Exit, pursued by a bear

Dear Reader(s),

During the week, while I was working on my YAWT in piano uno, an Italian boy called Marco came up to me and asked if I was English ('damn' I thought 'I haven't perfected the Euro-chic look') and then asked if I would like to help out a friend of his whilst improving my Italian. He said that he had a friend called Ruggero who was looking for a tandem partner; for those of you that don't know, a tandem partner is a person who you meet up with regularly and half of the meetings are in your language, for the other person's benefit, and the other half are vice-versa. I took Ruggero's number and said of course.

This weekend was an interesting one, on Saturday (after a bit of YAWT, which is going really well) Christina and I went for a coffee catch-up with the only other English (well, Scottish) girl here in Modena, Kelly. However, I tried to kill two birds with one stone by inviting my new tandem partner along. This was a mistake. Ruggero insisted that we speak slowly and loudly so that he could be included, which of course meant that we could not catch up at all. In the end I spoke to Ruggero (slowly and loudly) while Kelly and Christina spoke quickly and quietly to each other. I started to feel like I was in a Monty Python or Father Ted scene when it turned out that Ruggero's English was appalling and, to top it all off, he only had one good ear. We made it through the coffee catch up and got back to the residenza in one piece, however I'm going to have to do at least one more tandem partner meeting before I go home, just to be polite.

Sunday was a much better day! After a lie-in and a lot of reading of 'How to Write Essays and Assignments' I went to the theatre with Christina. The worst seats in the house and a student discount got us some not-too-bad-seats-really for 12€ to see Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, but wait, it gets better, it was in ITALIAN! After 2 and a half hours our brains were somewhat hurting from the level of concentration we'd needed (a level most recently matched during 2nd year exams) and we were in desperate need of some Tetly. We cycled home through the fog (as per) and had a Tetly tea, a White Twix each and a chat. What a lovely Sunday! We feel enriched and cultural and clever.

A presto...