Typical is not so typical

I have officially been here for a week so I can tell you what a typical day has been like for me… …and all of the “typical” things that happen here that I have found to be different and interesting.

Typical Day

10 am – 11 am	Wake up Eat breakfast
11 am – 1 pm	Study Italian on Rosetta Stone
1 pm – 2 pm	Eat lunch/hang out with roommates (always pasta followed by coffee)
2 pm – 5 pm	Errands ·         Grocery store ·         Meet with team doctor ·         Check in to validate my Visa	Or…. Go on a walk/Explore Forli ·         Piazza Saffi (the main centro) ·         Parco Urbano Franco Agosto
5 pm – 8 pm	Practice
9 pm – 11 pm	Dinner/hang out with roommates
12 am – 2 am	Bed

I am a breakfast lover… specifically eating cereal or an omelet every morning. It is a little different here, but still equally enjoyable. Of course there is coffee involved, but they mix it in a small bowl with some milk in the morning. The milk is in a cardboard box the size of a small paperback book and they buy it in bulk. I still don’t know how the milk doesn’t go bad, but we have about 10 boxes of milk in the pantry, and once we open a box, it goes in the fridge to stay cold and fresh. For breakfast, we dip “biscuits” in the coffee/milk. The Italian name for it is “biscotti”, but it is not the long, chocolate covered kind of biscotti you are thinking of that they sell at Starbucks or other coffee shops. They are kind of like Nilla wafers, but they also have chocolate ones. I basically feel like I am eating cookies for breakfast… probably not the healthiest but it’s more of a small snack because we eat lunch a few hours after.

After breakfast, a lot of the girls are doing homework or studying, so I study as well… my Italian! Rosetta Stone for Italian has 5 different discs. I have the first 2. This week, I finally finished the first disc! The topics covered in this first disc are:

• Language Basics
• Greetings and Introductions
• Work and School
• Shopping

The second disc includes:

• Travel
• Past and Future
• Friends and Social Life
• Dining and Vacation

I really think that Rosetta has helped me a lot because once I learn new vocabulary, I am able to notice the girls using some of those words in conversation.  I have also installed the Google Translate app which has been useful.

Like I mentioned before, lunch is always pasta. But it is always different noodles with different sauces. Right now I still love it… but I have only been here for a week. We’ll see how I feel about it as I continue eating it throughout the summer.

The time between lunch and practice is usually taken up by some sort of errand. I went to the grocery store (or the “supermercado”) for the first time this week. This actually looked like a typical grocery store I am used to (other than everything being in Italian) which doesn’t really matter because you can figure out what the food is by seeing what the food looks like, not reading the labels. However I did get confused when the label for the pineapples was “ananas” and the bananas were nearby labeled “bananas”. I learned that pineapple in Italian is banana without the b. Other than that, we bought all of the food we needed for about a week for 6 people and only spent €30. Split among 6 people is only €5 which is only about $7.

Within the next few weeks, everyone on the team has to meet with the team doctor and get checked out to make sure we are healthy. Miri and I had our appointments at the same time so we went together…but Miri’s English is the weakest out of all of my roommates. This isn’t really that big of a deal except when the doctor was trying to put little tester stickers on my chest, arms, and legs to check my heart rate, Miri was trying to translate and tell me that I can leave all of my clothes on… but she ended up saying to take all of my clothes off. Luckily the doctor stopped me before I did anything too embarrassing.

Parco Urbano Franco Agosto

On days that I didn’t have any appointments or errands to run, I have tried to go walk around and enjoy the weather and explore. I have Google Maps on my phone so I haven’t gotten lost yet! This week I walked about 30 minutes to the biggest park in Forli called Parco Urbano Franco Agosto. It is 26 acres and has many paths for walking, running, or biking. There are parks for children, soccer, volleyball, and basketball courts. There are many trees, flowers, ponds, and the Montone River and lots of open area and benches to relax.

