Daily Updates
Week Four: Oct. 12
12 October. Matt reporting: I’ve noticed of late that our small isolated group is much like an easily mutated social structure. Example: when I asked Maya, a Californian girl, what she did Sunday morning for our off day, she told me she went to Saint Peter’s for mayass. Yes, that’s “mass” with the charming drawl of a midwesterner. Perhaps it’s inevitable that the Ohio accent has branched out in a group that includes four buckeyes, but what is thrilling (especially for a small town Ohian like myself) is that what we could be witnessing is the advent of a new “hip” vernacular, to soon rival those of the Bronx, London, or Boston. Will high school girls one day day dream about meeting a dashing guy with a Toledo accent? Will pretentious people affect elongated A’s and casually claim they were educated in Akron? Would you really be surprised to know that the choir performing at St. Peter’s on Sunday was from Joanna’s hometown of Port Clinton, Ohio? Before I overdo it…things we did on our off day: an impromtu tour of the Napoleon museum, laundry by hand and at the laundromat (where a young Italian man is always ready with a song or a poem), pizza, the internet café, reading while drinking good gin and bad soda out of plastic cups on a plastic table in the courtyard, haggling and leather jacket buying at the open air market, a Sri Lankan (ie Ceylonian) restaurant, the search for universal good and evil, and packing for our upcoming roadtrip. Finally, although nobody told me this expressly, everyone was probably praying that the Browns would win.
12 October. Cordelia, Karen, Adam, Tori, and Myung-Hee in the Villa Borghese gardens
12 October. Karen, Myung-Hee and Cordelia in the Villa Borghese gardens