At the end of week 4 I can truly feel the change in my language conversational skills. When I attempted to watch Italian shows before I had a really hard time understanding and following the conversation but last night I was watching a newscast about the World Cup and I understood the entire conversation COMPLETELY! It was so great.
I feel really comfortable speaking in Italian now and it almost feels like second nature. Speaking English is almost challenging because my brain is so accustomed to rephrasing and translating my thoughts. It’s such a beautiful experience to be able to speak another language!
I went out to lunch this week in a pretty touristy part of town and the waiter proceeded to speak to us in English because he assumed I was a tourist and I responded “Ma che dici? Non parlo l’inglese io sono Italiana!”
This weekend I went to Firenze again but this time during the day and it was beautiful in such a different way! The city was large but it was fairly easy to walk almost all of it on foot. It was beautiful, I think Firenze is my favorite city I have seen thus far. I would like to come back to Italy and experience a few weeks in Firenze. After that I came back to Siena for a long/fun night of exploration. Because of Il Palio starting in a week there are many pre-Palio fesitivies, including contrada parties. I was able to meet a few native Italians and spoke to them on a casual level which was both fun and educational.
This week I also tried a traditional plate of Siena: Panzanella. This plate is a salad normally served with tomatoes, cucumber, onions, pepper, and topped panzanella, which is a soft seasoned bread. The salad was both delicious and filling thanks to the large quantities of bread. Siena, and the Tuscan region, are known for plates in which bread is a large part of the meal’s composition. This is due to the fact that Tuscany was a poverty stricken region soon after World War 2 and bread being somewhat cheap, it became a staple item in the Tuscan diet, along with hunting meats, such as wild boar.
