Florentine Adventures

More exploring. More market shopping.

Three of the other Berry students (Taylor, Melanie and Matt) arrived this week. Mary and I have enjoyed hanging out with them and sharing our favorite parts of the city with each other.

Saturday we decided to go to IKEA (a Swiss furniture warehouse-type store, found all over Europe and the US) because Mary and Taylor had never been. It was quite an adventure finding it, though. We finally go there. . .after almost 5 hours. Still, we had fun finding our way there and celebrated the small victories–such as finding the street (which turned out to be the right street…just in the wrong city). We also learned that while we call it eye-key-ah in the States, here they call it ee-kay-ah. That helped a lot once we figured it out. We also learned (as we were leaving) that there is a free IKEA bus that runs between the store and the main train station (one of the many stops on our adventure). Needless to say, it was a learning experience–and a fun one at that.

Before I left the States, my uncle Paul (the missionary) got me in contact with an English-speaking Italian at a church his mission was connected with. Mary and I went to Chiesa Cristiana Biblica (Christian Bible Church) this Sunday and absolutely fell in love with the people there. We were actually one of the first ones there (and very proud of ourselves for that, considering our previous adventures finding places), and our contact, Andrea, didn’t get there until right as the service was starting. So, we were on our own to try and communicate with everyone. One precious woman, Maria, spoke a tiny bit of English, and quite a bit of Spanish, so we were able to talk to each other. The man sitting in front of us turned around all throughout the service any time a new bible verse was mentioned to help us figure out the translation. He was wonderful and spoke enough English to have us laughing with him.

After the service, we met several other members of the church who spoke English (and many who didn’t, but were so excited to welcome us and love on us anyway). The pastor is a dual citizen of America and Italy. I didn’t have a chance to ask him how long he lived in the States, but judging by his accent when he speaks English it was obviously for a while.

It was so amazing to see how much love and compassion the church had for each other. It’s small–about 50 members, I’d say. The whole sermon was in Italian, so I didn’t understand most of it. We were able (or at least try) to sing along. I was able to understand most of the songs since they were written out (Spanish and Italian are very similar, but not in pronunciation, so it can be confusing). It was such a blessing to find other people here who love Jesus! While we do want to go to other churches for the experience, I think we’ve definitely found our home church for while we’re here. I’m so excited about next Sunday and that’s still 5 days away.

Andrea gave us a ride back to our apartment after church (which was wonderful as it saved us $3 each in bus fare), so we got to talk to him quite a bit. He is great–and so funny. The whole way home, we told us about what was going on in Italian politics right now (basically, their government collapsed), how they’ve had 62 governments in the last 63 years, about their sausage-faced ex-prime minister and his obsession with coalitions. . . It gave us real insight to how the Italians feel about politicians. It also explained a t-shirt I saw in the market that said Hell would be organized by the Italians.

Classes start Monday, so we’re hoping to get a few day trips and maybe even an over-night in. We’ll see if that happens.

Italian-word-of-the-post:

Gesù Cristo (Jesus Christ)