Chapter 17: My first visitor: mia mamma!

The hardest part about studying abroad so far has been the incredible frustration of not being able to share it with my family, who I've always done all my traveling with. I can send them pictures, write blogs, video chat, but it's not quite the same. There's no way to communicate through the internet what a fresh Italian meal smells like, or how the Arno river looks right before dark, or what chaos the daily market feels like. I can't explain how ancient the bricks of my school buildings are, or give a good enough impression of the Italian street market salesmen whispering "Ciaooo belllaaa" when I walk past them on the way to class every morning. I can't describe how tall the David looks in real life, or how small you can feel standing underneath Brunelleschi's dome inside the Duomo. There are some parts of this semester that only I will ever really understand, and that's hard for me, because I usually like to share every detail of my life with my family and my friends.
Imagine my joy, then, when I found out that mia mamma was coming to visit me for four days! I counted down the days all semester, and the very first weekend after fall break, there she was! I was so overwhelmed when she first walked through the arrivals gate at the Florence airport that I burst into ridiculous tears. It was by far the longest I've ever gone without seeing her, and I hope it's never that long again!
The whole weekend was pretty much perfect. I gave her a walking tour of the whole beautiful city: took her inside all of my classrooms, including my cooking class kitchen, and then happened to run into a couple of my teachers as well as my advisor, and got to introduce her to all of them. We wandered through the central market and saw the tons of fresh vegetables, and huge carcasses of animals that had probably been slaughtered just a few hours before. We went out for great dinners, and I also cooked a lot for her here! We visited the best museums and churches here, and also just window shopped and hung out. Showing someone else all the best the city has to offer made me realize even more how much I love it, and how well I know it. Florence really does feel like my own now! And it put on quite a show for her: great weather, happened to run into everyone I know on the streets, and a certain restuaurant owner who's taken a liking to me even gave us free wine, free dessert, and several kisses on her first night.

It was so strange to be hosting my mom at my first-ever apartment, I've never been hostess to her before! I already felt like I had grown up a lot this semester, but that weekend really felt like the first time my mom and I were hanging out as two grown-up friends, instead of an adult and a child. It was so much fun!
One of the best parts (besides sharing several of our first beers and bottles of wine together) was teaching her how to make homemade pasta from scratch, like a real Italian! A few days after she got home, my dad called to tell me that he'd come home from work one night to find her making pasta in Carterville.
I barely had time to recover from this whirwind weekend before finding out I was about to play hostess to two MORE Americanas.....