First Week: Full Faculty Meetings

At 9am I am running down Via Cavour, late for the first all faculty and staff meeting (12 people).  I'm thinking, I can't be late for the first meeting!  (Back in August 2002, I went from 93 South to 93 North en route to Braintree and arrived to my first faculty meetings at Thayer at least twenty minutes late.  The chairs in the library were arranged facing the door, so there I was, walking in facing my 60 new colleagues, late on my first day.  Yesterday I thought, I really cannot do that again.)  A woman walking along hollers, "Don't rush.  You're in Italy!"  Over my shoulder I yell, "But I'm late!"  I realize in that moment that that woman spoke perfect American English, that I know her voice, that she is one of my colleagues.

After two hours it's break time: espresso, cappuccino, caffe at the bar on the corner.  Then back to work.  At 1pm it's time for pizza from Taverna Etrusca with colleagues, spouses, families.  Two hours later, the official work day is done.

Today is a similar feel though I didn't run down Via Cavour first.  At 10:30 the director calls for a break, and someone brings in champagne and pastries to toast the recent wedding of a teacher.  In tandem, someone takes down coffee orders.  We work until 1:15 and then leave for the day.

It is not that there is not work to do.  People are revising courses; creating experiential learning plans with activities in the city to make learning hands-on (per a directive this summer); working out daily schedules on huge pieces of paper in the middle of the table; prepping for the two week orientation, for the retreat to Terracina, and for classes.  Each day folks arrive with new lessons prepared to review and run by the group, new ideas, new questions.  The director flies back to the states tomorrow to accompany the students on their flight to Rome.

But the breaks, the coffee, the food: these they work in as natural and necessary.  (When it was new faculty meetings last week, run by the director for the math teacher, and me -- all Americans -- we did not do the coffee break...hmmmm....)

What I learned in the margins of faculty meetings this week:

• Italians drink their espresso/cappuccino/caffe quickly.  They just down it.  They may linger for hours over lunch and dinner, but the morning coffee break is efficient.  This baffles me.  A tea drinker at home, I've been enjoying cappuccino here, the last one with cup in hand and sipping sipping.  I have to work on gulping it down Italian-style.
• Arrivederci is a formal goodbye.  You don't use it with friends or colleagues or people who know your name.  With them, you use Ciao.  But with store owners, strangers, etc., you use buongiorno and arrivederci.  The director yesterday told the bar owner my name.  Her name is Nadia.  From now on, he tells me, I use Ciao with her and she will do the same with me.
• The director has informed students that they are not to expect answers by email after 5pm.  I am wonderfully surprised by this, and I think that I might have sanity this year, a life.  But then, I may also have to discipline myself not to do work after a certain hour.  Some habits are hard to break. 
• You say congratulazione for a wedding and auguri for a birthday.  (Congratulazione to recently married colleague today and auguri to Hannah later in week.)