Apartment Inspections

Wednesday was a very busy day. We started at 8am with our first apartment inspection, at the Sisters' apartment one floor below us here. Not enough sleep after the late night before, and little time for exercise. The Balzottis did this inspection with us to show us how it works. We found a few real issues, such as the propane sensor alarm not being plugged in. It took about an hour to complete the inspection.

Next we headed out to fill up our car and drive to our first district meeting, at our ward building (Roma 3) which took over half an hour to drive because of an accident on the GRA (beltway). In the district, there are four young elders, two young sisters, and another senior couple, the Spragues. We are still learning how all this works, but they were all really sharp and it was good to start being part of the group. The ward is small and struggling, so they work a lot with the newer members to help strengthen and teach them.

Then we drove up to Ladispoli (almost an hour drive) to inspect two apartments: one sisters', one elders'. Ladispoli is a beautiful seaside town, and the ocean view from the sisters' fifth story apartment balcony is stunning. That inspection went very well and quite quickly, with only a few minor issues. The elders were not able to be there in person, so they left their apartment keys with the sisters to give to us. Unfortunately, only two of the three keys worked, so we were not able to get into the apartment. Bummer. However, we got permission to wait until next time around to inspect that apartment, since it's so far away. 

Next we drove back to the west side of Rome for two more apartment inspections, for the sisters and elders in Roma 1 Ward. That all went pretty smooth and quickly, though parking was a pain, as is typical around here.

We then drove home, stopping briefly at Ikea to get a few things, such as a small rolling set of drawers to match my computer desk. By the time we got home it was after 5pm and we were exhausted and famished. After some dinner we felt a bit better and walked to the local "Chinese" store to get a few things, including tools to mount a new door plaque at the Institute tomorrow. It's always fun to peruse the aisles there -- so many different kinds of stuff. Hopefully we can get a full night's sleep after a short night last night.

Fiona Givens in Rome

It was another Taco Tuesday, this time with a twist: my wife made the tortillas by hand, and they were awesome! The day started very crazy. After a good workout (28 floors) and a very nice haircut for me, we tried to leave early for Institute to start cooking, but everything conspired against us. My wife tripped over the step to her bathroom (Italy is the land of steps); she didn't fall, but hit her arm pretty hard. Then a truck parked too close to our car at an odd angle, and I could barely get into the driver's side door and back out. In doing so, I clipped the driver's side mirror and popped off the plastic cover. I should have flipped it in first, but needed it to see and didn't think of it until too late. Fortunately, though it looked bad, everything fit back into place nicely. 

As I was putting it back together on at the side of the road, a woman flagged us down frantically. She had pulled into a parking spot all wrong and was about 2 inches (5cm :-) from another car at an odd angle, on a slight incline. Her car was a stick shift and didn't have a hand brake, but a button, so it was difficult to let the brake off slowly. She kept saying "mio marito mi amazza!" (my husband is going to kill me). I tried to help but ended up getting her car an inch closer. We needed a few guys to push her car, but nobody was around. She was freaking out, and finally she decided to call the police to help, because we had to go and there wasn't much else for me to do. That delayed us a good ten minutes more.  Once we got to the Institute, I hit my head pretty hard on the door as I leaned out to bring in some of the many bags of food we had brought. I had to ice it for a while, but fortunately no big bruises. Anyway, we got delayed again.

Then my wife forgot what we were making, so she started with the wrong recipe, including sending me to the store for something we didn't actually need (bell pepper) but not for what we did need (kidney beans). It was a comedy of errors. With all the cooking and tortilla making and misadventures, we were over half an hour late with lunch, but everyone loved it! The tortillas were very warm and soft.

Some workmen came to fix a problem with the wood flooring in the office and to hang some nice church paintings on the walls: Christ washing the apostles' feet, a portrait of Christ, Moses ordaining Aaron, a painting of Christ looking down on ancient Jerusalem, and a photo of the first presidency. The place looks much nicer now with the visual reminders of the Savior.

Many days I send out an invite to all the kids on our Whatsapp group for whatever activities are occurring. My signature line at the end is the phrase "santi venite!", which is the opening phrase of the hymn "Come, Come Ye Saints" in Italian.

In the evening, Fiona Givens came in person as a guest teacher for the online Institute class. She and her husband Terryl have written some awesome books, including The God Who Weeps and The Crucible of Doubt (which we had translated into Italian for the saints here). We have known the Givens for some time, since they live in Richmond, Virginia, my home town, so we have some common friends. We also spent a week with them here in Rome in 2015 when they spoke at the FairMormon conference which we helped organize with Ugo. They are about to publish a new book in the series, The Christ Who Heals, and she spoke about the nature of the Godhead and how the restoration of the gospel helps us understand things better. It was all in English, with no translation, but the kids seemed to follow it well, based on their questions at the end. It was a wonderful lesson, with a few touching and insightful points that we'll need to reflect on. The spirit was strong.

