germany, for mimi

is 8am and i have already been awake for an hour and 20 minutes, as i was invited to come along with marion to her work today for the christmas party that she has with her students. apparently we are going to sing songs and eat alot of food and have a secret santa. marion, as i wrote last time, is constantly concerned with my "being bored", and has made a huge effort to entertain me these past several days. she and kalla and annika have done a great job. aside from the time i spend sleeping (not too much, but im on a v. different schedule than them i.e. late nights late mornings vs semi-late nights absurdly early, productive mornings), studying italian via work books and movies in italian (the royal tenenbaums and breakfast at tiffays!), and cooking (yea!), i am pretty much always engaged in some activity or another. last night, for example, i accompanied annika to kickboxing class. was really fun, actually, though my knuckles are raw from punching (annika?). and yesterday during the day, i spent many an hour with karl heinz and his school class on a trip into Essen. we went bowling, which i am awful at, and then kalla took me to the essen christmas market, which was beautiful and i ate way too much good stuff. the night before marion and i went to a play, "same time next year". it was performed at a small theatre in duisburg, and was all in german. i enjoyed it, the acting was good, and every now and then i could pick out little words and phrases that i remembered from my years of german.
i can honestly say that i am totally, completely 100% happy and comfortable here. their house is an oasis if ever there was one for a ragged, war-torn italian refugee. i can study in peace, i can wash my clothes, i can talk to marion into the wee hours of the morning about all variety of things, i can take walks and baths and watch movies and listen to christmas music and cook and eat (i am getting rather plump, actually...). everything is wonderful. they are the kindest, most generous, loving people and i am honored to call them family. their house is decorated like a little christmas shop, trinkets and santa clauses and lights. the christmas tree is in the backyard, as they dont bring it in and decorate it until the night before christmas (our christmas or theirs, actually? i.e. the 24th or the 23rd...ill ask). the backyard is scattered in cute lighted bushes and the floors are heated so you dont get cold walking on the marble. i think this evening im going to take an orange and stick some cloves in it and bring it to a nice 64 second boil (they have one of those wild stoves that uses magnets to boil water really fast. i love it).
i suggested to marion that we make mimis eggnog, and marion ran with the idea and decided that we should have an eggnog party right around christmas and have the neighbors over. so we are going to make eggnog and aunt sallys cheese straws (please send recipes) and i might make some little quiches or something and we´ll have a little party and i cant imagine anything nicer.
ugh, god, i am getting so fat. cant move really.
so i found out that my next internship, in ROMA, doesnt begin until january 12th, as the italians are even lazier then the americans and have a major, massive christmas vacation (like a month! totally my kind of place). so i will be with marion until the 29th or 30th, and then i will go to Berlin to crash with costa or billy in that wonderful city until it is time to make my way back to italia. a nice interlude, and i hope to come back to italy with a new lease on the whole ordeal. id like to think ive learned some lessons and gotten acquainted and i can go back composed and ready for farm life.
i´ll blog all about this fun day at school with marion later, as i am in the middle of it right now. germany is awesome.
the way i think i will recap cormons is to put a little tid bit story at the end of each blog from now on...so lets see...

...did i tell you about that coffee shop in downtown cormons? i would walk down there from my dorm, down these little rambling roads, large stone walls or little houses on one side, grape vines for miles on the other. the town would loom up and i would follow the curving cobblestone into the square. it was what you would imagine. tall, flat building fronts with rectangular windows a shutters, frescos or molding near the red shingled roofs. the town is small, and pretty much always empty, except for a few older men or women loitering in front of the wine bars and cafes. the town is dead silent. there are cats walking around, but they wont ever let me pet them. some of the windows are so old that the glass has began to run, making the windows look wavy and like water, thicker on the bottom which eats the light and makes shimmering reflections onto the walls across the street. the stores sell fresh baked bread, sweaters and shoes, meats and cheeses, toys. i have been told that the population of cormons is 7,000, but there is no way this is true. it seems to be just me sometimes. the coffee shop is refreshingly tacky, a weird combination of modern, polite, british formality, small town ice cream parlor, and they advertise flavored syrups to add to your coffee, with a sign that reads, "make your morning to a flavor". makes no sense. i love this sign. they have the tv on silent, game shows, and the top 40 radio station on. i always take the table in the back corner, because there is a small tank that holds two little turtles (tartaruge!). the turtles are nicer then the cats, and i can hold them and talk to them and they climb on my hands. the best part is that when little kids come in for ice cream, they always come to the tank and i get to talk to them in my simple italian. the man who works there is my friend. we dont have anything to say to each other, really. he speaks no english and i am always there studying my italian, and hell ask me how its going and ill tell him its going well. we smile alot and he brings me cappuccinos and glasses of wine, and the best part is that when i order a glass of wine i get snacks as well, finger sandwiches or cookies. when i walk by the shop on my way home from somewhere else, i look in and we wave to each other. im a regular.
the train station in cormons is another place that i frequent, though not necessarily willingly. since i have to take the train to and from school everyday, im there quite alot. there is that sweet old man working there, the one i mentioned in an earlier blog. but there is also a beautiful woman, in her late 20s i would imagine, brunette and sweet looking, like aunt keli, slim and green eyed. we always see each other around town, and when we do she exclaims (and i mean seriously, exclaims, not just says) "ciao!" and waves and smiles brightly. i see her at the coffee shop, at a restaurant, in the supermarket, on the street. we are friends. the other day i was at the counter, buying an espresso and a ticket to gorizia, and she was making this fantastic looking drink for an old man (the best part about the train station, by the way, is the bar. old men pack into the little bar there from morning till night, and they drink wine and eat ham and play cards and talk, all day long). so shes making this drink that is like this: she pours red wine out of an unmarked wine bottle into a metal canister, one of those used for steaming the milk for cappuccinos and lattes. she then adds a cinnamon stick, fresh grated nutmeg, a few herbs which i didnt get a good look at, and a couple slices of apple. then she steams this up using the espresso machine, and the smell of christmas fills the air. i watched her make this, and asked, "cos´e´?" ("what is it?"). she explained and asked, "tu vuoi?" ("you want some?). i grinned and nodded of course. she poured me a little espresso cup full of the steaming wine, and then poured the rest into the tall glass for the old man. he watched her do it, and noticed, of course, that she had given me a good 1\4 of the wine, and he snickered and raised his glass in a toast. i thanked him very much for his generosity and tried the wine, which was just what the doctor ordered on a freezing cold italian day when one has hours and hours of beuracracy and train travel to look forward to. i just thought it was so wonderfully italian, her just giving me some of the wine, because we all knew he wouldnt mind. thats the spirit of these people; generosity, community, family, wine for all, toasts and salutations at any hour of the day (was 10am).

ok, more later, time for christmas caroling with marions class!