I met my friend Laura on the street two weeks after arriving in Modica. She’s working as an au pair for a lovely family, and was with the au pair mum and two children. I heard her English accent and we very excitedly exchanged numbers, and the mum invited me to a dinner at theirs later that week. Cue amazing Italian dinner, celebrating the father’s birthday, in a garden that overlooks the whole town. Turns out they like sailing. I’m actually quite scared of boats, even more sailing, and have never really felt it was the pastime for me. However, they were going on a sailing boat that weekend, would I like to come? Yes I would. Incidentally, I discovered that it was actually how I’d like to spend all of the Sundays for the rest of my life please, it was absolutely stunning.
I went into school, and of course the English mother tongue speaker is an exciting and useful novelty. Can I come look after someone’s two little girls sometime? Can I speak English to someone’s little boy? Can I give private lessons to someone’s 17-year-old son? Yes, I guess so. None of these have come to anything yet, but I think they will. Today was a new one - would I possibly run an English conversation class in the afternoons for the other teachers at the school? This seems a bit of a responsibility: I, as an untrained teacher, am proving my abilities to a roomful of my colleagues and employers. It’s fine though, I think it’ll be fun. I also got invited to have a pizza sometime with some of my older students. They’ve just come back from the trip of a lifetime in London, where they were specially selected to do a course, and they’re feeling very England-sick.
The terrible thing is that I’ve agreed to go to the gym with one of my fellow English teachers. I probably will follow it through if she mentions it again because you never know what turns out to be good, but... a gym. It doesn’t fill me with joy.
Yesterday I got a message from Laura, ‘I just got us invited to a wedding’. RIght, what? Her au-pair family runs a B&B and Laura had got chatting to a guest, who turns out was getting married the next day. Would she like to come? Oh wow, erm... well yes! She checked it was okay to bring a friend, and we were ready to go at 4.30pm today. Turns out that the groom didn’t seem to have communicated to anyone else that we were invited, and had already disappeared off to the church. After being stared at a bit (read: a lot) by the guests (and the bride), we ducked out in order to avoid further embarrassment. On a sidenote, this surely isn’t a promising sign of a communicative marriage. It was when we were standing in our nice dresses in the small streets of a small town in Southern Sicily, being gawked at by anyone who passed, that I realised it was a fairly bizarre situation. We both thought it was quite funny really, and went to get a consolatory gelato instead, where an old man (like 75 or so, no teeth) asked me for my number.
I walked Laura to her language school and ended up signing up and learning kitchen vocabulary, very handy. Met a really nice Polish girl and promised that we should go out for drinks sometime, maybe tomorrow.
Yesterday I went for a drink with that lovely school secretary I mentioned in a previous post. She enthusiastically chatted on about some day trips she can take me on, and I nodded along. She is sweet.
I know that not all of these things will come to anything, but it’s fun to open your mind to anything at all and just look for every opportunity you can find. Laura and I are trying to decide whether to go to tennis school or not... the adverts say they do a free trial.
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