The Weekend

The next morning Danielle and I woke up, showered, and met Paola to sign my lease. After signing all the dotted lines and handing over a copy of my passport, I was official. I legitimately live in Teramo, Italy. Paola then drove us to a little building on the other side of town. I was introduced to Francesca, the local Italian teacher. I would take lessons with her to learn Italian. Bene (good).

I would start Tuesday.

Danielle and I then left Paola to enjoy the rest of her weekends sans Americans and walked the streets. Saturday mornings, the streets shut down for the market. You could find some AWESOME Christmas gifts at these things. I think I’ll be spending quite a few Saturday mornings out on the streets of Teramo. After perusing the streets and finding a new shirt, we searched for somewhere to eat. Danielle wanted pizza, so we dropped by a pizzeria next to my apartment. Except that they weren’t serving pizza in the middle of the afternoon. Wonderful. We had shrimp and pasta, which was about as good as pizza would have tasted. There was a cute cook who came out to take our order, and asked if the bread was good. We told him it was buono (delicious), and he beamed, saying that he baked it himself. I love Italians. We thanked the staff for the meal, as we were the only 2 people in the restaurant. Must have been that middle-of-the-day naptime for the rest of the Italians. As we left the restaurant, the owner came running out with 2 cookies for us, free of charge. How sweet. :)

That night, on Danielle’s request, we had pizza. Italian pizza is not like American pizza, and from reading a nifty little travel book, I knew not to order “pepperoni” unless you wanted green and red peppers on your pizza. Danielle did not know this. I laughed when she looked at the pepperoni pizza, so unlike the pepperoni in America. Maybe I should have said something, but I didn’t realize what she had ordered until it was too late. I watched the pizza man cut the pizza with scissors (yes, SCISSORS) and sat down with Danielle to enjoy my first piece of Italian pizza. Buono.

We were told that the city shuts down on Sundays. They weren’t kidding. Danielle and I slept until noon, then decided to roam the city around 3:00. It was like a ghost town. We were starving, but none of the restaurants were open. Luckily the bars (sandwich shops in Italy, not like bars in America) were still open, so I grabbed a prosciutto panino (ham sandwich) and Danielle a pizza and insalata con tuna (tuna salad). Then we walked the town, taking pictures like the tourists we were. If it’s not enough that I am blonde and have a bright red coat (I had noticed that most people wore black and brown coats around Teramo), the fact that I am taking pictures of every little thing labels me: foreigner.

Sunday night one of Paola’s friends that we had dinner with, Stefania, took us to visit her sister and niece, who spoke English. That’s when I met Anna Giulia, and knew that I had found one of my new Italian best friends. She spoke very good English, and our personalities seemed to click right away. We talked a little with Anna Giulia and her mother, then Stefania drove us to the Gran Sasso shopping mall. Yes!

We shopped that evening, and I found charcoal gray dress pants for 5 Euros at H&M. Pretty much a steal. We went to Burger King that night, and I thought, “Okay, if I ever need America, at least I can come to Burger King.” And after a long night, we headed back into town. We had a lot of formal paperwork to fill out on Monday.

I had NO idea how stressful it was going to be.