Statistics and Geography - not my forte

Day three of class. First section is usually interesting, despite its focus on grammar.

After the break, section two, with a focus on ‘’cultural studies’’, so far has been difficult.

This morning, the grammar focus was on comparisons. There are so many ways to make comparisons that after the teacher’s descriptions and her categorization of noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, and direct complement; it made us all so self conscious when we had to make sentences using these.

Students in this class are pretty talkative and vocal, but after all her explanations, it got us kind of confused, and even rather tongue tied each time we started to make sentences.

It does not help that we had to analyze a passage full of numbers and stats at 9 am in the morning – it’s an article elaborating the results of a survey about Italian youths and their values and beliefs.

After the break, it was continuation of yesterday’s tedious text about preparing for mountaineering. We struggled with all the jargons and technical details about equipping and training for the expedition, and the geographical terms used really bored many of us to tears.

As if that wasn’t enough, we had to do another ‘’geography lesson’’, finding the definitions of promontory, bay, gulf, field, plateau, cliff, valley, peak, coast and plain. Gosh, I don’t even use some of these words often in English! And then we had another Geography lesson on the location of Italy – the seas surrounding the peninsula, its 3 largest lakes, the famous rivers in the country, etc.

My good friend Im will smile if I say this – I never enjoyed Geography lessons at RGS, though I managed to get a pretty good O level pass – it must have been my RGS bravery and stoicism!

Every morning we weave in and out of masses of people and the occasional cars, trucks and bikes on the narrow paved streets of Siena as we march hurriedly to class. These people are probably citizens on their way to work.

Every afternoon we do the same as the streets get even more crowded with gawking and camera toting tourists as we march hurriedly, and hungrily, to the canteen. We walk a lot, and some of the streets are pretty steep. There is no luxury of Singapore’s frequent bus stops or MRT stations within the city centre.

Today there was more admin chaos. For those with scholarships from the Foreign Ministry, we were told to get some kind of form to fill and submit. Mine was applied through the Italian Cultural Institute – does it count? Everyone was confused, there are so many types of scholarships even the admin staff sometimes are dumbfounded!

It is pretty common to get lost with the confusing bus system here. I am not the only one. A housemate from Finland, despite her excellent Italian, got lost for more than an hour yesterday for taking the wrong bus.

Today, I had a less traumatic experience. I simply had a tour of the hospital nearby (the bus drove in and out of its car park) and then stopped for 25 minutes at a remote bus stop before moving on to my destination. The driver suggested that I walked to my residence instead of waiting, as it’s ‘’just down below’’.

It did sound simple enough, except that, well, you guessed it, it was not that simple, not when the blazing hot sun (as bad as Singapore’s, in August) had me soaked in perspiration and the whole lonely suburban area looks so unfamiliar. I suppose my ‘’new improved Italian’’ came in useful when I asked for directions…

Now I recall a similar situation when I arrived on Sunday. The bus also stopped at the same place and the sulky driver would not even say why. When I asked him a third time if he would go to via Berlinguer, where my residence is located, he retorted sullenly, ‘’yes, if you have some patience, you would get there’’ and then proceeded to descend for his break, clipping his finger nails and looking like he was made to drive the bus at gun point on a Sunday.

I suppose I should not sound like a typical French or Singapore woman – always complaining. I shall end with one positive thing – the bus is punctual, at least. So, even if you have to wait 45 minutes, be sure it will arrive, according to the time listed on the poster and computerized boards. That, I suppose, is one small comfort I can count on!