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| Anziano Waddell and the Whitings |
Only one GANS showed up for a bit, since there were no activities going on for them. In the evening, the missionaries taught their English classes, and Brother/Sister Hall held their second Book of Mormon Institute class in English, with a few more students online than last time (no one in person). I was IT support for Zoom again, but next week the Halls will teach from home using their own laptop, which will be much easier for them and their two small children, not to mention not having to park downtown.
We also had a nice chat in English with one of the non-member students in the advanced English class, MarcusD, who came a bit early. He's a very interesting young guy, of Albanian descent but living in Italy since he was a kid. He is an artist, who does amazing street painting as well as tattoos, and he also referees rugby matches throughout Italy on the weekend. His English is quite good, without many of the pronunciation challenges most Italians face, thanks to his Albanian which seems to have more of our sounds. He also likes to sing and has joined us before for the Tuesday choir class; I gave him the music for "What Child Is This" in Italian that we are learning, asking him to double the bass section with me. We helped him try to locate a long lost uncle in Brooklyn using whitepages.com; maybe the phone number we found work. Here is one of his chalk paintings:
It's nice that we get a little bit of down time most afternoons, because there are things to be handled at home: bill payments, checks in the mail, doctor appointments for my wife's parents, etc. I also got drivers installed on my wife's laptop for printing and scanning, with both our old and new printers. The new chip-and-PIN credit card from home worked fine -- thanks, McKay! I have a mission credit card, occasionally used for certain mission expenses but not for our day-to-day living, which is also chip-and-PIN but has not yet been activated for some reason; we need to get that fixed. Everyone here uses chip-and-PIN. Our regular (chip-and-signature) cards work ok for most things, but not for unattended purchases, such as filling up the car. My ATM card does work with its PIN for that, but it has a foreign transaction fee I'd rather avoid. I want to get a separate new chip-and-PIN card so that we can each have one; that way if a card gets lost or stolen we won't have to cancel the account and both be left without a card for a while.
Afterwards, we ran to Lidl to shop for Friday's dinner before they closed at 10pm. The schedule is painted on their wall and posted on their website, but when we arrived about 9:25pm they were already closing and chastising us for not knowing that they had changed schedules. So we ran through the aisles and got it done before they kicked us out.
I spent time preparing my Seminary class for Friday afternoon. I read and prepare in Italian, but occasionally go to the English manual just to make sure I have it right. Not all of the videos are available in Italian, which is too bad, but I can easily teach without it. Studying and teaching the gospel is a joy for me.