Aloooora

1. Introduction
2. The night of terror
3. calcetto/ big family dinner

So yesterday was a little bit absurd. The night before, Giovanna had made us amazing couscous with carrots, potatoes and fish. We also ate tomatoes with fresh mozzarella and olive oil. I’m not sure exactly what triggered the next series of events, but I was faced with the arduous task of trying not to bleed all over the white carpet (seriously, who puts a white carpet in a bathroom?) as well as trying to keep my vomit in the toilet. You see, I had skinned my knee pretty badly playing soccer earlier that day and I was going to clean it in the shower that night, but before I could, a wave of nausea hit me and I tried to go to sleep before I could vomit. That’s the “go-to” move in college. It turns out that when unrelated to drinking, that tactic doesn’t work. The last time I vomited, George Bush senior was the president, the Soviet Union was still together and the Trail blazers were vying for basketball championships. It was odd to experience that whole thing again. Not at all very fun. I would really have rather not partaken. When I was finished, I crawled into bed and decided to leave the damage report for the morning.
When I woke up, I had three hours until class, which left plenty of time to study for the quiz that I was unable to prepare for the night before. I cleaned the blood off the previously white carpet and discovered that the toilet was fine. I breakfasted, packed my bag, was headed out the door when I realized I didn’t have my keys. I went back to my room, and found nothing. I searched and searched and when I was fairly sure they weren’t in my room, I told Giovanna and she thought that maybe I had left them in the door. Since they weren’t still in the door, that could mean someone had taken them and now had the key to our apartment. If this were the case, we would need to have the apartment re-keyed as soon as possible. The keys to the doors in Florence look like the keys to medieval dungeons (Fiorentines don’t mess around with security). The long and the short of it is that I reaaally didn’t want to have to pay to have the apartment re-keyed. So after about 95 minutes of searching, I had about 30 minutes until class time and I decided to go. I grabbed my bag to check it one more time, and of course found the keys in a pouch of the bag that I didn’t know existed until this morning. I am a big genius. I was relieved and booked it to the bus to head to class. I showed up to Italian class about 10 minutes late, shared with the class that I vomited (ho vomitato ieri sera) and promptly bombed the quiz that between the vomiting, bleeding and loss of keys, I astonishingly didn’t have time to study for. I’m so upset with life at this point, that when I get to my next class where we had about 80 pages of reading that I didn’t do, I sort of shut down.
After all of that, we had our final soccer game, where I head-butted a guy going for the ball in a heart-breaking 3-4 loss. I then booked it home to try to be presentable for a dinner both of Giovanna’s sons and her oldest son’s wife and two children. They all spoke Italian and had a great time while my roommate and I sat there grinning stupidly and trying to eat whatever was put in front of us. Among the most exciting things were Chicken liver pate, fish-butter (that’s as good as it sounds), squid tentacles, spinach salad with raw fish and prosciuto on bread. I didn’t eat most of it because it wasn’t kosher, but also because my stomach was still a little upset with me from the night before and the frantic key search and the head-butting. Desert was an amazing flan served with fresh kiwi, pear, grapes, apples and tangerines. I had two servings of that and went and split a bottle of wine with a bunch of friends in front of Palazzo Pitti. It was a nice end to one of the worst days of my life!