Afterwards, we went to dinner nearby with Ugo, Fiona, and her daughter. It was great to catch up, but we were out a bit late -- don't tell our mission president! Unfortunately, we forgot to take any photos all evening :-(

The scriptures mention many different and wonderful spiritual gifts, but I seem to have received a new one: the gift of parallel parking! I knew I could parallel park, but usually at home it takes me several attempts. Last night I put our car into a spot with less than one foot at each end, on the first try. I have yet to require two attempts here. Wow, there must be a God! <g>

On other thing that I don't think I wrote about, going back to my collapsing on the plane almost three weeks ago. One of my wife's first thoughts, after being told her husband had collapsed and flatlined was not "Oh, no, I may be a widow. I will miss my husband". Nope, not my unstoppable woman! Her thought was "maybe they will let me continue on a mission as a single sister." That's true love.

Monday in Italy

Monday started with one of those Italian surprises. We love Italy, and there are so many wonderful things here, but a few things tend to drive Americans crazy. In the morning I went down to get a haircut at the barber Elder Thacker used. The place was closed at 9am, so I went for a little walk. When I came back, it was still closed, so I asked the store next door when it opened. They looked at me with that "stupid American!" look -- of course everyone knows that barbershops and hair salons are closed on Mondays! Almost every kind of store has one day that it is closed, often by law, and the Italians just know it, but we don't. By Murphy's law, whichever day you want to go to a particular store will be the day of the week it's closed. Someday maybe it will become second nature to us, but for now it's always funny/frustrating.

It's so good to be feeling healthy again. In the morning I climbed all seven floors of our building four times, which is a very good workout! By the time I get to the top, I'm pretty winded, so I take the elevator back down to give me a couple of minutes to catch my breath. I'm also doing some reps with our new weights and stretching on the nice floor mats. The marble floors here are so hard that the mat is quite necessary.

The kids are really busy with classes right now, so not much traffic until evening at the Institute. My wife prepared some lemon bars for FHE treats, but the recipe didn't turn out at all as she expected:

Fortunately, after a bit of initial panic (when we were about to head out to the store to buy something for dessert), it came out of the oven and tasted really good anyway. The kids loved it. It was my wife's turn to give the FHE lesson, and she did a really nice job, giving some biographical background on an apostle who will be visiting here next week, as well as reviewing some of his talks. After the lesson, we played the card game Uno with the kids while they devoured dessert. They love playing games, and it's a good way to bond with them.

During the day, I went to the Vodafone store to resolve an issue with the SIM card on my wife's phone. I also tried to reconfigure the WiFi network but found out that we don't know the admin password, so I'll figure out a plan B.

We got home about 9:30pm and got our daily Amazon delivery from the Balzottis, who are very helpful and bit surprised at all the stuff we are buying. This time the boxes included a paper shredder, some Ethernet cables for home and the Institute, and my wife's new Moto G5 Plus phone. We already had that model at home, but it turns out that the US version doesn't work here in Europe -- they apparently disabled one of the key GSM frequency bands. So far we've been using our 3-year old Samsung Galaxy S5s , which are a bit long in the tooth, so we ordered her a European G5 Plus to see how it works. If it goes well, we'll get me one too.

We finished setting up appointments for our first apartment inspections. Every six weeks we are assigned to go to five different apartments for young missionaries in the Rome area and check things out. Because this is our first time and the clock is running out before transfers, we will do all five on the same day. Wednesday has been a down day so far, but not this time!

Relaxing Sunday

This morning we went to church at Roma 3 Ward. It was my wife's first time there, since she was sick a couple of weeks ago. We enjoyed the meetings very much, although we forgot it was Fast Sunday. It's about 13 miles away, making for a 25 minute drive, much of it on the beltway around Rome, known as the GRA (Grande Raccordo Anulare). The ward is small, and we really like the people -- it will be fun to get to know them better.

Afterwards we came home and stayed here all afternoon and evening. For dinner, my wife cooked some very nice salmon we bought at the open market yesterday. We were able to calendar together, since this week will be very busy, as well as catch up on some other things such as syncing our contact lists. In addition to some wonderful upcoming visitors (you'll have to wait to read out about them!), among other things we get to start our inspections of the apartments of the young missionaries this week, which will involve some driving.

We're feeling refreshed after some down time this weekend. Back to "work" tomorrow -- it's too fun to be work!

