I Promise My English Self Is Not That Dumb

We have had some funny interactions with our host mom since we have been here. I absolutely love her! She is a cute 70-year-old lady who always says "ascolta" which means "listen" and then precedes to tell us a story. She checks up on us and does our laundry and cooks us wonderful Italian meals every night and tries to give us ten servings of each course. Honestly she reminds me a lot of my grandma Holdaway. Of course, that side of the family is Italian so maybe the loving force-feeding thing is in the blood. Well, I am not sure what her impression of me is so far based on a few instances....

Instance #1: The Laundry Mishap - On the first day we asked her where we could do our laundry and she came into our room and showed us where a laundry basket was to put our clothes in... well I thought she was then going to show us where the washer was so we could do our own laundry... wrong. We followed her into the kitchen and then she turned around and saw us behind her and was like what are you doing?! ... In Italian of course. Apparently she had said that she would do our laundry for us once we put it in the hamper... ya I didn't catch that. So we all started laughing and she was nice about it.

Instance #2: The Impossible Door - On the second day when we came home from our adventures in Siena we attempted to unlock the door. Italian doors are not the same as American doors, let's just say that. So we jiggled the key around for probably 5 minutes, determined to figure it out. Well, we didn't. So then we knocked for a while and nothing happened. Then all of a sudden Anna, our host mom, came to the window and poked her out, asking us what was wrong. She proceeded to attempt to instruct us on how to turn the key. She kept saying "in dietro" which I get mixed up with "destra." The first word means backwards and the second means to the right. So we kept turning the key to the right. Nah she meant to the left. Then Marcello our host dad was on the other side of the door trying to help us by turning some locks. There was a lot of noise and a lot of jumbling things around on both ends creating quite the scene. It took about 5 more minutes before we finally understood what they meant and got inside. They laughed for a good while about that one. Who needs TV when they have us?

These are only a few. I am sure there will be more entertaining interactions to come :)