Erin Miller

We had our Italian friends over for dinner last week. We made them a
five-course dinner in an attempt to repay them for the five-course, five hour
dinner they cooked us a few weeks ago. It took me a full week of wandering the
city to find all of the necessary ingredients for chocolate chip cookies. The
Italians loved them though. There aren’t any cup measurers here(duh) so I just
sort of guessed, but when one of the Italians asked me for the recipe I said
that there was a problem because it used weird “parole americani”(american words.) He was convinced he could figure it out, so I copied the recipe for him
but when he looked at it he asked, “what’s a cup?.” Somehow, during dinner, we
Americans got on the topic of Smurfs. The Italians asked what we
were talking about so when we described them they said, “oh, si, i pufi. I pufi
sono communisti.” When we asked for an explanation as to why the smurfs were
communists they explained that there was one leading older man, only one girl
and she dressed in red, none of them ever used money, their enemies were the
capitalists and they ate their babies. I’m not sure how this rumor got started,
but it sounds like the result of a fascist government to me. When we asked another Italian about the communist pufi he said, “well, yes, but not all communists eat their young, only some of them, and only during this one time…” So, there you have it, I pufi sono communisti.
We had an interesting conversation with Willy Wonka this week, the man who owns the candy store by our house. The store sells only candy and alcohol so we go for gummy bears and beer about once a week. He asked us why we were learning Italian, when we said it was fun he didn’t understand. “so, you guys have how many states in the united states, 40 or 60?” We told him 50. “Well, you guys have 50 states and they all speak English. We have 25 states in the EU and we speak 23 languages.” Turns out that he was very bitter that the EU was agreeing on 4 governing languages and Italian wouldn’t be one of them. Even though it is the language “il piu bella”. He claims that if the
EU is going to refuse to use Italian, it should at least use Latin because it
is the language that everyone learned in school, and the language “degli arte e
medicina”. But alas, it looks like he will have to learn French, Spanish,
German or English.
Only other big event this week was going to a disco outside of town Saturday
night. We danced all night and took the bus back to Perugia at 5 in the
morning. I decided that we should stay up to watch the sunrise, so we wandered
around town and found some kids from Barcelona hanging out by the fountain.
They are studying in Perugia. My roommate asked what they had done that night
and one of the girls said that she had stayed in. Apparently, she had just come
out to dance and sing with her friends in the streets at 5:30 am. We got bored
waiting for the sun so we asked a garbage man, “Cuando arriva il sole?” he said
that we were crazy and still had an hour, so we should go home a take a nap. We went home to eat breakfast. When we went back outside a fog had settled on the city so we never even saw the sun come up, it just went from a dark cloud to a light one, but we did put in a good effort.