Crazy Grades, Chips and Salsa, and Gnocchi

This past week has been pretty busy. I got back from the Barcolana in Trieste and plunged right into school. About school, I got the official confirmation that I will be staying in the class that I have been in so far. I am very happy with this decision, because had they moved me to a different class, I would have to start from scratch making friends and whatnot. This also means that I will finally be able to buy the books I need, since up until last week, I was waiting in order to not buy the wrong set of books.
Also, I realized how much I miss American gym class. One would think that a concept as simple as physical education would be essentially the same thing worldwide, yet this is not true. Here in Italy, our gym class only plays sports as a result of inclement weather. Whenever the weather is even remotely good, we get to go run. I will say that it is nice to do our running in Vicenza's city park as opposed to a track around a football field, but the concept of running for a whole hour and getting graded on it is not exactly my favorite (or anybody else's for that matter). Unlike in the United States, where it is fairly easy to get a decent grade in physical education by simply participating, here we are graded on our physical skill. Every day we run a certain distance, for which we are individually timed. There is a grading scale, and you get a grade based on where on the scale you fall. Therefore, only the most athletic students in the school can get an A in P.E. The top runner in our class, for example, was in the 9.5 bracket (in Italy, grades are on a 10 point scale, as opposed to a percentage). I came in third and took home an 8, which would logically translate into an 80% - a grade most people would find ridiculously low for a gym class, yet I was content with my B.
Even crazier than that is my English class. Apparently, I do not speak English. Well, that's not entirely true, but according to my English teacher, I speak it incorrectly since my accent is American rather than British. I thought about pointing out the fact that British English has actually evolved further from the English that Shakespeare used than American English, but then I decided against it. Considering who my English teacher is, it is probably best not to argue. Anyhow, on an English test I took, I got a 7. At first I was really taken aback by it, considering it probably ranks among my lowest English test scores ever, but then I looked around. Although mine was not the highest, it was definitely among the best. Most people had gotten a 6, and were content just to get the necessary passing grade, and some others even had lower grades. But still, this time I did go ask the teacher why I had gotten a 7. She was not happy. Apparently she writes down her own answers to the essay questions, and if your answer is not word-for-word identical, she takes off points. I had answered all of the questions right, with no grammatical errors, and good vocabulary, and yet I only got a 7. Then I remembered what had been told to me: the Italians are on a different scale. Even the best students are thrilled to receive an 8 on an assignment, while 9's and 10's are rare to none. Here, since somebody's grade point average does not count for anything as long as they pass and get their diploma, teachers and students alike are accustomed to lower grades (in the 6 to 7 range). But because of this skewed scale, I was really happy about a different 7 - the one I got on my philosophy test.

Last night, like most Saturday nights, I went out with my friends in Vicenza. We went to a restaurant called Papa Joe's. I do not know why. This place was the epitome of the word eyesore. You would walk in, and it looked like a typical Mexican restaurant that you would find in the United States. It had the equipale chairs and tables and the Tex-Mex color scheme of reds and yellows and greens. But then you would look at the pictures on the wall. My goodness! The first one that I saw actually was not that bad, a cowboy and a chuck wagon (somewhat with the restaurant's theme). But then, next to it, was an unexpected piece of art - a portrait of Frank Sinatra. And next to that, a picture of Babe Ruth. I then purposely looked around to study the furnishings and could not help but laugh. There were some steel cactus sculptures, some Easter Island-ish looking masks, a mural of Cinqueterre, and a picture of a lumberjack. I could not decide what kind of restaurant this was anymore. Then the menus came, and along with them, something which very few people in our group had ever seen - chips and salsa. I would like to point out that since Italians have no dipping sauces in their gastronomic tradition, there do not seem to know the general rules on double-dipping. But still, it felt like I was in America (except for no free water or free refills). Well, sort of. The titles of the items on the menu were in English, but the descriptions were in Italian. And even more unique were the items featured in the menu. On the first page, you could find a vast array of appetizers, including buffalo wings. On the next page, there were ribs and other barbecue type food (I could not imagine this to be any good, so I refrained from ordering, though I do love baby back ribs). But what really surprised me came on the following page - Indian food! After that came the Mexican food. Well, Tex-Mex. And everybody asked me to tell them what to get. I sort of wanted to refuse to tell them because I did not want to be responsible if they did not like it. For many in our party it was their first experience with "Mexican" food. I ended up ordering the chicken fajitas. It was a mistake. But so was everything else that was ordered, so I did not feel that bad. At least we still had fun.

Today I was supposed to go to Verona, but it got canceled due to the rain. One of my Italian friends actually told me a decent joke regarding Vicenza's weather patterns: "What do you call a sunny day after two rainy days? A Monday." And more often than not, this has been true. We will see if tomorrow's weather validates this claim. Instead, we stayed home today. We had homemade gnocchi for lunch, which I really enjoyed, and pretty much just stayed dry and warm inside.

This is the gnocchi as it was being made. Gnocchi is a potato-based pasta, in this case stuffed with cheese, and a specialty of the Veneto region. Typical gnocchi is actually more spherical than these tubular ones, but they ended up tasting the same.