In the morning, we had district meeting at our Roma 3 ward building. It went a bit long but was quite enjoyable. My wife brought oatmeal chocolate cookies for the group, which were very happily consumed. One of the things we discussed was the importance of getting up on time and exercising in the morning. These young missionaries are always out and about, walking a lot, but the exercise is good for them. The Preach My Gospel (PMG) manual says to find an exercise you like, or that you "dislike the least"☺. Each morning I stretch on our nice mat in the living room for a few minutes, then I walk up seven floors of stairs at least four times, sometimes a few more times for errands. Every couple of days I do ten minutes of weight training, enough to keep up my muscle tone a bit. It all feels good!
After that we went to the Institute. I ran out to get some cash at the nearby BNL branch ATM. I was going to go inside the branch and try to apply for a bank account so I can get a Bancomat card, but they were closed for lunch, and there was no time later in the day. Maybe I'll try at the bank down here at the corner tomorrow.
We had a good meeting with Ugo, the Ganziani, and President Pickerd (he was there via Skype/phone) to discuss how to best use the Institute to further missionary work. There were some good ideas discussed, and we all learned a thing or two about how things are supposed to work.
It rained quite heavily most of the afternoon and evening. Our internet went down about 7pm, which may be related to the rain -- not sure. We have a wireless ISP, which generally has been fairly reliable. Their tech support said they had a repair crew out to fix the issue but couldn't give any estimate of when it would be working. After English classes ended at 8pm, we got to come home a bit early.
Tomorrow there is a public transit strike (sciopero). These happen fairly often, but the problem for us is that most kids won't be able to come to the Seminary or Institute classes, since almost all of them take the train/bus/subway. We'll see what happens.