Some days for practice we just hit indoors with the cages. But we have been practicing outside most days recently and will continue to do that since it has been warmer. When we hit, we get a lot of reps and not much break time which is good because we are never bored or standing around not doing anything. We also work on bunting a lot more than I ever have before. We do different types of strength/conditioning every day, but yesterday at practice we did agilities with cones and ladders… nothing different than I am used to. What is new for me though is being a catcher on defense and having to communicate in a different language to my team. Calling counts and outs isn’t too hard because they use the words "ball", "strike", and "out". And I know how to say the numbers 1, 2, and 3. But when we were doing different defensive situations with a runner on 2^nd and the outfielders were throwing home, I had to communicate with the 1^st or 3^rd baseman so they would line up for the cut.

Important vocabulary I learned:

Sinistra=left

Destra=right

Taglio=cut

At this same practice, we were working on getting the lead runner. There was a runner on 1^st and the batter bunted it right in front of the plate. So I picked it up quickly and easily got the lead out at 2^nd. The coach (who speaks Spanish and Italian and very little English) got so excited that he said “Good Job!” in all 3 languages!

Some of the girls were telling me about rules during the game that are a little different than softball in America. Two rules stuck out to me most.

1. You can’t have any jewelry on when you play—no necklaces, earrings, or anything. It is going to feel like I am back in travel ball or high school again with the umpires being strict about this because in college we could wear whatever we wanted.
2. When you are at bat and you are getting signs from the coach in between pitches, you have to keep one foot in the box or a strike gets called on you.

Overall, practices have gone pretty well, and other than everything being in a language I don’t understand, softball is softball.

At the field they have a mini locker room area where people keep their bags. There is a fridge with waters and some snacks. But because it is Europe… the fridge is also filled with beers. After practice a lot of us will hang out there for a little, and not many, but a couple girls will drink a beer and smoke a cigarette. Two of the girls actually got in a little argument yesterday after practice over the last beer in the fridge. But today it was stocked up again so no fights broke out. Don’t worry…  in the locker room there is also a box filled with little cubes of delicious chocolate which I choose over beer and cigarettes any day!

Like I said in my previous blog… dinner is LATE here! We eat dinner at 8:30 pm at the earliest! I am always trying new foods. The girls explained to me that they eat everything here. So far I have eaten chicken, pork, veal, and rabbit. And I think I heard something about eating a horse sometime in the future…

Dinner is the most difficult time for me to understand what is going on because there are several conversations going on at once and it sounds like everybody is talking a mile a minute. But on Monday at dinner I felt like I was able to understand so much more. But that was probably because Andrea, the girl who talks the most and the fastest, was translating everything in English for me…

As most of you reading this already know… I am usually in bed at 9 pm. I get tired early and I love to get my sleep. I don’t know if it’s the eating dinner so late, the whole drink-coffee-after-dinner thing, the time change I haven’t fully adapted to, or a combination of those, but I go to sleep so late here! But it’s been working out well for me because I’ve been able to sleep in and feel rested!

Now that I have explained my typical day and all the not so typical things that go on, I am going to share a few quick random things I have learned that I found interesting.

• Cali, the coach, asked me if my name Lauren was short for “Laurina” which apparently is the Italian version of my name.
• When answering the phone, they say “pronto” which translates to “ready”.
• Their clocks in the car and on their phones are on 24 hour mode. So it will say 20:30, but if you ask what time it is, they will say it is 8:30.
• Their laptops look the same as ours, except there are extra buttons on the side to include all the letters with accent marks they use when writing in Italian.
• For a snack, they cut up a banana into little slices, squeezed lemon juice on top, and sprinkled some sugar over it.
• No, they didn’t celebrate St. Patrick’s Day here on Monday.
• One of the girls is reading The Last Song, by Nicholas Sparks (in Italian). They asked if I had seen the movie and we bonded over how hot Channing Tatum is. Yes, Channing Tatum is loved all over the world… for a good reason.
• They watch American movies that are voiced over in Italian. The girls who understand English prefer to watch these movies in English because then you get the actual actors’ voices and their lips match up with what they are saying.
• When eating lunch/dinner (at home or out at a restaurant), we get a bottle of water for the table, and pour the water into our own individual cups. 

I have a favorite Italian song! It is called Dimmi Che Non Passa by Violetta Zironi. It has a catchy tune and there are some words in English.

I am starting a Gelato Tracker that I will update each blog to keep track of how many gelatos I consume during my time here.

GELATO TRACKER

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