Mistakes... We've Made a Few

Before we left, one of my uncles, with his usual cynicism, noted that this could be a great adventure or a great flop. So far, we've been lucky that this has been a great adventure. We haven't had any major catastrophes (knock on wood). Though we have made a few mistakes...

Language
My mistakes with language have been the smallest and the simplest- but still embarrassing to me. In Piemonte, I confidently ordered lunch for the waitress' wife. Just last week I realized that I've been using the plural form of 'week' incorrectly on a daily basis.
The best was a few weeks ago when Dave and I were at an appointment. A receptionist was explaining that after our appointment, we could return the next day to follow up. We thought she was saying that we missed our appointment and left the building... She kindly came running out to the parking lot to retrieve us.

School
We got a list of school supplies that the boys would need, and had two days to find them. We went to the large supermarket (similar to a Meijer), and found everything but the notebooks. Despite an aisle of them, they didn't have the type needed for primary school. We searched three stores in centro, near the University, to no avail. We sent the boys to school with the incorrect type for a few days before finding an awesome stationery store later that week. Four weeks later, we discovered that the store across the street from the school has all of the needed notebooks and supplies... just like the teacher tried to tell Dave on the first day.
In that same school supply email, it noted that we needed to 'comprare un diario' for Ben. We totally skipped that line. It turns out that a diario is a planner, and we needed to buy one because the students use it every day to write down their homework. I was so confused about all of the homework that the other mothers were talking about- how did they know what the homework was? What were these pictures of assignments that they were sharing on the classroom group text messages?- until one of Ben's friends came over and I saw his diario. Oops. He's started keeping track of homework, and actually completing some of it.

Navigation
We had a normal learning curve for getting around the city. There have only been a couple of days that I have been really frustrated by using public transportation.
Getting to IKEA was one of those. I took a 2.5 hour 'giro' of the area around IKEA (that included four miles of walking) because I didn't hail the bus correctly and couldn't cross the divided highway on foot. Eventually I just went home and tried again the next day.


The Bigger Mistakes...


The Questura

Our faces, though.

Dave knew that we had 10 days after entering Italy to get some of our 'documenti' (visa paperwork) started. Because we arrived over the holidays, once we hit January we felt some urgency. We spent a good portion of two mornings waiting in the atrium of the Questura (immigration office), with very little personal space. Finally we were called to see the officer/agent, who didn't know what to do with us, because we didn't actually have to be there in the first place.
While this could be a much longer blog post by itself, neither you nor I need to spend more of our time on the Questura.

Committing to a Job
The first day we dropped the kids off at school, the English teacher stopped me in the hallway to explain that they had a job opening for an English teacher. She started telling me this in Italian, so I was nodding and smiling, all the while worried about seeing my kids off and wondering what she was talking about. Eventually she reverted to English, and told me to check the website to get the details of the job opening.
Apparently my smiling and nodding led her to believe that I was very interested and going to apply for the job. The next week she asked Dave to make sure that I looked at the materials online, and again talked to me in the hallway, showing me the website where the posting was. The job itself is a great opportunity- 40 hours of serving as a co-teacher during the students' English class, giving them experience working with a native English speaker. Unfortunately, I have neither the visa nor the 'codice fiscale' necessary to apply for the job. I sent her a very apologetic email for the misunderstanding... and have heard nothing back.

Sheep #2 got left in Venice 😢
(Ben has slept with two sheep
since he was a baby)