Day 15

Today was a Tuesday, aka a no-class day. However, three hours of community service at a specific soup kitchen are required for my theology class, so we decided to do that today.

I had a quick breakfast of pineapple juice and a yummy donut, and then the six of us volunteering met up to head to Mensa Caritas soup kitchen. The group was me, Katie, Sam, La Shay, Eva, and Ceci, all of whom are people in my program that I get along really well with.

It was a brief, easy metro ride and a short walk to the kitchen (metro tickets were actually provided by St. John's. Very nice!) We arrived only to find out that they were apparently banking on one of us knowing Italian, which just foreshadowed all the language barriers we'd be hitting while at the site. Luckily, one of the guys in charge knew enough English to somewhat communicate with us. After letting us put our bags away and use the restroom, he asked for two of us to volunteer in the front taking signatures and handing out tickets, and Katie and I agreed to do this.

Even more luckily, the woman who taught us how to perform this job spoke excellent English. It was also not a super difficult task: a person would hand us their ID card, we would read their ID number and look it up in one of our binders, have them sign on today's date, and then give them a ticket to get food. I found this task to be quite doable, and not in the least boring, but I regretted that I could barely verbally communicate with the people. Honestly, though, many of them probably barely spoke Italian as it was. Their pages in the binders listed their name and nationality (among other details), and I took note of everyone's nationalities. I encountered people from Italy, Mali, Afghanistan, Romania, Eritrea, Egypt, Iran, and even Peru. Almost all were male, and almost all were very polite. Some were pretty impatient, but I certainly couldn't blame them.

Working alongside us was an Italian woman, who seemed to really love me (probably because I covered for her during her smoke breaks) and a Portuguese woman who could speak English. She was a little deceiving, because she spoke English well with virtually no accent, but seemed to struggle quite a bit with understanding our responses to her. I would imagine that's kind of what I was like back in the peak of my Spanish knowledge (had I ever tried to speak for real with native speakers). She was really nice, though, and did really help out as a translator for us several times.

Our part ended a little while before the kitchen closed, so I also did some dish drying before we all left. An Italian girl, probably about my age, was doing the washing, and kept trying to tell me where to put everything, but I had zero clue what she was saying. I just kept drying and let her correct my mistakes.

After all was said and done and all the lunches had been served at the soup kitchen, our group headed back to campus. Katie, La Shay, and I ended up going to Fonzie's for lunch (the burger place) which was much, much needed. We had a quiet afternoon of doing homework and just relaxing, and then had dinner with Gina later at one of the little places across the street.

Tonight was also the first of our now official "Tame Turn Up Tuesdays," in which Katie, Gina, and I bought a bottle of strawberry prosecco and some little cookies, took it to the Palazzo di Giustizia (big, beautiful supreme court building not ten minutes from campus), and just drank it and people/dog watched. Yes, we are going to do that every Tuesday, and will modify it when we go to Seville and, later, Paris. It was amazing.

We're trying to call it an early night, as tomorrow will be a very, very early morning. BUT WE'RE GOING TO SEE POPE FRANCIS!!! I really can't wait for that, and I really can't wait to write all about it on this blog.