Marzo pazzo

"Crazy March." That's definitely the right name for this month! Sally, one of the volunteers here and a friend of mine, was telling me that she heard a couple of women in the store talking about "marzo pazzo" because of the strange weather we've been having. Then in one of our classes we learned a little phrase for it: "Marzo pazzarello, esce il sole e prende l'ombrello!" I know it doesn't go exactly like that, but it's close. It roughly translates as "Crazy march, out with the sun and take the umbrella," but don't put any faith in my translation skills! After a couple of translation classes and learning the dangers of mistranslating, I'm frightened to translate anything!

So my March has been pretty crazy so far. The weather has been pretty strange; at the beginning of this past week it felt like spring for sure with sunny days and very mild temperatures (I even went outside with short sleeves). Then in the middle of the week the temperature suddenly took a sudden plunge. The days since then have been cold, cloudy and rainy. Oh, and extremely windy! How could I have forgotten the wind? It's quite impressive wind, actually. When we're sitting in our classes, we can hear it whistling around the corners of the building pretty much constantly. Actually, it's more than whistling. Closer to screeching! One cool thing about this weather is that the clouds always seem to look incredible, even when they're dumping rain on us. Plus for a couple of days this past week, when it first got cloudy, underneath the cloud cover the horizon was extremely clear! We could see clearly some of the mountains (or hills, whatever they're called) around the city, which are normally seen through a haze of what I assume is probably pollution.

View under the clouds

The sky trying to decide whether to be cloudy or sunny

Besides the weather, we started a new trimester at the end of February, and I'm still getting used to it! I'm taking a lot of classes this time since most of the classes I need are available only this trimester. Besides the normal grammar, composition and conversation courses, I'm also taking History of Italy, Translation and Interpretation, History of Art, Literature, Italian Culture, Geography and Mediterranean Cooking. Of course, a couple of these classes only meet once a week, but it's still a pretty busy schedule.

In two weeks, we're taking a two-day trip to Rome, and the day we get back from that, our three weeks of spring break begin! This is my crazy March, though not so crazy when I'm writing it down.

Soon I'll put more pictures on my picture site, I hope, though I haven't been taking many pictures lately. I think the most recent ones (besides a couple I took of the sky this week) were from the Valentine's party. Those are pretty fun. Well, I suppose I'll save some of my motivation for writing for the next entry.