School and MURALS FINISHED!

I am cooking pasta tonight, and I think it is going to be delicious. I am making hot sausage sauce with my own tangs and additions. There is one good thing about not owning a true Italian cookbook and not having any US measurements to make anything you were used to making. It makes you improvise and think on your toes! haha. I love cooking, and I think I am improving!

OMG--on a side note, I just ate my dinner. It was SO DELICIOUS!! I always make enough for two or three dinners so that I can eat the rest during the week. I want to buy the Italian mother cookbook "Cucchiaio Argento," and I'm hoping that my parents can give me this as an anticipated Christmas gift so I can become meaner in the kitchen!

I had a lovely day at school today, and I was able to leave early around 2pm. I taught two art classes with my Italian colleague. The first class is 3rd year middle school students, and they are incredibly sweet. We were continuing the project that she started on my first day. I really enjoyed the second class because all of my kids in veicolare "english track" are incredibly smart. However, I enjoy ALL of the children in this class, and they are really eager to learn. They are also very self-conscious to make sure that they are doing the right thing. This is also probably because this art teacher, in my opinion, doesn't explain the projects well to the class, and she changes her opinion often. Sometimes, she doesn't really make sense. The other day she said that a rainbow wasn't symmetrical. I was totally confused--a rainbow in its essence, cut in half, is a perfectly symmetrical form in nature.

My challenge in teaching art will finding a way to collaborate with the Italian art teacher. She is one of the oldest teachers at the school, and she has been teaching this program for years and years. I was also informed by the principal, who believes in transparency, that she wasn't happy that her classes would become a part of the "Veicolare program," meaning that they would take away some of the students from her classes. She has a bold personality during class; she makes sarcastic jokes with the students but also scolds them harshly. She wears funky glasses, has bangs, has a more casual and colorful sense of style, and you can tell that she has a creative personality. I think that she is making an attempt to work with me. She, thus far, has been very nice to me, but I can tell that she isn't ready to accept my suggestions. She needs to remain as head honcho--or feel as if she is completely in charge.

My plan of attack? Suck up to her as much as I can, and continue to subliminally propose some of my ideas--hoping to then convince her that they are her own. I hope that we can strike a friendship where she would be more willing to accept my ideas. However, given the fact that she gives grades based on the students' precision and shoots out comments that make absolutely no sense, I feel as if I will have to swallow some difficult pills in the begging. Precision in art? Okay, I understand the concept...but making these students feel inadequate because they cant draw millions of straight "marks" on the page is absurd. Some of the best artists aren't able to "stay in the lines." Art is creative expression, not "straight line boot camp." However, I can accept some of the lessons for the sake of learning the fundamentals.

Okay...at this point I will skip two days to finish this blog:

Yesterday, I officially finished the murals in the hospital!!! After my morning meeting at school, I came home around the early afternoon. I wrote some emails and did some art history research, and I headed to the hospital.

I stayed in the hospital until 11pm painting to finish the last wall section to complete the murals in the waiting room. FINALLY!!!! Many designs and 20 METERS OF PAINTED SPACE LATER...CARA FINISHES HER MURAL PAINTING PROJECT. Since February in the planning, I have to say that the murals are absolutely beautiful, and I, with the help of my graphic designer friend, Massimiliano, painted and decorated the whole wing of Neurology at the Ospedale dei Bambini di Buzzi in Milan!! Tomorrow morning, I will be going to the hospital to take pictures and paint two strawberries near the elevator. I will post a few when they are ready. Three cheers for me!

Today, I SLEPT IN! I also cleaned the whole apartment from top to bottom, organized everything, went shopping, picked up dry cleaning, did 4 loads of laundry...I was on fire. I am now waiting for Matteo to arrive.

I have to run out to get a bottle of wine, but if I return in time, I'll write my Italian Fact of the Day later.