It was chilly and very rainy most of Thursday (of course -- I just washed the car!). In the morning I purchased train tickets online for us to go to Naples/Pompeii in June with Marilyn and Lu. The Trenitalia website hadn't been allowing purchases that far in advance until just today, so I was able to get pretty cheap tickets. Now I have to find a tour guide for Pompeii, but there's no huge rush on that. We are really looking forward to the trip.
We went to the Institute at the usual time, and Dee spent most of the afternoon and evening on her lesson, first preparing it and then giving it. I went to the Post Office around the corner to do a couple of Amazon returns, which went very quickly. The wait was very short. Here you don't print the return shipping label like in the US; instead you print a form that you take to the Post Office and they print/apply the label, after you have waited for your number to show up on the screen. Seems less efficient, but it works. The impressive part is that Amazon issues the return credit within an hour of dropping it off.
It was a big transfer day, with Anziani and Sorelle coming and going all day. With our location so near the Termini train station, the Institute is a convenient place to stop and hang out while waiting for your new companion's train to arrive. Several of the missionaries spent over 12 hours on the train from Sicily. Only a handful of GANS showed up all day, which is typical for Thursdays. No students came at all for the English class, which I would have ended up teaching. I did a fair amount of prep for my Friday lessons, but still need some more time, what with all the fun visiting with missionaries all day. Several of them were hungry, so we ended up feeding them sandwiches with cheese/sliced meat from our fridge.
Dee writes:
I missed out on most of the visiting because I was working on my lesson. Making all those slides and translating everything takes time. Then, it turned out that about half my students couldn't make it. So, we decided to wait until next week to do part of the lesson. I talked about what to do when the repository says the document isn't there. They really enjoyed those suggestions, which included praying for a different clerk.
I told them one of my favorite stories: A policeman is walking down the street and sees a man on his hands and knees under a lamppost. "What are you doing," he asks. The man replies that he's looking for his keys. So, the policeman gets down on his hands and knees, too, and joins the search. After awhile, the policeman says, "Are you sure you lost your keys here?" The man replies, "No, I lost them down that alley, but the light is better here."
The moral of the story is that sometimes we do what we're comfortable with, but to find what we're looking for, we need to go to the right place.
Ricardo, a former GANS (now married), asked on the WhatsApp group if there was anybody who could help him with a PC question. I volunteered my services and was able to give him some advice and suggestions about a new Acer desktop PC he's looking at buying. He seemed very pleased at my input, and I'll probably end up helping him configure it a bit.
Coming home, there were three Sorelle and six suitcases. We took the suitcases in the car while they took the subway. Surprisingly, we were able to fit five of the six suitcases into our tiny Toyota, which made it much easier for them on public transit.