no salt in the bread here (it's gross). and it ended with Zach taking us illegally onto private property and whispering a little about the history before telling us that while the tour was fun, class will be serious, and we have 50ish pages of reading to do by Wednesday. Yikes.

Before the tour, I went to 8:30am mass with Luciana. It was my first mass here, and it was an interesting experience. I was surprised by how few people were there - maybe 20, tops, and also the lack of... regal feeling? For instance, there was no procession of the priest, altar servers, cantor, etc., through the center aisle; the priest just kinda popped up from a door in the side and started the service. There was also no real uniformity as to when the congregation sat/stood/knelt, so I basically just did whatever Luciana did. I also paid close attention to the responses so that I'll be able to partake more in the mass in the upcoming weeks, as they're not a direct translation from what we say at church at home. One linguistic aspect I really liked though was the fact that God (il Signore) is addressed using the "tu" form; this is informal, as if to show that we have a personal rapport with God, that he is a close friend and someone we are on a tu-form-basis with. (It's kinda a big deal here to use the tu form with an "authority" figure / someone of high regard / someone older than you in general - you almost always use the "Lei" form which is formal, until they specifically tell you that you can use the tu form.) Language nerd moment :)


Day's Recap:
Hours spent walking: ~3
Pieces of cool information learned: 237+
Pages of homework done: 2
Pages of homework left to do: approximately 3294 :(
Flavors of gelato tasted: Biscotto (think cookie dough with pieces of cookie in it... SO good) and cioccolato bianco (white chocolate)


Datemi del tu,
Michelina

PS - Happy Father's Day, Daddy! Miss and love you - and ate a gelato for you! (that you technically paid for...hmm)