Cooking with Luisa

My second night as an intern was even better than the first! I loved it! There are two chefs at the school, Nando and Luisa. Nando is awesome and very funny. Luisa is incredible though, she is an amazing chef and she's so nice. I get to do a lot more interacting with the students when she's there and I also get to cook quite a bit! She'll show me how to do something then just leave me like I know what I'm doing. I'm learning, though, and it's so much fun. When Luisa is there, the other assistant is Letizia, one of my Italian teachers from the school. She is so much fun to work with too! Plus it's nice because she's the one who taught me all of the cooking vocabulary so she knows if I know a word or not. So if the translating gets tricky, she helps me.

Italians have a hard time with my name, Luisa's definitely not the first. She kept forgetting it last night. She'd grab my wrist to have me help her with something, then stumble for a while trying to remember my name. Finally, on about the fourth time, when I told her my name is Hillary she said, "Ohhhh, Hillary Clinton! Got it!". That's not the first time that's happened. I'm always associated with her. Oh well. We had a lot of students last night and the food was incredible! We cooked with eggplant, which I'd never done before. And we made home-made fettucini noodles, they were so good and so fun to make!

I have to walk for about 10-15 minutes from my school to Piazza Gramsci to catch the bus, and I don't like doing it at night. Luisa actually lives in the same general direction as me, so she gave me a ride home because we got done pretty late. She, like all Italians I've met so far, was a crazy driver. She has a funny taste in music. The CD we listened to ranged from Elton John to Sting to Backstreet Boys. She loved her American music, especially Sting. She just sang her little heart out to those songs. It was really funny, and it was really nice of her to give me a ride home.

I'm really excited for the rest of my internship! It's going to help my Italian, and my cooking, a lot! (The picture above this post is the view from the terrace outside the kitchen I work in)