Lent in Italy

In preparing for Lent, I've told you all about the carnevale celebrations that go on before Ash Wednesday. This Tuesday was "Fat Tuesday," "Mardi gras" or "Martedi grasso" in Italy. After dinner, the gang and I got ready for the costume party that Bar La Posta was hosting. I dressed up as a pirate, Shenell as Ke$ha, Alice as a wood nymph and Dezi as a magician. We realized that us girls could potentially have shown up as Captain Hook (me), Tiger Lily(Shenell) and Tinker Bell (Alice)!

It was a lot of fun. I'm always surprised by how amazing these Italian teens' English are and then I realize how much American pop culture(ex: music) is transfused here to begin with.. of course they know English better than I know Italian! I was happy to be able to dance to the songs I was familiar with back home, but it would have been nice to be more immersed with Italian music.

On Wednesday, we went to Orvieto for our weekly field trip (Heads up: next week is Rome, I'm excited!) and mainly focused on the Duomo di Orvieto. It has defintely been my favorite duomo so far (I've only really seen about three or four so I can't be absolute yet, but it sure does take the cake) perhaps because of it's aesthetic beauty or the fact that I really appreciated the historical value that the tour guide emphasized to us. I think about anything can be interesting if told correctly or if one focused on the things that would interest that audience most. Muara (the guide), was really great at doing so. I wish I could show you pictures of the interior, but we were not allowed to take any.

The newest chapel in the duomo was beautiful. Signorelli painted very frightening Last Judgement depictions that apparently inspired Michelangelo's Last judgement. Fun fact: Signorelli depicted his ex-girlfriend as a prostitute and also in hell strapped on a demon. FUN STUFF. So the moral is - don't upset an artist because his revenge is eternal!

I went to Ash Wednesday mass for the first time ever (I think I've gone once as a child, but I can't really recall that) and my first Italian mass. It was extremely cold because there was no central heating unit. It was hard to follow for obvious reasons (I can barely follow mass in Vietnamese let alone Italian which I don't know that well) but at the same time so similar to english/vietnamese mass that I could understand what was happening.

I decided to give up gossiping (which has shown to be very hard to define, but I know what I should say and what I shouldn't repeat, if that makes sense), talking negatively about others and kiwis (Dezi and I are always fighting for the kiwi during lunch and dinner, so I thought I would be a fun thing to give up so others could eat it).

Forward to Friday. I had woke up (late for class- whoops) to the idea that I could try and fast today instead of just giving up meat for the day. I don't plan for it to be a reoccurring thing, but it was just one of those "in-the-moment" decisions that I felt I was compelled to follow. I was surprised that I did not feel much hunger pains through out the day at all. God was very good to me. I got a lot of reading done that I have been avoiding (The Picture of Dorian Gray) and caught up on journaling. It got a lot more difficult after dinner but at midnight I treated myself to a Rocchio pizza at the pirate bar (4 cheese, sausage and other goodness) and some of Cece's delicious nutella pizza (WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT TO MAKE SUCH A CONCOCTION).



I will let you all know how Lent is going in these next several weeks.

Until next time!

 To change and to change for the better are two different things.

          - German proverb.