The Family-
There are four: the mother Caterina, the father Alessandro, the children Virgina and Leone. I haven't met Leone yet because he has been at first-week-of-school camp. He comes back this evening and I will finally get to meet him. Virginia stays mostly to herself, takes the bus to school and back, and is what I would describe as a typical teenage girl. She is often on the phone, the computer, watching TV or studying. She seems nice but highly irritable. Sometimes I hear her screaming in italian at either her parents or someone on the phone. Alessandro is my favorite. He is funny, interesting to talk to and I feel at ease around him. He has silvery white hair and a beard. Today he let me drive his Audi into town so that Virginia (who went with me) could pick up something from the tailor's. He is very approachable and seems to enjoy answering my questions about his work and his family. There is a hand-drawn family tree in my room that shows the family's beginnings from the 1200's to the 1800's. Caterina is nice, but very intimidating and critical. Alessandro told me she is crazy and I believe it. I have spent the most time with Caterina but I feel like I know her the least. She is constantly in a bad mood, it seems. She also seems stressed out from all the work she does, and is always on her phone. She often makes comments to me that seem offhandedly critical. An example: She says to me that we are driving into Florence because she has errands to do and she wants to see how well I drive. So we leave, and constantly she is saying that I am too close to the car in front of me even though it's at least 15 car lengths in front of me and I'm only going 90 km/h! Not to mention the fact that every other person on the road is zooming in and out of traffic at breakneck speeds, passing in the center “lane” (the term lane here is used loosely, what I really mean is not a lane at all, but simply the area exactly the width of a car in the center of the road that can temporarily turn a two-lane road into a three-way road) while oncoming traffic is plentiful! Then she SCREAMS at me when I take the exit off the freeway because it was “not smooth enough.” I have been taking exits off of freeways for 7 years and I think I have it down by now! But all I can do is apologize and try to be smoother next time. Anyway, I have gotten off track. The inital example of Caterina's stabbing critiques is when we're in Florence. First, though, a distinction to be made: In Italy, a SIM card for your phone is a disposable piece of plastic that means virtually nothing. You can walk into almost any tobacco shop and buy one with a phone number attached to it or you can recharge the one you have. In America, SIM cards are an important piece of plastic with phone numbers and information on it, and it is sent to you by the phone company. I did not know this distinction! So Caterina had mentioned that I need to get a SIM card, I assumed calling the phone company and having one sent to me. When we got to Florence she asked me if I had brought my cell phone and when I said no, she says “Jimmy, you must get organized!” I was shocked and a little hurt. I ended up buying a cell phone since I figured (correctly) that European SIM cards wouldn't work in my American phone and it was very cheap, only about 40 dollars. Also it was a quick remedy to my supposed lack of organization. Anyway, I am beginning to think that possibly that is typical behavior for Caterina because on more than one occasion she has stormed angrily out of the room after an especially aggressive yelling competition with Virginia or Alessandro. Once, after storming out and leaving Alessandro and me alone, I asked “Did you say something wrong?” and he replied “I always say something wrong.”