P-day and photo tour of the Institute

Today was our first normal P-day. In the morning, I climbed 21 floors again as part of my workout. Later we went to the local open market, just a few blocks away. It's huge and is very crowded on Saturday. There are probably 100 large booths in a covered pavilion, selling fruits, vegetables, meat, cheese, pasta, fish, bread, wine, clothing, shoes, electronics, kitchen utensils, etc. The selection is quite good, and the Balzottis say that the quality and price of the fresh produce is excellent. We didn't buy much, but it was fun to walk the entire length. It's open every day, with fewer open booths and fewer patrons apparently on weekdays.

In the afternoon we went to the mall and bought some heavier dumbbell weights for me (two each of 5kg and 10kg), which were fun to carry from the car. We also went to Auchan and bought a bunch of different things, from toiletries to food. The wiper fluid on our car was out, so we bought that and I refilled it this evening. Tonight we just had some down time in our apartment, which was very welcome.

I thought I'd give a pictorial tour of the Institute office, which is found on the third floor (second floor in Italian). The front door is large and thick, as is typical in homes and offices:

Going through the door, there's a small entryway room with a couch and a desk with a computer on it. We have some church artwork, including paintings of Christ, that we will get mounted on the walls this coming week.

From the entryway, there's a hall with a bulletin board on one wall and a map of Nauvoo on the other:

On the right as you enter the hallway is the kitchen (you've seen some photos inside the kitchen in prior posts).

The kitchen has a table, a storage cabinet with a microwave on top, a fridge, and a long countertop with cooktop, stove, and sink, and cabinets and drawers underneath. Above the sink is a cabinet with a built-in dish drainer; this is very typical in Italy (dishwashers are very rare), and it's really cool -- the dishes just drip down into the sink as they are drying.

At the end of the hall on the left is a nice little library, with a big-screen TV, a conference table, and lots of church books:

Straight ahead at the end of the hall is classroom 1, which has an electronic piano:

If you turn right at the end of the hall, away from the library, there's another hallway leading to the bathroom:

At the left, right before entering the bathroom, is classroom 2, which has a smaller TV and an Apple TV, used for lessons (and watching conference).

That's it: it's big enough for our needs, but we hope not for long!

Tuna casserole

This morning I only went up 13 flights of stairs because we needed to get going a bit early, but it's still so wonderful to not be sick any more! We went into the mission office early to provide some IT support for one of the senior couples and to pick up some packages from amazon.it. It's better to ship them there than to our apartment address, because there's no way to deliver them to our door.

We then did some grocery shopping in preparation for dinner tonight after class. My wife is really doing awesome things. She cooked a tuna casserole which was absolutely devoured by the kids:

All gone!

My role was to run to the local market a couple of times and do the dishes once. 

The kids met at the Colosseum before class to make a short video to submit to the church for possible use in an upcoming worldwide broadcast. After that, Ugo gave a wonderful lesson on Lehi's dream of the tree of life in the Book of Mormon. He is quite a force, with great and touching stories, as well as penetrating insights and questions. Again the room was full, 15 or 16 kids. After class the casseroles were devoured within a few minutes, and Alessio, one of the young men, offered to do the final dishes and became my hero!

Tomorrow is P-day (preparation), and for the first time we have no scheduled activities on Saturday, which will be nice. Tired and off to bed, but it was a good day.

Slow day at work

Thursdays are normally very slow days at the Institute, as there's no class scheduled. We had only a couple of kids drop in and enjoyed visiting with them.

This morning I woke up and felt great, lots of energy for the first time in a few weeks. I put on workout clothes, did some stretching on our nice new mat, did a few reps with the weights (too light for me -- we'll get bigger ones), and then climbed up our apartment building stairs three times for a total of 21 floors. It was exhausting but felt great! There's one rib on my upper left that's still painful from the CPR, but overall I think I'm better. We did a lot of fixing and moving around the house this morning, and we're very happy with the results.

We took in our Amazon Echo Dot to the Institute. It hasn't been working very well here at the apartment, but I got it working there. Italians really don't know about them because they only work in English and aren't available here. We had a lot of fun showing it off to one kid who speaks English. He was amazed! It'll be fun focal point for a while. Here's Oscar holding it:

We got to leave a bit early, during the English classes taught by the young missionaries, so we drove a good ways to go to Metro, having found our membership "card" with help from the Thackers via email -- it was in the glove compartment. Anyway, the store is HUGE! It's like a Costco, but bigger and with more selection. It's focus is food and items for hotels/restaurants, and the shopping carts are very large:

We bought a bunch of food for the Institute, much of it for the meal Dee is fixing for tomorrow night after class. We got home only a bit later than normal. Now it's late and we're tired, so that's it for now.