Primo Maggio

May 1st 2020: Buona festa! Today is Mayday in Italy so that meant no school for me! It also marked the beginning of Phase 2 in Tuscany so we were allowed outside! Lots of restrictions are still in place; masks must be worn in public, 1.8 meters between people (but I have my mom’s metric skills so this confuses me!!) and most businesses are still closed. Individual sport means running, walking, and biking so the streets were full today!

It was my first time out of the apartment in 2 months so I was insanely excited. Hopefully the joy is evident in the photo even with the mask! Obviously I went to the Palazzo Vecchio, just to check in! I did 8.7 miles today and can’t wait to go back out tomorrow!

One of the rules is that your exercise has to start and finish at your front door, you can’t drive to a different neighborhood or downtown to do it so there were not many cars out. This meant the streets were full of little kids riding bikes and playing!

As I walked downtown, a guy stopped and started talking to me (from a safe distance!!) and I was just smiling. I realized after he definitely couldn’t tell that I was smiling and I just kept walking. Blaming it on no social interactions!!

A school update: we’ve been doing a lot of fun activities lately to practice our conversation and use the different tenses. One that was particularly fun for me was planning our dream dinner party. Who would you invite? What would you serve? Mine was pretty awesome! I invited RBG, Malala, Michelle Obama, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy, Meryl Streep, and Kevin Cox. My thought process was if everyone was bringing a plus one, Barry would get an invite without an invite 🙂 My classmates didn’t know who Kevin Cox was even when I said the scientist from Hartland! I possibly cheated and declared my party a potluck. But oh well there were no rules!

In other news: as I was walking on the Oltrarno, a man was riding a bike towards me with a kid in a seat in front of him. From afar, I could see that the man’s hand was covering the kid’s face but I assumed that it was serving as a mask. Once we got closer, I could see the kid was sound asleep and his dad was holding his head up. As someone who can fall asleep anywhere I laughed soooo hard!